Delacroix wrote often and at length about the concept of civilization, especially after he took to keeping a regular journal for the second time, in 1847. By then his ideas on the subject were fully formed. Civilization and barbarism had been key concerns in his work from the outset of his career, and scholars have interpreted some of his early major canvases, such as The Massacre at Chios and The Death of Sardanapalus (see fig. 28), in relation to these themes.1 From 1838 to 1847 he had worked on the ceiling of the Library of the Chamber of Deputies, a vast, complex project that had civilization and barbarism as its central theme. I begin, however, with Delacroix’s written thoughts between 1847 and the end of his life, in 1863, because, as verbal statements, they allow ready access to the discursive aspects of his thinking, ideas that might only be guessed at in front of his paintings. I am particularly interested in how the ideas of civilization and barbarism relate to his attitudes toward modernity, emulation, and primitivism, and thus how they affected his practice as a painter.2
Delacroix’s understanding of civilization can be traced back to major philosophical thinkers—in particular to Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau—but his intellectual sources were just as much in newspapers and novels, which he devoured, and especially in the magazines and journals popular with the bourgeois elite of the nineteenth century. He regularly read the Revue britannique, the Revue des deux mondes, the Revue de Paris, L’illustration, and the Magasin pittoresque, and he published in several of these as well as in other serial publications. He was as likely to pick up an idea from a magazine article or dinner-party conversation as from a scholarly work. The following passage, which he copied down on two separate occasions from the Revue britannique, offers just the sort of speculation in which he liked to indulge:
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One of the powerful ways in which civilization works is the constraint it imposes, the chain of social relations, and the feeling of well-being that it provides. When you see that each sacrifice is amply repaid, you submit without resistance and you grow accustomed to this useful and reasoned submission. . . . The savage gives free rein to his natural appetites; he does not know how to repress them or why he would try to contain them. . . . It is, they say, nature that teaches the savage to content himself with what he can procure, to confine his needs to the narrow circle of his means; no, it is a more powerful force, necessity. But when you reveal to his eyes the treasures of industry, when you make him feel the pinch of desire, when he witnesses the temptations of the civilized man, without having learned how to combat them, where will he find in nature the means of resisting such seductions? (263, 1557–58)
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Delacroix no doubt raised his eyebrows at the notion that the products of industry were “treasures,” but he fully understood the passage’s basic assumptions and took for granted its easy, superior tone. Civilization carried benefits and taught a reasoned restraint, as opposed to the unthinking appetite of the savage, constrained only by nature. No wonder the savage’s world crumbled in the face of modernity! But Delacroix also had fundamental doubts about civilization’s supposed ability to suppress wild, irrational, impulsive, or violent behavior, as well as about the notion that civilization was a blessing. Civilization came at a price, in his view, and could result, for example, in a faded or empty world in which instrumentalized, disengaged reason and discipline deprived humans of rich, meaningful experience.
Delacroix’s views on civilization frequently returned to four key ideas. First, he believed that humanity—not God or nature—created civilization, but civilization was subject to the laws of nature, which seemed wholly indifferent to it. Delacroix often pondered the paradox that man is distinct from nature and at moments even appears to overcome its laws but in the end is subject to them. Here, for example, he observes that nature reclaims her rights by causing even civilized man to suffer:
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Nature did not make civilization. The civilization of savages is the most that it gives us. Man has thus actually added much to its gifts. In building his houses, in clothing himself, in augmenting the means of feeding himself with agriculture, he has done an immense amount. In building palaces, coaches, in inventing the arts that amuse him, he is even further from the simple ends of nature, which, never losing its rights amid all the changes in man’s condition and his apparent well-being, causes him to be born into suffering, and to live and die in anguish. (1686)
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This passage reveals a fundamental uncertainty in Delacroix’s thought—Did even the savage possess some degree of civilization?—but the main point is that however much civilization ameliorates the condition of humanity, nature has the first and final word. Delacroix was fascinated with the divine, or spiritual, sources of individual creativity, and he sometimes entertained thoughts in his journal about a higher spirit looking down on humanity.3 His speculations on civilization were nonetheless markedly nontheological. He was more inclined to see man alone in the universe: “Nature worries about neither man nor his works” (1809).4
Second, Delacroix often thought about civilization by conjuring up its opposite, the state of nature, embodied sometimes by animals and sometimes by the savage. In this passage he likens the animal and the savage:
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Animals don’t feel the weight of time. Imagination, which was given to man to see beauty, brings him a host of imaginary pains; the invention of distractions, the arts that fill the moments of the artist who takes them up, charms the leisure time of those who only enjoy his productions. The search for food, the short moments of animal passion, of breast-feeding the young, of building nests or dens, are the only labors that nature has imposed on animals. Instinct drives them; no thought directs them. Man carries the weight of his thoughts as well as that of the natural miseries that make him an animal. To the extent that he distances himself from the condition most like an animal—that is to say, the savage state in its various degrees—he perfects the means of cultivating this ideal faculty that beasts lack; but the appetites of his brain seem to grow as he attempts to satisfy them; when he neither imagines nor composes for himself, he has to please the imaginations of other men like him, or he must study the secrets of nature, which surrounds him and creates problems for him. (587)
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Delacroix pursued this idea, beginning with the exact same opening phrase, no less than four times in his journal and various notebooks, and he developed essentially the same argument.5 Savages were akin to animals in their unthinking relationship to the world, guided only by instinct and necessity. Civilization improved this condition, but it came at a cost: it condemned some people—thinking people at least—to worries about the future, to an insatiable intellectual thirst, and to ennui.6 Unsurprisingly, at the opposite end of the spectrum from the animal was the artist, supremely capable of using his imagination but also more susceptible to ennui.
Delacroix finishes up the entry excerpted above by considering dim- or dull-witted men: “Even the man with a more obtuse or less cultivated intelligence, who cannot enjoy delicate pleasures or intellectual life, gives himself over to physical amusements to fill his time. . . . There are many men who sleep to avoid the ennui of an idleness that weighs upon them and that they nonetheless cannot shake off with pastimes.” To this he compares the “savage, who hunts or fishes to have something to eat, who sleeps during the moments he does not use for making, in his manner, his crude tools, his bow, his arrows, his nets, his hooks made of fish bones, his stone hatchet” (587). And yet he wavered on the question of how unthinking the savage was. On another occasion, while contemplating the contribution of “great men” to civilization, he launches into a diatribe against the idea that man lived free in a state of nature:
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What good are the care and intelligence [of the creative man]? Does living in a state of nature mean that you must live in filth, swim across rivers in the absence of bridges and boats, live from acorns in the forest, or pursue deer and buffalo with arrows, to maintain a sickly life a hundred times more useless than that of oaks, which serve at least to nourish and shelter creatures? Is Rousseau thus of this opinion when he proscribes the arts and sciences, under the pretext of their abuses? Is everything that comes from the intelligence of man therefore a trap, a condition of misfortune, or a sign of corruption? Why doesn’t he reproach the savage for decorating and painting in his own manner his crude bow, adorning with feathers the loincloth that conceals his scrawny nudity? And why hide it from the sun and his fellow human beings? Don’t we see there a sentiment too elevated for this brute, for this living, digesting, and sleeping machine? (505)
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Delacroix is simplifying Rousseau in order to establish his own Hobbesian image of the state of nature as an unending struggle for survival, and here as elsewhere he takes issue with the notion that the arts are a source of moral corruption.7 His savage was just as filled with desire as modern man, but because he was locked in a battle to satisfy his most basic needs, he had little opportunity for higher reasoning. Delacroix believed that something like a state of nature had once existed, and this separated him from those who saw it as a convenient fiction. Many social theorists argued that human society necessarily had some degree of cultural and social organization—language, at least, but many mentioned art as well—and that these were constitutive of the human.8 Delacroix’s diatribe against Rousseau led him exceptionally and almost inadvertently to recognition of this point: even the savage had his arts in the form of dress and decoration.
