The Genius of Liberty...Forget the Bastille...prison, destroyed on July 14, 1789 .. A syncretism between the political heritages that an Orleanist regime that wanted to be "blue" claimed for itself made sense.

The history of the Place de la Bastille began in fact with a reversal of meaning that is quite common in political symbolism. A square on the outskirts of Paris at the time, dominated by the massive silhouette of a fortress transformed into a prison, destroyed on July 14, 1789 by Parisians in revolution, became for the people of Paris, and then for all the French and progressives of the world, the very symbol of the revolution and the victory of liberty over absolutism. One year later, on July 14, 1790, there was almost nothing left of the old fortress destroyed under the direction of the architect Pierre-François Palloy, but the place remained invested with a strong symbolic charge. Renamed Place de la Liberté, the place had been designated by the law of June 27, 1792 as the location for "the erection of a monument dedicated to liberty. For a while, it was considered as a site for the National Assembly. On the occasion of the celebration of August 10, 1793, a Neo-Egyptian monument made of wood and plaster, the Fountain of Regeneration, was built in the center of the square.The change of course proclaimed by the new power in the aftermath of the July Revolution is all the more spectacular and offers, in its own way, a means of measuring the distance that separates the monarchy of Louis-Philippe from the Bourbon regime. It was indeed without delay that the monarchy of Louis-Philippe intended to pay tribute to the fighters of the barricades. The law of August 30, 1830 ordered the publication in the official bulletin of the list of names of citizens who had earned the July medal and of those who had died in battle. The law of December 13, 1830 aimed to bring relief to the wounded and the families of the victims of the Three Glorious Years, a task entrusted to a parliamentary commission. In this last law, the fifteenth article stipulates "that a monument will be dedicated to the memory of the events of July" without, however, giving any details on the nature and profile of the commemorative monument.

3 See AN, F 13 1244, PV conseil général de la Seine 7 July 1831.
7 In the spring of 1831, the "Resistance" prevailed over the "Movement", Laffitte bowed out and Casimir Perier imposed a policy whose immediate objective was to put an end to the revolutionary dynamic that was compromising the stabilization of the Orleanist project.3 But the victory of a very bourgeois and anti-republican version of the July Revolution did not in any way modify the commemorative project and the homage owed to the combatants of 1830. Was the determination to commemorate the dead of 1830 a counterpart to the abandonment of the hopes for change in the summer of 1830? Nothing is less certain. On the contrary, there seems to have been a certain continuity in decision-making and a consensus between the king and his various governments to carry out this task, which was imposed on the regime beyond its conjunctural political turns.

4 See AN, F 13 1244, extract from the registers of the minutes of the general council of the Seine, July 7, 1831.
5 Printed parliamentary archives, 2nd series, 30 November 1832, 17 January 1833.
8On a proposal by the Count d'Argout, then Minister of Commerce, Louis-Philippe, by the ordinance of July 6, 1831, decided that a monument commemorating the revolution of 1830 "would be erected on the former site of the Bastille" and that the laying of the foundation stone would take place on July 27, 1831, the first anniversary of the Three Glorious Years. At the same time, the Place de la Bastille was returned to the State by the General Council of the Department of the Seine4. But the commemorative monument had only a virtual existence. No plans were yet drawn up for the project. It was not until the end of 1832 that d'Argout, who was in charge of presenting the bill for the construction of the monument and who was forced by his own majority to provide details about his ministry's budget, reported on the work of the parliamentary commission that had worked on the subject. No details yet on the monument, but the deep meaning of the project is clearly defined. He intimately associates the French Revolution and the 1830 Revolution and establishes that the symbolic link that unites them must naturally find its setting on the Place de la Bastille: "This commission, in agreement with the government, thought that the Place de la Bastille must be dedicated to the erection of this monument. Twice the blood of our generous fellow citizens has flowed there for the conquest and maintenance of our liberties and the inscription of the two years 1789 and 1830 engraved on the marble will bring together two equally memorable memories5...". On the occasion of the laying of the foundation stone, the project was sketched out: a mock monument was built and it included grisailles recalling the Revolution and in particular the storming of the Bastille. There was no real opposition to the bill. There was some resistance: the credits would be better used for school construction; why not transport the Luxor obelisk offered to France in 1831 by Mehemet Ali to the Bastille? These suggestions were not accepted and the deputies even agreed to increase the credits fixed in a first project at 600,000 francs to 900,000 francs. A large consensus allowed the vote of the law which ordered the construction of a monument "in honor of the citizens who died for the fatherland defending the laws and liberty during the days of July 27, 28, 29, 1830.

