The Joyous Monsters of the Romantic Era (original) (raw)
Related papers
Fatal Attraction: Loving the Guillotined Woman, from Washington Irving to Alexandre Dumas
French Forum, 2022
Alexandre Dumas' 1848 novella, La Femme au Collier de Velours belongs to a centuries-old lineage of narratives about a young man courting a mysterious woman who conceals a fatal neck wound. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, this narrative template, now featuring a guillotined woman, becomes a relatively popular device for reflecting on the events of the Terror and its lingering presence in the French and wider European cultural imaginary, even and especially for those born too late to actually witness them. In this article, I trace developments and embellishments in the guillotined woman narrative from Washington Irving's "The Adventure of the German Student" (1824) through Dumas' novella. I argue that the self conscious repetition of this narrative both amplifies and ironizes the masculine anxieties it evokes. Through constant recirculation and reanimation, the guillotined woman becomes both a figure for the uncannily restored monarchy and an allegory of degraded cultural production.
Body and head: Equality, Punishment and Justice in the Decapitation of Louis XVI
Abstract: Th is essay examines three aspects of the beheading of king Louis XVI to show how it symbolized the transformation of the legiti- macy principle of the body politic, and the development of modern for- mal and substantive justice. Th e beheading is seen as a metaphor of the transference of sovereignty from the king to the people. Louis Capet’s is analyzed focusing on the speeches of Saint Just and Condorcet, and their opposing conceptions of legality and legitimacy. Th ese two threads are considered as fundamentals of two of the trends developed as part of the legacy of the French Revolution: the modern approach to human rights and totalitarianism.
The Candle and the Guillotine: Introduction
The Candle and the Guillotine: Revolution and Justice in Lyon 1789-93, 2020
As in a number of France’s major cities, civil war erupted in Lyon in the summer of 1793, ultimately leading to a siege of the city and a wave of mass executions. Using Lyon as a lens for understanding the politics of revolutionary France, this book reveals the widespread enthusiasm for judicial change in Lyon at the time of the Revolution, as well as the conflicts that ensued between elected magistrates in the face of radical democratization. Julie Patricia Johnson’s investigation of these developments during the bloodiest years of the Revolution offers powerful insights into the passions and the struggles of ordinary people during an extraordinary time.
The Journal of Modern History, 2018
Flaying in the Pre-Modern World: Practice and Representation. Edited by Larissa Tracy. Boydell. 2017. xviii + 406pp. £60.00. Flaying as a punishment-for treason or otherwise-was a rare occurrence in the pre-modern world. Indeed, as some of the essays in Larissa Tracy's collection establish, even allusions to human flaying in some pre-modern cultures are hard to find. Mary Rambaran-Olm notes only 'scattered references to flaying in Old English literature' (p. 101); William Sayers finds likewise that 'the flaying of the human body features only marginally in the traditions of early medieval Ireland' (p. 261). In cultures where flaying is allowed as a punishment in the law it is an exceptional one and the known instances of it being meted out are few and far between. It is, nonetheless, a persistent image in some medieval genres (hagiography, romance and literature of the life of Christ, in particular), as well as in the post-medieval imagination, as this collection demonstrates across its fourteen essays and epilogue, which span from the eleventh to the early seventeenth centuries, and range across Irish, English, French, Italian and Scandinavian examples. While its main subject thus sometimes proves elusive, this book's usefulness partly derives from the explanations it finds for the literary prevalence of human flaying in cultures where its practice is unusual if not nonexistent. For this reason too it is necessarily a book that is about many other things-flagellation, cannibalism, painting techniques, surgical instruments and Mediterranean conflicts, among others-but, perhaps most prominently, also about skin: its relation to the body and to the self, and to what constitutes the individual human as well as the social body. Rambaran-Olm's inquiry into the emergence and persistence of the so-called 'Dane-skin' myth in the seventeenth century and beyond is illustrative. The fantasy of pre-modern flaying (that eleventh-century hostile Danes, living in England, are massacred, flayed and their skins displayed on church doors) is used, Rambaran-Olm argues, to construct and uphold a post-medieval sense of national identity. Thus she notes: 'For seventeenth-century viewers', the skin-bound doors 'were material evidence of Anglo-Saxon fortitude and moral justice in punishing invaders for crimes against their community and Church' (p. 105). It is another near myth of human flaying that forms the focus of Perry Neil Harrison's epilogue on early modern anthropodermic bibliopegy (or, the binding of books in human skin). Harrison notes that 'scientifically verified examples of the practice during the Middle Ages are exceedingly rare, and perhaps even non-existent' (p. 368). However, Harrison argues that one verified
Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment in France
From the early Middle Ages to the twentieth century, capital punishment in France, as in many other countries, was staged before large crowds of spectators. Paul Friedland traces the theory and practice of public executions over time, both from the perspective of those who staged these punishments as well as from the vantage point of the many thousands who came to "see justice done". While penal theorists often stressed that the fundamental purpose of public punishment was to strike fear in the hearts of spectators, the eagerness with which crowds flocked to executions and the extent to which spectators actually enjoyed the spectacle of suffering suggests that there was a wide gulf between theoretical intentions and actual experiences. Moreover, public executions of animals, effigies, and corpses point to an enduring ritual function that had little to do with exemplary deterrence. In the eighteenth century, when a revolution in sensibilities made it unseemly for individuals to take pleasure in or even witness the suffering of others, capital punishment became the target of reformers. From the invention of the guillotine, which reduced the moment of death to the blink of an eye, to the 1939 decree which moved executions behind prison walls, capital punishment in France was systematically stripped of its spectacular elements. Partly a history of penal theory, partly an anthropologically-inspired study of the penal ritual, Seeing Justice Done traces the historical roots of modern capital punishment, and sheds light on the fundamental "disconnect" between the theory and practice of punishment which endures to this day, not only in France but in the Western penal tradition more generally.