Perhaps the best evidence that Delacroix could not resist the idea that all societies, no matter how primitive, possessed a sense of beauty and a compulsion for the arts is found in The Natchez (fig. 5), probably completed in 1834–35.9 The painting depicts a scene inspired by the epilogue to Chateaubriand’s Atala (1801), in which a Native American woman explains to the European narrator that she and her husband are exiles, the last of the Natchez, who have been massacred by the French. Delacroix’s painting depicts the couple just after the birth of their child (who has already died when the couple appears in the novel). Delacroix consistently referred to these figures as “savages.” He no doubt thought of them as representatives of a society that approached Rousseau’s state of nature, but his choice of Chateaubriand’s narrative emphasized that the depredations of European colonists had destroyed whatever primitive society they may have belonged to, leaving them alone in nature. They are stranded in a vast, rugged, desolate, completely wild landscape, where the woman has given birth—a drama that appears at once very human and very animal. While the painting emphasizes their closeness to nature, it also foregrounds the beauty of the cultural objects they have brought with them. Something of Delacroix’s fascination with their arts and adornments is revealed by the prominence given to them in the composition and the unusual care with which they are painted, particularly the jewelry, feathered headdress, hatchet, and container. No matter how convinced he was of the superiority of the arts of European civilization, he was drawn to the creative impulse evident in these artifacts. It was only to be expected that in Morocco he would amass a large collection of objects revealing that country’s genius for the decorative arts.
FIG. 5 Eugène Delacroix, The Natchez, 1834–35. Oil on canvas, 90.2 × 116.8 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, Gifts of George N. and Helen M. Richard and Mr. and Mrs. Charles S. McVeigh and Bequest of Emma A. Sheafer, by exchange, 1989. 1989.328.
Third, Delacroix liked to reflect on the course of civilization and its effect on human experience. He never did this systematically, as did the classic stadial theories of the Enlightenment (i.e., theories based on successive stages), but he made many of the usual observations: the manufacture of clothing and dwellings must have been quite early accomplishments; agriculture required greater sophistication; palaces, coaches, canals, and cities demanded still higher degrees of civilization. He was more original when it came to speculating on civilization’s effect on man’s relationship to nature. For example, in the meditation on animals cited above, he ended with a claim about how men at different degrees of civilization relate to hunting. For the savage, hunting is purely a matter of procuring food, but for men living in “an ordinary state of civilization” (587), it becomes a form of play, an act more of the imagination than of necessity, a release from boredom and idleness.10 There is in this comparison of the modern and the savage a double-edged view of civilization that is typical of Delacroix, for while civilization allows for greater leisure and creativity, it also leads to ennui and alienates people from the original purpose of their activities.
Civilization did not always progress and could in fact decline. In an extended passage he reflects on the ways in which civilization might undermine itself:
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I don’t need to point out how much certain supposed improvements have harmed morality, or even well-being. Such and such an invention, in eliminating or reducing work and effort, has diminished the amount of patience to endure difficulties and the energy to overcome them, and that is in our nature to deploy; some other invention, in augmenting luxury and apparent well-being, has had a grievous influence on the health of generations, on the physical fitness, and has brought with it a moral decadence. Man borrows poisons from nature, like tobacco and opium, in order to make them into instruments for crude pleasures. He is punished with debasement and the loss of his energy. Entire nations have become Helots because of the immoderate use of these stimulants and hard liquor. Having achieved a certain degree of civilization, nations see especially ideas about virtue and merit weaken. The general softening, which is probably the product of the progress of pleasures, brings with it a rapid decadence, a forgetting of what was the conservative tradition, the national point of honor. (839–40)11
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Civilization did not necessarily lead to the betterment of society. Here Delacroix joined Rousseau, Byron, and many others who saw the possibility that civilization might produce its own forms of corruption: it could make men weak and immoral or produce harmful substances.12 Savages were apparently not the only ones susceptible to overindulgence in the temptations of civilization. In a related vein, Delacroix repeatedly lamented the diminished life that modern work created, “not just for poor people who work for their bread each day: I mean these lawyers and office workers, sunk in their paperwork and endlessly occupied with fastidious business that does not interest them. It is true that most of these people are hardly tormented by their imagination: even in their machinelike occupations they find one way or another to fill their hours. The stupider they are, the less they are unhappy” (808).13 The last two quotations make plain Delacroix’s conviction that modernity did not necessarily represent an improvement of civilization. It could flatten life by replacing meaningful forms of experience with alienating drudgery or dubious pleasures, or it could create a disenchanted world without moral purpose, in which tedium, luxury, and artificial stimulants substituted for the harder-won satisfactions of purposeful labor, virtuous behavior, and good health.14
Immediately following the above-mentioned consideration of narcotics, Delacroix turned to another of his favorite topics concerning the downfalls of civilization, the incursion of barbarians:
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It is in such a situation that it becomes difficult to fend off conquest; there is always a people hungry for pleasure, either completely barbarous or with some merit and some enterprising spirit, that will profit from the spoils of a degenerate people. This catastrophe, easily foreseen, sometimes becomes a sort of rejuvenation for the conquered people. It is a storm that purifies the air after having disturbed it; new seeds seem carried by this hurricane to the depleted soil; a new civilization will perhaps emerge; but it takes centuries to see the peaceful arts flourish, destined to soften manners and corrupt them again, to bring back the eternal alternatives of greatness and misery, in which appear equally the weakness of man and the singular power of his genius.
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As obsessed as Delacroix was by the destructive powers of nature, he was even more struck by barbarism’s threat to civilization. The passage above suggests that barbarians lived outside civilization—they were the alien hordes looking in—but more often Delacroix saw barbarism as part and parcel of civilization itself.15 The revolutions of 1848 reinforced the idea: “recent and very memorable times have shown that the barbarian and even the savage were always living in civilized man” (1330).16 This was a commonplace that Delacroix could have found in many books and to which he returned again and again.17
He emphasized the idea as much in his painting as in his writing. Major canvases from throughout his life—for example, The Execution of the Doge Marino Faliero (1825–26, Wallace Collection, London), Melmoth, or Interior of a Dominican Convent in Madrid (1831, Philadelphia Museum of Art), and The Two Foscari (1855, Musée Condé, Chantilly)—focus on moments when powerful figures in Europe’s leading states commit acts of extreme cruelty or injustice. They bring home their theme by juxtaposing the material splendor of civilization with its barbarous violence. Delacroix’s Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople (fig. 6), painted for Louis-Philippe’s Room of the Crusades in Versailles in 1841, unexpectedly foregrounds murder, rape, and pillage, making these the most evident result of the Catholic Church’s campaigns to gain access to the Holy Land.
FIG. 6 Eugène Delacroix, The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, 1840. Oil on canvas, 411 × 497 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Inv. 3821.
Delacroix’s various ideas about civilization come together in the following passage, in which he moves from the Patagonian, who was for many in nineteenth-century Europe the epitome of the savage, to the pinnacle of civilization, only to reflect on the presence of barbarians within civilization and the dangers that modernity poses for its ideals:
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How many degrees there are in what is conventionally called civilization, how many separate these Patagonians from . . . those few who sum up all that moral and intellectual culture can add to a happy nature. Let’s say that much more than three quarters of the globe finds itself in barbarism; the more or the less makes all the difference. Barbarians are not found only among savages: how many savages in France, in England, in this Europe so proud of its enlightenment. So it is that after about a century and a half of a more refined civilization that recalls the beautiful times of antiquity—I am speaking about the century of Louis XIV and a little after that—humankind, and I mean by that the small number of nations that now carry the flame, sank back into the shadows of an entirely new barbarism. Mercantilism and the love of pleasure are, in this state of mind, the most energetic motivations of the human spirit. Young people learn all the languages of Europe, and they will never know their own; they are left in systematic ignorance of ancient languages because these are useless for earning money. They are taught science not in order to enlighten and rectify their judgment but in order to help them in the calculations that lead to a fortune. (1203)
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Delacroix continued at great length with the same themes—degrees of development, the presence of barbarism both within and without civilization, decadence, and the evils of contemporary society. The end of the quotation makes clear Delacroix’s deepening disillusionment in the 1850s with modernity, in which distraction, instrumentalized knowledge, and the pursuit of mammon displaced nobler ideals.
