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The "Citoyenne" Tallien: Women, Politics, and Portraiture during the French Revolution Author(s): Amy Freund Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 93, No. 3 (September 2011), pp. 325-344 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23046580 Accessed: 20-10-2015 08:57 UTC

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The Citoyenne Tallien: Women, Politics, and Portraiture

during the French Revolution

Amy Freund

Revolutionary Paris was awash in portraits. Portraits domi

nated the Salon, filled the print shops, decorated political

clubs, and were paraded through the streets in festivals and

funerals. Commissioners eager to redefine themselves in Rev

olutionary terms flocked to portraitists' studios at a time

when patronage for other genres of art production was dry

ing up. The statistics from the official Salon exhibitions testify

to the growing visibility of portraiture. Between 1789 and

1791, the number of portraits exhibited at the Salon more

than doubled, and the totals continued to rise steadily over

the Revolutionary period.1 The complaint of a critic at the

1796 Salon confirms the increasing public presence of the

genre and snidely lays the blame for the epidemic of portraits

at the feet of the Revolution: "Portraits, portraits, and more

portraits. Since we have all become brothers, the Salon has

been made into a gallery of family portraits."2 Indeed, liberty,

equality, and fraternity seem to have served as tonics for the

portrait market. The dismantlement of the nobility and the

emigration of many members of the pre-Revolutionary elite

may have affected demand for portraiture at the highest end

of the price scale (and this is far from certain), but the

popularity of portraiture touched all socioeconomic levels.

The cheapest available portraits, such as the silhouettes and

mechanically produced physionotraces made by artists work

ing on the streets of Paris, could be purchased for as little as

three livres, at a moment when a ticket for the standing

places at the Opera cost a little more than two livres.3 Por

traits were affordable and much in demand by the newly

constituted French people.

Portraiture was central to post-1789 visual culture because

it proposed solutions to the fundamental challenge of the

Revolution: how to make subjects into citizens. Revolutionary

legislators confronted the problem of regenerating the na

tion from the top down, legislating sweeping changes in the

nation's political, social, and cultural structures. The citizens

of the new France used portraits to effect regeneration from

the bottom up. Both portraiture and Revolutionary political

morality were predicated on the assumption that the face and

body communicated essential truths about the sitter to the

viewer. Transparency between citizens was the watchword of

the new regime. Now that political sovereignty rested with the

people, it was particularly important that the people be vir

tuous, and that their shared virtue be clearly manifested to

each other and in the governance of the state.4 Maximilien

Robespierre expressed this desire for constant and unim

peded communion between the individual and the polity in

1794 when, speaking on the floor of the legislature, he

looked forward to a new political order, "where all souls are

magnified by the continual communication of Republican

sentiments and by the need to merit the esteem of a great

people. . . ,"5 Robespierre posits a self that is always demon

strating its republicanism and is constantly mindful of the

critical gaze of its fellow citizens. The continual communica

tion of Republican sentiments, a goal difficult to realize in

the flesh, could be attained by a portrait, the permanent

image of the soul or, at least, of the body.

Revolutionary portraits reveal the ways in which French

citizens reformulated the basic elements of selfhood at a

moment when traditional political and social hierarchies

were being dismantled. In the wake of the collapse of the

ancien regime and of the Royal Academy of Painting and

Sculpture and its aesthetic strictures, sitters and artists

adapted the old conventions of portraiture to new social

realities. Some hierarchies, nonetheless, remained largely

unchallenged by the successive Revolutionary governments.

Citizenship was a male prerogative. Women had neither vot

ing rights nor legal access to military or civil posts. But

portraiture was not a male prerogative. Its centrality to Rev

olutionary visual culture made it a particularly effective

means by which women could claim political agency. The

visual vocabulary for making that claim, however, was limited.

Revolutionary allegories employed female faces and bodies to

visualize liberty, reason, nature, or the Republic, but actual

women were discouraged from representing themselves as

political actors. The efforts of those women who seized on the

Revolution's promise of universal liberty and equality, such as

the participants in the women's political clubs that were

founded after 1789 or activists like Olympe de Gouges, were

quickly suppressed. The only officially acceptable model for

Revolutionary femininity, promoted in speeches, in print,

and in visual representation, was that of the Republican wife

and mother, inspiring patriotism in her husband and raising

citizens for the nation.

A few women succeeded in carving out political identities

for themselves over the course of the Revolution. Not many

of them commissioned portraits. The case of Theresia Cabar

rus, better known as Mme Tallien, is exceptional. Socially

prominent, politically active, and profoundly convinced of

her ability to shape her own destiny, Cabarrus posed for a

portrait that not only proposed a novel form of female sub

jectivity but also inserted its sitter into the national drama of

the Terror (Fig. 1). Cabarrus's portrait, painted byJean-Louis

Laneuville and exhibited at the Salon of 1796, depicts, as the

title in the Salon catalog informs us, "The Citizen [Citoyenne]

Tallien in a prison cell at La Force, holding her hair which

has just been cut."6 The portrait represents Cabarrus's im

prisonment two years earlier by the radical Jacobin govern

ment. Cabarrus's prison correspondence with her then lover,

Jean-Lambert Tallien, reportedly prompted Tallien to stage a

coup d'etat against Robespierre, thus bringing the Terror to

an end and liberating Cabarrus. In this complex life-size

composition, Cabarrus and her portraitist manipulated the

conventions of female portraiture in order to produce a self

that was both reassuringly feminine and capable of interven

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326 art bulletin September 2011 volume xciii number 3

1 Jean-Louis Laneuville, The

Citoyenne Tallien in the Prison of La

Force, Holding Her Hair Which Has Just Been Cut, exhibited at the Salon of

1796, oil on canvas, 63% X 50% in.

(162 X 129 cm). Collection of the

princes of Chimay (artwork in the

public domain)

4$

ing in the course of national history—a citoymne in the full

sense of the term. That her attempt to create a feminine

version of political agency through portraiture was by and

large a failure provides us with an insight into the unfulfilled

promises of Revolutionary citizenship. The case of Cabarrus's portrait also demonstrates the value

of understanding portraiture as a collaborative process. A

portrait is the product of the ambitions of both the sitter and

the artist. Recent work on portraiture in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries has privileged the artist's claims over

the sitter's, an approach that obscures the complex power

dynamics of the portrait process as well the unique nature of

portraiture's intervention in cultural and social debates.7

Rethinking portraiture as a collaboration yields a more vivid,

and more historically responsible, understanding of what is at

stake—personally, aesthetically, and culturally—for artists,

sitters, and viewers. This approach to portraiture is particu

larly crucial for our understanding of the Revolutionary mo

ment. As both historians and art historians have noted, the

Revolution provoked a wave of what historian Jan Goldstein

refers to as "self-talk": intense debate over the constituent

elements of individual identity.8 Paintings like Laneuville's

portrait of Cabarrus thus did political as well as biographical and aesthetic work.

The ambitious format of Cabarrus's portrait, moreover,

points to the ways in which portraiture was becoming the

most important artistic means of investigating pressing phil

osophical and moral questions. Portraiture at this time took

on many of the responsibilities of history painting, making moral exemplarity and historical agency something that or

dinary people could claim for themselves. The Revolution

marks a turning point in the history of art, when seriousness

of purpose and aesthetic ambition passed from the formula

tion of historical narratives to the depiction of contemporary individuals—both men and (uneasily, as the case of Cabar

rus's portrait shows) women. This shift had major conse

quences for the course of art production in the modern era:

the undermining of academic genre hierarchies, the fore

grounding of the individual subject as the focus of ambitious

painting, and, eventually, the rise of a modernist painting concerned with the contemporary and the contingent.

Cabarrus's portrait not only participated in these cultural

changes but also made an argument for the centrality of

women to the Revolutionary polity. In order to understand

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WOMEN AND PORTRAITURE DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 327

2 Jacques-Louis David, Portrait of Louise Pastoret, 1791-92, oil

on canvas, 51 Vs X 38 in. (129.8 X 96.6 cm). The Art Institute

of Chicago, Clyde M. Carr Fund and Major Acquisitions Endowment, 1967.228 (artwork in the public domain;

photograph © The Art Institute of Chicago)

3 Portrait of a Woman with Revolutionary Emblems, ca. 1790-93, oil on canvas, 23 X 19V4 in. (58.5 X 49 cm). Musee Lambinet, Versailles (artwork in the public domain)

the stakes involved in this high-profile attempt to represent female political engagement, we need to consider both the

specific circumstances of the commission and the relation

ship of women to the polity during the Revolution. On the

one hand, we can understand the Cabarrus portrait in bio

graphical terms: as an unorthodox expression of an unorth

odox life. On the other hand, the portrait embodies the

contradictions and tensions surrounding the notion of fe

male citizenship in the new regime. Cabarrus had extraordi

nary access to political power, as well as to the means of

self-representation, but the challenges she faced in fabricat

ing a public face were common to all women.

These challenges are evident in the few female portraits of

the Revolutionary era that suggest a relation between female

identity and political commitment. Even women whose por traits hinted at their engagement with national affairs were

almost always defined by their roles as wives and mothers.

Jacques-Louis David's 1791-92 portrait of Louise Pastoret, a

member of the liberal nobility and well-known supporter of

the Revolution, makes no explicit reference to the sitter's

political sympathies (Fig. 2).9 Instead, the portrait turns Re

publican motherhood into Pastoret's main attribute. Seated

by her infant son's cradle, she labors decorously at a piece of

needlework, her partially bared maternal breast testifying to

her role as nurturer of citizens. A less sophisticated but more

forthright approach to the representation of female civic

identity is evident in a portrait of an unidentified woman by an equally unidentified artist (Fig. 3). The sitter's entire

outfit is rendered in patriotic red, white, and blue, from the

Revolutionary cockade and artificial flowers on her bonnet to

her blue bodice and white sleeves decorated with red roses.

Around her neck she wears a miniature portrait of a man with

a mustache, a liberty bonnet, and an open-necked shirt, the

markers of the sans-culotte, the stereotypical radical working class citizen (or of the middle-class activist who adopted this

politically expedient persona). The letter she holds reads,

"My friends, I'm counting on seeing us in a Republic."10

Letters and miniatures appear frequently in contemporary

genre paintings as tokens of love. This particular missive is

most likely meant to be interpreted as the words of the man

whose portrait the sitter wears; her Revolutionary political

engagement is thus articulated by the male voice. In the

David portrait, the presence of a man is implicit in the

representation of motherhood. The anonymous portrait is

more explicit about the relationship between women and

citizenship; it pictures a female patriot by hanging a male

patriot around her neck.

In each of these portraits, a woman's political engagement

is mediated by her relationship with a man. None of the

sitters inserts herself into a national narrative. Instead, all

support men and raise children in indeterminate interior

spaces. The difficulty of picturing active and independent female citizenship speaks to the constraints that the Revolu

tion imposed on the political activity of women despite (or

because of) its promises of universal liberty and equality. As

the historian Carla Hesse has shown, the primary argument

against women's political rights was that they were incapable

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328 art bulletin September 2011 volume xciii number 3

of reason and independent judgment. Women were limited

by their supposed lack of a self-created subject position—the

same objection that was raised to the enfranchisement of

domestic servants and actors.11 Portraiture had the potential

to construct that subject position, but the social and artistic

conventions that governed women's self-representation

proved far more rigid than those that applied to men.

