The Boulevard and the Salon:

Popular Theatre and Romanticism

in 1824
John P. Lambertson

Abstract
On 24 August 1824, a vaudeville entitled La St-Louis des artistes announced the
opening of the most important artistic event in France during the Restoration,
the Salon of 1824. This article analyses popular theatre in relation to French
Romantic painting and emphasises the link between popular spectacle, high art
and politics during the Restoration. The comparison of popular theatre and Ro-
mantic painting by artists like Eugne Delacroix and Charles-Emile Champmar-
tin underscores the intermediality of visual culture during the Restoration
and suggests the importance of popular culture for the critical debate over
Romanticism, for the innovative form of Romantic painting, and for state pa-
tronage of this controversial art.

Key words: Eugne Delacroix, Charles-Emile Champmartin, melodrama, popular

culture, Romanticism, Restoration

La St-Louis des artistes, o la fte du Salon, a fascinating but forgotten one act
vaudeville by Merle, Simonnin and Fd.-Laloue, made its debut at the Thtre
de la Porte-Saint-Martin on the boulevard du Temple during the royal festival
of Saint Louis on 24 August 1824.1 The play announces the opening of the Salon
of 1824, a state-sponsored exhibition of contemporary art in the Louvre, which
was the most important artistic event in France during the Restoration. There,
writers dened Romanticism in painting as a battle between two camps: the
Shakespeareans and Homerists, the new school and the old school, or most typi-
cally the Romantics and the Classics. This article analyses the play in relation to
the French art world and emphasises the link between popular spectacle, high
art and politics in the visual culture of the Restoration. In an uncanny parallel
with artistic circles and the emergence of public debates on Romantic painting
in the early 1820s, the play focuses on the life of a young history painter,
Raimond, and his attempt to make a reputation at the Salon. La St-Louis des

Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, Volume 40, Number 1 (Summer 2013) Manchester University Press
http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/NCTF.40.1.2
16 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 40/1

artistes presented the artists quest for a subject that would captivate the audi-
ence at the Salon, lead to state sponsorship and concluded with political com-
mentary on French military intervention and an invitation to the lower
classes to visit the Salon - the very issues that animated the practice and discus-
sion of painting in Paris in the mid-1820s.
La St-Louis des artistes and its relationship to artistic networks and the Salon
of 1824 elucidate the intermediality of visual culture during the Restoration. In
the Restoration, as Robert Darnton found for pre-Revolutionary culture, media
of all sorts - printed, written, oral and visual - crisscross and interconnect.2
The dramatizing of history paintings on stage and the portrayal of actors poses
in pictures exhibited at the Salon in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century
clearly anticipated the intermediality of cultural production rooted in the spe-
cic and unique circumstances of the Restoration.3 La St-Louis des artistes,
however, diers from the one-dimensional parodies of high culture found in
the public sphere studied by Thomas Crow and other exchanges between the-
atre and painting in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century examined by
James Rubin and David Alston, as it satirises on stage the world of the artist
and high art in its social, aesthetic and political complexity.4 In fact, the play
presents artistic, social, political and economic issues faced by Romantic artists
in the early 1820s as well as presages outcomes of the actual Salon of 1824.
Striking revelations of the vaudeville include the extent to which the classically
oriented discourses of high art had penetrated popular culture by 1824, and
conversely the inltration of popular culture into these very discourses.5 My
discussion of the play and of the Salon of 1824 reveals that popular culture
embraced the subject matter of the artist and high art and ultimately contributed
through satire to the artistic debate surrounding Romanticism. Furthermore, my
analysis suggests that popular audiences responded to Romantic canvases as they
reacted to boulevard theatre and explains the misunderstood royal sponsorship
of this controversial painting.
La St-Louis des artistes opened to a socio-economically diverse audience on
the boulevard du Temple, where an array of popular theatres produced shows
ranging from light vaudevillian comedy to melodramatic horror. The Irish
novelist Lady Morgan, struck by the popular playhouse and its audience,
reported during the early Restoration that:
The Thtres des Boulevards . . . divide among them dramas, melo-dramas, panto-
mime, dancing and petites pices (sic.) of every description. And, though it is a sort
of ton for persons of fashion to go in large parties to these most amusing theatres,
two or three times in a season, yet the audience, generally speaking, appeared to
me to be extremely coarse, and so loud and vivacious in their disapprobation, or
applause, and so curious and varied in their costume and appearance, as to form
almost as entertaining a part of the spectacle, as the representations on the stage.6

The range of entertaining gures on the boulevard du Temple in general and

the Porte St. Martin in particular materializes in the cast of characters in La
 The Boulevard and the Salon 17

St-Louis des artistes. The plays three main roles are Raimond, a painter,
Montignac, a sculptor, and Duplan, an architect, who live together in the
faubourg Saint-Germain near the Pont des Arts. Their model is a disabled
Napoleonic veteran humorously named Duracuire, whose daughter Clestine
is one of Raimonds students. The artists cleaning lady is la mre Michel
and their porter le pre Trinquard. In contrast to the bohemians in the play,
the last major character to appear, M. Richardville, is a wealthy patron of
the arts and a war proteer.
When the playwrights authored La St-Louis des artistes, the most prominent
image of contemporary artistic life was Horace Vernets depiction of his atelier
in the rue des Martyrs, exhibited in 1822 at his new studio a few blocks away
in the fashionable Nouvelle Athnes neighbourhood. Vernet mounted the
highly successful one-man show comprising forty-ve paintings to protest poli-
tics that led to the rejection his Battle of Jemmapes and the Clichy Gate from
the Salon of 1822. Like the Clichy Gate which depicted the defence of Paris
against the Allies in March 1814, Vernets Studio, the painting as well as the
real place, appealed to opposition politics, and it embodied Liberal and Bona-
partist aspirations. The picture reveals that Vernets studio became a gathering
place for Napoleonic veterans, journalists, apprentices and artists, including
August de Forbin, Director of the Louvre and inuential state art patron.
Another prominent visitor to the studio, liberal journalist Etienne de Jouy,
co-authored the catalogue for Vernets show.7 Jouy, in fact, had a direct connec-
tion to the principal author of La St-Louis des artistes, Jean-Toussaint Merle;
they collaborated on popular satires of Parisian life entitled Lhermite de la
Chausse-dAntin and on such Liberal and Bonapartist projects as the journal Le
Nain jaune.8
If La St-Louis des artistes appropriates elements of the thirty-ve-year-old
Vernet and his studio, a gathering of artists and apprentices infused with
Imperial nostalgia, the play presents characters that reect most closely younger
painters like Eugne Delacroix and Charles-Emile Champmartin who were two
of the most important artists to appear in the vanguard of the Romantic move-
ment in 1824. Delacroix and Champmartin belonged to a complex communica-
tion system that overlapped with Vernets circle; the young painters knew
Vernet and worked and visited with his friend and neighbour Gricault in the
early Restoration.9 Furthermore, Delacroix produced no fewer than eight
caricatures, some dealing with politics and theatre, for Le Miroir des spectacles
co-edited by Jouy, Merles collaborator.10
Delacroix and Champmartin, like their theatrical counterparts but unlike
Vernet, lived in the faubourg Saint-Germain, which was an economically and
socially diverse quarter.11 Although traditionally home to the aristocracy,
appealing to the wealthy middle class, and attractive to artists and students,
Saint-Germain drew its population mostly from the lower classes in the 1820s.12
One contemporary described such intermixing of these groups: opulence and
misery contrast hideously in Paris; a thin board separates them. The loud
18 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 40/1