Finally, Delacroix was inclined to consider civilization as a single historical process operating to a greater or lesser extent on all societies. It was singular in the sense that it was essentially the same for everyone, no matter when or where it was encountered. Such an understanding was typical during the Enlightenment, but in the 1820s another meaning became attached to the word. It was used to denote ethnographically distinct societies developing differently from one another.18 Initially a certain “level,” or “degree,” of cultural achievement was required to be designated a “civilization”—the term carried an implicit value judgment. Delacroix employed it in this way in the previous quotation. But by the twentieth century the word had been applied to virtually all societies, much in the way the word “culture” is used today.
On a few exceptional occasions Delacroix used “civilization” in its ethnographic sense. When he saw antiquities recently transported to France from excavations in Assyria, he exclaimed,
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Long before the Greeks had produced their admirable works, or the genius of the Renaissance—a half-pagan genius—had inspired the painter from Urbino, other men, other civilizations, had produced beauty and offered it up for admiration.
The fragments of the art of the Assyrians strike the imagination differently from the art of the Greeks.
No doubt what we find striking in the art of the Egyptians and the Assyrians is different from what is in the art of the Greeks: but who cares if the emotion remains grand and complete. (1805)
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Delacroix suggests that the ancient Assyrians had produced something fundamentally different from the grand European tradition that began with the Greeks: it was the product of another civilization, the term now used in the ethnographic sense.19 In this instance and in others, Delacroix was willing to entertain a degree of relativism regarding civilizations, even to assert that the sheer aesthetic force of objects from other civilizations could transcend cultural boundaries, but normally he held to the belief that European civilization at its best was unrivaled in the world. For example (and as I show in a subsequent chapter), Delacroix applied the template of European civilizational development to North Africa, seeing there an earlier stage of civilization (now in the singular).
For Delacroix, modernity was sometimes the product and pinnacle of civilization, but more often it was, paradoxically, civilization’s opposite, the very embodiment of barbarism. His journal abounds with complaints about modernity, of which I offer a partial list here. Modern man distinguished himself through his materialism, selfishness, and corruption (393, 666, 1099–100, 1638–39). He was governed by pleasure and surrounded himself with idle amusements (1638–39). Delacroix very much enjoyed Honoré de Balzac’s depictions of Paris in this vein, as a den of iniquity produced by an excess of wealth (1250). He copied lengthy passages by Astolphe de Custine suggesting that France’s democratic politics and vulgar literary culture had led it into decadence (1568–69, 1573–74). The rise of newly “enriched merchants” was dumbing down polite society (667–68). Professional specialization and the division of labor had created narrow individuals with no ability to understand the world in its entirety (1100). So-called social progress had succeeded “in starting a war between all classes by arousing foolish ambitions in the inferior classes” (787). Modern cities perpetuated a state of distraction and were filled with colossal architectural monuments entirely lacking in taste (393, 654, 1190–91, 1220–21). New modes of travel and communication destroyed traditional cultures, eliminating a sense of place and much else that had given purpose to life (1172). Some of Delacroix’s complaints are even more stunningly conservative: he inveighed, for example, against the end of primogeniture (788), against the breakdown of the family and diminished respect for fathers (788), and against professionalized charity and mechanized agriculture (as mentioned in my introduction).
Michèle Hannoosh has noted that Delacroix, for all his criticism of modern life, nonetheless availed himself completely of its opportunities. He invested widely, taking advantage of profitable new financial opportunities, including the questionable arrangements behind Baron Eugène Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris, for which he was well placed to understand the remunerative possibilities as he sat on the Paris Municipal Council, over which Haussmann presided.20 Some of the things he saw on Haussmann’s council captivated him: “I see at the council a model for a machine designed to transport the Châtelet column about twenty meters to one side. Huge chestnut trees have just been brought to the square in front of the stock exchange. Soon they will transport houses—who knows, perhaps even whole cities” (1220–21). Such enthusiasm for technology is also reflected in his habit of recording in his journal new practical inventions that he might use. He immediately took to the train system to visit resorts and relatives around France and to commute regularly to and from his country house. His journal is filled with observations culled from his flânerie as he traveled about Paris and more broadly.21 He marveled at the changes taking place in society, the numbers of people in motion, the new classes one saw in the train, and noted fleeting encounters typical of modernity that piqued his fantasy, such as that with a pretty young woman, whom he did not know, speaking amiably to him on a train (1360).
Despite all this, his complaints dominate the journal and coalesce around the notion of progress, which was central to theories of both civilization and modernity. In 1849, enraged by the progressive political doctrines that had emerged from the revolutions of the previous year, he penned a lengthy, barely coherent screed against the idea:
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I think, from the evidence that has been staring us in the face for a year, we can affirm that all progress must bring, necessarily, not greater progress but in the end a negation of progress, a return to the point where one started. The history of humankind is there to prove it. But the blind confidence of this generation and of the one that preceded it in modern ideas, in some supposed advent of an era in humanity that must mark a complete change but that, to my mind, if it is to mark one in humanity’s destinies, should above all mark it in the very nature of man, this bizarre confidence, which nothing in the centuries that have preceded us justifies, remains assuredly the only gauge of those future successes, of those revolutions so desired in human destinies. Is it not obvious that progress—that is to say, the progressive march of things, for better or worse—has at present brought society to the edge of the abyss, into which it could easily fall to make way for complete barbarism; and the reason, the only reason, is it not in this law that dominates all others henceforth—that is to say, the necessity of change, whatever it may be? You must change. Nil in eodem statu permanet. We will have to accept and submit to what antique wisdom had discovered, before having made so many experiments. What is in the process of dying in our society will probably reconstitute itself or live on elsewhere a more or less long time. (443)
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This passage rambles and contains an unusually large number of crossed-out words. Delacroix’s anger seems to get the better of him. But the message is clear enough: progress was capable of undermining itself, of producing evil, just as civilization did not always beget greater civilization, but sometimes its opposite, barbarism. It had happened in the past and was happening again. One of his favorite themes regarding modernity—present in a number of passages cited above—was that it made life too easy and therefore diminished the proper value of formerly hard-won things. Progress had made people soft. His contemporaries’ faith in it blinded them to the negative aspects of modernity.22
Delacroix never tired of critiquing this faith, but some forms of it met with particular reproach. I have already noted his mockery of Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon, and other utopian philosophers for what he viewed as their unfounded belief in the perfectibility of human society (393–94, 497). While technological progress could delight him, more often it appeared “hideous,” “horrifying,” and “barbaric.” Delacroix noted how industrial progress tore at the social fabric, dehumanized people, and disrupted meaningful patterns of social life. What disturbed him most, however, were ideas about political and social progress. Delacroix’s conservatism was already firmly in place under the July Monarchy, but the revolutions of 1848 unleashed a reactionary strain in his thought that remained throughout the rest of his life. The journal for 1848 is tragically lost, but his growing disgust with the Left is evident in his letters. In one of the few political portraits of him after 1848, T. J. Clark notes that he greeted the initial uprisings in February with “something like enthusiasm,” only to fall into disillusionment, anger, and at times downright fear. He retreated from Paris to Champrosay, into a privacy and disengagement epitomized by his decision to paint, exceptionally, a series of large canvases of flowers.23 He supported Louis-Napoleon’s coup d’état. Delacroix often noted stories about the first Napoleon in his journal, and admired him throughout his life. His family owed much of its standing and fortune (lost in Delacroix’s childhood) to the Empire, but more than that, Delacroix came to believe that France needed to be run autocratically, by a strong man, after the great political upheavals of the end of the eighteenth century. He once noted approvingly the observation of a friend that “the Napoleonic tradition is the necessary result of the Revolution” (485), presumably asserting that the excesses of democratic revolution demonstrated the benefits of a more dictatorial form of government. Delacroix could not muster much enthusiasm for Napoleon’s nephew, Napoleon III, after his ascent to an imperial throne, but his regime was better than an egalitarian republic. Delacroix was not without republican sympathies in his later years, but as Lee Johnson has noted, he was an elitist who preferred a republic led by a patrician class or an aristocracy.24
