Overview

During the French Revolution of 1830, insurgents raised some four thousand barricades. Afterward, lithographs of the street fighting flowed from the presses, creating the barricade’s first imagery. This book documents the changing political valence of the revolutionary ideals associated with the barricade in France from 1830 to 1852. The Revolution Takes Form coordinates the political reality of the barricade with the divergent ways in which its image gave shape to the period’s conceptions of class, revolution, and urban space. Engaging the instability of the barricade, art historian  Jordan Marc Rose focuses on five politically charged works of art: Eugène Delacroix’s La Liberté guidant le peuple, Honoré Daumier’s Rue Transnonain, le 15 avril 1834 and L’Émeute, Auguste Préault’s Tuerie, and Ernest Meissonier’s Souvenir de guerre civile. The history of these artworks illuminates how such revolutionary insurrections were characterized—along with the conceptions of “the people” they mobilized. Foregrounding a trajectory of disillusionment, growing class tensions, and ultimately open conflict between bourgeois liberals and the proletariat, Rose both explains why the barricade became a compelling subject for pictorial reflection and accounts for its emergence as the period’s most poignant and meaningful symbol of revolution. Original and convincing, this book will appeal to students and scholars of art history and, in particular, of the history of the French Revolution.

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9780271095493

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Reviews

“The Revolution Takes Form will count as an important book in the field of nineteenth-century French art history. The book is expansively erudite, the prose is lively, and I learned so much about the events of 1830 and 1848.” —Katie Hornstein,Dartmouth College “The Revolution Takes Form is a richly articulated and finely tuned art-historical analysis grounded in a real grasp of political theory and a full understanding of the shifting cultural political landscapes of early and mid-nineteenth-century France.” —Alex Potts,University of Michigan

Author Information

Jordan Marc Rose is Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego.

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