Review. Death, Torture and the Broken Body (TMR16.09)
This book brings together essays exploring the imagery of torture in late medieval and early modern Europe. Its purpose is made clear by co‐editor John R. Decker in his introduction. Building upon the work of scholars such as Samuel Edgerton, Mitchel Merback, Elaine Scarry and Pieter Spierenburg, the book's contributors aim at widening the subject's traditional legal framework to further address social, political and devotional issues. According to Decker, extending inquiries on torture beyond questions of legal and moral practices is warranted by the "protean nature of pictorial and verbal disassemblies of the body" ﴾3﴿. He appreciates images of bodily desecration as creative works able to assume multiple functions by eliciting different responses from the viewer. Ranging between repulsion and attraction, their reception is thus conceived a space of tension in which the logic and sense of the visual narrative are to be negotiated. To illustrate this point, Decker uses two late fifteenth‐century examples. The first is Dirc Bouts's Martyrdom of Erasmus in which the saint is depicted being eviscerated by a windlass. Decker argues that the choice of a cranking device as the implement of torture endowed the saint with a new protective power, that against maladies of the stomach. By focusing on the disembowelment of the saint's body, Bouts's image validates and informs the viewer of this "apotropaic covenant" ﴾7﴿. The second image is Gerard David's Justice of Cambyses which shows the flaying of the corrupt judge Sisamnes. Here, Decker explains, perhaps less convincingly, that the level of detail with which the body's destruction is depicted reinforces the narrative's moral message: "Sisamnes corrupts the system from the inside out; his destruction from the outside in corrects that corruption" ﴾10﴿. In addition to illustrating how one may locate "artistic, social and philosophical creation within acts of bodily destruction" ﴾2﴿, the two examples serve to establish the conceptual structure of the book, which is divided into two parts, that of "holy violence, the creation of martyrs" and that of "social violence, the creation of civic identities". The first part begins with an essay by Assaf Pinkus on Guido da Siena's reliquary shutters from the Sienese monastery of St. Clare. Displaying the stigmatization of St. Francis, the story of St. Clare defeating the Saracens, the flaying of St. Bartholomew and the episode of St. Catherine on the wheel, the panels are a perfect example of devotional art in which Franciscan piety, the local cult of saints and philopassionism ﴾empathic suffering﴿ all converge. But by carefully considering both theological and juridical discourses on violence from Augustine to late‐medieval reports of legal punishments, Pinkus also sees in Guido's work an artistic embodiment of the four different modes of medieval violence: reflective, reflexive, physical and imagined. Though his analysis of the panels is focused ﴾despite inverting the shutters at one point early in the text﴿, the nature and specificity of the modes are insufficiently explained by the TMR 16.09.
The 'Pear of Anguish': Truth, Torture and Dark Medievalism
International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2014
This paper examines the historical truth of the ‘pear of anguish’ — a common exhibit in European dungeon museums that has recently made its way into the popular imagination by way of TV shows and Internet sites. Like the ‘chastity belt’ before it, the ‘pear of anguish’ evidences the ‘dark medievalism’ of the modern consciousness, a dystopian view of the Middle Ages that imagines pre-Reformation Europe as a nexus of cruelty and sexual perversion. The historical reality, however, traced here through commentaries and catalogues from the past few centuries, would seem to indicate that, just like the 'chastity belt', both the device itself and its imagined function are creations of the modern world.
Word & Image, 2021
Introduction The French guillotine was an instrument of revolutionary political discipline, the legacy of which would also be felt in cultural spheres. The fragment, as a visual form and literary device in nineteenth-century French word and image, owes its origins to the repetitive labour of this ‘democratic’ instrument. Severing head from body in one neat movement, the guillotine enacted one of the most public displays of corporeal fragmentation in the history of the modern era. Compared with other atrocities, the number of guillotined victims was relatively small, yet the forum for the killing was highly visible, located at the centre of one of the largest cities in the modern world. This terrible coming apart of bodies would haunt many of the authors and artists of the Romantic generation. In the light of this political and social trauma and the accompanying overthrow of the artistic institutions of the ancien régime, artists sought new representational strategies and modes. With...