For Delacroix, revolution became synonymous with destruction. In early 1849 he inspected the damage to the Tuileries Palace and the Palais-Royal in disgust; ten months later he fancifully considered writing a study demonstrating that vandalism was “the clearest result of revolutions” (411, 473). This sentiment grew over time. Contemplating the vandalized ruins of an abbey near his country house in Champrosay in 1853, he exclaimed, “Destroy, burn, uproot, that’s what the fanaticism of liberty knows how to do as well as devout fanaticism; that is the way either begins its work when it is unleashed; but that is where their brutal momentum ends. . . . To erect something durable, to mark its passage with something other than ruins, that is what the blind plebs do not know how to do” (654). Revolution was the opposite of civilization; indeed, it unleashed complete barbarism from within civilization. This was a well-established view: thinkers such as Edmund Burke and Chateaubriand, with whose work Delacroix was very familiar, condemned revolution with the same rhetoric.25
When he discussed the keywords of revolution, Delacroix was at his most cynical. Whereas Enlightenment thinkers had often seen liberty as the greatest gift of civilization, Delacroix denigrated it: “One always speaks of liberty: it is the avowed goal of all revolutions: but one doesn’t say what this liberty is. In the freest state, who is completely free [libre]?” Delacroix goes on to note that everyone except the most isolated individual had his or her liberty checked by something—for example, by the demands of a family or a job. But political liberty was elusive for another reason:
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Political liberty is the great word to which one sacrifices precisely, in this order of ideas, a more real liberty. Political liberty is ordinarily summed up, for the moderns, by the liberty to say and write everything one thinks. But how many people exercise these liberties? Saying what one thinks is an isolated event that only yields a slim satisfaction and is more likely to make you enemies than to advance you in the world. Simple caution reveals the uselessness and danger of the liberty to say everything. And how many people will exercise the liberty to print next to this phalanx of writers driven by hunger or ambition, who close off all avenues, who defame everything that stands in their way, who have made of this purported means of liberty a terrible weapon that nothing can resist and that they use in every which way to advance their own interest or that of their party? This much-vaunted liberty therefore only exists for professional writers. One way or another, they will impose their opinions and prejudices upon you: for every clear-sighted and unconvinced man, there will be thousands who only see things through the eyes of pen holders. Do these people have much of this liberty to say anything, which is such a powerful means of domination? No; they are like the others, subjected to the tactics of their party, of their leaders, who impose upon them the tone they must take; and these leaders, in their turn, are indifferent to all opinions, provided that they enrich themselves by keeping a numerous public under their control. (1816–17)
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Essentially, most people were too lazy, self-interested, stupid, cowardly, or subservient to exercise true political liberty. What was the point of fighting for it?
When it came to the subject of equality, he could barely contain his fury: “When equality has fully established its hold,” he writes sarcastically, “one of the duties of the public will be to provide ugly and rachitic men with mistresses. To take away from the beautiful men’s share, you will have to find women willing to devote themselves to the evangelical fraternity.” He goes on to suggest that those “unfavored by nature” will then demand to be loved, that intelligent men will have to censor themselves in order not to offend the dull-witted. “You will only be as good a citizen as your neighbor if you are as stupid as he. The lawyer who speaks better than his adversary in a trial will be punished to compensate for his superiority. Only ugly women will have the right to bathe and primp; only the plays of bad playwrights will be staged, in order to console them a bit; talented people will even be invited to help them with their competence.” The passage goes on at length in the same vein, with no consideration given to the ideas of equal opportunity or inalienable rights. The notion of equality ran directly counter to Delacroix’s elitism: there were great men and lesser ones, men of talent and men bereft of it, and no amount of advocacy for equal rights would change this. Such was the implication of the following criticism of his fellow painter Jean-François Millet: “Moreover, he is a peasant himself and brags about it. He belongs indeed to the pleiad, or squad, of bearded artists who were in the revolution of 1848 or who applauded it, believing apparently that there would be equality of talent as well as equality of fortunes” (634).
For Delacroix, the Industrial Revolution was bringing about a sort of negative equality, in which peasants were reduced to dehumanized laborers stripped of their distinctive regional identities and traditional lifestyles. In the summer of 1857, while changing trains in Épinal, he observed,
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This line is only beginning to take shape, the partitions have not been placed, and already myriads of comers and goers throng there. Twenty years ago there was probably hardly one carriage a day, capable of conveying ten or twelve people leaving this little city for essential business. Today, many times a day, there are convoys of five hundred or a thousand emigrants in all directions. The best places are occupied by people in coveralls who don’t seem to have anything for dinner. Singular revolution and singular equality! What a most singular future for civilization. Moreover, the meaning of this word is changing. This fever of movement between classes, whose material occupations would seem to tie them to the place where they find a living, is a sign of a revolt against eternal laws. (1172)
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If this was civilization, Delacroix wanted none of it.
Delacroix brings together a number of his complaints about modern ideals in a passage that offers a brief historical account of their rise and effect on art. He had been thinking about some “charming allegories of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, those cities of God, those luminous Elysium fields, filled with gracious figures, etc.” In his opinion, in those periods when there was a belief in “higher powers,” “the soul soared constantly above the trivialities and miseries of real life into imaginary abodes that one embellished with everything that was missing around oneself.” Before the Reformation, he argues,
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[t]he arts were concerned only with elevating the soul above the material. In our day it is just the opposite. One only tries to amuse us with spectacles of our miseries, from which we should be eager to turn our eyes. Protestantism first prompted this change. It depopulated the sky and churches. Peoples with a positive genius embraced it ardently. Material happiness is thus the only [kind of happiness] for moderns. The Revolution succeeded in tying us to the land [glèbe] of self-interest and physical joy. It abolished every kind of belief: instead of this natural support that a creature as weak as man seeks in a supernatural force, it gave him abstract words: “reason,” “justice,” “equality,” “right.” A band of brigands rules itself just as well as a morally organized society with these words. [These words] have nothing in common with goodness, tenderness, charity, and devotion. (1638–39)
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Delacroix goes on to elaborate his idea that Revolutionary principles could serve a gang of crooks just as well as they did modern society. He concludes, “I don’t know if the world has ever seen such a spectacle, that of selfishness replacing all the virtues that were regarded as the safeguard of societies.” The beginning of the passage makes clear the extent to which Delacroix felt modern art lacked a sense of spirituality and failed to provide an escape into a better world. Much of his aesthetic theory would be concerned with restoring a spiritual purpose to art in the absence of the shared ideals whose passing he lamented.
Delacroix was far from alone in portraying key aspects of modernity as the very opposite of civilization. It was a strategy he shared with, for one, Charles Baudelaire, who referred to France as a “truly barbarous country”26 and to modernity in its American guise as a “great barbarity illuminated by gas” where “the impious love of liberty has given birth to a new tyranny, the tyranny of beasts, or zoocracy, which resembles, with its ferocious insensitivity, the idol of juggernaut.” Baudelaire goes on to criticize America’s “naive faith in all-powerfulness of industry. . . . Material activity, exaggerated to the proportions of a national mania, leaves little space in people’s minds for things that are not of this earth.”27 Delacroix had similar thoughts. The sight of a new American ship, the clipper, sent him into a tirade against machines and men who love speed. The cult of the machine was going to “make man into another machine.” When they have made cannons that fire men as fast as bullets, “civilization will have surely made a great stride: we are headed toward that happy time that will have eliminated space, but not ennui, considering the increasing need to fill up the hours that used to be occupied with coming and going” (816). Baudelaire’s hostility to American industrial prowess led him to endow the American “savage” with the spiritual values that he felt were missing in its civilization:
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By nature, by necessity even, [the savage] is encyclopedic, whereas the civilized man is confined to infinitesimal areas of specialization. The civilized man invents the philosophy of progress in order to console himself for his abdication and downfall, whereas the savage man, a feared and respected husband, a warrior obliged to display personal bravery, a poet in the melancholy hours when the setting sun encourages him to sing of the past and of his ancestors, sticks close to the contours of the ideal. What shortcomings can we find? He has his priest, his witch doctor, and his physician. And, yes, he has his dandy, the supreme incarnation of the idea of the beautiful transported into the material realm.