5The political significance of the place lost its strength under the Empire. In 1806, the Emperor, at a time when Paris was to be covered with fountains, had the idea of having one built on the Place de la Concorde and another on the Place de la Bastille, a way of trivializing the symbolic location of the revolutionary July 14th. Jacques Célérier and Jean-Antoine Alavoine were in charge of the order under the direction of Vivant Denon, and the first stone was laid on December 11, 1808. A bronze elephant, a subliminal allusion to the Emperor's conquering and exotic dreams, was to accompany the ensemble and make people forget or transcend the revolutionary epic. The project never saw the light of day and was transformed into a confused construction site accompanied by a derisory plaster model of the pachyderm that had become, over the years, and according to Hugo, a dilapidated refuge for the children of Paris. To show its lack of interest in the unfinished monument and the square, the State under the Restoration handed over the whole thing to the municipality, by order of October 19, 1828, which was then responsible for completing the fountain. In 1830, the work had hardly progressed and the square had almost turned into a wasteland. After the real estate crisis of 1827, only unfinished buildings remained from the attempts to construct buildings on the Arsenal side."On the column of Liberty (or of July, or of the Bastille) it was also necessary to have a statue and it was planned at first also, a feminine allegory of the constitutional France. But it was not, and it is finally a male genius who had the mission, under features and in the posture evoking rather a Mercury, to represent the freedom. At least the popular force in the form of a lion was preserved at the foot of the column.1 In Marianne au combat, Maurice Agulhon analyzes the winding path of this figure of freedom in the aftermath of 1830, a liberal and national revolution that put France back on the rails of 1789, but a complex revolution that left in place a king whose only legitimacy was henceforth to be "king of the French.

2In a political landscape where the republican threat was still feared, but where the king claimed his identity as "blue", to statuette the freedom reconquered on the barricades of 1830 without "resurrecting the Goddess", without recalling Marianne who had become a figure of the Republic, constituted an extremely perilous exercise in which the entire regime engaged its image, but also, in a certain way, its legitimacy and survival. The power hesitates, and the solutions adopted that Maurice Agulhon evokes are plural. On the pediment of the Pantheon, David d'Angers succeeded in "drowning" liberty in a large group of figures representing the Fatherland, History and a constellation of crowns generously distributed. The colossal statue of a woman that was to have topped the dome of the building was abandoned. But on the Arc de Triomphe, Rude manages, against all odds, to make emerge from the stone fresco that pays tribute to the Revolution, an extraordinary allegory of a woman whose power avoids all the prudence and procrastination of the regime. But Maurice Agulhon underlines it, the commemorative monument built on the place of the Bastille, the Genius of the Bastille which surmounts the column, become tomb of the dead of 1830, constitutes probably the most revealing choice of the deep identity of the regime of July and represents, in negative, a key moment in the political route of the figure of Marianne.

The Genius of Liberty, also known as the Genius of the Bastille, is a gilded bronze statue created by Auguste Dumont in 1836. It surmounts the July column, place de la Bastille in Paris. 4 meters high, the statue of the Genius of Liberty crowns the July column since 1836, date of its commission and delivery. Allegorical statue representing Liberty under masculine features, it represents a winged genius brandishing a torch in his right hand and the broken chains of despotism in his left, while launching himself into the air from his left foot. This statue is based on a plaster model sculpted by the artist in 1833 in half size, kept in the museum of Semur-en-Auxois (Côte-d'Or). A bronze proof of the plaster model was subsequently made by the Thiébaut Frères foundry in 1885, shortly after the sculptor's death, on commission from the Louvre Museum, where it is kept1. This work appears on the reverse side of the ten-franc Genie de la Bastille coin created in 1988. The statue benefits from the protection of the whole column, classified as a historical monument since September 29, 1995. A masculine allegory, the work created under the July Monarchy breaks with the artistic tradition of the time, avoiding a feminine representation that would have been too explicit a reference to revolutionary and republican Liberty. In the same perspective, the genius does not wear a Phrygian cap, the usual attribute of Liberty.