Cabarrus's portrait, working from within those conven

tions, challenges Revolutionary assumptions about the fe

male self. Laneuville certainly does not hesitate to advertise

his sitter's personal attractions, and, indeed, Cabarrus had

been an object of public admiration since she arrived in Paris

as an adolescent in the 1780s. The portraitist pictured his

sitter as a luminous beauty in a dark prison cell, surrounded

by the emblems of her imprisonment: the chain in the fore

ground, the miserable rations behind her, and the long locks

of her hair, which had been cut in anticipation of her trip to

the guillotine. Cabarrus is depicted at three-quarters length,

with her face and body turned toward the viewer. The calm of

her perfectly symmetrical face is animated by a slight but

perceptible smile. Her eyes meet ours. Her body leans for

ward toward the viewer and the light falling from the upper left. That light draws our attention to her face and her chest,

and makes her white dress, red sash, and pale skin glow

against the dark grays, blues, and browns of her surround

ings. Her arms are modestly crossed in her lap, and the long locks of curly dark hair that signal her impending doom

tumble down her body into the darker edges of the picture

plane, almost an afterthought in a composition that stresses

the elegance and beauty of its subject. But those severed curls remind the viewer that this is not a

society portrait or an image of a woman captured in the

happy dishabille of domesticity, as in David's portrait of

Louise Pastoret. The locks of hair return our gaze to the head

from which they were cut; Cabarrus's cropped hair is not

powdered, curled, or dressed for a portrait sitting but rather

is parted carelessly in the center and hangs loose on her

shoulders. One anomaly leads us to another. The sash

around Cabarrus's waist is improvised from a knotted hand

kerchief. The skirt of her dress is overlapped on the right by

pieces of straw and on the left by a chain, objects that em

phasize the conditions of her captivity. Cabarrus's body is

framed by a pillar supporting an archway on the left and the

edges of a craggy stone wall on the right, adding a note of

Gothic atmosphere. Behind the sitter to the left, the light

picks out the broken rim and handle of an earthenware jug and a coarse loaf of bread.

On the stone wall behind Cabarrus is a portrait within a

portrait: a profile of a classically handsome man with a high

forehead, straight nose, tender lips, strong chin, and loose

dark hair falling over his neck. The portrait is bisected by a

vertical line of the masonry, and the blocks of stone around

it are cracked and chipped. All these cut and crumbling

objects remind the viewer of the dangers surrounding Cabar

rus, whose unearthly calm suggests the fortitude of a Chris

tian martyr or a heroine of ancient Rome. They also serve as

clues to a narrative that seems to be still unfolding. Who is

she and why was she imprisoned? Who is the man whose

portrait floats behind her head, and how did it materialize on

her cell wall? When will she be led off to the guillotine? The

melodramatic mise-en-scene of the portrait throws into relief

the stasis of Cabarrus's pose and the neutrality of her expres

sion. She is at once a society beauty and an actor in the

national drama of the Terror.

This arresting amalgam of elite female portraiture and

prison narrative disturbed many of its viewers in 1796, at a

moment when France was struggling to suppress the memo

ries of the Jacobin Republic and to forge a new state out of its

legacy of civil unrest and foreign wars. Cabarrus's portrait

commission was a gamble. In 1796, she was famous both as a

political actor and as a fashion icon of questionable virtue.

Laneuville, the artist she chose, was best known for his por

traits of radical Republican politicians. The imagery they

devised treads the line between traditional portrait conven

tions for elite women and the visual vocabulary of Revolu

tionary political culture. The painting acknowledges and

works around the objections to female political engagement,

playing up the sitter's passivity and sentimental attachments

while at the same time proposing her as an exemplar of active

citizenship. Cabarrus's portrait argues—by intimation, by

analogy, and by invocation of the Revolutionary portrait pro

cess itself—for her creative intervention in the course of

national politics.

Theresia Cabarrus was born in Spain in 1773 to a French

banker and his Spanish wife.1" Her father, Francois Cabarrus,

was an important financial adviser to the king and founder of

the national bank; although bourgeois in origin and by pro

fession, the Cabarrus family had acquired patents of nobility

in France in 1786. Theresia was sent to Paris to be educated

and to make an advantageous marriage. Her family's wealth,

their recent ennoblement, and her own beauty weighed in

her favor, and in February 1788, at the age of fourteen, she

married Jean-Jacques Devin, marquis de Fontenay, a member

of a recently ennobled family with a fortune of 800,000 livres.

The new Mme de Fontenay and her husband plunged into

the world of reforming financiers and liberal nobility, social

izing with the Lameths, the Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeaus, and many other early supporters of the Revolution. Indeed,

one memoirist alleged that the Fontenays' son, Theodore,

born in May 1789, was in fact fathered by Felix Le Peletier de

Saint-Fargeau, brother of the future subject of David's first

martyr portrait. Whether or not her entanglement with pro

gressive politics took so carnal a form, Cabarrus was certainly immersed in the pre-Revolutionary reform movement; she

was, for instance, initiated in a Masonic lodge, one of the

most important nongovernmental institutions of civil society

during the ancien regime and a cradle of Revolutionary sentiment. After 1789, Cabarrus was publicly associated with

the most radical factions of the new government. Sometime

in the summer of 1791, soon after the arrest of the royal

family on their flight to Varennes, Cabarrus was the subject of

a satiric attack in the aptly named journal La Chronique Scan

daleuse. An imaginary dialogue between "Mme de Font. . ."

and her friend "Don ... Pic ... , femme Lam . . ." (Anne

Marie Picot, the wife of Charles Lameth) portrayed Cabarrus

as both a libertine and a political radical. Cabarrus tells her

friend that she was so happy about the arrest of the king and

its probable hastening of the declaration of the Republic that

she walked all the way from her suburban estate to Paris,

spent the night with Robespierre, dined with Danton, and

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WOMEN AND PORTRAITURE DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 329

then attended Picot's ball thrown in celebration of the happy event. Picot says admiringly:

It's your way of thinking that's so dear to me, it's your

patriotism, and that elevation of mind that made you rise

immediately to the heights of the revolution, that makes

me so crazy about your charming nature; and then, my

dear, what I adore in you is the courage to have had

Mirabeau.

The fictional Cabarrus replies by justifying her adventure

with the notoriously ugly comte de Mirabeau—"How could I

resist that manly eloquence?"—and then turns the tables on

her friend by accusing her husband and brother-in-law, the

Lameth brothers, of not being committed enough to the

antimonarchical cause.13 This sexually charged slander was

an utterly formulaic means of attacking women who were

perceived to be too involved in political affairs; Marie-Antoi

nette was the target of similar but far more scurrilous accu

sations. Cabarrus may have been neither a radical Republican

nor a sexual adventuress, but her sympathies and her con

nections were common knowledge, and she had become one

of the public faces of the Revolution.

No matter the actual nature of Cabarrus's involvement with

the events of the early Revolution, she certainly took advan

tage of one of the few legislative reforms favorable to women:

the legalization of divorce. In 1793, Cabarrus initiated di

vorce proceedings against her husband and left Paris. She

originally intended to rejoin her family in Spain, but in fact

she settled in Bordeaux, where she also had relatives. Cabar

rus rented an apartment in the center of the city and estab

lished a household for herself. This itself was remarkable: a

nineteen-year-old Spanish-born noblewoman with pro-Revo

lutionary sentiments, living alone with her young son in the

midst of the Terror, at a moment when being a foreigner and

a member of the former aristocracy was more than enough evidence to send someone to the guillotine.

Soon after her arrival in Bordeaux, Cabarrus met Tallien, a

deputy to the National Convention who had been sent on a

mission to the city to bring it in line with the policies of the

Jacobins. Tallien's origins were far humbler than Cabarrus's;

his was the classic trajectory of the ambitious lower-middle

class man to whom the Revolution afforded a path to power.

He was the son of the majordomo of a noble family and was

employed as a secretary to the same family before becoming

ajournalist and eventually the secretary of the Parisian public

prosecutor. In this capacity Tallien was involved in the Sep tember 1792 mob attacks on counterrevolutionary suspects in

the Parisian prisons; although Tallien actually attempted to

control the violence, he would later be blamed for inciting and abetting the mob.14 Soon after the massacres, Tallien was

elected a deputy to the National Convention, and a year later,

he was sent to Bordeaux.15 Immediately after his arrival,

Tallien and Cabarrus began a very public affair. Cabarrus

used her influence with Tallien to save many people from

persecution, serving as a power broker and Lady Bountiful

for countless petitioners.16 Her efforts did not go unnoticed.

A denunciation from November 1793 accused her of protect

ing aristocrats and corrupting Tallien, but it apparently had

little effect on her behavior.1'

4 Godefroy Engelmann, after Theresia Cabarrus, Portrait of Three of Theresia Cabarrus's Children, 1816, lithograph. Biblio

theque Nationale de France, Paris (artwork in the public domain)

One of the people who approached Cabarrus for help was

Jean-Philippe-Guy Le Gentil, comte de Paroy, an ardent roy alist who was also a professional artist. Le Gentil described

her apartment and its contents in his memoirs:

... an easel with a painting begun, a box of oil paints, brushes on a sort of stepstool, a drawing table supporting a small stand with a miniature, an English box, an ivory

palette and brushes, a desk open and filled with papers, memorandums and petitions, a bookcase with books in

disorder, as if they were frequently used. . . ,18

Many elite women took drawing lessons as part of a genteel

education, but Paroy's account testifies to Cabarrus's ambi

tions as an oil painter and a miniaturist. There is some

evidence to suggest that she studied with Jean-Baptiste Isabey, the best-known miniaturist of the Revolutionary era. Later in

life she produced a credible portrait of her children, which

was reproduced in one of the first French lithographs

(Fig. 4).19

Paroy mentioned Cabarrus's painting equipment and her

memorandums and petitions in the same breath, and, in

deed, her activities in Bordeaux went far beyond the usual

genteel female occupations or even the dispensing of patron

age, another traditional perquisite of elite women. Two sur

viving political tracts written by Cabarrus in Bordeaux pro vide a window onto her political ideology. The first essay, on

Revolutionary education, was read out loud by a member of

the National Convention, mostly likely Tallien, at the Temple of Reason in Bordeaux in December 1793.20 Her call for

public education is a smoothly written compendium of En

lightenment and Revolutionary values: the natural virtue of

children, the advantages of physical exercise, the importance of sensibility to personal character, the simplicity and frank

ness necessary to Republican morals, and the role that the

citizen-soldier plays in the defense of France. Cabarrus is

equally at ease citing John Locke and invoking the heroes of

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330 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2011 VOLUME XCIII NUMBER 3

antiquity; virtue and regeneration are her watchwords. The

speech was printed up, and Cabarrus sent copies to the

Committee of Public Safety in Paris.

The second essay, written in April 1794, took the form of

an address to the National Convention. It examined the place

of women in the public sphere and called for them to be

allowed to work as teachers and nurses in order to reinforce

their commitment to the Republic. Cabarrus begins by reas

suring her listeners and readers that she has no intention of

claiming equal political rights for women or encouraging in

them "the absurd ambition to free themselves of their duties

by appropriating those of men." However, she continues,

women desire, and deserve, a place in the civic order:

. . . wouldn't it also be a misfortune if, deprived in the

name of nature of the exercise of political rights, from

which are born strong resolutions and social connections,

they believe themselves justified in considering themselves

strangers to that which should insure the preservation of

those rights, and even from that which could lay the

groundwork for their existence? Ah! in a Republic, all

must doubtless be republican, and no being endowed with

reason can without shame deliberately exile him- or her

self from the honorable work of serving the father

land! . . ,21

In some ways, this argument reinforces the Revolutionary

trope of women as wives and mothers who encourage their

husbands' patriotism and raise children for the nation.

Cabarrus falls short of demanding political rights for women,

instead merely suggesting that they play a role in establishing and preserving them. But the sentence about women being

deprived of those rights in the name of nature reads like a

backhanded swipe against women's exclusion from politics.

Women, she implies, are barred from full citizenship not by nature itself (always the highest authority in Revolutionary

rhetoric) but by those who speak in the name of nature—a

construction that leaves room for doubt about the wisdom of

those who make these claims. Cabarrus immediately points out that such an exclusion runs the risk of alienating women

from the Republic. She then issues a stirring call to all beings "endowed with reason," a category in which she includes

women. In Cabarrus's interpretation of Revolutionary ideol

ogy, political virtue is not the exclusive possession of men.

The Republic's survival depends on the active participation of both sexes.

Cabarrus proposes that women work in public institutions

as teachers and nurses. Such service, she contends, should be

mandatory for unmarried girls, as it would prepare them for

their domestic roles as wives and mothers. Her plan for

women's civic service was based on widely shared essentialist

notions of women's sensibility and morality, but it also as

sumes that women have a right and a duty to participate in

public institutions. She concludes by exhorting the legislators to recognize the fact that women were part of the polity:

Custom, so often the precursor of your decrees, has

awarded women the beautiful title of citoyennes. Let this no

longer be a vain name with which they adorn themselves;

and let them be able to display with pride, or rather with

confidence, the true titles of their civic duty!22

Cabarrus holds up the speech patterns of the people—an

authority only slightly less hallowed than nature—as proof

that women were in fact already citizens. Giving them an

official role in education and nursing would allow them to

fully merit this title.