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Jean Starobinski notes that it was precisely Baudelaire’s disdain for modern civilization that led him to search for “moral strength and aesthetic sophistication” in the primitive.28 Delacroix often used the same rhetorical strategies, locating in the savage’s world many of the ideals that he felt were lacking in modernity. His primitivism grew directly from his understanding of civilization.
One of Delacroix’s bitterest complaints about modernity—it has surfaced numerous times already—was that it led to ennui. While the savage unthinkingly answered his needs, the civilized man was afforded a leisure that, for some, resulted in ennui. It is difficult to capture the extent to which ennui—melancholy, spleen, mal du siècle, emptiness, purposelessness—was for Delacroix an utter bane. Perhaps the testimony of his assistant, Pierre Andrieu, is more telling than Delacroix’s many references to ennui in his journal. On 1 October 1852 Andrieu noted, “M. D[elacroix]. Ennui in full force.” The next day he wrote: “M. D. same ennui as yesterday, less suffering. Stroll in the sun. Absence of work.”29 Ennui was for Delacroix a completely debilitating experience, akin to a deep depression and characterized by an almost physical suffering. It was a product of civilization and led him directly to embrace primitivism: “Ennui is the great enemy of the civilized man, surrounded by the pleasures of the arts and the refinements of an easy and opulent life. The savage, weighed down by needs, always searching for prey that he pursues across enormous distances and does not always catch, experiences neither this lassitude nor this emptiness that we constantly seek to fill” (1811). He often defined it by contrast, pointing to those who could not feel ennui: the savage, the peasant, or the unthinking lawyer or bureaucrat. Creative people—the true movers of civilization—were particularly susceptible to ennui. For the shallow individual, the spectacles and commodities of modernity might provide distraction, but for Delacroix, these only aggravated his sense of ennui (1190–91).30
In the nineteenth century it was common to think of civilization as having two aspects. There were broad social developments—the fundamental changes in the organization and functioning of a society that established its well-being and way of life—and there were individual intellectual and artistic achievements—the distinctive monuments and discoveries it had produced in the arts, letters, and sciences. In his influential History of Civilization in Europe, Guizot divides civilization along these lines, speaking of “the development of social activity, and that of individual activity; the progress of society and the progress of humanity. Wherever the external condition of man extends itself, vivifies, improves itself; wherever the internal nature of man displays itself with luster, with grandeur; at these two signs, and often despite the profound imperfection of the social state, mankind with loud applause proclaims civilization.”31 One aspect was exterior and social, while the other was internal and individual. On the one hand, there were developments such as growing resources, increased security, new pleasures, greater justice and liberty—the list varied according to the priorities of whoever drew it up. On the other hand, there were the great intellectual or creative works that developed out of the talent and cultivation of thinkers and artists.32 As a historian, Guizot primarily devoted himself to the former, but in his occasional work as a critic and art historian, Guizot was quite typical of his period in his admiration for the classical humanist tradition and his belief that it resulted from the contributions of the singular geniuses who had, in effect, lifted up humanity with their example.33
Thus far I have focused uniquely on Delacroix’s understanding of civilization as a social development and how this informed his views on modernity. As an artist, however, he was necessarily interested in the great individual cultural accomplishments of civilization. He devoted immense energy to understanding past artistic achievements in all the arts, especially in painting, but it was perhaps his voracious appetite for literature that most distinguished him from other artists. Delacroix was better read and more familiar with premodern and early modern literature than perhaps any other French painter of his day. He had received a scholarly education at the elite Lycée impérial, but more important, he pursued learning on his own throughout his life. His journal and the contents of his libraries both in Paris and in Champrosay suggest an astounding appetite for reading, in both its breadth and its depth in certain areas. Beyond the expected newspapers, literary and scholarly reviews, art criticism, art history, and aesthetics, he kept up on a number of scientific and scholarly fields, from medicine and his beloved natural history to history and political philosophy. He was attracted to some popular genres, such as explorer accounts and travel writing, but what marked his reading most was his profound engagement with the classical humanist tradition, which dominated both the literary discussions in his journal and the contents of his library.34
Classical humanism and admiration for canonical masterpieces of past art were at the core of his artistic practice too. Contrary to the persistent but utterly false view of Delacroix as a Romantic rebel who dispensed with the canon, he was devoted to the study of Greek classicism and the great painters of the Renaissance. Various commitments, however, brought him into conflict with the vision of classicism and artistic achievement that prevailed at the Académie des beaux-arts (henceforth the Academy). He often worked with the most traditional academic subjects, but he also embraced newer types of subject matter, such as Orientalism and contemporary history and literature, most notably Byron, as well as the newly fashionable writing of Shakespeare, Dante, and Tasso. He published essays on some of the most revered masters in the classical tradition—Raphael, Michelangelo, Poussin, and Puget—yet as a painter he was equally attracted to the less orthodox (though still widely admired) examples of Titian, Veronese, and Rubens and to the relatively unknown art of Théodore Géricault and Jules-Robert Auguste. He repeatedly attacked contemporary canons for being too narrow.35 He strove to fulfill the Albertian ideal of the artist as a humanist, scholar, and intellectual, but he feared how this ideal made the artist dependent on the word and devalued the sensual, plastic, and illusionistic qualities of painting.36
These tensions were exacerbated by his efforts to use painting as a vehicle for exploring civilization’s others. He was capable of producing works that even the most stringent adherent of academic classicism would consider worthy homages to the great individual achievements of civilization because of their subject matter, erudition, art-historical references, and style—works like The Last Words of Marcus Aurelius (1844, Musée des beaux-arts, Lyon), The Justice of Trajan (1840, Musée des beaux-arts, Rouen), his murals in Saint-Sulpice, and many of his paintings of Christ—but he often appalled aesthetically conservative critics and colleagues with his choice of barbarous subject matter and the manner in which he painted it. This was so true of The Death of Sardanapalus (see fig. 28) that most critics mistakenly interpreted the painting to reveal Delacroix’s disdain for or ignorance of the classical tradition.37 Delacroix’s desire to explore civilization’s others also directed him away from the high genre altogether, to, among other subjects, scenes of life in North Africa and animal painting.
In later chapters I argue that he cultivated such unacademic aspects of his technique as gestural brushwork, vivid color, and abstracted form in some part to provide an immediate, sensual experience that might provide a release from or antidote to what he saw as the humdrum or emptiness of modern life. While he developed these aspects of his technique in all varieties of painting and for many different themes, he relied on them in particular to depict the primitive, the decadent, the natural, the bestial, and the like. Perhaps because academic doctrines connoted tradition and civilization, though perhaps also because they were associated with control, order, and discipline, those aspects of artistic practice devalued at the Academy—among them, low subject matter, painterly handling, rich pigment, simplified form, and unstable compositions—often seemed to serve best to conjure civilization’s opposite terms. Sensual handling and color could stand for spontaneity, immediacy, and unconstrained passion, qualities that were all-important for Delacroix in relation to the animal and the primitive.38 Moreover, the appeal of sensual painting was not dependent on the learning and cogitation associated with civilization, rendering it well suited to evoking civilization’s others. Paintings of animals and North African subjects elicited from Delacroix some of his most daring formal experimentation. Paradoxically, gestural, coloristic painting was itself a product of civilization. Delacroix relied on the example of Venetian and Flemish masters to develop his own style and to provide his work with formal intelligibility. For Delacroix, Rubens was among the greatest geniuses produced by civilization, but at the same time, his art was capable of evoking experiences that stood entirely outside of civilization.