happiness of the salons on the rst oor trouble and aggravate the gloomy
sadness of rooms above.13 The play and its characters represent an early stage
in the development of the bohemian identity and appeared two decades before
the term bohemian identied exclusively the artist on the periphery of middle-
class life. In the 1820s the public understood the bohemian as an urban social
type: the struggling young artist, the disabled veteran and the domestic labourer
as well as the gypsy and the Parisian criminal underbelly.14
The play begins as the three artists struggle humorously with their bulky
objects on their way to the Salon, aided by their porter. As they walk, they sing:

Lets go friends, lets get our start,

Think of how they wait at the show,
Break nothing; endeavour that our art,
Arrives intact at the Temple of Apollo.15

Once back at home, Raimond, the painter, tells his two friends that it is an
honour just to be admitted to the Salon, to be in the catalogue, and then places
his hand on his heart, which he says, tells him one day he will be famous.
Montignac, the sculptor, pokes fun at his friend Raimond by placing his hand
on his stomach, which says that he is hungry. Then, they realise, for the first
time in memory, that they all three have money; Duplan, the architect, asks
How in the devil did this happen?16 In a dialogue that follows Raimond lays
bare his soul: My good friends, I must admit to you, that I infamously allowed
myself to be seduced. I earned three hundred francs by painting a shop sign.
How horrible!, respond Duplan and Montignac.17
The theatrical juxtaposition of Raimonds canvas for the Salon and his
commercial work for the street blurred the distinction between high and popular
art and contributed to lively debates on painting during the early nineteenth
century. Of course, such artists as Antoine Watteau and Jean-Simon Chardin
painted shop signs in the eighteenth century; however, there seems to have been
a boom in sign painting in Paris during the Restoration encouraged by expand-
ing commercial demand as well as artistic competition. Many well-known artists
participated in this phenomenon, as documented in Edouard Wattiers Muse en
plein air, ou choix des enseignes les plus remarquables de Paris published in 1824,
and apparently many wished to remain anonymous like Raimond in the play.
And unlike earlier periods, newspapers recorded that crowds in the street
admired new shop signs, and even a new board game based on these images
appeared. Remarking on the intersection of high art and commerce, critics
lamented that Paris will soon be nothing more than a museum, and we will
nd the arts everywhere apart from where they should be . . . .18 Conversely,
many journalists feared that the commercialism of the street had inundated
the Salon; the Journal des artistes compared the Salon in 1827 to the cargo
of a shipwrecked vessel which has been haphazardly put on show in shops
completely unsuited to them, as if only there while waiting to be sorted.19
 The Boulevard and the Salon 19

Plate 1: Nicolas Toussaint Charlet, Form before Colour, 1824. Lithograph. Paris,
Bibliothque nationale de France.

This aesthetic debate converged with the political, as underscored by a series

of lithographs depicting lower-class sign painters published by Charlet in
1824. In one (Plate 1), the sign painter joins another lower-class artisan, a
cobbler dressed as a demobilized Napoleonic veteran, in a toast parodying
high art polemics. Celebrating the sign painter in word and image was a
coded method to criticize the Restoration and its art policy at a time of elaborate
restrictions on the press.20
The amusing exchange on stage about sign painting, therefore, may likewise
reproach Restoration policies in an age of complex theatrical censorship, rather
than the low-brow commercialism of contemporary artists. Humour, as in
Charlets prints, oers a cathartic resolution to the cultural tension between art
for the museum and objects for the street while preserving the political com-
mentary on aesthetics and class. Raimond was not alone in pursuing commer-
cial opportunities. Montignac in short order reveals that he sculpted a relief for
a carriage gate, and Duplan admits that he measured a building for a mason,
and both for a fee. After exclaiming Oh infamy! and What a calamity for the
Fine Arts!, they excuse each other for their transgressions.21 Duplans intentions
were not uniquely commercial, since the architect wished to help an artisan
whom an unscrupulous developer wanted to cheat, underscoring class conict.
The rst three scenes introduce important issues for the artist that will be
20 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 40/1

developed in subsequent action: the centrality of the Salon for a successful

artistic career, the interwoven lives of unknown artists and the working-class
economy, and the clash between the quest for artistic glory and material needs.
In the next several scenes, the play introduces simultaneously a love interest,
the artists patriotic subjects and their model. Duracuire, the model, enters with
Clestine, his daughter, and he announces that she will no longer take lessons
from Raimond. Duracuire fears that Clestine and Raimond will fall in love,
leaving her pregnant. The artists feast with Duracuire and Clestine in a farcical
scene which begins when Raimond tries to sit next to Clestine. Her father
quickly takes the seat, admonishing the young man: Slowly, slowly, each to his
post, you take the avant-garde, Ill bring up the rear.22 As the feast winds
down, Montignac says softly to Raimond, Ill get rid of papa for you, and then
calls Duracuire to pose for a sculpture.23 Alone at last, Raimond and Clestine
discuss her drawing of Henri IV and his mistress Gabrielle; Raimond oers his
supportive criticism that there should be more tenderness between the two
gures. The two burst into song, which includes a solo by Raimond on the re
of desire and the hope of pleasure, completed as Duracuire enters to break up
their twosome.24
Delacroix and Champmartin, like Raimond, found models and mistresses in
their bohemian milieu, which Delacroix made clear in his journal entries as he
prepared for the Salon in 1824. During his adolescence and early adulthood,
Delacroix seems to have pursued sexual relations primarily with lower-class
women: servants, models and prostitutes. In particular, he recorded in his
journal in the 1820s that sessions with his models Emilie, Laure and Aspasie
often concluded with sexual intercourse and payment for services, equating the
model and the prostitute.25 Champmartin most certainly engaged in sexual
activity with his models, and he and Delacroix frequented prostitutes together.26
Duracuires disapproval of his daughters relationship with Raimond, therefore,
reects a social reality of sexual relationships between artists and lower-class
women. Indeed, Clestines drawing of Henri IV and his mistress, produced
under Raimonds tutelage, underscores the potential illicit sexual nature of
her relationship with the young painter.
As the love interest unfolds in these scenes, the young artists disclose, that in
their quest to make a career at the Salon, they adjusted their subject and style
to capture public attention, at times embracing or conversely rejecting political
and aesthetic norms. Montignac exhibited a bust of Louis XVIII, Duplan a plan
for military barracks, and Raimond a scene from the French invasion of Spain
in 1823. The artists in the play had every reason to expect success, as the Resto-
ration government purchased many portraits of the King from young artists as
well as images of the French invasion of Spain, popular at the actual Salon of
1824.27 The French attacked Spain to put down the constitutional government
and to restore Ferdinand VIIs royal power. French liberals at rst decried the
Bourbon campaign as reactionary, but yielded to the excitement of a quick
victory and nationalist pride.28 Raimond painted his compelling subject in a
 The Boulevard and the Salon 21

