Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Richard Taws. The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France. College Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 2013. 288 pp.

Review by Nina L. Dubin

12 February 2016

Writing in 1783, the philosophe and future Girondist Jacques-Pierre Brissot commented that he preferred newspapers to books. Whereas the latter could lay claim to duration, noted Brissot, the former possessed the capacity to “rapidly enlighten” the masses.[1] The remark, equating the fleeting with the progressive, foreshadows the topsy-turvy order described by Richard Taws in The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France—a chronicle of how visual culture adapted to the turmoil of the old regime’s collapse. It did so by embracing the potential of temporary, incomplete, hybrid and makeshift media to acculturate a new body politic to the Revolution’s lifeworld. The art and ephemera Taws explores—including paper money and passports, festivals and prints, unfinished paintings and Bastille relics—expressed the “hesitant self-determination” of a postabsolutist state (p. 115). “Almost every culture in history has had its fair share of transient, interim, or speculative images and objects,” writes Taws, “but in France in the 1790s they took on a heightened significance as the very substance of the Revolution” (p. 7). Enacting an absence of authoritative command, provisional objects afforded citizens “a free space for the development of a revolutionary politics” (p. 127), and yet such works were far from utopian. They variously exemplified the cycles of obsolescence characteristic of a burgeoning capitalist economy; skepticism toward the prospect of a universal, public consensus; iconoclastic sentiments; and hostility toward notions of “artistic independence or creativity” (p. 153). While scholars have long acknowledged the challenges posed by the turbulent era to the traditional ambitions of high art, Taws insists on the Revolution’s withering belief in the possibility or even desirability of monumentality, timelessness and transcendence. Such ideals—embodied by the Revolution’s most famous painter, Jacques-Louis David, and by one of its proudest achievements, the establishment of the Musée du Louvre (unmentioned by the author)—are implicitly presented as no less outmoded than Brissot’s books. In short, this provocative and pioneering study itself occupies a liminal zone: exhibiting the look and heft of a traditional art historical monograph, it channels a twenty-first-century discomfort with the lofty aspirations of the nonprovisional. In an age when newspapers are giving way to tweets, Taws has written a disquieting meditation on the nature of the modernity bequeathed to us by the eighteenth century.

[1] Quoted in Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), p. 50.