While the great artistic achievements of civilization provided inspiration, they also represented a burden, particularly for Delacroix’s generation, as several recent studies have emphasized.39 Tradition offered a repertoire of ideas, motifs, styles, and techniques, but it was equally a problem insofar as artists felt obliged to emulate and extend it. They were expected to follow the example of the past, but then again, they had to produce something original. Delacroix was very much aware of this dilemma. He characterized the great artists of the European tradition as path-breakers who opened the way for those who followed:
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Just as Homer seems, with the ancients, the source from which everything followed, . . . so, with the moderns, certain geniuses, whom I will dare to call enormous—and you must [take] the word to refer to the greatness of these geniuses as much as to the impossibility of confining them within certain limits—have opened all the roads traveled since them, each according to his particular character, such that there are few great minds following in their wake who have not been their tributaries, who didn’t find in them the classic examples of their inspiration. (1224)
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The geniuses who establish a tradition are so overpowering that “few great minds following in their wake” can surmount their influence. The problem becomes immediately apparent: most artists will never be more than “tributaries.” Delacroix himself went on to caution against a facile emulation of great talents: “The example of these primitive men is dangerous for weak talents or the inexperienced. Even great talents, at their beginning, easily misread their pretensions or the wanderings of their imagination to be equal to the products of these extraordinary men. It is to other great men like them, but who come after them, that their example is useful; inferior characters can comfortably imitate Virgils or Mozarts” (1224–25). Weak or immature talents may think that they, like the great geniuses of the past, are opening up a new avenue with their art, but sadly they are often doing little more than mimicking the greats.
Delacroix discussed these issues in terms remarkably similar to those of cultural critics today who see the emulative concerns and authority of the past as a particularly acute psychological burden for artists of this period. Here he is, for example, taking up the problem of belatedness:
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Primitive artists [here he means the early-comers in a tradition] were emboldened by naïveté and, so to speak, unknowingly. Indeed, the greatest boldness is to get outside conventionality and habit; now, those who come first have no precedents to fear. The field was open in front of them: behind them there was no precedent to shackle their inspiration. But with the moderns, in the midst of our corrupt schools and intimidated by precedents that are well made to shackle their presumptuous spirits, nothing is rarer than this confidence that alone can produce masterpieces. (1289, same thought on 1057–58)
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Those who come early on in a tradition have few precedents to preoccupy them and are thus freer to follow their inspiration. Modern schools are, in contrast, intimidated by the past and possibly misled by corrupted taste. Curiously, it seems never to have occurred to Delacroix that all artists are situated within some tradition and that the great painters of the early sixteenth century faced their own intimidating precedents: his admiration for the art of the High Renaissance was so great that the tradition preceding it did not matter. On the other hand, perhaps Delacroix wished to assert that those who came after the Renaissance felt the anxiety of influence particularly acutely. In any case, Delacroix’s own solution for overcoming the example of the past was to recommend a “great boldness to dare to be you,” though he cautioned that true boldness was found only in those with “native originality.” Too frequently “men bereft of ideas and any kind of inventiveness think they are simply geniuses and declare themselves to be such” (1289).
Delacroix usually blamed the supposedly diminished state of the arts in his own day on larger social and cultural developments: declines in noble patronage, good taste, or manners, and the rise of a self-interested and cultureless middle class.40 Nonetheless, he was convinced that individual artists could transcend their civilizational moment and produce art of the highest quality. An extended exchange he had with the artist Paul Chenavard reveals the differences between him and those who were paralyzed or otherwise disabled by their admiration for the past. Chenavard was a longtime acquaintance of Delacroix’s, but he was also notorious in the art world of mid-nineteenth-century France for his pessimistic estimation of the possibilities for artistic achievements in the present, earning for himself such nicknames as “First Discourager,” “Great Depresser,” and “Father of the Wasteland.” In his own work he attempted to emulate the heroic projects of the Renaissance, even as he fatalistically argued that it was now impossible to equal its accomplishments.41 During a month Delacroix spent with Chenavard in Dieppe in 1853, he noted down feelings that alternated between disgust and admiration for his friend. After a dinner darkened by Chenavard’s “lugubrious predictions,” Delacroix speculated, “I think that the doomed fate that, according to him, awaits everything has also attached itself to the possibility of a bond between us” (828). The following evening, however, he wrote of Chenavard: “[He] pleases me; I like him and would like to find him more likable; but I always come back to the ideas that I express here” (829). He was both deeply attracted to and irritated by Chenavard’s ideas.
As Michèle Hannoosh has noted, Delacroix ultimately rejected Chenavard’s theories because they were so paralyzing, defeatist, fatalistic, and dogmatic.42 He wrote at one point, “His depressing doctrine on necessary decadence is perhaps true, but you have to forbid yourself even to think about it” (826). And he wondered if Chenavard’s theories arose from his own feelings of inadequacy in the face of the Old Masters: “perhaps, unable to suffer with the feeling of impotence, is he trying to switch things around by finding nothing but impotence everywhere” (829). For my purposes, however, the most significant difference between Chenavard and Delacroix is that between their respective ways of relating artistic greatness to historical context. Both emphasized the role of great men in the history of art, but for Chenavard their achievement was determined by the stage of civilization in which they found themselves. Delacroix, in contrast, felt that artistic achievement was not wholly determined by time and place and that those who succeeded in the midst of decadence deserved admiration in part because of the difficulty of their task. Objecting to Chenavard’s idea that “talent is worth less in a time that is not worth much,” he speculated: “What I would have been in Raphael’s day, I am today. What Chenavard is today, that is to say, dazzled by the enormity of Michelangelo, he would have been, surely, in Michelangelo’s day. Rubens is just as much Rubens for having come a hundred years later than the immortals of Italy; if someone is Rubens today or someone completely different, he is only more so” (853). The essential point is that artists will achieve what they are capable of regardless of their historical context. The last sentence seems to make the point that those who achieve greatness in the wake of other geniuses or in the midst of decadence are that much more deserving of admiration. Elsewhere he proposes that Rubens was possibly a greater figure than Michelangelo for having succeeded amid more difficult circumstances and with the example of the Renaissance already there before him (1125–26). Interestingly, Baudelaire praises Delacroix in exactly these terms in his Salon of 1859:
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He is as great as the ancients, in a century and in a country where the ancients would not have been able to live. Because, when I hear men like Raphael and Veronese praised to the stars, with the plain intention of diminishing the merit that appeared after them, . . . I ask myself if a merit, which is at least the equal of theirs . . . is not infinitely more meritorious, as it is victoriously developed in a hostile atmosphere and land? The noble artists of the Renaissance would have been quite guilty of not being great, fecund, and sublime, encouraged and thrilled as they were by an illustrious company of lords and prelates—what am I saying?—by the multitude itself, which was also an artist in these golden ages!43
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A great genius is that much greater for coming in a fallow artistic period. This was the opposite of Chenavard’s attitude, for whom civilization was too full of masterpieces beyond all possibility of emulation; for Baudelaire, as for Delacroix, this made the challenge of originality all the more compelling.