style mired in the material truth of battle, including no less than twenty
grenadier heads modelled from Duracuires features. The origins of Duracuires
disabilities, however, were actual Napoleonic battles in Egypt and Spain, where
he lost an arm and a leg. Duracuire, after seeing his features animate the Spanish
battleeld, assures Raimond that you have succeeded! And my opinion on
Trocadro is most worthy, because Duracuire was there.29 The fusion of Resto-
ration military ambitions and Imperial nostalgia, therefore, permeates the
picture on canvas and stage and introduces an oppositional Napoleonic subtext
to the audience, a subtext that infused actual artistic circles as well as other
theatrical productions.30
If Raimonds picture, as presented by the play, integrated a Napoleonic
subtext into an image of Bourbon foreign intervention, Delacroixs Scenes of the
Massacres at Chios (Plate 2) and Champmartins Massacre of the Innocents
(Plate 3) directly challenged the Restorations foreign policy.31 Rather than illus-
trating victorious French military action like such images as Hippolyte
Lecomtes Episode of the Spanish Civil War in 1823, Taking the Corner of Sainte-
Marguerite to La Cortona, 5 July 1823 (Plate 4), the pictures of Delacroix and
Champmartin appealed to public taste for the melodramatic sensation of
violence and graphically portrayed murder and bedlam permitted in part by the
French monarchys policy of non-intervention in the Greek Wars of Liberation.
Delacroix exhibited his painting as Scenes of the Massacres at Chios; Greek
Families Awaiting Death or Slavery, etc., which parallels contemporary accounts
of Turkish atrocities against innocent men, women and children at Chios that
dragged on for two months and that included the rape, murder and enslavement
of Greeks as well as the outbreak of the plague on the island. Tragically, it was
an attack by Greek insurgents from the island of Samos that provoked the mas-
sacres; the Chiots were uninvolved in the uprising against the Turks.32 In this
light, Champmartins Massacre of the Innocents may be read as recasting the
horrors at Chios in Biblical terms, paralleling French arguments for intervening
against the Muslim Turks. The inhabitants of Chios in 1822, like the children of
Bethlehem at the birth of Christ, were innocent victims of bloodshed. In fact,
Delacroix himself had contemplated painting an allegory of Ottoman barbarism
and probably discussed these ideas with his good friend Champmartin during
one of their many discussions in the spring of 1824 in preparation for the
Salon.33
Delacroixs politically-charged contemporary subject the Scenes of the
Massacres at Chios, as well as Champmartins biblical corollary, guaranteed
popular appeal with two important audiences at the salon: liberals who opposed
Restoration policies and the lower classes who packed boulevard theatres. As
early as 1821 Delacroix wrote a friend that I am planning to paint for the next
exhibition a picture whose subject will be taken from recent wars between the
Turks and Greeks. I think in the present circumstances, if it is well done, this
will be a way of drawing attention to myself.34 As for Champmartin, one com-
mentator suggested that his Massacre of the Innocents embodied a quest for
22 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 40/1

Plate 2: Eugne Delacroix, Scenes of the Massacres at Chios; Greek Families Awaiting
Death or Slavery, etc., 1824. Oil on canvas, 419 x 354 cm. Louvre, Paris. (Photo: Erich
Lessing/Art Resource, NY).

fame at any price.35 Delacroixs image of dying and enslaved Greeks also
evoked the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt and French imperial ambitions in the
1820s, which commentators and the artist himself underscored by comparing
Delacroixs painting to Baron Gross extremely popular General Bonaparte
Visiting the Pesthouse at Jaa, 1804.36
Imperial heroism, perhaps inevitably, penetrated aesthetic discussions in the
studio as well, rendering style political. The sculptor Montignac, for instance,
 The Boulevard and the Salon 23

Plate 3: Charles-Emile Champmartin, Massacre of the Innocents, 1824. Oil on canvas,

382 x 331 cm. Louvre, Paris. (Photo: Michle Bellot/Art Resource, NY).
greets Duracuire: what a superb acadmie! too bad only half is left! And
Duracuire responds in song:
If my body is only half ne,
To pose I still have the line, . . .
I bequeathed by my glorious loss,
That Herculean leg at the foot of the Pyramids,
And this Ulyssean arm under the walls of Cadix.37

Montignac continues the dialogue: You will be my Agamemnon, my Ajax, my

Priam; all the heroes that my chisel will create, to which Duracuire replies, I
24 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 40/1

Plate 4: Hippolyte Lecomte, Episode of the Spanish Civil War in 1823, Taking the Corner
of Sainte-Marguerite to La Cortona, 5 July 1823, 1824. Oil on canvas, 22.7 x 25.4 cm.
Versailles, Muse national des chteaux de Versailles et de Trianon. (Photo: Art
Resource, NY).

know well that you put me in all sauces.38 This burlesque exchange parodies
for its popular audience the important artistic debate on the nature of beauty
that was central to the definition of Romantic painting in the public sphere
in 1824.
During the early Restoration art critics agreed in theory that visual art
required transcendental human form in order for it to speak of timeless truths,
reecting the persistent inuence of academic doctrine in post-Revolutionary
France. Academic critics like Etienne Delcluze dened this form as ideal beauty
(beau idal), the perfect human form inspired from the noblest ancient and
natural models, and opposed it to relative beauty (beaut relative), forms
mired in the material truth of a specic historical context.39 Other critics argued
that beauty was not the unique purview of the ancients and actually had modern
manifestations. Stendhal, for instance, advanced a pluralistic notion of beauty
and claimed that Michelangelo and Racine, now considered classic, were modern
in their day; in Stendhals aesthetics the artist begins with Classical models,
transforms them with modern traits, and thereby creates a modern ideal beauty
(beau idal moderne).40 Even the most pro-Romantic critics, like Adolphe
Thiers, believed that the painter should seek to penetrate the past, to seize its
 The Boulevard and the Salon 25

