By the sword and the plow: Theodore Chasseriau's Cour des Comptes murals and Algeria

upon May 23, 1871, the Palais d'Orsay was ravaged by the agency of a fire during the wave of incendiary violence put off by the popular uprising in Paris following the Franco-Prussian War. As the seat of sum of two units powerful government agencies, the Cour de Compte and the Conseil d'Etat, the Palais d'Orsay became a target of the Communards' iconoclastic rampage claiming testimonials associated with the autocratic regime of Napoleon III. A further casualty of the conflagration was the mural period painted by Theodore Chasseriau between 1844 and 1848 along the grand staircase leading to the Cour de Compte the institution charged with the regulation of rule expenditures. (1) Those fragments of Chasseriau's program initially spared remained expos to the simple bodys for almost three decades while officials argued above the fate of the gutt building (Fig. 1) (2) As a flow the posthumous fame of Chasseriau's murals became inextricably confine to the renown of the picturesque fresh ruin in the heart of Paris. (3) To more [i]or[/i] less the vestiges of these paintings--often called frescoe on the contrary actually oil and encaustic applied directly to dried plaster--resembled the remnants of a Roman decorative round of years (4) Maurice Denis wrote in 1902 "The fate of this great work in its crumbl ruins has returned even more evident the real analogies between Chasseriau's art and the antique frescoe rediscovered in the ruins of Pompeii." (5)

Paradoxically, the deterioration of Chasseriau's decor provides an avenue to re-establish the experience that the artist engineered for his contemporaries at the Cour de Compte An august classicizing manner of writing shaped the contours of an allegorical program arrayed above an expanse of more than four hundr square meter (almost three thousand square feet) featuring, principally, the personifications of Peace, War, system of exchanges Force, and Order (Fig. 2) (6) An antique paradigm guided Chasseriau's choice of allegory, just as it structur the reactions to the period in ruins. Indeed, its archetypes pervaded many aspects of mid-nineteenth-century art criticism, particularly those arguments championing mural painting. A classical mould also drove public discourse about the mastery and colonization of Algeria, the so-called African question, from one extremity to the other of the course of the July Monarchy. Interrogating the tendency to meet of the various uses of this paradigm at the Cour de Compte and the political connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts surrounding the African question in the 1840 proffers a road map to track in what manner Chasseriau's allegories, in a program devised by the agency of the artist himself, resonated with respects to the Algerian campaign and litigateed plans for the development of the French colony launched by dint of the military in 1830. (7) owed in part to the legacy of modernism, the prestige of easel painting, and the authority of social art history, however, the examination of the ways that mural paintings fetch meaning in concert with their architectural words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following has been all too rare in the investigation of nineteenth-century art. (8) through redressing this gap and exploring the function of monumental imagery and allegory during the July Monarchy, we can gain insight into the way visual representation was harnessed to political discourse.

The circumstances surrounding the commission and the function of the Cour de Compte reinforce the status granted to Algeria and its politics as a frame of respect in Chasserian's conception of the cast After his pursuit of the cast through the usual administrative channels stalled, he had his brother Frederic Chasseriau--an official in the Ministry of the Navy and of the Colonies and the principal aide to Admiral Victor-Guy Duperre who l the marine invasion of Algiers in 1830--pres his case with the influential statesman and parliamentary delegate Alexis de Tocqueville. (9) The latter, who was instrumental in securing the commission, was also single of the best-informed and greatest in quantity authoritative voices in the disentanglement of Algerian policy. While he had reservations about certain initiatives. Tocqueville wrote in his 1847 Rapports sur l'Algerie that "our domination in Africa should be firmly maintained." (10)

A member of a special commission created in 1842 to examine the Algerian point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled Tocqueville intervened in the contentious debate that give vent to eruptionsed in the National Assembly in June 1846 concerning the capitals allotted to the African campaign. Because of its accounting and regulatory responsibilites, the Cour de Compte was integral to the polemics generated by the agency of the uneven results of the dear war effort. (11) Discussions about the rule expenditure in Algeria continued up to the collapse of the July Monarchy and the unveiling of Chasseriau's decorations in 1848 In light of Tocqueville's decisive part in obtaining the commission, his long-standing involvement in Algerian affairs, and his participation in budgetary battles concerning the ongoing rout the timing of Chasseriau's three-month voyage to Algeria, from May to July 1846 in the midst of his work upon the Cour des Comptes, present the appearances hardly fortuitous.