Writing and publishing a proposal about female citizen

ship was a bold move on the part of a woman who had already

been denounced at least once for interfering in political

matters. Cabarrus was by no means the only woman to have

publicized her objections to an exclusively masculine defini

tion of citizenship. Etta Palm d'Aelders published Call to

French Women for the Regeneration of Morals and the Necessity of the

Influence of Women in a Free Governmentm 1791, the same year

that Olympe de Gouges's Declaration of the Rights of Woman and

Citizen appeared in print.23 These authors are merely the best

known among the hundreds of women who published polit

ical tracts during the Revolutionary era.24 It is the timing of

Cabarrus's publication that makes her intervention seem par

ticularly aggressive—indeed, foolhardy. Over the course of

1793, the government had banned women's political organi

zations, forbidden women to speak in front of the legislature,

and explicitly excluded women from citizenship. Moreover,

by the time Cabarrus published this address and sent it to the

National Convention in April 1794, her lover had been re

called to Paris to account for his management of the situation

in Bordeaux. Cabarrus, meanwhile, had remained engaged in local politics and had also started a factory producing

saltpeter, a key ingredient of gunpowder and a major part of

the Revolution's war machine.25

Was Cabarrus oblivious to the dangers she ran by publiciz

ing herself and her ideas, both in Bordeaux and in Paris, in

a period when the Terror was accelerating? She was no fool,

as her writings attest, and her relationship with Tallien must

have given her considerable insight into the workings of the

government. It is more likely that her efforts to publicize her

political engagements were intended as a form of preemptive self justification, a defense against accusations that she had

corrupted Tallien and used her influence to save aristocrats

from the guillotine. As a good Republican, Cabarrus may have decided that transparency was the best policy. All her

political and economic support for the Revolution, however,

could not change the fact that she was both foreign-born and

a member of the nobility. Two days after her address was read

in Bordeaux, the National Convention expelled all foreigners and former nobles from port and frontier towns. A few weeks

later, Cabarrus obtained a passport to leave Bordeaux, a

document that described her as "height five feet two inches,

white and pretty face, black hair, well-made forehead, light

eyebrows, brown eyes, well-made nose, small mouth, round

chin." 6

Despite the obvious dangers, she traveled to Paris

and was promptly arrested.

The story of Cabarrus's arrest and imprisonment quickly became part of the romantic legend of the Revolution, due in

large part to Tallien's and her own repetitions and embroi

deries. The earliest detailed account that survives is that of

the Geneva-born traveler Charles de Constant (cousin of

writer and politician Benjamin Constant). In letters sent to

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WOMEN AND PORTRAITURE DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 33]

his family during a trip to Paris in 1796, he records his

impressions of Cabarrus, whom he met at a luncheon in the

company of lier friend Rose de la Pagerie, better known as

Josephine de Beauharnais, Napoleon Bonaparte's first wife.

After devoting many lines to Cabarrus's beautiful person and

stylish dress, he transcribes her description of the ordeal.27

Arriving at the prison of La Force in the middle of the night,

Cabarrus says, she was stripped of her clothes in front of eight

men. Reclothed in only her chemise and a rough canvas

dress, she was held in isolation in a windowless and filthy cell

for twenty-five days. During that time, she resisted all attempts

to bribe her into denouncing Tallien and his political allies.

Finally, her jailors took pity on her and allowed her to spend

an hour a day in a better-lit and ventilated cell. There she

drew a self-portrait on the wall. Her jailors noticed her talent

and asked her to draw their portraits. Soon thereafter, a

mysterious benefactor smuggled paper and pen to her dis

guised in a head of lettuce. She used these supplies to write

letters to Tallien, first in her own blood and then in pigments

given to her by her jailors in exchange for her services as a

portraitist. Cabarrus warned her lover that she was to be sent

to the guillotine in a matter of days and related a dream in

which Tallien had overthrown Robespierre. Tallien replied

that he would either obtain her release or go to the guillotine

with her; the next day, he led a successful coup against the

Jacobin regime.

Cabarrus's romantic account of her imprisonment and

escape, in which love and politics are inextricably inter

twined, was no doubt largely invented to sugarcoat the cou

ple's previous and subsequent actions. However, the Revolu

tionary public was clearly ready to believe, or at least be

charmed by, Cabarrus's story. She left prison a celebrity,

hailed as "Our Lady of Thermidor," the motivating force

behind the overthrow of Robespierre. As Cabarrus put it

herself later in life, "it's a bit by my little hand that the

guillotine was toppled."28

Now that she had moved from Bordeaux to Paris, the

center of government, she became a major force on the social

and political circuits. She claimed credit for taking the keys to

the Jacobin Club, the radical political party that drove the

Terror, effectively shutting it down. In the aftermath of

the coup, she employed her diplomatic skills to reconcile the

factions wrestling for power. Her political leverage was in

creased by her position as the most visible of the female

leaders of fashion known in contemporary commentary as

the merveilleuses. In the post-Revolutionary social hierarchy,

the women of the court had been replaced as fashion leaders

and power brokers by newcomers distinguished not by their

birth but by their wealth, their connections to military and

legislative leaders, and their spectacular taste in clothing and

interior decoration.29 Cabarrus cemented her membership

in this group by marrying Tallien in December 1794; five

months later, she gave birth to a daughter named Thermidor

Rose, after the momentous event that made her parents into

political celebrities and Cabarrus's best friend, Rose de la

Pagerie.

With celebrity came renewed attacks in the press. The new

Mme Tallien's taste for semitransparent muslin dresses and

her determination to play a central role in Parisian society

attracted the ire of commentators who connected her popu

larity with the corruption of already fragile post-Thermidor ean Republican virtue. Less than a month after her marriage, a Parisian journal complained that Cabarrus was distracting the public from the real challenges facing the Republic:

Enormous luxury, concerts, the singer Garat and the beau

tiful citoyenne Cabarus, wife of Tallien, that's what occupies

people here, far more than subsistence and our fourteen

armies. ... Is she arriving? People applaud enthusiasti

cally, as if having a Roman or Spanish face, superb skin,

beautiful eyes, noble bearing, a smile in which amiability

tempers influence, a Grecian dress and naked arms was to

save the republic. .. . Several journals have multiplied the

literal copies of the same portrait of Theresia Cabarus,

portrait in several columns, where we see successively Or

pheus, Eurydice, Duhem, Cambon, the new Antoinette of

some, the goddess of others. . . . What taste! How much wit!

And what republican morals!30

Cabarrus is accused of distracting the people from the real

political issues at hand—food shortages and the war—with

her beauty, her radical fashions, and, by implication, her

immorality. The commentator not only enumerates her phys

ical charms but also strategically alludes to her Spanish birth

and her reputation as a protector of the victims of the Terror,

two circumstances that supplied fodder for attacks on Cabar

rus from the surviving political left. The writer also refers to

the written portraits of her published in various journals. For

some, her story evokes the classical narrative of Orpheus and

Eurydice, in which a man (almost) frees his beloved from

death. For others, she is an ally of the moderate deputies

Pierre-Joseph Duhem and Joseph Cambon, who collaborated

with Tallien to establish a post-Thermidorean government.

But some descriptions of Cabarrus, the author notes coyly,

paint her as a new Marie-Antoinette, partying while the peo

ple starved and the Republic's armies struggled to defend

France against a coalition of hostile European forces.31 It is

unclear if the concluding ironic reference to "republican

morals" is directed toward Cabarrus, those who allow them

selves to be fascinated by her, or her detractors in print, but

there is no mistaking the author's disapproval of her behav

ior.

These criticisms, although steeped in the micropolitics of

1795 and 1796, in essence reiterated condemnations of wom

en's influence on politics dating from the ancien regime. As

Cabarrus had discovered at the beginning of the Revolution,

a woman in the public sphere could not help but be caught

in an endless loop in which political participation was

equated with sexual immorality and the subversion of the

notionally serious and pure masculine political order. This

criticism extended to her husband, who discovered that the

aureole surrounding the hero of Thermidor did not protect

him from condemnation for his own role in the Terror or,

from the other end of the political spectrum, suspicions of

royalist plotting. Soon after the coup, he was accused in the

Jacobin Club of counterrevolutionary tendencies. His liaison

with Cabarrus, "the wife of an emigre and the daughter of the

treasurer of the king of Spain," constituted the primary evi

dence against him. Tallien defended himself by characteriz

ing Cabarrus as an innocent victim who had been willing to

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332 art bulletin September 2011 volume xciii number 3

5 Laneuville, Portrait ofBertrand Barere de Vieuzac, 1793-94, oil

on canvas, 51Vs X 38% in. (130 X 98 cm). Kunsthalle Bremen

(artwork in the public domain; photograph © Kunsthalle

Bremen—Der Kunstverein in Bremen)

sacrifice herself rather than sign a false accusation against

him.32 Tallien's enemies in the legislature also attacked him

through his connection to Cabarrus, compelling him to an

nounce his marriage in a session of the National Convention

in an attempt to defend himself and his new wife from

accusations of royalism.33 In the same month, January 1795,

a newspaper article reporting on the Tallien controversy

provided a much-pruned biographical sketch of Cabarrus. It

emphasized her early commitment to the Revolution and her

courage during the Terror while minimizing her wealth and

downplaying her Spanish connections, turning her father the

royal minister into an uncle.34

The attacks on Cabarrus and Tallien from both the left and

the right mirrored public resistance to the post-Thermidor

ean government. Over the course of 1795, the legislators

suppressed Jacobin-inspired popular violence in Paris in sup

port of "Bread and the Constitution of 1793," beat back a

counterrevolutionary invasion of Brittany led by emigre no

bility, and deputized rising military star Napoleon Bonaparte to put down a royalist uprising in Paris. In the winter and

spring of 1796, a new constitution was written, a government headed by five executive directors was sworn in, and another

serious leftist conspiracy, led by Gracchus Babeuf, was ex

posed and dismantled. While her husband struggled to find

a place in the new government, Cabarrus continued to oc

cupy the public eye and to forge alliances with ascendant

political figures like Napoleon Bonaparte (her friend Rose's

new husband) and Paul Barras, one of the new directors and

the organizer of the recent suppression of the royalist

uprising. Sometime in 1796, Cabarrus decided to commission a

portrait from Laneuville. Litde is known about the artist

beyond the bare outlines of his biography. He was born in

1748 and studied at least briefly with David. He exhibited in

the open-air Salon de lajeunesse in Paris between 1783 and

1789 and began sending pictures to the official Salon as soon

as it opened to those who were not members of the Royal

Academy in 1791. Laneuville seems to have particularly

sought out the patronage of political figures. In 1793, for

instance, eight of the twelve portraits he sent to the Salon

were of politicians, as were four of his six portraits in the

Salon of 1795. All of the sitters who are identifiable were on

the political left. Laneuville must have specifically targeted

this clientele, either because of his personal sympathies or

because he sensed an untapped market; at least four of the

deputy portraits were still in his studio at his death in 1826,

suggesting that he painted them on his own initiative in order

to drum up more business.35

All of Laneuville's known portraits from the Revolutionary

era adhere to a strict formula: single figures, strongly delin

eated against a neutral background; the meticulous detailing of physiognomy and material goods; a polished paint appli

cation that effaces the hand of the artist; reduction of color to

a contrast of strong tones; and, almost invariably, intense,

level, and sober eye contact between the sitter and the viewer.

The 1793-94 portrait of the radical deputy and journalist

Bertrand Barere de Vieuzac is typical of Laneuville's style

(Fig. 5). The determined regard of Barere, who leans on

papers referring to his role in the trial and execution of Louis

XVI, summons the viewer to share in his seriousness and to

join him in the fraternity of popular sovereignty. Laneuville

inherited this formula from his master, and he followed it so

faithfully that his best portraits have invariably been misat

tributed to David. The illusion of immediacy and transpar

ency fostered by these visual strategies suited Revolutionary

notions of the politically engaged self.