mores, character, local colour, and to present a true and at the same time noble
and poetic history.41 Clearly these critical positions have common ground,
stressing nobility in form and poetry in meaning. In fact, critical disagreements
about Romanticism at the Salon emerged not so much in the dispute of these
ideals, but in their application to contemporary painting. The burlesque dialogue
between Montignac and Duracuire, on the other hand, introduces relative beauty
as an aesthetic alternative, and therefore presents a more radical aesthetic
position, albeit through satire, than the most progressive criticism in 1824.
Montignac takes a crippled Napoleonic veteran as a modern surrogate for
such ancient heroes as Agamemnon, Ajax, and Priam, and Raimond actu-
ally pays the model by the head or arm, highlighting his materialist ap-
proach as well as parodying traditional academic study.
As the artists leave the studio for the Salon, they persuade Duracuire to
accompany them by stressing the reality eect of the works on display.42
Raimond describes painting that simulates cannonballs ying through the
air, here! . . . an enemy patrol surprised by our avant-garde, there! . . . further
along, a French ag that you retrieve .... The description of images so utterly
convinces Duracuire that he envisions the galleries of the Louvre as a battleeld:
I go to the Salon, as if I return to combat.43 The paintings have a similar eect
on the porter le pre Trinquard, when he helped the artists deliver their works
to the Louvre at the opening of the play. He tells la mre Michel: it was amusing
the museum . . . the paintings one would say talk to you. Then in a playful lyric
he describes beautiful objects at the exhibition:

Among a thousand large canvases,

Where more than one subject shines,
We see by very capable brushes,
In portrait over a hundred family lines.44

La mre Michel, enticed by the spectacle at the Salon, replies, lets go, lets go
. . . I must go see that.45 The play represents the reality of lower classes at the
Salon, disabled Napoleonic veterans, porters, cleaning ladies, among others, and
entices them to visit the exhibition at the Louvre and experience the mystical
power of life-like paintings.
Audiences at the actual Salon also apparently experienced the works of
Delacroix and Champmartin as spectacular reality. Critics Flocon and Aycard
wrote that in Delacroixs Scenes of the Massacres at Chios, All is so natural, the
tattered clothes, facial expressions, the victims dreary and frightening exhaus-
tion, that we forget art and the painter, and we actually witness this terrible
scene.46 Perhaps even more telling is Auguste Jals description of a ctional
encounter with a lower-class woman at the exhibition:

Do you want to hear what a simple woman who stopped in front of M. Champ-
martins painting said yesterday? I gathered her account as we crossed the room.
26 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 40/1

Look, she said, what our children are exposed to! A horse carries away the rider
who was walking him on the Champs Elyse; he jumps the Tuileries barrier and
arrives at little Provence to knock over and kill the nannies and kids! If I were
the prefect of the Police! . . . . I wager that she let loose a stream of abuse at
the grooms, horses, guards and perhaps even the nannies who stayed in the
lower garden rather than climb up on the terrace!47

Jals text reveals that Champmartins image operated spectacularly, like

melodrama, in creating a convincing and emotive image of injustice and villainy.
In fact, the Massacre of Innocents seems so real to this simple woman that she
recasts it imaginatively as a contemporary massacre in Paris.
Before la mre Michel departs for the Louvre, a wealthy collector, Richard-
ville, appears at the studio, directly from the Salon, seeking to purchase a
Spanish battle painting from Raimond. In a humorous scene, la mre Michel
acts as salesperson and Richardville decides on the sketch for Raimonds Salon
exhibit. Duracuire, returning to the studio at this moment, tells Richardville, a
war proteer, that he should pay dearly for the painting, because the money
you made on the soldiers would be well spent for a picture to honour them.48
There is a larger problem, however; Richardville wants to be painted on the
canvas where Duracuires gure heroically stands. Duracuire, outraged by this
prospect, sings:

I tell you it would be debasement

To confuse by vile envy
A man who lives from government allotment
With a soldier who dies for his country.49

Raimond, entering, overhears the dispute and tells Richardville that his paint-
ing is not for sale. If I had known that, replies Richardville, I would not have
bothered to climb four flights of stairs. You understand how difficult it is for
one who lives on the first floor.50 Social hostility between the privileged and
lower classes increases, as Raimond asserts that those who live on the fourth
floor are more patriotic than those on the first. When it becomes clear how
much Richardville will pay for the sketch, however, Montignac negotiates a deal
between genius and fortune, as humour again diffuses class conflict.51
The play concludes as Trinquard, the porter, barges into the studio with
news that three uniformed ocials, including a policeman, have arrived, ap-
parently to arrest the artists for debt. Trinquard then presents Duplan and
Montignac with ocial letters from the men, which, on the contrary, bring
good news. Duplans plan for a barracks will be built, which prompts Duracuire
to whisper to his daughter that she should have chosen Duplan! Montignac
opens his letter and learns that the Ministry of the Royal Household purchased
his bust for the considerable sum of 6,000 francs. Only poor Raimond is left
 The Boulevard and the Salon 27

without glory, at least until a government representative arrives with news that
the King awarded him the cross of the Legion of Honour, and the state bought
his work. Everyone celebrates the artists successes around a bust of the King, as
Raimond says: My friends, it is to the King, whose likeness you see, that your
adoration should be addressed.52
On the surface, La St-Louis des artistes appears to celebrate the king and his
patronage of the arts, but a curious oppositional subtext emerges through
allusions to the glorious Napoleonic past, through references to contemporary
class conict, and through politicized debate on aesthetics. The press observed
this, and one journals review of the play actually quoted word for word
Duracuires angry response to Richardvilles desire to replace the Napoleonic
veteran in Raimonds painting with a war proteer, underscoring the plays
coded oppositional meaning.53 In fact, such kings days often became a target
for the regimes critics, who often booed lines in such free theatrical perfor-
mances that gloried the King, although police archives reveal that La St-Louis
des Artistes proceeded without incident.54
The denouement of the play anticipated the acquisition of Romantic paintings
from the Salon in 1824 and their complex political meaning. Among the
audience at the Louvre was at least one private patron who wished to buy
Delacroixs painting, paralleling Richardvilles desire for Raimonds picture.
In response, Auguste de Forbin, Director of the Louvre, successfully appealed to
his superior, Sosthne de la Rochefoucauld, just weeks after the opening of the
Salon to purchase the Scenes of the Massacres at Chios, along with works by
ve other painters, before it was snatched up by a private collector who wished
to embarrass the government. Painters like Delacroix, Forbin wrote, have
resisted even higher prices from private patrons with the hope of having their
work placed in the beautiful collections of the Luxembourg Museum . . . .55 The
Luxembourg Museum opened in 1818, dedicated to outstanding works of living
French artists, and already exhibited Delacroixs Barque of Dante purchased in
1822 as well as works by David, Grard and Gros.56 Champmartins Massacre of
the Innocents also appeared on Forbins list of proposed acquisitions, but the
Ministry of the Interior purchased it for a provincial church, probably on For-
bins recommendation.57 In an unprecedented gesture, Forbin ordered that
Champmartins painting hang temporarily in the Luxembourg Museum, where
the picture remained for one month before departing for the provinces, unit-
ing the massacres of Delacroix and Champmartin one last time.58 The events
of the actual Salon in 1824, therefore, reected those produced earlier on stage;
young artists acquired reputations and royal sponsorship important to make a
career in visual arts.
State acquisition of Raimonds ctive image unequivocally endorsed the
French policy of military intervention in Spain, whereas royal patronage of
Delacroixs Scenes of the Massacres at Chios responded to much more complex
political circumstances. The art world during the Restoration became domi-
nated by such unocial agents as private collectors and a highly politicized
28 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 40/1

