Pierre Michon - The Eleven

In the Hôtel de Ville on the Place de Grève, the Commune de Paris, which had been carried there by the district sections, the Limousins with their great pikes, the People , you could say, vociferated, which had had a great audience but now had hardly any, which was hungry and weary and whose wings were being clipped by the bureaucrats of the committees; deliberating and decreeing in the Salle des Machines of the Tuileries was the Convention, the true nominal power, the elected and all-powerful assembly, all-powerful and terrorized, which had no power other than to obey the Committee, which nevertheless issued from it and could theoretically be dismissed by it, but which it renewed each month without Robespierre even needing to raise a finger — the Convention, for which the only way out appeared to be the hand of Providence, a kind of miracle, a deus ex machina of the fifth act, which it had not yet learned to call Thermidor. In two lower halls and communicating by the Queen’s Stairway to the Flore pavilion, then called the pavillon de l’Égalité , in that Flore pavilion at the very end of the Bord-de-l’Eau gallery in the Louvre, under our feet, under The Eleven , the two committees made up another party, the Committee of General Security, shadow and executant, standard-bearer for the other, the true one, the Committee of Public Safety, which had to retain absolute power or die — the tightrope-walking party, which subjugated the people through the Convention and the Convention through the people. And please note, Sir, that this power was a phantom power, that, in fact, did not exist, because the executive position that it held at the top of the pyramid of power no longer existed, had been abolished as something left over from the execrable position of the tyrant — this power did not exist, but nevertheless with its phantom voice it demanded, obtained, and severed forty heads a day. Within the Committee itself there were parties, perhaps eleven parties, which history and the little notes have reduced to three, because three is a good number that works for all occasions: first, Robespierre and the Robespierrots , two of them, Saint-Just and Couthon, so three with Robespierre; second, the scientists, engineers and lawyers, captains, excelling in the liberal as well as mechanical arts, who constructed canons out of the ruins of bells and fashioned decrees in the fine rhetoric of year II out of the ruins of the fine rhetoric of theology, empty rhetoric that, to render to Caesar what was his, had actually been invented by Robespierre’s Saint-Just: these good scholars with dirty hands were Carnot, Barère, the Prieurs, Jean Bon, Lindet, six men of science. And finally, two independents, Billaud and Collot, impassioned and unpredictable. The one principal point all these men had in common, these eleven writers, as I have told you, was affixing their eleven signatures to the bottom of various decrees where it was a question of canons, of grain, of requisition, of execution, of the guillotine.

What has this to do with the painting? First of all: these “parties,” Sir, what I have called parties, in this period of theatrical crescendo, of the ultimate round when each player only raised his voice to outbid his rival, to drown him out and finally toss the talking head into the basket, these parties were only roles now. It was no longer a matter of opinions, but of theater; this often happens in politics; and it always happens in painting when politics are represented in the very simple form of men: because opinions cannot be painted, but roles can be.

What has this to do with the commission, the small commission transacted that night of Nivôse in the Saint-Nicolas church? You ask me who, in that climactic scene in the fifth act, could have wanted the painting? What lead or supporting role wanted to make that phantom committee into a real committee, theatrically real? I am coming to that, Sir. Let me tell you about one more party, one more caste or occupation, and I will be finished.

This last party, this caste, those great leading roles distributed throughout France, sent out by the Convention and the Committees for brief mandates, were the Représentants en Mission ; the men of the great missions of 1793, the ad hoc warriors, peacemakers, proconsuls, the amateur generals who had complete power over the generals; the spearheads for the Jacobin plan of action who, forged in the midst of storms, were to have the force of lightning ; who had returned from their missions, or their tours as we say of actors, who were returning, in the months of Ventôse and Nivôse, after victories; who, on their missions, had worn the costumes and accessories à la nation , that is, the three colors, the extravagant tricolored silk waistband, silk an inch thick, three or four yards long, wound four times around the waist, sumptuous, clerical; the costume à la nation that Corentin himself had designed, under David, and which I think, even more than the Sibylles , is his true masterpiece, before The Eleven : triple collars high at the nape of the neck, alla paolesca , in the style of Paul, that is, Paolo Veronese, not Paul of Tarsus, although those who wore them had more in common with Paul of Tarsus than with Paolo Veronese — thus in the Veronese style, since it was Veronese, via Tiepolo, who had thought of it in paintings before Corentin thought of it on actual impetuous young necks; woolen cloth in national blue, erstwhile royal blue; white cravat, frothy, high, lavish, phallic; hat à la Henri IV and rosette, plume à la nation . Young men of flesh and iron wore that plume, Sir, which History, luck, fortune, the muse of the theater, perhaps God as well, because God is a dog, remember with tenderness and terror: that plume that did not tremble running up the hill, sword drawn, under fire at Fleurus, at Wattignies, at Wissembourg, because the young man who wore the plume had it on good authority that the canon fire could not touch him, that its rumbling was a sound effect, a zinc plate rattled backstage by the Great Machinist, that the cannonballs falling like hail around him were flies — the great magic, Sir, the pocket of luck. And neither had the plume trembled when its wearer, camped under the torches on the Quai de la Fosse in Nantes at the end of the Loire at midnight, wild, trembling with wine, trembling with joy, with terror, watched, melancholic, as the barges set off on his order, rotten traps that would open in the middle of the Loire and send shrieking to the bottom their cargo of nuns, rustic priests, Jean-Chouans, and beggars from the Vendée, erstwhile hussies with their brats — because all that, Sir, hussies, brats, priests, they were flies, and the Loire was a famous republican torrent ; and in Lyons at dawn on the Brotteaux plain the plume in the mist did not tremble either, or only mechanically so in the wind of the grapeshot when the marine canons fired, even though the one who wore it trembled with wine, with joy, with terror; not the least trembling either when from the back of the famous oxblood carriage hurtling full speed through the phantom city of Bordeaux with a company of dragoons at full gallop, the plume’s wearer gave the order to fire randomly in the night at windows, trees, stars; and likewise in Avignon, Marseilles, Toulon, Moulins, Arras, everywhere. Some of them returned with stolen gold filling their pockets and their oxblood carriages, so that indiscriminately Robespierre called them all rogues ; while others returned as poor as before, having forgotten in the beauty of the gesture that gold itself possesses a beauty more lasting. Thus the plumes had returned to Paris, were returning or were about to return, the borders and the cities were secured, the Vendée quelled, the mission accomplished, the tour completed; in Paris they had taken off the plume with the uniform and changed back into civilian clothes: Collot of Lyons, Tallien of Bordeaux, Carrier of Nantes, Carnot of Wattignies and Saint-Just of Wissembourg, and Rovère, Fouché, Fréron, the two Prieurs, the two Merlins, called Merlin of Douai and Merlin of Thionville, the almost twins Lequinio and Laignelot, Mallarmé of the Meurthe, the other Bourdon, not Léonard Bourdon but Bourdon of the Oise, and Barras, Jean Bon, Baudot, Lebon, Le Bas, among others. These men, these fine names, all these generals, had even more blood on their hands than the others; better than the others they knew the meaning of the word expeditious ; they had the epic halo, the gloria militar , the plume; thus they were extraordinarily popular, celebrated as heroes, larger than life. And the civilians, Danton, Hébert, Robespierre alike, Robespierre above all, feared them, feared that one of them, in the wake of Fleurus or riding the Republican wave of the Loire, might seize power with the support of the masses or the armies. But that would be for later; in its pocket, luck was keeping warm that most professional plume and enchanted sword of the general Bonaparte.