Laneuville's display of Republican portraiture at the Salon

of 1793 must have attracted Jean-Lambert Tallien's atten

tion—or perhaps Tallien's celebrity attracted Laneuville,

who had already demonstrated his eagerness to build his

business. In the first Salon after Thermidor, in 1795, a por trait of the newly married Tallien was included in Laneuville's

entry, along with images of three other deputies, an ex

minister, a military officer, and an artist.36 Cabarrus was

evidently pleased enough with Laneuville's efforts on behalf

of her husband to award the artist the commission of her own

portrait.57 But Laneuville was still an odd choice of portraitist

for a woman and for a leader of the reborn Parisian elite. If

money was no object, she could have addressed herself to

David—although the memory of his friendship with Robespi erre and his martyr portraits may have held unwelcome asso

ciations for the wife of a former Terrorist. Joseph Ducreux,

another veteran of the pre-Revolutionary portrait market,

had sent a portrait of Cabarrus's friend Rose de la Pagerie to

the 1795 Salon. Rising stars like Francois Gerard or Robert

Lefevre would also have been fashionable (and economical)

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WOMEN AND PORTRAITURE DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 333

choices. All of these artists were producing sophisticated and

elegant portraits of women in 1795, while Laneuville was

working almost exclusively for men. Cabarrus's previous por trait commissions are poorly documented, but the only two

early portraits identified with her are by female artists: a bust

portrait attributed to Rosalie Filleul, a contemporary and

friend of the young Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, and a half-length

image attributed to Marie-Genevieve Bouliar.38 If these com

missions are indicative of Cabarrus's taste and her commit

ment to female artists, she could certainly have chosen one of

the thirteen female portraitists who showed work in the Salon

of 1795.

Instead, Cabarrus gave the commission to Laneuville, a

painter who specialized in intense, confrontational portraits

of male politicians in which physical and psychological im

mediacy stood in for Republican virtues. These strategies

were difficult to apply to a female sitter, especially an ambi

tious, politically engaged woman who had frequently come

under public attack for her opinions and also for her per

ceived or real sexual adventures. Cabarrus, by embracing this

masculine aesthetic and inserting herself into a politically

charged narrative, deliberately appropriated conventions

that had been eagerly adopted by male commissioners during

the Revolution.

Coming up with an effective visual vocabulary for female

political engagement in 1796, then, posed a real challenge.

Cabarrus put her finger on the problem in her 1794 address:

the Revolutionary promise of universal liberty and equality

did not extend to women, who were excluded from the

"exercise of political rights" on the grounds of natural differ

ence. Cabarrus advocated a partial extension of the rights

and responsibilities of citizenship to women without chal

lenging assumptions about their essentially nurturing and

domestic nature. In the first years of the Revolution, many

other women took the Revolution at its word, forming polit

ical clubs and leading popular demonstrations. Feminists of

both sexes argued for the necessity of awarding political

rights to women. The government's hostile response to fem

inist demands demonstrated the general unwillingness to

extend the promise of liberty and equality to women.

The acceptable model for Revolutionary women was

summed up by the deputy Andre Amar in 1793:

They can illuminate their husbands, communicate to

them precious reflections, fruit of the calm of a sedentary

life, use all the empire that private love gives them to

fortify in them [their husbands] the love of the fatherland;

and the man, illuminated by informal and peaceful dis

cussions in the midst of his household, will bring back to

society the useful ideas that an honest woman gives him.39

Amar acknowledges women's capacity for sound political

reflection but insists that the only proper arena for those

reflections is the home, and the only conduit for them an

attentive husband. This was a relatively generous assessment

of women's role in the Republic. Many other theorists felt

that the female contribution to the public sphere began and

ended with raising children for the nation. The visual vocab

ulary of Revolutionary femininity was likewise dominated by

images of Republican wives and mothers.40 A 1794 print of a

family at the Festival of the Supreme Being neatly summarizes

the roles available to women: wife guided by her husband,

mother educating her children, daughter following her

mother's lead, or limp allegorical personification of Nature

or the Republic (Fig. 6). Portraiture for the most part re

flected the limited range of imagery popularized by prints, as

the examples of David's Portrait of Louise Pastoret or the anon

ymous woman with the sans-culotte miniature testify. Cabarrus commissioned a different kind of portrait. By

hiring Laneuville, she allied herself with the kind of male

political portraiture he practiced and the kind of active citi

zenship he pictured. Their collaboration resulted in an im

age that combined the safely passive imagery of Revolution

ary femininity with conventions usually associated with men.

This approach suited Cabarrus's unorthodox public persona.

She had never been particularly concerned with following

the rules governing eighteenth-century women, whether they

concerned sexual propriety, financial dependence, or main

taining silence on political matters. A twenty-year-old divor

cee and proprietor of an ammunitions factory who did not

hesitate to publish a pamphlet calling for greater civic in

volvement for women in 1794, long after women's political

clubs had been banned, was the ideal client for a portrait that

broke down barriers between male and female modes of

representation.

In many ways, Laneuville's depiction of Cabarrus pays lip

service to the conventions of female portraiture of the early

1790s. David's 1790 portrait of Anne-Marie-Louise Thelusson,

comtesse de Sorcy, established the post-Revolutionary gram

mar of this mode of portraiture, which was recombined with

more or less fluency by younger artists such as Charles-Paul

Landon (Figs. 7, 8). Laneuville's portrait borrows liberally

from these models: Cabarrus's seated three-quarter-length

pose, her calm face and level gaze turned outward toward the

viewer, the simple white dress brightly lit against a sober

neutral background, and the position of her arms and hands

are all characteristic of the work of David and his many

students and imitators. Like David and Landon, Laneuville

invested considerable energy in the meticulous re-creation of

the details of costume and accessories, and effaced most if

not all traces of brushwork. The result is an illusion of literal

and figurative transparency between the sitter and the viewer.

The proximity of the sitters to the picture plane and the

steady eye contact they maintain with the viewer reinforce the

feeling of intimacy.

This visual strategy was employed for both men and women

in the early 1790s, as Laneuville's portraits of politicians

attest. Its roots extended back to Vigee-Lebrun's portraits of

the 1780s, which themselves represented the culmination of

a visual culture of Enlightenment selfhood that celebrated

emotional honesty and communion with others. This mode

of portraiture held different connotations for men and

women, however. For men like Laneuville's sitters, it served

to emphasize their civic engagement, a message reinforced by

their upright postures, their level gazes, and their firm grasp

on their documents or pens. It evoked the communion of the

body politic, in which male citizens confronted each other on

an equal footing. For female sitters, immediacy and commu

nion were generally played as domestic intimacy or a tame

kind of desirability rather than as civic engagement. The

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334 art bulletin September 2011 volume xciii number 3

FETE CELEBREE EN LHO XN'KIII I) E LET RE SUPREME Lc 20 Prairiale lan 2"* do la Hep

fie Pf'rilttAlePre/r* </e /'Ktre supreme, c 'est !a - X tfnre, son temple /Vtuvers . son (tt/fe fcrt/e , s, i /e/es la/oye dimyran*/ Pettfle r ,y. m/'/e /'our resserer Its iIoujc noeuJs </e '

la Praterntte c/ Jurer At /nor/ i/es '/'trans

6 Festival Celebrated in Honor of the

Supreme Being, 1794, engraving.

Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris (artwork in the public domain)

canny manipulation of pose and accessories tempered any risk of assertiveness, political or sexual. David's women of the

1790s, for instance, clutch flowers, children, or implements of handicraft or keep their hands demurely clasped. Female

sitters were often posed leaning slightly forward or backward,

their bodies and clothing tracing curved lines in contrast to

the male uprights. Landon scores a hat trick in his portrait of

an unidentified sitter: she is depicted reclining, clasping her

hands, and sandwiched between a vase of flowers, an un

opened book, and a basket of yarn.

Laneuville's portrait of Cabarrus follows the rules for fe

male portraits but subtly manipulates them to accommodate

strategies generally reserved for male sitters. Cabarrus is

seated not on the standard wooden or upholstered chair, an

accessory that served as a sign of luxury consumption, but on

a stone ledge covered in straw. Mottled gray masonry walls

replace the richly draped Neoclassical interior of the Landon

portrait and serve as a kind of gallows-humor retort to David's

elegandy neutral backdrops. Cabarrus's costume also differs

in subtle but meaningful ways from the fashionable dress of

other female sitters of the 1790s. Given the rapid pace of

sartorial change during the Revolution, and particularly the

promotion of radically pared-down dresses a la grecque (in

spired by Classical antiquity) by Cabarrus and other leaders

of post-Thermidorean society, it is significant that Cabarrus

chose a relatively conservative costume for her 1796 portrait.

By eschewing the transparent muslins and entirely bare arms

seen in many contemporaneous portraits, Cabarrus warded

off the accusations of immorality and extravagance that had

already been leveled at her in the press. Laneuville and

Cabarrus further undermined the modishness of the dress by

substituting a roughly knotted checked scarf for the standard

satin sash or cashmere shawl. The knotted scarf turns the

dress from an expensive commodity into the improvised costume of a prisoner deprived of all creature comforts—

more like the shift that Cabarrus claimed was her only cloth

ing in prison. Her hair is similarly like but unlike that of other

female sitters. Undressed, unadorned by ribbons, and falling

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WOMEN AND PORTRAITURE DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 335

limply onto her shoulders, the undisciplined tendrils curling

against her white shoulders and neck call attention to what is

missing: the severed locks that spill out of Cabarrus's hand

and fill her lap. The cut hair is Cabarrus's attribute in this

portrait, occupying the hand that in other female portraits lies idle or holds a needle, a book, or a child's hand.

The cut hair is more than a personal attribute. It is the

catalyst for a narrative, referring viewers to a moment in time

just before the prisoner's transportation to the guillotine and

to political events outside the portrait's frame. This is, more

over, a national as well as a personal narrative. Cabarrus's

portrait inserts her into French history, recalling to viewers in

1796 the events of the Terror and the pivotal roles that she

and her husband played. Laneuville gives his sitter a type of

agency reserved, both legally and visually, for men. Like male

commissioners, Cabarrus uses visual representation to claim a

stake in the Revolution. She belongs to the Revolution, and

the Revolution belongs to her; she is a citoyenne, as the title of

the portrait insists.

But Cabarrus knew better than most women (having pub

lished on the topic) that female citizenship was inherently

contradictory. To claim too much political agency was to run

the risk of drawing criticism as a "new Antoinette," a manip

ulator of men whose ambitions were inseparable from her

greed and sexual aggression. Cabarrus and her portraitist

hedged their bets, promoting her role in Revolutionary his

tory while at the same time stressing her beauty, her capacity

for sentiment, and her physical passivity. The pose and cos

tume borrowed from standard female portraiture help to

reassure viewers that the sitter is a woman first and a political

actor second. Cabarrus and Laneuville also temper the por

trait's claims by emphasizing Cabarrus's status as a victim. She

changed the course of the Revolution, the portrait implies, by

7 David, Portrait of Anne-Marie-Louise ThHusson, Comtesse de

Sorcy, 1790, oil on canvas, 503A X 38!/« in. (129 X 97 cm). Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemaldesamm

lungen (artwork in the public domain; photograph by Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, provided by Art Resource,

NY)

8 Charles-Paul Landon, Portrait of a

Woman, 1793, oil on canvas, 25% X

31% in. (65 X 81 cm). Musee de

Grenoble (artwork in the public domain; photograph © Musee de

Grenoble)

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336 art bulletin September 2011 volume xciii number 3

9 H. Dupont, after Joseph-Benoit Suvee, Portrait of Andre

Chenier, 1838, etching, 4 X 3% in. (10 X 8.5 cm). Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris (artwork in the public domain)

inspiring her lover to take action. This was the kind of female

civic engagement that was endorsed by Amar in 1793; Cabar

rus used the private empire that love gave her over Tallien to

strengthen his resolve and inspire him to action in the public

sphere.

Laneuville borrowed from prison and victim imagery, both

ancient and contemporary, in order to dignify (and sugar

coat) Cabarrus's ambitions. The fortitude of prisoners was a

stock subject of pre-Revolutionary history painting; Laneu

ville would have been intimately familiar with David's Death of Socrates (1787), and scenes of imprisonment and sacrifice

such as Jean-Francois-Pierre Peyron's Funeral of Miltiades

(1780) or Francois-Andre Vincent's Arria and Poetus (1784)

would also have formed part of his and his viewers' visual

vocabulary. The prison theme was revived and updated after

Thermidor as a means of engaging with the Terror and its

aftermath. Numerous prison-themed portraits and genre

scenes were produced during the Terror, or retrospectively

after the fall of Robespierre. At least ten of these images could be seen at the Salons of 1795 and 1796. Some of the

portrait sittings had taken place in prison, as was the case with

Joseph-Benoit Suvee's portrait of the famous poet and poli tician Andre Chenier, who was imprisoned with the artist and

who sat for his portrait just before his execution (Fig. 9).