press often espousing oppositional viewpoints, and Forbins purchase of Dela-

croixs painting may have been a defensive gesture by the monarchy to
maintain symbolic control over culture in 1824.59 On the other hand, com-
pelling archival evidence suggests that Forbin proactively engaged this new
volatile public sphere to direct Restoration patronage and inuence public
debate. Forbin, in a report to his superior in December 1824, oered his
candid assessment of the Salon and the future of the ne arts during the
Restoration:

The present Salon is proof of what we have argued, that the arts must be free of all
shackles. This Salon is noteworthy for its strength derived totally from its variety,
and despite the critics, it is from clash of opinions, diversity of viewpoints and
independence that original and elevated works will be born.

Watch over talent, support it; do not force it to do what it does not feel, to obey
your own inspiration. Provide work, open careers, reveal the goal and do not
impose the means: there it is, I think, the only reasonable step indicated by the
experience of arts administration.60

Forbins report is astonishing since it presents the classic liberal argument for
freedom of the arts to his superior, Sosthne de la Rochefoucauld, an Ultra and
recent appointee of Charles X. Forbin had nothing to gain, other than to
persuade by force of argument, by presenting such heart-felt ideas to a superior
who held antithetical views. In fact, Forbins argument parallels that of Ludovic
Vitets liberal appeal, De lIndpendance en matire de gout. Du Romantisme
published in the opposition journal Le Globe in early 1825.61
Forbin had, in fact, nurtured and supported Delacroix and Champmartin
since their apprenticeship with Gurin, visiting Delacroixs studio and purchas-
ing his rst exhibited painting for the Luxembourg Museum and awarding
grants and commissions to Champmartin.62 Rather than censor or discretely sky
Champmartins Massacre of the Innocents, as a defensive administrator might,
Forbin provoked debate by placing the controversial painting in the highly
visible and honoric grand salon. In fact, Forbin later wrote his superior:
Exhibition in the grand salon has become a kind of reward for artists and
as a way to signal to the public the most remarkable works on display.63
Champmartins Massacre of the Innocents was reported in the grand salon
by press in mid-October.64 Forbin pursued this strategy again in 1828 when
both Delacroixs Death of Sardanapalus and Champmartins Massacre of the
Janissaries appeared in the grand salon.65 Forbins practice of supporting young
artists, artistic freedom and public debate - even when highly controversial -
found its way on stage in the last scene of La St-Louis des artistes when Raimond
celebrates the kings enlightened patronage of the arts.
La St-Louis des artistes recreated on stage the world of the artist and high art
in its social, aesthetic and political complexity - a complexity absent from earlier
 The Boulevard and the Salon 29

exchanges between popular culture and high art, between theatre and painting.
The play also reected many of the same issues that emerged later at the actual
Salon in 1824, where two young artists, Eugne Delacroix and Charles-Emile
Champmartin, tantalized the public with images of murder and bedlam. La
St-Louis des artistes, which itself contained a political subtext critical of the
restored monarchy, invited the lower classes to the Salon to see the compelling
subjects and dynamic pictorial strategies of Delacroix and Champmartin which
conveyed coded critiques of Restoration foreign policy toward the Greeks.
Theatre presented the world of the artist as tableaux vivants which animated
the artists bohemian existence and quest for a subject that would captivate
the audience at the Salon and therefore lead to state sponsorship. The play
concluded with commentary on French military adventures and an invitation
to the lower classes to visit the Salon.
The connection of La St-Louis des artistes with the world of high art, however,
oers more profound revelations than overlaps in politics and audience for low
culture and high art. The comparison of popular theatre and Romantic painting
underscores the intermediality of visual culture during the Restoration and sug-
gests the importance of popular culture for the critical debate over Romanticism,
for the innovative form of Romantic paintings, and for state patronage of
controversial art. The play satirically challenged consensus in art criticism in
favour of ideal beauty in art and sanctioned the notion of relative beauty; the
play, therefore, represented perhaps the only endorsement for Delacroixs and
Champmartins subsequent rejection of the ideal in favour of the real which
generated intense criticism at the Salon. According to critics, the Massacres at
Chios and the Scenes of the Massacre of the Innocents also created persuasive
and aecting simulations of villainy and injustice, like melodrama, which
suggests the importance of subjects, structure and mis-en-scne of melodra-
matic theatre for the development of form in the paintings of Delacroix and
Champmartin. Finally, La St-Louis des artistes celebrated state patronage of
young artists, even a painter whose picture encoded an oppositional message,
and provided popular support for Forbins liberal argument for freedom of
the arts from within an Ultra royalist regime. By 1824, therefore, the life of
the artist and high art infused popular culture and conversely popular cul-
ture participated in an unprecedented fashion in the debate over the aesthetics,
form and patronage of high art.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Washington and Jeerson College for the Kenneth M.
Mason, Sr. Summer Grant for Faculty Research which supported the comple-
tion of this article.
Notes
1 La St-Louis des artistes ou la fte du Salon, vaudeville en un acte, en honneur de la
fte du roi, par MM. Merle, Simonnin, et Fd.-Laloue (Paris, 1824).
30 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 40/1