In one lengthy formulation of this idea, Delacroix begins by admitting that great moments of artistic achievement are often followed by long periods of decadence in which only a few geniuses rise up and most artists wallow in mediocrity:
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Beauty is found only once in a given period. Too bad for the geniuses who come after this moment. In periods of decadence, only very independent geniuses have a chance of rising to the top. They cannot bring their public back to the good taste of former times, which no one would understand; but they have flashes that show what they would have been in a time of simplicity. Mediocrity, in these long centuries when beauty is forgotten, is even duller than in those moments where it seems everybody can profit from this taste, in the air, for the simple and true. Dull artists then start to exaggerate the deviations of more talented artists, which is triteness driven by pretension, or they devote themselves to the outdated imitation of a good period, which is the last word in insipidness. They even go beyond this. They become naive like the artists who preceded the beautiful periods. They affect a disdain for this perfection that is the natural end of all the arts. The arts have their infancy, their virility, and their decrepitude. There are vigorous geniuses who came too soon, just as there are those who came too late; in both cases you find singular bursts. Primitive talents do not come any closer to perfection than talents in a time of decadence. (488–89)
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The last part of this quotation was clearly intended to describe his own time, as he felt many artists unsuccessfully emulated the manner of their more talented colleagues, copied acknowledged masterpieces, or, worst of all, imitated the primitive styles that preceded these high points. He had in mind the vogue for Late Gothic and Early Renaissance styles promoted by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Hippolyte-Jean Flandrin. For Delacroix, nothing was more absurd than contemporary efforts to circumvent the pressures of tradition by imitating styles that preceded the great achievements of civilization. He saw himself as one of a select group of artists who had equaled the achievements of the Renaissance despite coming in a period of decadence. One night when he was mulling over Chenavard’s ideas, he wrote, somewhat coyly, “I believe that Gros, David, Prud’hon, Géricault, Charlet are admirable men like the Titians and the Raphaels; I also think that I have done certain pieces that these gentlemen would not despise, and that I have made certain innovations that they did not make” (820). The quotation reveals much more than Delacroix’s sense of his self-worth. He was intrigued by the dilemma of those artists who, he believed, like Rubens and himself, worked in times of relative barbarism. His understanding of emulation, however, not only rendered him far more optimistic than many of his colleagues about the possibilities of rivaling the greats of the past, but also engendered in him a fascination with moments in the history of civilization when artists achieved greatness in the face of barbarism or the absence of civilization.
When contemplating the problem of originality in the face of tradition, Delacroix imagined two types of return to a more innocent state: a return to the formative stages of the artist, before his or her originality was damaged by poor instruction, and a return to a moment when creativity was unfettered by tradition and existing examples of greatness.44 In both cases he imagined a more primitive state where artistic possibilities had not been obscured or foreclosed. In this sense primitivism had a direct appeal to Delacroix, though he sometimes mocked the idea: Rousseau’s savage living freely in a state of nature was an absurdity, and Flandrin’s imitation of painters who came before Raphael was a dead end. But in his writing and still more in his art Delacroix often embraced primitivism as a response to the ills of civilization.
Arthur Lovejoy and George Boas define primitivism as “the belief of men living in a relatively highly evolved and complex cultural tradition that a life far simpler and less sophisticated in some or all respects is a more desirable life,”45 and they demonstrate that such sentiments are to be found in Homer and Hesiod and throughout classical antiquity. But primitivist critiques of civilization took on renewed vigor in the eighteenth century. Vico, Rousseau, Diderot, and many other writers with whom Delacroix was familiar voiced some version of them, and the vogue for classicism in the years around 1800 depended on the desire for a simpler past, whether it was for a style free of academic conventions and more in touch with nature, for the virtue and republican institutions of a bygone day, or for access to emotions and experiences that were somehow dulled or obscured by civilization.46 Such ideas were common, and Delacroix alluded to them casually. In 1847 he remarked to himself, “How civilization as we understand it dulls natural feelings,” and he went on to assert that a passage from the Iliad revealed how much closer the ancient Greeks were to nature (391, 1059). Appreciation of Homer as a primitive had existed since the eighteenth century and was very much alive. Delacroix knew the work of the classicist Jean-Baptiste Dugas-Montbel, who in a book from 1831 praised the “primitive character” of Homer’s poetry.47 Dugas-Montbel elaborated: “What charms me is the delightful naïveté of the world at its birth; the feelings expressed with that has not yet been altered by the politeness and elegance of civilization.”48 Dugas-Montbel distinguished himself from earlier translators of Homer in that he tried to remain faithful to what he felt were the simple, noble, naive, and majestic qualities of the bard’s primitive Greek style.49
At another moment Delacroix argued that the simpler society of classical antiquity created a more “enlightened public.” Unlike “a notary in our time,” men were not as specialized in their vocations and received more general education, but this public disappeared with their “institutions and mores, when they had to please barbarian conquerors, as, for example, the Romans were in relation to the Greeks. Taste was corrupted especially when citizens lost the impulse that leads to great actions, when public virtue disappeared.” This was very much Baudelaire’s well-rounded, “encyclopedic” savage. Delacroix concluded, “In our societies, such as they are, with our narrow mores, our trivial little pleasures, beauty can only be an accident, and this accident does not have enough traction to change taste and bring the general mindset back to beauty” (1100–101). Elsewhere he lamented what a “poor industrial artist” had to do, in comparison to a Turkish artist, “to amuse his public”: “You first have to pull it away from its business worries, its passions, etc.,—and then politics” (1473).
For Delacroix, something heroic had been lost in the modern age. Once, after listening to some Gounod, he wrote,
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in periods like ours the public comes to this love of details through works that have made it fashionable to be punctilious about everything. . . . [I]n our time you do not have to paint boldly for the public: rather, that would be for infinitely rare minds who rise above common demands, who still nourish themselves with the beauties of the great periods, who, in a word, love beauty, which is to say, simplicity. You have to have paintings in a bold style—in the primitive ages, works of art are like that. (1007)
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Modern taste favored the trivial, the virtuosic, the overly refined, and the banal, whereas the primitive was bold, simple, and more devoted to beauty. Delacroix also asserted that primitive art—which for him usually meant Homer and archaic Greek art—possessed a more uninhibited, spontaneous character as it was ostensibly free from the burden of the past and was thereby emboldened.50
Delacroix had, however, a dimmer view of what had come to be known as primitive painting, by which was meant very approximately the painting of the Early Renaissance and the period immediately preceding it. Unlike early Greek sculpture, primitive painting did not impress Delacroix as a good model for artists. Rather than vigorous and inspired, it struck him as constrained and timid: “at its origin, [painting] is discovering itself: why be astonished that, barely freed from the languages of barbarism, it hesitated and tottered in its tracks, having started with the excessive dryness of the first masters, a consequence of their timidity and their inexperience of the means that had to be invented for perfection” (1789).51 Delacroix’s own predilection was for painterly and coloristic painting in the mode of Titian:
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With Titian begins this broad handling that breaks with the dryness of his predecessors and is perfection in painting. The painters who strive after this primitive dryness, [which is] completely natural for the schools who are trying their hand and leaving behind almost barbaric sources, are like grown men who, in order to appear naive, imitate the speech and gestures of infancy. The broad handling of Titian, which is the end of painting, . . . is as far from the dryness of the first painters as from the monstrous abuse of handling and the loose manner of painters belonging to the decadence of art.
—The antique is like that. (1060)
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In this instance, it was by breaking with tradition that painting perfected itself and, paradoxically, achieved the same effect as antiquity. The primitivism of Flandrin and other archaizing painters was a misguided attempt to find originality in the face of the intimidating precedents of the Renaissance: “why be surprised that, like people who are tired of behaving themselves, you see artists turn toward barbarism to be new?” (1789).