Suvee exhibited Chenier's portrait in the Salon of 1795,

along with images of three other doomed prisoners.41 Other

images, such as the scenes of everyday prison life that Hubert

Robert painted during his incarceration or David's profile

drawings of his fellow Jacobins made while they all faced

judgment for their roles in the Terror, circulated privately. These images provided commissioners, artists, and viewers

with a means of putting human faces on the Terror and

making sense of its place in the already bewildering historical

narrative of the Revolution. Many had strong political moti

vations; Suvee and his sitters were all anti-Jacobin, and Da

vid's portraits, as Ewa Lajer-Burcharth has argued, attempted

to reinsert their disgraced subjects into a heroic Republican

lineage that began with portrait prints of National Assembly

deputies in the first years of the Revolution.42 Prison portraits

explicitly associated their sitters with the greatest drama of

the Revolution and (with the exception of David's Jacobin

portraits) communicated a political position as a victim of

Robespierre—an enemy who united monarchists and mod

erates alike in 1794 and 1795.

Prison portraits, especially those actually produced in jail, were meant to evoke a kind of deathbed sincerity, function

ing as their sitters' last testament. Even sitters like Cabarrus

who commissioned these portraits retrospectively, as records

of their escape from political oppression, used the solemnity

of the depicted moment and place to lend their self-repre sentation a fixed, memorial quality. In this way, prison por

traiture served much the same purpose as the written politi

cal self-justifications required of many prisoners, or the

letters that the condemned wrote to their loved ones. A

selection of these "last letters," intercepted by the Revolution

ary tribunal, have been collected in a volume by Olivier

Blanc.43 Despite the disparate concerns and political posi tions of their authors, some common themes emerge: pro

testations of innocence, exhortations that the recipients re

member them, messages of love for spouses and children,

and insistence that their friends and family refrain from

taking vengeance on their persecutors. A surprising number

of prisoners employ Revolutionary rhetoric or swear their

allegiance to the Republic. Prison portraits like Cabarrus's

touch on the same themes: innocence, love, and memorial

ization. Cabarrus's saintly demeanor, her level gaze, and the

commemorative profile portrait on the wall behind her im

press on the viewer her fortitude and her confidence that her

hands, at least, are clean.

Most prison images, like the letters of condemned prison

ers, play on themes of resignation and tolerance. The latter

virtue became particularly important after the fall of Robes

pierre, as France tried to suppress the culture of denuncia

tion and reconstitute the government and civil society. A pair of prison-themed portraits by Pierre-Nicolas Legrand de Le

rant from 1794-95 exemplifies this spirit of national recon

ciliation. The two paintings were commissioned to commem

orate the generosity of a prison guard named Joseph Cange.

Discovering that the family of a prisoner under his watch was

in desperate financial straits, Cange gave the prisoner the

money he needed, claiming that it came from the prisoner's wife. When the wife visited her imprisoned husband, Cange

gave her money, too, in the name of the prisoner. When the

prisoner was released, the jailor's charity was discovered, and

the grateful recipients commissioned both a bust portrait of

their benefactor and a more elaborate image that made the

jailor, the released prisoner, and their families into the main

characters of a Greuzian scene of gratitude (Fig. 10).44 The

latter painting reveals the eagerness of portrait commission

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WOMEN AND PORTRAITURE DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 337

10 Pierre-Nicolas Legrand de Lerant, A Good Deed Is Never Forgotten, 1794-95, 011 on canvas, 24% X 31V4 in. (62.8 X

80 cm). Dallas Museum of Art, Founda

tion for the Arts Collection, Mrs. John B. O'Hara Fund (artwork in the

public domain)

ers to insert themselves into the Revolutionary narrative; the

tricolor cockades and liberty bonnets, the obviously institu

tional setting, and the public notices about nationalized

property point toward the political context of these seem

ingly private emotions. It also demonstrates how the theme of

the compassionate jailor and the virtuous prisoner was used

to heal the wounds of the Terror. The charitable act of

Cange, the good sans-culotte, testifies to the essential virtue of

le peuple, the implication being that the bloodthirsty sans

culotte was an aberration, led astray by a small group of

perfidious Jacobin leaders who had already paid with their

lives for their sins. The gratitude of the bourgeois family in

turn provides viewers with a model of class-blind fraternity.

The prisoner/commissioner, wronged by the Jacobins, puts

aside his legitimate grievances and embraces his worthy

jailor. Everyone, it appears, is a good person, and all French

citizens are members of the same family.

Cabarrus's 1796 portrait capitalizes on the emotions

evoked by the prison imagery of the immediate post-Terror

period. Indeed, its belatedness points to the sitter's will to

return to a moment in her life, and the nation's, when the

line between political virtue and vice seemed clearer. Her

choice of this mode of portraiture served to refute the accu

sations of immorality, foreignness, and royalism leveled at her

in the press and to recall the heady days immediately after

her release from prison, when she was hailed as "Our Lady of

Thermidor," the savior of the nation. By casting herself as a

prisoner, Cabarrus reminded viewers of her righteous refusal

to inculpate her lover, as well as her suffering in prison. But

she does so without any overt reference to politics besides a

vague and uncontroversial anti-Robespierrism—a wise ap

proach for a woman who had incurred ire from both the left

and the right. Instead, she and her portraitist trade in the

universal language of youth and beauty.

Even this kind of pathos had become politicized after the

fall of Robespierre. Immediately after Thermidor, one of

Andre Chenier's last poems was published in the Decade

Philosophique, a leading journal. Chenier had become some

thing of an emblem of the excesses of the Terror, as Suvee's

exhibition of his portrait in the Salon of 1795 attests. The

poem, entitled "La jeune captive," was an ode to a beautiful

young female prisoner, written in the woman's voice. The

prisoner's naive refusal of death penetrates the narrator's

despair and inspires him to continue writing:

"Oh death! You can wait, go, go away Go console the hearts devoured by shame, fear, and

pale despair.

For me Pales still has green havens,

Cupid has kisses, the Muses concerts.

I don't want to die yet."45

"La jeune captive" was chosen for publication from among Chenier's far angrier and more explicitly political prison

poems; its sentimentalism cloaked the poet's politics in a

more neutral language of love and femininity. Laneuville's

portrait of Cabarrus does much the same work; the sitter's

claim to political agency is softened by the lyricism of her

likeness. In Cabarrus's case, however, no displacement is

needed. She is both the symbol of youth and innocence and

the intellectual who uses that symbol as a means of comment

ing on national events.

The painting, nonetheless, remains a portrait, no matter

how poetic, and its primary concern is the depiction of a

unique and intact self, caught in a situation designed to

erode and eventually destroy that self. Laneuville's portrait is

ultimately about the integrity and the independence of the

subject under the worst possible circumstances. The implicit

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338 art bulletin September 2011 volume xciii number 3

11 Francois Vincent, Portrait of Marie de Broutin, Baronne de

Chalvet-Souville, 1793, oil on canvas, 42% X 36V4 in. (109 X

92 cm). Musee du Louvre, Paris (artwork in the public domain;

photograph by Gerard Blot, provided by Reunion des Musees

Nationaux/Art Resource, NY)

claim about the integrity of the self—and particularly of the

female self—was inherently political, given that women's sup

posed lack of autonomy was used as grounds to deny their

political rights. One of the most pointed signs of femininity

in the portrait is also the most potent marker of self-deter

mination: Cabarrus's hair. Cabarrus was famous for her long black hair; it functions in the portrait as one of her personal

attributes. But hair was also a central element of the prison

narratives of the Terror and a powerful symbol of the intact

self. It was standard practice to cut prisoners' hair just before

they were sent to the guillotine, ostensibly to clear the path for the falling blade.46 Hair in the eighteenth century was the

ultimate pledge of intimacy and devotion; the hair of friends

and family was incorporated into jewelry and plaited into

initials or decorative patterns on the reverse of portrait min

iatures. The cutting of their hair was experienced by prison

ers as a gross violation of their persons. Many prisoners

included locks of hair in their last letters, along with the

assurance that they had cut it themselves. "I hope that they

will give you my hair which has not been touched by the

executioner," wrote a twenty-two-year-old woman to her

brother on the day of her death.47

Cabarrus's shorn locks occupy the place in the portrait

usually reserved for symbols of the sitter's identity—pens or

scrolls for men, flowers or novels for women. In Cabarrus's

portrait, the hair not only symbolizes femininity and her

particular beauty but also defiance of Robespierre's authority and imminent death. Cabarrus, the portrait argues, retained

her self-possession in the face of the destruction of that self.

Her body, composed as if for a society portrait, glows white

against the massive stones of the tenebrous prison, and her

steady gaze meets that of the viewer. The cut hair warns of

other cuts to come, but it remains within Cabarrus's grasp. She has preserved at least this much of her self, and her

self-determination.

The profile portrait drawn on the wall behind Cabarrus's

head is another sign of self-determination, one that functions

on many levels. Taken literally, it is a mark of female accom

plishment of the kind that often made its appearance in

portraiture. A 1793 portrait of a young noblewoman by the

distinguished history painter and portraitist Vincent, a paint

ing that falls squarely into the category of elegant Revolution

ary society portrait, similarly foregrounds its sitter's skills as a

portraitist (Fig. 11). We know from contemporary accounts

and from surviving works that Cabarrus was a competent

portraitist who worked in pen and ink, watercolor, and oil.

Her skills as a draftsman appear here in part as testimony to

her gentility. In Laneuville's portrait, though, drawing is

elevated from a token of feminine accomplishment to some

thing far more serious. Cabarrus's draftsmanship becomes a

symbol of her initiative and her resourcefulness. Because she

was a portraitist, she was able to win over her jailors and

obtain the materials she needed to engineer her escape.

Drawing is the key to her contribution to Revolutionary his

tory. By filling up this normally hollow attribute, Laneuville

and Cabarrus manipulated the conventions of female portrai

ture in order to signal both her femininity and the ways she

exceeded the limitations of that category. As the Vincent painting demonstrates, a portrait within a

portrait was also a sign of womanly emotion. Vincent's sitter

has drawn a male head, presumably a husband or relative,

and the portrait on the wall behind Cabarrus could have

been (and perhaps was meant to be) read by contemporary

viewers as an image of Tallien. To sketch one's lover's profile

was a pleasantly sentimental occupation for a woman, remi

niscent of the novels of sensibility popular in late eighteenth

century France. It also recalls the story of Dibutades, the

Corinthian girl said to have invented the art of drawing by

tracing the silhouette of her lover on a wall. This was a

favorite theme of artists in the last decades of the eighteenth

century; it provided the visual arts with a graceful origin

myth. Suvee, one of the elder statesmen of French history

painting and enthusiastic producer of prison portraits, had

exhibited an austerely designed Dibutades painting at the

Salon of 1793, which would have been fresh in the minds of

Laneuville and his viewers (Fig. 12). Suvee's version of the

story, with its stripped-down interior, massive masonry walls,

and sober palette, was a Dibutades for the Terror, solemnly

recalling art's memorial function in the face of absence or

death. The anguished face of the lover and his tight grip on

his beloved/portraitist's waist heighten the impression of

impending loss. Cabarrus, in her simple white dress d, la

grecque, makes a convincing Dibutades, and the pathetic ref

erence to a departed lover would have resonated with the

"Jeune captive" strain of post-Thermidor depoliticized prison

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WOMEN AND PORTRAITURE DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 339

narratives. The associations of cut hair with lovers' exchanges

of locks and with portrait miniatures would only have

strengthened the mythological and sentimental import of the

profile portrait.

The formal treatment of the portrait within the portrait,

however, wrenches it out of the decorous realm of myth and

poetry and brings the viewer back to the unpleasant contin

gencies of 1794. The portrait is traversed by one of the

verticals of the masonry blocks on which it is drawn. That

edge, which effectively severs a third of the head, is itself

terminated by jagged gouges, as if a previous prisoner had

attempted to chip away at the mortar. This vertical leads the

eye downward to other broken edges in the masonry and to

the missing shard in the rim of the pitcher that presumably

contains the prisoner's water ration. All these cuts and lacu

nae reinforce the message of the cut hair: Cabarrus is bound

for the guillotine. The disembodied and sectioned profile

portrait hovers behind the cropped head of the prisoner like

a vision of the near future.