2 R. Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York,

1995), p. xxii. For several important studies of visual culture during the
Restoration, see B. Wright, Painting and History during the French Restoration:
Abandoned by the Past (Cambridge, 1997); P. Mainardi, Husbands, Wives, and
Lovers: Marriage and its Discontents in Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven,
2003); E. Fraser, Delacroix, Art and Patrimony in Post-Revolutionary France
(Cambridge, 2004).
3 On the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century prototypes, see G. Levitine, The
Dawn of Bohemianism: The Barbu Rebellion and Primitivism in Neoclassical France
(University Park, 1978), pp. 1932 and R. Wrigley, The Origins of French Art
Criticism from the Ancien Rgime to the Restoration (Oxford, 1993), pp. 24757.
On earlier exchanges between theatre and painting and their theoretical
implications, see C. van Eck and S. Bussels, The Visual Arts and Theatre in Early
Modern Europe, Art History, 33:2 (2010), 20823.
4 T. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven, 1985),
pp. 4574; J. Rubin, Gurins Painting of Phdre and the Post-Revolutionary
Revival of Racine, Art Bulletin, 59:4 (1977), 60118; D. Alston, David et le thtre,
in David contre David, (Paris, 1993), vol. 1, pp. 16797.
5 I use high art and popular culture to express categories understood by
contemporaries as distinct in 1824. High art issued from the separation of the arts
and crafts institutionalized by the Acadmie royale de peinture et sculpture in the
seventeenth century and embodied in the teaching of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts
through the nineteenth century. In this system, ambitious painters and sculptures
practiced a liberal art based on a theoretical understanding of the classical tradition.
The Academy, moreover, distinguished between the high art of history painting
and the lesser genres. In contrast to high arts largely self-referential practices,
popular culture in the form of boulevard theatre primarily addressed workers and
artisans. Although ordinary people did not produce popular theatre, as they did
folk culture, the workers and artisans who consumed popular culture did exercise
great influence over it by choosing which productions to attend and through
reactions to performances that led to rewrites. For a useful overview of the French
academic tradition, see P. Duro, The Academy and the Limits of Painting in
Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge, 1997), esp. pp. 117; C. Goldstein,
Teaching Art: Academies and Schools from Vasari to Albers (Cambridge, 1996),
pp. 4054. On audiences for popular theatre, see D. Davidson, France after Revolution:
Urban Life, Gender, and the New Social Order (Cambridge, MA, 2007), p. 83.
6 Lady Morgan, France (Philadelphia, 1817), p. 292. On the variety of theatres on the
boulevard, see M. Albert, Les Thtres des boulevards (Geneva, 1969); H. Beaulieu,
Les Thtres du boulevard du crime (Geneva, reprinted 1977); F. Rahill, The World
of Melodrama (University Park, 1967), pp. 3100. On the post-Revolutionary
audience for melodrama in Paris, see Davidson, Melodramatic Spectatorship on
the Parisian Boulevard, in France after Revolution, pp. 75102.
7 On the meaning and reception of Vernets studio, see N. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer,
Imago Belli: Horace Vernets LAtelier as an Image of Radical Militarism under the
Restoration, Art Bulletin, 68:2 (1986), 26880.
8 LHermite de la Chausse-dAntin, ou Observations sur les moeurs et les usages
parisiens au commencement du XIXe sicle, 5 vols. (Paris, 1814). On Jouy, see C.
 The Boulevard and the Salon 31

Pichois, Pour une biographie dEtienne Jouy, Revue des sciences humaines, 118
(1965), 22752; P. Comeau, Etienne Jouy: His Life and His Paris Essays, Ph.D.
dissertation, Princeton University, 1968. On Merle, see Biographie universelle
ancienne et moderne (ed.) L.-G. Michaud (Paris, 1843), vol. 28, pp. 434.
9 Darnton employs the term communication system to explain networks of
gathering and disseminating information that can elucidate a societys political
culture. See his An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-
Century Paris, American Historical Review, 105:1 (2000), 135 and The Forbidden
Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York, 1995). On the relationship
between Delacroix and Vernets circle, see E. Delacroix, Journal (ed.) M. Hannoosh
(Paris, 2009), vol. 1, p. 174. C. Clment, Gricault: Etude biographique et critique
(Paris, 1879), p. 305.
10 On Delacroixs cartoons, see N. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Eugne Delacroix: Prints,
Politics, and Satire, 181422 (New Haven, 1991).
11 The Salon catalogue reveals that Delacroix lived at rue de Grenelle-Saint-Germain,
number 118 and Champmartin just up the street at number 86.
12 A. Daumard, La Bourgeoisie parisienne de 1815 1848 (Paris, 1963), pp. 181211.
Daumard based her analysis on voting, tax, and census records. See also J. Seigel,
Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 18301930
(New York, 1986), pp. 402. For a discussion of housing and the lower class,
see L. Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First
Half of the Nineteenth Century, trans. F. Jellinek (New York, 1973), pp. 18699.
13 Quoted in Daumard, p. 181: lopulence et la misre offrent Paris des contrastes
hideux; un lger plancher les spare. Les joies bruyantes des salons [du premier
tage] troublent et enveniment la morne tristesse des chambres plus leves.
14 M. Gluck, Theorizing the Cultural Roots of the Bohemian Artist, Modernism/
Modernity 7:3 (2000), 35253. On the historical background and development of
bohemian identity, see M. Gluck, Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture
in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge MA, 2005), pp. 164.
15 La St-Louis des artistes, p. 4: Allons, amis, mettez-vous en voyage, / Songez que
lon nous attend au salon; / Ne brisez rien; tchez que notre ouvrage / Arrive intact
au palais dApollon.
16 La St-Louis des artistes, p. 8: Duplan: Comment diable a se fait-il?
17 La St-Louis des artistes, p. 8: Raimond: Mes bons amis, je dois vous lavouer, . . .
jai eu linfamie de me laisser sduire. Jai gagn trois cent francs la semaine
dernire; jai peint une enseigne .... / Montignac et Duplan: Quelle horreur!
18 R. Wrigley, Between the Street and the Salon: Parisian Shop Signs and the Spaces
of Professionalism in the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries, Oxford Art
Journal 21:1 (1998), 57.
19 Wrigley, Between the Street and the Salon, 57.
20 My discussion follows Wrigley, Between the Street and the Salon, 5666.
21 La St-Louis des artistes, p. 9: Raimond: Un tois de btiment! infamie! Un
architecte! . . . / Montignac: O calamit des beaux arts!
22 La St-Louis des artistes, p. 15: Duracuire: Doucement, doucement: chacun sa
poste, passez lavant-garde, moi je veille sur la rserve.
23 La St-Louis des artistes, p. 17: Montignac: J vais t dbarrasser du papa.
24 La St-Louis des artistes, p. 20: Raimond: Le feu du dsir / Lespoir du plaisir.
32 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 40/1

