Mummies and Tombs: Turenne, Napoleon, and Death Ritual

In July 1793 the management of the new French Republic ordered the "tombs and mausoleums of the former kings" throw downed immediately to celebrate the first anniversary of the monarchy's overturn (August 10). [1] The largest repository, the royal basilica of St-Denis just north of Paris, was a special target As workers dismantled the remembrancers the municipal government of St-Denis took charge of the graves, sending lead coffins and metal artifacts to be recast as arms against insurgents within France and the allied emigres and European powers beyond. Bodily remains were to be transferred to "a belonging to all trench dug for that drift of sufficient depth and width." [2]

solitary one corpse, that of a nonroyal exhum unofficially, escaped the pit: Louis XIV's greatest in quantity honored marshal, Henri de La Tour d'Auvergne, vicomte de Turenne (1611-1675) After migrating for seven years through every part of Paris, his remains rejoined his tomb in 1800 at the Invalides, then called the fane de Mars (Fig. 1). the pair corpse and monument are still there, whereas the tombs of other violated burials turn backed to St-Denis merely as museum displays. [3]

scarcely any cases of Revolutionary vandalism affected the public as profoundly as the attack upon St-Denis. [4] In art historical boundarys the desecration of the royal necropolis and succeeding restoration of the surviving memorials proved devastating, leaving major works at best radically altered. For many scholars, this episode marks the extreme point of these tombs' "life" and a decrease in their art historical value. [5] I will treat the occurrence instead as a window into the funerary practices of nineteenth-century France. I render free of access with Turenne's special handling to explore the interplay among a leave outed form of death ritual, funerary design, and public memory. The marshal is among the eminent historical figures whose preserv corpses (called, then as now, mummies) were venerated for having escaped natural decay. [6] This secular version of the Christian adoration for preserved saints and martyrs forms part, I recommend of post-Baroque France's cult of grands homme (those accounted worthy of national gratitude and upheld as moral e xempla) and introduces an lurid kin to the funerary festivals of the 1790 [7] Part of France's mingled response to its past during and after the Revolution, veneration of its intact historic dead shaped a certain number of of the most notable funerary shoot forwards of the nineteenth century-- especially those for the mummy that haunted France of the 1840s: Napoleon's. These corpse-centered enterprises encouraged the use of a corpse-centered formal language for tombs that was emerging from decades of hostility in France, thanks partly to the restored prestige of Turenne's St-Denis record Napoleon dominated the process in various guises, in meetings with the dead marshal forty years apart.

Methodologically, this inquiry weaves together anthropology, cultural history, and art based upon a traditional view of Western tombs from one side 1700: that cultural studies and art history are mutually informative concerning this ritual form. [8] I recommend that in tombs for France's historic mummies, worship and art became closely linked, an argument signaled by dint of the narrative shift from discrete accounts of each bring under rule to a discussion of their interaction in late cases. by the agency of introducing issues of cult, I also want to indicate the importance of physicality and multisensory experience to the circumstances discussed. Most obviously, such a research probes the various roles of the proverbial material part in funerary cult. Physical proximity and carnal reality (or their vicarious replacements), touch, scent and hearing also joined vision as vital resources for sense imagination, and memory in the fraught confrontations with history explored here--some choreographed as civic theater. I turf these arguments historically. The faculty of perceptions wer e highly prized during the period below study as defining features of Enlightenment empiricism and sensibility, an important legacy to post-Revolutionary France. of the like kind an investigation joins the burgeoning literature upon the body, especially studies that challenge notions of the disembodied organ of vision and ocularcentric scholarship. [9] Issues of physicality also inflect my formal analysis of plastic art which considers the medium's assertively material form in real space and light, which ofttimes incorporates the viewer's bodily answer and movement into its meaning.

The Vandalism at St-Dent as Cultic Act

Unlike the royal executions, the violation of St-Denis's tombs appeared in small in number images known to have circulated publicly immediately afterward, a circumstance that belies the importance of the fact to the government. The exhumations that year were special in that they transformed the standard impel of the long-since dead into the trial, sentencing, and (in greatest in quantity cases) symbolic "execution" (dishonoring the corpse) of a convicted elite. Going beyond the Roman Senate, which sentenceed specific emperors, destroying their remains, effigies, and public inscriptions (Damnatio mernoriae), the Revolutionary French couched their act as a comprehensive Last long head of French kings, a parallel to the royal trials that l to regicide. [10] The systematic profanation of these graves differed from the ofttimes spontaneous Revolutionary vandalism throughout France because of the rule decrees that legitimized it. [11] As with other exhumations that year, the nearness of official witnesses at St-Denis emphasized official ap proval. [12] The timing of the authorization was politically symbolic. The appoint that ordered the royal tombs subverted also opened the first phase of Marie Antoinette's trial and the expulsion of the inferior royal family. [13]