If the portrait within the portrait was read by contemporary

viewers as an image of Tallien, it would have served as one of

Cabarrus's attributes, an indication both of her talents and of

her womanly attachments. But if the profile portrait is under

stood as an image of Cabarrus's jailor, as suggested by her

own account of her imprisonment, it becomes the key both to

a narrative unfolding over time and to a particular political

interpretation of the Terror. Cabarrus claimed that her skills

as a portraitist enabled her to win over her jailors and obtain

the necessary material to communicate with Tallien. Her

draftsmanship, in other words, ended the Terror. The profile

on the wall gives Cabarrus's portrait the narrative structure of

a history painting; it implies past actions on the part of the

heroine and points to the future results of her initiative. A

portrait of an accommodating jailor also connects Cabarrus

to the spirit of post-Thermidorean reconciliation represented

by Legrand de Lerant's images of Cange and his grateful

beneficiaries. Cabarrus styled herself an agent of political

harmony after the fall of Robespierre, and advertising her

ability to forge a connection even with her jailors would have

advanced her cause. Moreover, a former aristocrat married to

a parvenu and erstwhile Terrorist had particular reason to

argue that the common humanity invoked by portrait making

superseded any factionalism or class difference.

The emphatic use of the honorific "citoyenne" in the title

of Cabarrus's portrait drives home the political ramifications

of the image. Many Revolutionary portraits went to the Salons

with "citoyen" or "citoyenne" in their titles, and the feminine

version of the term did not necessarily indicate any particular

political convictions on the part of the sitter, besides perhaps

a general sympathy for Revolutionary cultural reforms. None

theless, the term "citoyenne," as the historian William Sewell

points out, was inherently provocative. Its popularization in

everyday language was by no means initiated or endorsed by the Revolutionary government (as Cabarrus's essay points

out), and its application to a category of person legally de

nied political rights and responsibilities made obvious the

exclusions built into the supposedly universal rights of man.

The title "citoyenne" gave women the dangerous impression

that they, too, were included in the body politic.48

Cabarrus had already claimed the title of "citoyenne" in

"A ■Jam

12 Suvee, The Invention of Drawing, exhibited at the Salon of

1793, oil on canvas, 105 X 52 in. (267 X 131.5 cm). Bruges

Groeningemuseum (artwork in the public domain;

photograph © Lukas—Art in Flanders VZW, www.lukasweb.be)

writing; in 1796, she did so in paint. Her portrait works from

within the conventions of female portraiture and Republican

femininity to make an argument about the kinds of political

agency that a woman could wield. The authority that Cabar

rus appropriates is in part traditionally feminine and thus

passive: the power of beauty to inspire great deeds, the moral

suasion of conjugal (or soon-to-be conjugal) love, the plight of innocence wrongly accused. This passivity is echoed visu

ally in her static pose, white drapery, and mild gaze. At the

same time, Cabarrus also exploits the narrative possibilities of

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340 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2011 VOLUME XCIII NUMBER 3

Revolutionary portraiture to position herself as a political

actor. Indeed, she appropriates the cultural and political

power that portraiture had itself wrested from history paint

ing. Her portrait declares her to be a portraitist. She has

created another self even as she maintains her own bodily

and subjective integrity under the most debilitating of cir

cumstances. Cabarrus the portraitist, who used the empathy

between sitter and artist to make her jailors into her allies, is

an emissary of reconciliation after a fratricidal conflict that

called into question the very unity of the French nation.

Laneuville's portrait of Cabarrus manages to picture her

both as an innocent victim and as a political actor. But the

balance struck by sitter and artist is a delicate one. The

recycling of older conventions and the indirection of using

artistic creation as a metaphor for Revolutionary virtues tes

tify to the difficulties of depicting female citizenship. By

promoting the image of a beautiful prisoner whose influence

over a powerful man changed the political course of the

nation, Laneuville and Cabarrus ran the risk of invoking any

number of unflattering comparisons: to Marie-Antoinette,

vilified as a foreigner, a sexual predator, and the power

behind the throne; to the princesse de Lamballe, the queen's

alleged partner in crime, who had famously been decapitated

during the September 1792 prison massacres; and to Char

lotte Corday, the assassin of Jean-Paul Marat, who had be

come a counterrevolutionary folk hero for her beauty and

her sangfroid in prison. The supposedly salutatory effect of

wives' influence over their husbands promoted by the ideal of

Republican womanhood could not outweigh in the public

imagination these recent images of women imprisoned for

their crimes against nature and the Revolution. Given that

Cabarrus had already, by 1796, been condemned in the press as a new Marie-Antoinette, she and her portraitist should

have anticipated the dangers of telling a story involving a

woman who pressured her lover into overthrowing the gov ernment.

Laneuville and Cabarrus must have hoped that the portrait would make a splash at the Salon of 1796. It was the kind of

portrait that usually attracted public and critical attention:

the canvas was large, the composition told a story as well as

providing a likeness, the political references were sensational

and (relatively) up-to-date, and the sitter was both famous

and beautiful. The portrait's reception, however, was under

whelming. Indeed, according to one of the few references to

the painting in the Salon criticism of that year, in the Critique du Salon, ou les tableaux en vaudevilles, it was removed from

public view soon after it was hung. The portrait apparently recalled too vividly the political passions of the Terror: "This

picture, which only stayed on view for a few days, recalled the

awful time when France was composed of nothing but exe

cutioners and victims, and made those sensitive souls who

dared fix their gazes on this painting recoil in horror."49 The

innocence and beauty of the sitter apparently did not miti

gate the portrait's evocation of the guillotine. Moreover, this

critic willfully misread Cabarrus's image as a piece of Jacobin

propaganda, interpreting the prison theme in light of her

husband's alleged role in the September 1792 massacres. He

or she described the portrait (in verse, since the review was

peppered with vaudeville-style song lyrics) as a record of

these earlier Jacobin crimes:

The scene was in the prison

of the unhappy Lamballe;

and Cabarus, whose intentions

Are not to embolden crime (1)

Held, it was said, in her hands

The hair of that victim.50

By turning Cabarrus's hair, the symbol of both her beauty

and her threatened bodily integrity, into a relic of the prin

cesse de Lamballe, a woman firmly associated both with the

royal family and with Tallien's supposedly radical past, the

critic undermined Cabarrus's efforts at self-creation and ef

fectively dismantled the portrait's central strategy. The incon

gruous number in the middle of the "song" sent the reader to

a footnote, which explained that the author did not hold

Cabarrus personally responsible for the horrors imputed to

her husband. In this account, Cabarrus was neither the im

portant historical figure nor the independent political actor

she styled herself. She was just an accessory to crimes com

mitted by others.

The handful of other reviewers who mentioned the por

trait merely damned it with faint praise. The anonymous

author of the pamphlet Les etrivieres de Juvenal, ou Satire sur les

tableaux exposes au Louvre I'an Voffhandedly noted the picture

of "la citoyenne Tallien" and concluded "elle est bien" (she's

good)—a characterization perhaps prompted less by the

quality of the portrait or the sitter's reputation for beauty and

benevolence than by the fact that "bien" rhymes nicely with

"Tallien."51 L'Ami des Arts noted cryptically that the portrait had "reappeared" and that "the changes that have been made

have introduced more harmony, but the work is too notice

able."52 It is unclear what these changes consisted of, or what

problem they sought to correct, besides a generalized lack of

harmony. The evidence of the Salon criticism suggests that

the painting arrived, was criticized (at least in antijacobin

circles) for its theme, was removed, revised, and rehung, all

without making any significant impact on the critics or, for

that matter, on the public at large. '3

Cabarrus's portrait missed its mark because it recalled the

Terror and the disunity of France at a moment when the

nation was at war against external enemies and wrestling with

internal unrest and political dissension. If Cabarrus had com

missioned the portrait in time for the Salon of 1795 (which

opened three months after the fall of Robespierre, an almost

impossibly short turnaround for a portrait this elaborate),

she and Laneuville might have met with a more sympathetic reaction. The disapprobation, however, was not entirely due

to political contingencies, just as the condemnation of Cabar

rus in the press involved more than her or Tallien's putative

royalism or Jacobinism. Her portrait was disturbing because it

depicted a woman who had seized the slim personal and

political opportunities offered to her sex by the Revolution

and made the most of them. Its forthrightness about Cabar

rus's centrality to contemporary politics provided an easy

target for the generalized anxiety surrounding the increased

visibility of women in post-Thermidorean social life and visual

representation. Cabarrus's person, clothing, and political connections were a matter of public discussion; her portrait

may have been designed to mitigate criticism, but instead it

awoke the specter of Marie-Antoinette, accused of bringing

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WOMEN AND PORTRAITURE DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 34]

the nation to the brink of ruin through her sexual impulses

and political ambitions.

By the fall of 1796, when the Laneuville portrait went on

view, almost any political statement, no matter how ambigu

ous, was likely to make enemies. The Directory government had attempted to maintain a stable executive power and rise

above factionalism, at the price of lashing out both at the left

and the right. A government defined largely by a shifting

parade of enemies could have no stable relation with its

pre-Thermidorean past or with the former hero of Thermi

dor. It was likewise difficult to sum up clearly and effectively

Cabarrus's own complicated political career for a public bat

tered by the seesawing of its government. The Tallien-Cabar

rus household, moreover, had its own share of troubles.

Tallien's career was in eclipse. He had been elected to the

new lower chamber of deputies, the Conseil de Cinq-Cents,

but had never recovered the influence he briefly enjoyed

after Thermidor. Cabarrus's affections were wandering as

well, a fact that had not escaped public notice. An article in

the royalist journal Rapsodies du Jour in 1796 recounted an

anecdote about "la citoyenne T . . ." who, attending a ball in

her "Roman costume," discovered that someone had affixed

to her dress a note reading "Respect for National Proper

ty"—a dig both at the Republican nationalization of church

and private property and at Cabarrus's alleged sexual profli

gacy.54 The gossip had some basis in fact; Cabarrus began an

affair with Paul Barras, one of the five directors, just months

before the Salon of 1796 opened, making any narrative of

innocence and fidelity to Tallien difficult to sustain.

For Theresia Cabarrus, the Laneuville portrait was just one

element of her ongoing and very public efforts to consolidate

her fame and influence. Its failure did little to check her

momentum. After her affair with Barras ended, she entered

into another relationship, with Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard, a

wealthy financier, and bore him four children over the

course of five years. In 1802, she obtained a divorce from

Tallien, who had completely squandered his political capital and ended up discredited and destitute, dependent on his

ex-wife's financial support. In 1805, Cabarrus made an im

probably good marriage to Francois-Joseph de Caraman, a

member of an ancient Belgian family who soon thereafter

inherited the title of prince de Chimay. It seems to have been

a love match, at least initially, and Cabarrus bore her husband

three children. Shortly after her marriage, Cabarrus com

memorated this new phase in her life with another spectac

ular portrait (Fig. 13). This time she chose as her portraitist

Francois Gerard, one of David's most successful students and

the most sought-after society portraitist in France. Gerard's

likeness of the thirty-one-year-old Cabarrus transforms her

into an almost impossibly majestic Junoesque figure. The

painting is a standard example of Gerard's full-length por

traiture, interchangeable with his other images of the mem

bers of Napoleon's extended family or the wives of his gen erals. The only hint of Cabarrus's unconventional past is her

partially bared left breast, which could be interpreted vari

ously as a sign of her charitable nature, her fecundity, or her

reputation as a leader of fashion during the wild Directory

years of semitransparent dresses.

The Gerard portrait was commissioned at a time when

Cabarrus was more interested in repairing her social credi

13 Francois Gerard, Portrait of Theresia Cabarrus, Princesse de

Chimay, ca. 1805, oil on canvas, 8314 X 50 in. (212 X 127 cm). Musee Carnavalet, Paris (artwork in the public domain;

photograph © The Image Works)

bility than in staking claims to political agency. In 1805, the

fluctuating social and political structures that had allowed

women more latitude in their self-representation had, under

the firm hand of Napoleon, succumbed to a new (but retro

grade) social and legal hierarchy. Napoleon knew Cabarrus

well; after she divorced Tallien, he forbade his wife Josephine

any contact with her former best friend. Napoleon's condem

nation was echoed by the court of the United Kingdom of the

Netherlands. The prince de Chimay was a prominent fixture

there, but his wife was not received by the royal family, and

she spent the last years of her life becalmed in the tiny town

of Chimay.