25 E. Delacroix, Journal, vol. 1, pp. 131, 132, 143, 145, 163. On Delacroixs sexual
relations in his early years, see R. Escholier, Delacroix et les femmes (Paris, 1963),
pp. 976; Jack Spector, The Death of Sardanapalus (New York, 1974), pp. 98101;
Darcy Grigsby, Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (New
Haven, 2002), pp. 25360. Once women became too old to be models, they often
turned to prostitution to earn a living. See M. Lathers, Bodies of Art: French
Literary Realism and the Artists Model (Lincoln, 2001), p. 55.
26 Delacroix, Journal, vol. 1, pp. 101, 105. See also Escholier, Delacroix et les femmes,
p. 61.
27 On the image of Louis XVIII and politics during the Restoration, see M. Wrede, Le
portrait du roi restaur, ou la fabrication de Louis XVIII, Revue dhistoire moderne
et contemporaine, 53:2 (2006), 11238.
28 For a discussion of paintings of the Spanish campaign and politics in 1824, see
N. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Liberals of the World Unite: Gricault, his Friends,
and La Libert des peuples, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 116 (1990), 22742.
29 La St-Louis des artistes, p. 17: Duracuire: Mille cartouches! je vous rponds que
vous avez russi! Et mon suffrage sur le Trocadro en vaut bien un autre, car
Duracuire y tait.
30 On veterans in Restoration theatre, see Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Imago Belli, 271.
31 The historiography on Delacroixs painting is vast, whereas the importance of
Champmartins painting has gone unnoticed by scholars. The central study of the
Delacroixs painting and the Greek revolt is N. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer,
French Images from the Greek War of Independence, 182130 (New Haven, 1989),
pp. 2537. Other important treatments of Delacroixs painting are: F. Trapp, The
Attainment of Delacroix (Baltimore, 1971), pp. 2948; L. Johnson, The Paintings of
Eugne Delacroix (London, 1981), vol. 1, pp. 8391; F. Haskell, Chios, the
Massacres, and Delacroix, in J. Boardman and C. E. Vaphopoulou-Richardson
(eds.), Chios, A Conference at the Homereion in Chios 1984 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 335
58; Wright, Painting and History, pp. 14853; E. Fraser, Uncivil Alliances:
Delacroix, the Private Collector and the Public, Oxford Art Journal 21:1 (1998),
87103; B. Jobert, Delacroix (Princeton, 1999), pp. 708; Darcy Grigsby,
Whose colour was not black nor white nor grey,/ But an extraneous mixture,
which no pen/ Can trace, although the pencil may: Aspasie and Delacroixs
Massacres at Chios, Art History, 22:5 (1999), 676704; Grigsby, Extremities, pp.
23779; Fraser, Delacroix, pp. 39114; Margaret MacNamidhe, Delcluzes
Response to Delacroixs Scenes from the Massacres at Chios (1824), Art
Bulletin, 89:1 (2007), 6381.
32 Haskell, Chios, the Massacres, and Delacroix, pp. 3401.
33 Delacroix, Journal, vol. 1, p. 100. Delacroix recorded meetings with Champmartin
on 1, 24, 27, and 30 April and 5 May 1824 in Journal, vol. 1, pp. 131, 146, 149,
150, 154. Delacroix and Champmartin met nine years earlier in P.-N. Gurins
studio, worked together with Thodore Gricault as he prepared the Raft of the
Medusa in 1818, studied horses together in 1823, and maintained a strong
friendship though the 1840s. On their relationship in the studio and later creative
relationship, see J. P. Lambertson, The Genesis of French Romanticism: P.-N.
Gurins Studio and the Public Sphere Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois,
1994, pp. 1659; J. P. Lambertson, Delacroixs Sardanapalus, Champmartins
 The Boulevard and the Salon 33

Janissaries, and Liberalism in the Late Restoration, Oxford Art Journal, 25:2 (2002),
6585; J. P. Lambertson, Friendship in the Romantic Studio: Charles-Emile
Champmartins Portrait of Eugne Delacroix and Alphonse Ve, Burlington
Magazine, 151:1274 (May 2009), pp. 2937.
34 Eugne Delacroix, Correspondance gnrale (ed.) Andr Joubin (Paris, 1935), vol. 1,
p. 132: Je me propose de faire pour le Salon prochain un tableau dont je prendrai
le sujet dans les guerres rcentes des Turcs et des Grecs. Je crois que dans les
circonstances, si dailleurs il y a quelque mrite dans lexcution, ce sera un moyen
de me faire distinguer.
35 F., Beaux-Arts. Exposition de mil huit cent vingt-quatre, Drapeau blanc, 17
January 1825, p. 4.
36 T. Porterfield, The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism, 1798
1836 (Princeton, 1998), pp. 1279.
37 La St-Louis des artistes, pp. 1011: Montignac: . . . quelle superbe acadmie! quel
dommage quil ny en ait que la moiti. / Duracuire: Si la moiti d ma personne est
rfaire, / Pour bien poser cependant jai le fil; / . . . / Mais jai laiss par dglorieux
oublis, / Cte jamb dHercule au pieds des Pyramides, / Et c bras dUlyss sous les
murs de Cadix.
38 La St-Louis des artistes, p. 11: Montignac: tu seras mon Agamemnon, mon Ajax,
mon Priam; enfin tous les hros qu mon ciseau enfantera. / Duracuire: Ah! je sais
bien que vous me mettez toutes sauces . . . .
39 E. J. D. Beaux-Arts, Le Lyce franais, vol. 2, 1819, pp. 23738. On the
development of the concept of ideal beauty, see R. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The
Humanistic Tradition of Painting (New York, 1963), pp. 916. Delcluze did
believe that modern and contemporary subjects could conform to the
principles of Greek art and offered Girodets Atala, the tragic love story of an
eighteenth-century Christian, as evidence in Le Lyce franais, vol. 2, 1819,
p. 240. Delcluze argued that to create a history painting that transcends its
own fixed historical period, an artist must be steeped in ancient art and
theory as understood by the academic tradition. So, for Delcluze, those who
have best treated subjects drawn from modern or contemporary history are
again those who studied antiquity the most, those who, like M. David,
Girodet, Grard, Gros and Gurin [Delcluzes emphasis], merit the title
history painter. See E.J.D. Beaux-Arts, Le Lyce franais, vol. 1, 1819, p. 277.
On Delcluzes criticism of the 1824 Salon, see MacNamidhe, Delcluzes
Response, 6381.
40 E. Talbot, Stendhal and Romantic Esthetics (Lexington, 1985), pp. 4668. D.
Wakefield insightfully analyzed Stendhals relationship to the visual arts in Stendhal
and the Arts (London, 1973), pp. 132 and Stendhal and Delcluze at the Salon of
1824, in F. Haskell, A. Levi, and R. Shackleton (eds.), The Artist and the Writer in
France: Essays in Honor of Jean Seznec (Oxford, 1974), pp. 7485.
41 A. Thiers, Peinture franaise. Salon de 1824, La Revue Europene, vol. 1 (1824),
p. 681: on cherche pntrer dans les temps recul, en saisir les moeurs, les
caractres, la couleur locale, et rendre lhistoire fidle, et en mme temps noble
et poetique.
42 R. Barthes suggested that it is detail - detail irrelevant to narrative structure - that
guarantees a sense of authenticity to an historical account in The Reality Effect in
34 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 40/1