There were moments when Delacroix expressed aesthetic relativism, arguing that all humans possessed a sense of beauty and that the artistic impulse could be seen in even the most rudimentary plastic arts. I have noted that he could marvel at the beauty of Assyrian art, and he demonstrated a willingness to learn from Persian miniatures, North African decorative arts, Chinese wallpaper, and Japanese prints.52 But there were clear limits to his ability to appreciate non-European art. Once he argued that the Romantic school surely possessed an ideal of beauty, because everyone admired beauty. Disagreements arose when beauty was defined a certain way. He continued, “A man who doesn’t like beauty, that’s like a man who wouldn’t like what is likable, which is to say, an absurd being. Therefore, it is beauty as defined by others that he doesn’t like; in a word, that which is beautiful for some is not beautiful for others.” In the very next sentence, however, he asserted that the “fetishes” of “savages” were not art at all:
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The difference—you will feel it—is great; because instead of being the sorts of savages that are beyond all human law, the sorts of worshippers of formless fetishes, the Romantics, or Frenetics, as you will, will truly have a kind of constitution that allows them to distinguish a certain ugliness from a certain beauty. They will be easily recognized as truly belonging to a family of bipeds endowed more or less with reason and the mania to reason. They will distinguish admirably well between a horribly boring work and an interesting work. (1473–74, same thought on 1471)
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The tone here is ironic—Delacroix is defending Romanticism against its conservative critics—but the passage nonetheless suggests that Delacroix imagined the art of some human societies was completely beyond the pale of aesthetics. For Delacroix, as for most of his contemporaries, there was a savage art that did not really qualify as art at all, even if here he only conjures it up rhetorically. His primitivism was hardly that of Gauguin, Matisse, and Picasso, and certainly not Dubuffet’s. Though intrigued by the visual arts in “primitive” societies, he could not imagine their providing an alternative set of artistic ideals, or even a serious challenge, to the European tradition.53 Even Baudelaire, who sardonically argued that sculpture was “a Carib art . . . issuing from a savage age” and did not demand the same “profound reasoning” as painting, still allowed that “fetishes” were carved “skillfully.”54
On the other hand, some purportedly primitive forms of art caused Delacroix to muse, however skeptically, over the possibility of an art devoid, as he saw it, of literary content. Frances Connelly has noted that, before Gauguin, the few thinkers and artists who found so-called primitive art worth aesthetic consideration likened it to the European categories of the arabesque, the hieroglyph, and the grotesque. Romantic writers, particularly in Germany, had seized on the first two as examples of images that could speak directly and sensually to the human spirit, unmediated by conventional language, much as they thought images in the natural world or early poetry did, and they suggested civilization had dulled people’s sensitivity to them.55 The grotesque was a far more ambiguous category that could encompass the whimsical improvisation of the arabesque but also ranged into the monstrous and the horrific. Though normally used pejoratively, it might also suggest the sublime, as, for example, when used to appreciate frightening Gothic imagery.56
When Delacroix discussed these categories, he normally pointed to their insufficiency as great art. For him, the grotesque defied representation in an elevated language. Once, when trying to write about his experiences in Morocco over a decade after the fact, he remarked on the difficulty “of describing appropriately the half-primitive manners of these people”: “It would take a very skillful and especially a very experienced pen to move easily from the grotesque to the sublime” (313). In his finished essay he returned to the idea, suggesting that grotesque scenes contained “ridiculous” things that had to be described in a “colloquial [familier] style,” whereas “imposing” objects required an “admiring” style (285).
Delacroix used “arabesque” in a less pejorative sense but still suggested it lacked the full power of art. In response to an article by Louis Peisse that argued that modern painting suffered from an overreliance on “picturesque” and sensual qualities such as color, contrasts, impasto, and facture,57 he found himself in partial agreement that formal effects alone could not carry a painting:
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Yes, if it is only a question of having an effect on the eyes by an arrangement of lines and colors, that would just mean: arabesque; but if, to a composition whose subject is already interesting, you add a disposition of lines that augments the impression, a chiaroscuro that seizes the imagination, a color adapted to the characters, you have resolved a difficult problem, and, again, you are superior: it is harmony and all its combinations adapted to a unique song. He calls this tendency musical, and me, I find it as praiseworthy as any other. (661–62, emphasis in the source)
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Delacroix agreed that the illusionistic aspect of painting was essential, but he also felt that its formal aspects, its “musical” effects, were as important as any other. Nonetheless, arabesque lacked a subject and was therefore merely “an arrangement of lines and colors.”
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The kind of emotion proper to painting is tangible in some way; poetry and music cannot offer it. You revel in the representation of these real objects as if you were really seeing them, and at the same time the meaning enclosed in the images for the mind [esprit] warms you and transports you. These figures, these objects, that seem like the thing itself to a certain part of your intelligent being, seem like a solid bridge on which the imagination relies in order to penetrate to the mysterious and profound sensation for which the forms are in some way the hieroglyph, but a hieroglyph that speaks quite differently from a cold representation that holds only the place of a printed character: a sublime art in this sense, if you compare it to one where thought comes to the mind only with the aid of letters put in an agreed-upon order; a much more complicated art, if you will, as the character is nothing and the thought seems to be everything, but a hundred times more expressive, if you consider that, independently of the idea, the visible sign, a speaking hieroglyph, a sign without value for the mind in the work of a writer, becomes for the painter a source of the most lively joy. (696)
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This passage goes to the core of Delacroix’s conception of painting, whose material, sensual, and seemingly transparent signs were for him more immediately expressive than the disembodied, conventionalized signs of literature. He used the notion of a “bridge” between the mind of the painter and the spectator at least three other times to suggest that the communicative powers of painting were somehow more direct than those of the other arts in modern society (90, 528, 1702). Vico, Diderot, Ballanche, Quatremère de Quincy, and many others imagined that primitive culture shared these qualities, even if they, like Delacroix, could not generally see them in the actual arts of non-Western societies. Vico felt that the development of an abstract alphabet led to a rational, prosaic form of communication separated from more poetic forms, one of which was hieroglyphs.58 Quatremère de Quincy identified hieroglyphs with a primitive form of representation that was admirable insofar as it communicated ideas to the mind more immediately than either writing with letters or more illusionistic imagery.59
Delacroix would no doubt have argued that some of the greatest achievements of civilization were paintings, but he admired them in ways that sometimes privileged qualities associated with barbarism. Hannoosh has written extensively on the distinctions Delacroix made between literature and painting, primarily to the benefit of the latter. The pictorial was, for him, superior to the literary insofar as it was more material, vivid, voluptuous, and immediate in its effects. Paintings struck the viewer all at once and had no need to guide the reader through a linear narrative, controlling his attention over an extended period of time. The use of color and painterly touch rendered the art of painting uniquely sensuous.60 Delacroix never, as far as I know, made an explicit equation between these aspects of painting and the primitive, but the parallels are readily apparent. His use of “grotesque,” “arabesque,” and “hieroglyph” relied on the fact that these words connoted the premodern, the primitive, and the analphabetic. The qualities of painting that he held up over and against literature shared much with the experiences he celebrated in North Africa, in the presence of animals, and in the midst of natural beauty. The special qualities of painting made it the supreme cure for that peculiarly modern malady, ennui. Chenavard’s own equation of the civilized with the literary, combined with his excessive respect for the civilized, made him blind to the nonliterary qualities of painting. Literature and painting did not map neatly onto civilization and barbarism in Delacroix’s thought, but painting shared unexpected affinities with the latter category.
In subsequent chapters I show that the primitive held sway over Delacroix in ways he could scarcely articulate in words. He was drawn to the simpler life he supposed existed in North Africa, and the observation of animals appealed to him in part because he felt it allowed access to modes of experience completely outside of civilization, modes that humans sometimes shared with animals. In his North African pictures and those of animals Delacroix broached many of the standard tropes of modern primitivism, and he believed that something of the organic, sensual, and immediate aspects of life in these worlds could be communicated by the formal qualities unique to painting.61 Finally, the primitive suggested a function for art in a society that, as Delacroix would have it, lacked good taste and uplifting public doctrines, or that at least had few publicly available orders of meaning worthy of art. The noble ideals that guided ancient Greek or Italian Renaissance society may have faded, but art could still enhance life through its inherent properties, through the immediately transporting qualities of its sensual and pictorial effects, as available in the present-day France as they were in any other time or place. Delacroix eventually argued that painting could transcend its own time and lift up its audience by exploring the special aesthetic qualities of its medium, either by finding these in the great art of the past or by developing them in new ways appropriate to the modern world. The vague, mysterious sensations caused by the medium itself could move viewers profoundly, providing something like a transcendent spirituality, or at least an imminent experience of beauty lacking elsewhere in modern life.
I have been surveying Delacroix’s written account of civilization, formulated primarily in his journal in the 1850s. By this time, however, he had already completed his murals on the ceiling of the Bourbon Library, which themselves offer a complex account of the idea. Their genesis reveals that Delacroix’s ideas about civilization underwent significant revision during the decade he worked on them. Civilization was a difficult theme to translate into paint, and Delacroix considered numerous possibilities before settling on a scheme that, in the way it portrays civilization, shares much with the ideas he eventually wrote down in his journal, even as it develops other aspects not present in his writing.