Laneuville, her portraitist, fared somewhat better under

Napoleon. He received both private and official portrait com

missions under the Empire, exhibiting work in the Salon

until 1817. He also pursued a career as an expert art ap

praiser and possibly also as a dealer; the catalog of the artist's

posthumous sale reveals that he had amassed a vast collection

of old master and contemporary French art.55 His post-Rev

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342 art bulletin September 2011 volume xciii number 3

olutionary output as a portraitist remains almost completely

unknown, so it is unclear whether or not he ever attempted

another female portrait as ambitious and unconventional as

that of Cabarrus.

The 1796 portrait was, in any case, a product of its complex

and contradictory moment, conceived by a sitter and an artist

who were both deeply engaged with politics. Each had taken

advantage of the freedoms offered by the Revolution to cre

ate new selves and new career paths. Cabarrus, looking back

in 1796 at the short and eventful course of her adult life from

the vantage point of "Our Lady of Thermidor," may be

excused for thinking that in a society in flux, a gifted and

determined woman could claim a position of social and

political autonomy. The Revolution was committed to rein

venting politics and everyday life; indeed, it insisted that the

two were one and the same. This theory of regeneration, in

terms of visual imagery, placed portraiture at the center of

cultural and civic life—and portraiture was a tool that both

men and women could use. Cabarrus and Laneuville capital

ized on portraiture's symbolic resonance, presenting the por

trait process itself as a metaphor for active citizenship. The

portraitist Cabarrus fixes us with a steady gaze; the profile

portrait on the wall takes the place of the easel of the tradi

tional artist's self-portrait. The viewer becomes the self that

Cabarrus re-creates on the wall of her prison cell; we are

drawn into her vision of herself, seduced and reinvented by

her political and artistic skills. In this transaction, the viewer

and the self created is, of course, male: in the end, Cabarrus

can imagine herself politically only as a woman among men.

Cabarrus's portrait inserts her into the narrative of na

tional events in the only way possible for a woman: by indi

rection and subversion, with ample reference to older models

of femininity and their representational conventions temper

ing Cabarrus's claims to political power. It was a difficult

argument to make, as was any argument for female partici

pation in the polity during the Revolution. The portrait

offended its contemporary viewers because it recalled the

Terror and the disunity of France. But the portrait was also

disturbing because it depicted a woman who took the Revo

lution's promises of liberty and equality seriously and acted

on them. Even in portraiture, which provided artists and

sitters a means of exploring the novel forms of personhood on offer after 1789, female citizenship ran up against unyield

ing conceptual barriers.

Cabarrus's portrait may not have been a resounding suc

cess at the Salon, but like most portraits, it had a second life

in the sitter's home, which, given her political and social

status, served as a public space. Its long life, its ideological

complexity, and its use of the portrait process as a cipher for

political agency demonstrate the ways in which portraiture functioned as a privileged site for the elaboration of new

models of selfhood for a new nation. The genre's innovative

approach to the problem of individual identity in a represen tative regime (amply demonstrated in the Cabarrus portrait) both performed crucial ideological functions and established

new and long-lasting aesthetic priorities. Cabarrus's likeness

is a limit case of the power of Revolutionary portraiture. Laneuville and his sitter took extraordinary risks, and the

result of their collaboration exceeded the accepted bound

aries of citizenship. The freedoms the portrait took—both

literally and figuratively—point not only to the possibilities

and limitations of female agency in Revolutionary portraiture

and politics but also to the ways in which portraiture after

1789 shouldered the burdens formerly borne by history

painting. The fact that these artistic and political liberties

were visualized in a prison portrait makes the painting's

arguments that much more vivid and haunting.

Amy Freund is an assistant professor of art history at Texas Christian

University. She has recently completed a book manuscript entitled

"Portraiture and Politics in Revolutionary France, 1189-1804

Her work has appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies and In

terior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789—

1914 (Ashgate, 2011) [School of Art, Texas Christian University,

TCU Box 298000, Fort Worth, Tex., 76129, [email protected]].

Notes

Funding for research for this essay was provided by Texas Christian Univer

sity's Research and Creative Activities Fund and an Andrew W. Mellon Post doctoral Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Thanks are due to Charles

Hatfield, Nina Dubin, Jessica May, Heather MacDonald, Eric Stryker, Amy Buono, Sally-Anne Huxtable, and The Art Bulletin's anonymous readers for their careful readings and helpful comments, and to Mary Sheriff and the members of the research seminar on eighteenth-century European art at the

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, for their valuable feedback on a talk based on this material. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

1. At the Salon of 1789, 38 artists exhibited 110 portraits. In 1791, 103 artists exhibited 252 portraits. Statistics are based on my analysis of the official Salon catalogs.

2. La Gazette Frangaise, Papier-Nouvelles de Tous les Jours et de Tous les Pays, 23 vendemiaire year V [October 14, 1796], 3: "Des portraits, des por traits, et puis encore des portraits. Depuis que nous sommes devenus tous freres, on a fait du sallon une galerie de tableaux de famille."

3. Etat actuel de Paris, ou le provincial h Paris; ouvrage indispensable (l ceux qui veulent connoitre & parcourir Paris, sans faire aucune question, 4 vols. (Par is: Chez Watin fils, 1789), vol. 1, 125-27. Physionotrace portraits were small-scale engravings produced using a silhouette apparatus and a

pantograph. The price for an opera ticket (48 sols, at 20 sols per livre) is noted in Heinrich August Ottokar Reichard, Guide des voyageurs en Europe, 2 vols. (Weimar: Bureau d'Industrie, 1793), vol. 1, 120.

4. For an overview of the importance of transparency in Revolutionary political culture, see Antoine De Baecque, The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France, 1770-1800, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 209-46.

5. Maximilien Robespierre, Rapport sur les principes de morale politique qui doivent guider la Convention Nationale dans Vadministration interieure de la

Republique, fait par Robespierre au nom du Comite de Salut Public ([Paris]: Convention Nationale, 17 pluviose year II [February 5, 1794]), 539-67, at 541: "ou toutes les ames s'agrandissent par la communication con tinuelle des sentiments republicains et par le besoin de meriter l'estime d'un grand peuple. ..

6. Explication des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, architecture, gravures, dessins, modules, etc exposes dans le grand Salon du Musee Central des Arts (Paris: Imprimerie des Sciences et Arts, year V [1796]), 49-50: "Portrait de la

citoyenne Tallien dans un cachot a la Force, ayant dans les mains ses cheveux qui viennent d'etre coupes."

7. Tony Halliday, in his book Facing the Public: Portraiture in the Aftermath of the French Revolution (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1999), approaches the problem of portrait production and use primar ily from the point of view of the artist, tracing the ways in which artists constructed their own identities as practitioners of a liberal art. His work convincingly places portraiture at the center of Revolutionary aes thetic discourses but provides only a partial view of the culture of por traiture during the Revolution. Philippe Bordes's Portraiture in Paris around 1800: Cooper Penrose by Jacques-Louis David (San Diego: Timken Museum of Art, 2003) offers a wider understanding of portrait practice in Paris through the careful analysis of a single portrait. The most re cent scholarly study of French portraiture, Tamar Garb's The Painted Face: Portraits of Women in France, 1814-1914 (New Haven: Yale Univer

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WOMEN AND PORTRAITURE DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 343

sity Press, 2007), like Halliday's work, is primarily invested in the art ist's ambitions and motivations.

8. Jan Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750-1850 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 2. Ewa

Lajer-Burcharth gives a compelling account of cultural and artistic manifestations of post-Revolutionary anxiety about the self in Necklines: The Art of facques-Louis David after the Terror (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

9. Pastoret was married to Emmanuel de Pastoret. Husband and wife were early supporters of the liberal Revolution, and Emmanuel held several positions in the government between 1789 and 1792. Louise herself was described by a disdainful contemporary as a "gossipmonger of the Revolution [mattresse commere de la Revolution]." Ferdinande Bas san, Politique et haute society a Vepoque romantique: La famille Pastoret

d'apr&s sa correspondance (1788 a 1856) (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1969), 24.

10. "Mez amis, je suis bien comptant de nous voir en Republique."

11. Carla Hesse examines the objections to female citizenship and the ways that women used writing as a means of self-constitution in The Other

Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2001). Hesse's work builds on that of Genevieve Fraisse in Reason's Muse: Sexual Difference and the Birth of Democracy, trans.

Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

12. The myths that have grown up around Cabarrus's life story—some of which originated with Cabarrus herself—make it difficult to separate fact from fiction; indeed, many of her biographies are more or less fic tionalized. The most credible studies of her life are Maurice Ferrus, Madame Tallien a Bordeaux pendant la Terreur: Etude historique et critique (Bordeaux: Delmas, 1933); and Marie-Helene Bourquin, Monsieur et Madame Tallien (Paris: Librairie Academique Perrin, 1987). Frangoise Kermina's biography Madame Tallien 1773-1835 (Paris: Perrin, 2006),

although slightly novelized, also draws heavily on primary sources.

13. La Chronique Scandaleuse 14 (n.d. [1791]): 2: "c'est votre fagon de

penser qui m'est chere, c'est votre patriotisme, et cette elevation d'ame

qui vous a tout de suite portee a la hauteur de la revolution, qui me font raffoler de votre charmant naturel; et puis, ma chere, ce que j'adore en vous, c'est le courage d'avoir eu Mirabeau." An earlier num ber of the same journal (6) featured another dialogue between "Made moiselle Gaba .. . femme Fonte . .." and a friend, in which Theresia is accused of covering up an indiscretion by telling her husband she was

attending a session of the National Assembly.

14. Bourquin, Monsieur et Madame Tallien, 102-14.

15. For Tallien's early biography, see ibid., 17-35, 80-114.

16. For an account of the Terror in Bordeaux, and Cabarrus's and Tal lien's influence on its conduct, see Ferrus, Madame Tallien d, Bordeaux, 225-74.

17. Ibid., 165-66. There is some evidence that Cabarrus was imprisoned because of this denunciation, but if that was the case, she was quickly liberated and continued her advocacy.

18. Jean-Philippe-Guy Le Gentil, Memoires du Comte de Paroy, souvenirs dun

defenseur de la famille royale pendant la Revolution (1789-1797), ed. Etienne Charavay (Paris: E. Plon, 1895), 381-82: "un chevalet avec un tableau commence, la boite de couleurs a l'huile, des pinceaux sur une

espece d'escabeau, une table a dessins, portant un petit pupitre avec une miniature, une boite anglaise, une palette d'ivoire et des pinceaux, un secretaire ouvert rempli de papiers, de memoires et de petitions, une bibliotheque dont les livres paraissaient en desordre, comme si on

y touchait souvent. . .

19. Arsene Houssaye advanced the claim that Cabarrus studied with Isabey and reproduces the miniature of her children in Notre-Dame de Thermi dor: Histoire de Madame Tallien (Paris: H. Plon, 1866), 468. He does not document this claim, but his biography was based on her letters and

on conversations with her children. Cabarrus also lent her artistic skills and her influence with the government to Godefroy Engelmann, the

pioneer of lithography in France. Cabarrus sent samples of Engel mann's early efforts, including a print after her own work, to a high

ranking official in a successful effort to promote the new technology. See Leon Lang, Godefroy Engelmann, imprimeur lithographe: Les incunables

1814-1817 (Colmar: Editions Alsatia, 1977), 51.

20. Theresia Cabarrus-Fontenay, Discours sur Veducation, par la Citoyenne Theresia Cabarrus-Fontenay, Lu dans la seance tenue au Temple de la Raison

de Bordeaux, le ler Decadi du mois de Nivose, jour de la Fete nationale, celebree

a Voccasion de la reprise de Toulon par les armes de la Republique, imprime

d'apr&s la demande des Citoyens reunis dans ce Temple (N.p., n.d. [1793]). A

letter by Cabarrus confirms the circumstances of its delivery in Bor

deaux; see Ferrus, Madame Tallien d. Bordeaux, 194.