Tzvetan Todorov (ed.), R. Carter (trans.), French Literary Theory Today

(Cambridge, 1982), pp. 1117.
43 La St-Louis des artistes, p. 22: Raimond: ici des boulets sautant en lair! .... l, une
patrouille ennemie surprise par notre avant-garde! . . . plus loin, un drapeau
franais que vous rapportez .... / Duracuire: J vais aller au salon d peinture, /
Comm si je rtournais aux combats!.
44 La St-Louis des artistes, p. 23: Trinquard: Oui, a ma amus l Muse . . . des
peintures quon dirait que a vous parler .... / Entre mille grands tableaux, / O
plus dun beau sujet brille, / On voit, par dhabils pinceaux, / Plus dcent portraits
de famille.
45 La St-Louis des artistes, p. 24: La Mre Michel: Allons, Allons, cest dcid, faut que
jaille voir a.
46 F. Flacon and M. Aycard, Salon de 1824 (Paris, 1824), p. 15: Tout y est si naturel,
le dsordre des vtemens, lexpression des figures, labbattement morne et sinistre
des personnages, quon oublie lart et le peintre, et quon assiste rellement cette
scne terrible.
47 A. Jal, LArtiste et le philosophe, entretiens critiques sur le Salon de 1824 (Paris,
1824), p. 88: Voulez-vous que je rpte ce que disait hier une bonne femme qui
stait arrte devant le tableau de M. Champmartin; jai recueilli son propos,
pendant que nous traversions cette salle? Voil, cependant, disait-elle, quoi sont
exposs nos enfans! Un cheval emporte son cavalier qui le promenait aux Champs-
Elises; il franchit la barrire des Tuileries, et vient la petite Provence renverser et
tuer les marmots et les bonnes! Si jtais prfet de police! . . .. . . Je parie quelle
sest rpandue en invectives contre les valets, contre les chevaux, contre les
factionnaires, et peut-tre aussi contre les bonnes denfans qui restent dans la partie
basse du jardin, au lieu de monter sur les terrasses!.
48 La St-Louis des artistes, p. 31: Duracuire: Parce que largent que vous avez gagn
sur les soldats, serait bien employ payer un tableau fait en leur honneur.
49 La St-Louis des artistes, p. 33: Duracuire: Jvous ldis tout net, ce srait un attentat /
D confondre ainsi par une basse envie / Lhomme qui vit aux dpens de ltat /
Avec lsoldat qui meurt pour la patrie.
50 La St-Louis des artistes, p. 33: Richardville: Si javais su cela, je ne me serais pas
donn la peine de monter vos quatres tages. Vous conviendrez quil est dur pour
moi qui loge au premier . . . .
51 The conflict between Richardville on one side and Raimond and Duracuire on the
other seems an early manifestation of the cultural bohemian identity from which
bourgeois modern culture comes under attack. See Gluck, Theorizing the Cultural
Roots, pp. 354-9.
52 La St-Louis des artistes, 40: Raimond: Mes amis, cest au Roi dont vous voyez
limage, que vos hommages doivent sadresser.
53 Thtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin, Le Diable boiteux, 25 August 1824, p. 4.
54 Archives Nationales, Paris (hereafter AN), F73878, Prfecture de Police, Bulletin de
Paris, 24 August 1824. For a study of such oppositional expression at other royal
celebrations, see S. Kroen, Politics and Theater: The Crisis of Legitimacy in
Restoration France, 181530 (Berkeley, 2000), pp. 1705.
55 AN, O31413, Letter from Forbin to Rochefoucauld, 6 September 1824: ont
rsist des prix plus considerables qui leur taient offerts par des
 The Boulevard and the Salon 35

particuliers, dans lesprance de faire partie de la belle collection de

Luxembourg . . . .
56 For an overview of the Luxembourg Museum, see M.-C. Chaudonneret, LEtat et les
artistes. De la Restauration la monarchie de Juilliet (181533) (Paris, 1999), pp. 30
41. See also, Fraser, Uncivil Alliances, pp. 87103; Fraser, Delacroix, pp. 78114.
57 Archives des Muses Nationaux, Paris (hereafter AMN), xSalon de 1824, Salon de
1824, Tableaux dont on pourrait proposer lacquisition.
58 AMN, P30, Champmartin, Letter from Alphonse de Gisors to Forbin, 21 April
1825.
59 Fraser, Delacroix, pp. 78114. See also Fraser, Uncivil Alliances, pp. 87103.
60 AN, O31307, Report from Forbin to Rochefoucauld, 8 December 1824: Le salon
actuel est la preuve de ce que nous avanons, que les arts doivent tre libres de
toutes les entraves. Ce Salon est remarquable par sa force qui est tout entire dans
sa varit, et cest ainsi du choc des opinions, de la diversit des jugements, de
lindpendance des travaux que natront, malgr les esprits chagrins, des ouvrages
originaux et levs. Epiez le talent, soutenez-le; ne le forcez pas faire ce quil ne
sent pas, obir votre propre inspiration. Dsignez les travaux, ouvrez la carrire,
montrez le but, nimposez pas les moyens: voil, je pense, la seule marche
raisonnable indique par lexprience lAdministration des art.
61 L. Vitet, De lIndpendance en matire de gout. Du Romantisme, Le Globe, 2 April
1825, pp. 4435.
62 Lambertson, The Genesis of French Romanticism, pp. 60107, 15964 and
Lambertson, Friendship in the Romantic Studio, pp. 2956.
63 AN, O31422, Letter from Forbin to Rochefoucauld, 29 February 1828: LExposition
dans le grand salon est devenue une sorte de rcompense pour les artistes et une
manire de signaler au public les objets le plus remarquables de lExposition.
64 M. J., Salon de 1824, La Quotidienne, 10 October 1824, p. 4.
65 The presence of paintings in the grand salon was reported in Salon de 1827 et
1828, Le Mentor, 8 February 1828, p. 2. For Rochefoucaulds letter to Forbin, 29
February 1828, see AN, O31422. The letter was published by P. Angrand, Histoire
des muse de province au XIXe sicle (Les Sables-dOlonne, 1984), vol. 1, p. 144. For
a discussion of this letter and other archival documents related to the Forbins
sponsorship of Delacroix and Champmartin at the Salon of 1828, see Lambertson,
The Genesis of French Romanticism, 20615. Fraser recently republished this
letter in Delacroix, pp. 17273. Delacroixs and Champmartins pictures appeared
in the third of four hangings at the salon, and were probably omitted from the last
instalment in March 1828 according to Eva Bouillo, Le Salon de 1827. Classique ou
romantique? (Rennes, 2009), pp. 512.

Contributor
John P. Lambertson is Professor and Edith M. Kelso Chair of Art History at
Washington and Jeerson College. He has published on Gricault, Delacroix
and French Romanticism and his most recent article appeared in the Burlington
Magazine. He is currently at work on a book on French Romantic painting,
politics and popular culture. E-mail: jlambertson@washje.edu.
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