21. Theresia Cabarrus-Fontenay, Adresse d, la Convention Nationale (Bor deaux: Pinard fils, year II [1794]), reprinted in Ferrus, Madame Tallien

a Bordeaux, 363-70: Tabsurde ambition de s'approprier ceux des hom

mes, et perdroient ainsi les vertus de leur sexe, sans acquerir celle du votre. Mais ne seroit-ce pas aussi un malheur, si, privees au nom de la nature de l'exercice des droits politiques, d'ou naissent et les resolu tions fortes, et les combinaisons sociales, elles se croyoient en droit de se regarder comme etrangeres a ce qui doit en assurer le maintien, et meme a ce qui peut en preparer l'existence. Ah! dans une Republique, tout sans doute doit etre republicain, et nul etre doue de la raison ne

peut sans honte s'exiler par son voeu de l'honorable emploi de servir la patrie! . . (ellipses in the original). See also the Gazette National'e ou Le Moniteur Universel, 7 floreal year II [April 26, 1794], reprinted in

Reimpression de VAncien Moniteur, vol. 20 (Paris: Bureau Central, 1841), 306-7.

22. Cabarrus-Fontenay, Adresse d, la Convention Nationale, 368: "L'usage, si souvent precurseur de vos decrets, a decerne aux femmes le beau nom de citoyennes. Que ce ne soit plus desormais un vain nom dont elles se

parent; et qu'elles aussi puissent presenter avec orgueil, ou plutot avec confiance, les titres veritables de leur civisme!"

23. Joan Wallach Scott's essay on Gouges, " 'A Woman Who Has Only Par

adoxes to Offer': Olympe de Gouges Claims Rights for Women," in the collection Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution, ed. Sara E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 102-20, provides an incisive overview not only of Gouges's argument but also of the problem of female citizenship during the Revolution. A version of this essay was incorporated into a larger argument about feminism and "natural" difference in Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni

versity Press, 1996).

24. Hesse, in The Other Enlightenment (53), supplies a tally of female writers who published between 1789 and 1800; 251 publications by women

during this period were political in nature.

25. Ferrus, Madame Tallien a Bordeaux (350-51), furnishes archival evi dence of Cabarrus's saltpeter enterprise.

26. Archives Departementales de la Gironde, Registre L. 2170, no. 629, 15 floreal year 2: "taille 5 pieds 2 pouces, visage blanc et joli, cheveux

noirs, front bien fait, sourcils clairs, yeux bruns, nez bien faits, bouche

petite, menton rond." For this and other documentation on Cabarrus's

flight from Bordeaux, see Ferrus, Madame Tallien a Bordeaux, 374-76.

27. Charles de Constant's letters were published in the Nouvelle Revue

Retrospective 1 (1895): 49-96, 145-91, the relevant passages are found on 81-87, 175-76.

28. Cabarrus describes her role post-Thermidor in later letters, from 1824 and 1826, cited in Houssaye, Notre-Dame de Thermidor, 8-11, and quoted on 13: "c'est un peu par ma petite main que la guillotine a ete renver see."

29. The public visibility of the merueilleuses and their influence on politics and aesthetics are discussed in Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby's "Nudity d, la

grecque'm 1799," Art Bulletin 80, no. 2 (June 1998): 311-35; Lajer-Bur charth, Necklines, particularly chap. 4, on David's portrait of Julie Re

camier; and Au temps des merueilleuses: La societe parisienne sous le Directoire et le Consulat, exh. cat. (Paris: Musee Carnavalet, 2005). Aileen Ribeiro discusses the innovations in dress introduced by Cabarrus and her

peers in Fashion in the French Revolution (New York: Holmes and Meier,

1988), 124-35.

30. LAbreuiateur Universel 109 (19 nivose year 3 [January 8, 1795]): 434: "Un luxe enorme, les concerts, le chanteur Garat 8c la belle citoyenne Cabarus, femme Tallien, voila ce qui occupe ici, beaucoup plus que les subsistances & nos quatorze armees. .. . Arrive-t-elle? on applaudit avec

transport, comme si c'etoit sauver la republique frangaise que d'avoir une figure a la romaine, ou a l'espagnole, une superbe peau, de beaux

yeux, une demarche noble, un sourire ou l'amabilite tempere la pro tection, un costume a la grecque & les bras nuds. Quelques journaux ont multiplie les copies litterales du meme portrait de Theresia Caba

rus, portrait en plusieurs colonnes, ou l'on voit successivement Or

phee, Eurydice, Duhem, Cambon, la nouvelle Antoinette des uns, la diesse des autres. . . . Quel gout! Que d'esprit! 8c quelles moeurs republi caines!"

31. Among the early attackers of Cabarrus from the left was Gracchus Ba

beuf, who in 1794 referred to her and other women in her circle as

new manifestations of Mme de Pompadour and Mme du Barry, both

mistresses of Louis XV, and Marie-Antoinette, who had become "lady

legislators [legislatrices]"; cited in Kermina, Madame Tallien, 161-62.

32. The proceedings of the meeting were reported in Le Messager du Soir, Gazette Generale de lEurope 747 (19 fructidor year 2 [September 5,

1794]): 2-3; and 748 (20 fructidor year 2 [September 6, 1794]): 2-3.

This gave the first published account of Cabarrus's captivity.

33. Gazette Nationale ou Le Moniteur Universel (13 nivose year III [January 2,

1795]), reprinted in Reimpression de VAncien Moniteur, vol. 23 (1842), 101-2.

34. Vedette ou Gazette du Jour, 13 nivose year 3 (January 2, 1795], 2-3.

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344 art bulletin September 2011 volume xciii number 3

35. Catalogue de tableaux anciens et modernes du cabinet de feu M. Laneuville

(Paris: A. Coniam, 1826), 34. Laneuville's career still awaits serious

study; my account here, slender as it is, offers the most detailed and

up-to-date consideration of his work.

36. Laneuville's Salon entry included a portrait of Louis Legendre, a dep uty who participated in the Thermidorean coup (location unknown);

according to the Salon livret (exhibition catalog), he was depicted in the act of presiding over the trial of Jean-Baptiste Carrier, a notorious

Jacobin who had carried out a massacre of suspected counterrevolu tionaries in Nantes that came to symbolize the excesses of the Terror. The two other politicians whose portraits were exhibited in 1795 were

anti-Robespierre: Jules-Francois Pare (Musee Carnavalet, Paris), a for mer minister of the interior and a supporter of Georges Danton; and

Jean Pelet, known as Pelet de la Lozere (location unknown), who like Tallien had participated in the Thermidor coup. The location of Tal lien's portrait is also unknown.

37. While there is no direct documentary evidence surrounding the com

mission, the fact that the portrait remains in the sitter's family to this

day indicates that it was indeed a paid commission. Portraitists some times volunteered to paint famous sitters at their own expense, but those portraits remained in the artists' studios as advertisements for their skills. This was the case with a number of Laneuville's other por traits, and they are clearly indicated in the catalog of his posthumous sale, Catalogue de tableaux. . . de feu M. Laneuville.

38. Both portraits were last documented in private collections. The work

by Filleul was published in the catalog Exposition retrospective de portraits de femme sous les trois republiques (Paris: Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, 1909); and a detail of the Bouliar can be found in Emmanuel Berl, Le 9 Thermidor (Paris: Hachette, 1965), 107.

39. Andre Amar, in Archives parlementaires de 1787 d, 1860: Recueil complet des debats legislatifs et politiques des Chambres frangaises (Paris: P. Dupont, 1867-1990), vol. 78, 50, quoted in William H. Sewell Jr., "Le Citoyen/la Citoyenne: Activity, Passivity, and the Revolutionary Concept of Citizen

ship," in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 2, The Political Culture of the French Revolution, ed. Colin Lucas (Ox ford: Pergamon Press, 1988), 105-23, at 118: "elles peuvent eclairer leurs epoux, leur communiquer des reflexions precieuses, fruit du calme d'une vie sedentaire, employer a fortifier en eux l'amour de la

patrie par tout ce que l'amour prive leur donne d'empire; et l'homme, eclaire par des discussions familieres et paisibles au milieu de son me

nage, rapportera dans la societe les idees utiles qui lui aura donnees une femme honnete."

40. Both female political participation and its condemnation are reflected in visual representation; studies devoted to this material include Made

lyn Gutwirth, The Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Lynn Hunt, "The Imagery of Radicalism," in Politics, Cul ture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 87-119; and Joan Landes, Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001).

41. La Revolution franfaise et lEurope, vol. 2, L'evenement revolutionnaire (Par is: Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 1989), 616-18, provides a brief dis cussion and some examples of prison-related works, including a rare color illustration of Suvee's portrait of Chenier, now in a private collec tion. Suvee's other sitters were the Trudaine brothers, Charles-Louis

and Charles-Michel (commissioner of David's 1786 Death of Socrates), and Charles-Louis's brother-in-law. In the livret entry, each of Suvee's

portraits is accompanied by an affecting description of the sitter's last

moments, evidently aimed at eliciting viewers' empathy. Explication des

ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, architecture, gravures, dessins, modules, etc,

exposes dans le Grand Sallon du Museum au Louvre (Paris: Herissant, year 4 [1795]), 57-58.

42. Lajer-Burcharth, Necklines, 88-118. I discuss the deputy portraits of the

early Revolution in Amy Freund, "The Legislative Body: Print Portraits of the National Assembly, 1789-1791," Eighteenth-Century Studies 41, no.

3 (Spring 2008): 337-58.

43. Olivier Blanc, La derniere lettre: Prisons et condamnes de la Revolution

1793-1794 (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1984).

44. The pendant painting, a bust portrait of Cange, is in the collection of the Musee de la Revolution Frangaise, Vizille.

45. Andre Chenier, "La jeune captive," Decade Philosophique, 20 nivose year III, reprinted in Chenier, Oeuvres completes, ed. Gerard Walter (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), 185-86:

" 'O mort! Tu peux attendre; eloigne,

eloigne-toi; / Va consoler les coeurs que la honte, l'effroi, / Le pale desespoir devore. / Pour moi Pales encore a des asiles verts, / Les Amours des baisers, les Muses des concerts. / Je ne veux point mourir encore.' "

46. David's hastily sketched portrait of Marie-Antoinette on the way to the

guillotine (Musee du Louvre, Paris) records the humiliation that this

practice visited on prisoners, particularly women.

47. Blanc, La dernifrre lettre, 156.

48. See Sewell, "Le Citoyen/la Citoyenne," 115.

49. [Villiers and Capell], Critique du Salon, ou les tableaux en vaudevilles 2

(N.p., n.d.), in Collection de pieces sur les beaux-arts (1673-1808) (Paris: A.

Picard, 1881), known as the Collection Deloynes, Bibliotheque Natio nale de France, Paris, no. 488: "Ce tableau, qui n'a reste que peu de

jours en exposition, rappelait ce tems affreux ou la France n'etait com

posee que de bourreaux et de victimes, et fesait reculer d'horreur les ames sensibles dont les regards osaient se fixer sur cette peinture."

50. Ibid.: "La scene etait dans la prison / De la malheureuse Lamballe', / Et Cabarus [sec], dont les desseins / Ne sont pas d'enhardir le crime, / Te

nait, disait-on, dans ses mains / Les cheveux de cette victime." In the

original, a footnote appears at the end of the fourth line.

51. L es etrivifrres de Juvenal, ou Satire sur les tableaux exposes au Louvre Van V

(Paris, 1796), 11, Collection Deloynes, no. 490.

52. LAmi des Arts: Journal de la Societe Philotechnique, 26 brumaire [Novem ber 15, 1796], 443.

53. The painting has never undergone technical examination, and any changes made by Laneuville after it was hung in the Salon are not ap parent to the naked eye. I have found no trace of any contemporary accounts of the portrait outside the Salon criticism. The only other mention of the painting beyond the three cited occurs in the Feuille du

Jour, no. 184 (27 vendemiaire [October 18, 1796]): 2—3, which merely mentions the beauty of the sitter and her "beneficence [bienfaisance]."

54. Rapsodies du Jour, no. 13 (n.d. [1796]), quoted in Bourquin, Monsieur et Madame Tallien, 310, who dates this issue to July 24, 1796.

55. Catalogue de tableaux. . . de feu M. Laneuville.

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