The text of the law specified that the Bastille was to be the place where the monument would be erected, but nothing indicated that it would serve as a tomb for the dead of the barricades. The form of the monument was not clearly indicated either. Alavoine, author of the Elephant Fountain project, had been chosen to direct the work and remained attached to his fountain. On August 6, 1833, Alavoine again asked that the one-twelfth model of the elephant be preserved before it was destroyed, and on August 15, he even suggested that the existing elephant be restored7. This idea, which had a whiff of Napoleonic nostalgia, was ignored, and besides, Alavoine had in hand, since June 18338, the project set by the government of Thiers, who had become Minister of Commerce and Public Works and was now the real pilot of the operation. The latter wanted the monument to be a column inspired by the Trajan column in Rome, a monument to victory, in the spirit of the Arc de Triomphe, the construction of which was resumed at the same time. The implementation of the project was not easy to launch in the planned budget of 900,000 francs. The specifications indicated that it was necessary to reuse the foundations of the fountain already in place. A marble column, a prestigious construction that Alavoine had once dreamed of, was impossible because of its excessive weight on the fragile vault of the Canal Saint-Martin. The alloy of zinc and tin envisaged then for its low cost and its lightness was also discarded. The symbolic importance of the monument required a more noble and durable material. In the end, a mixture of cast iron and bronze parts was chosen, a project that the Parisian founders were confident of mastering because they had proven techniques in this field9.

10 Order of June 14, 1833, Ministère du Commerce et des Travaux publics, AN, F 21 1373.
11 On June 14, 1833, a ministerial order launched the construction of the monument. The column rested on the marble base originally planned for the fountain. This supported a bronze pedestal decorated only at the beginning of the project with four roosters and a garland of oak leaves. It was planned to engrave the names of the victims of 1830 on the column, and the column was to be surmounted by a Doric capital and a statue. Alavoine had originally envisaged a female statue representing France. Thiers decided otherwise and intervened very directly in the question. He himself rectified the decree of June 14, 1833 by striking out the words "A statue of France" and replacing them with the following sentence: "A statue of the genius of Liberty.

11 See AN, F 21 1373.
12 See AN, F 13 1244, report to Thiers, June 13, 1835.
12 Thiers, perfectly aware of the political stakes of the monument, followed the development of the project with the greatest attention. On August 30, 1833, Blanc, director of works in Paris, informed Alavoine that "Monsieur le ministre had charged Monsieur Dumont with the execution of a bronze statue of the Genius of Liberty that would be placed on the July monument. This statue would be paid for by 60,000 francs11 ". Thiers himself designated the sculptors Marneuf12 and Antoine Barye for the other ornamented parts of the monument. Déblais and Denière were chosen as founders. The whole project was affected by the death of Alavoine on November 14, 1834, but Louis-Joseph Duc succeeded him immediately. The latter was already the director of works for the monument and immediately argued that the general balance of the building required modifications to the plan and therefore to the initial estimate. Thiers accepted the financial slippage without hesitation. The main modification made by Duc was the division of the column's shaft into three parts representing the Three Glorious Ones and the construction of an original monumental capital entrusted to the Roule foundry. Much more important than in the initial project, it overhung the whole column at a height of 50 meters, whose weight was now close to 200 tons.

fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_G%C3%A9nie_de_la_Libert%C3%A9

From stage to stage, the column had changed its profile. Initially defined in reference to the Trajan column, it now adopted a significantly different shape, if only because of the width of the capital that overhung it. It thus moved away from the spirit of the other column, that of the Place Vendôme, Napoleonic and classical. Originally imbued with Roman, military and triumphal references, the July column took on new meanings.

13 See Notice historique sur la colonne de Juillet, 1840, fonds Le Senne, Z 6803, BNF; J. Stirling " (...)
14The very pure decoration had become a real program. At the four corners, one found the Gallic rooster that had been intended from the beginning. The pedestal was decorated with medallions on which alternated motifs that celebrated, but only through the prism of symbols, the Three Glorious Years: the July Cross, an engraved table representing the Charter, scales to represent Justice. The people were not directly represented, but the entrance door was surmounted by Barye's lion in the round, which symbolized "the strength and majesty of the people" but also the zodiacal sign of July.13 The lion was surmounted by a small wooden statue of a man, a woman, a boy, a girl, a boy's boy, a boy's boy, a boy's boy, a boy's boy, a boy's boy, a boy's boy, a boy's boy, a boy's boy, a boy's boy. The lion was surmounted by an inscription proposed by the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres after long debates, the content of which was finally determined at a time of great political tension, in 1839, and in fact illustrates quite well the stakes of the Battle of July: "To the glory of the French citizens who armed themselves and fought in defense of public liberties during the memorable days of July 27, 28, and 29, 1830." The opposite side of the monument bore the text of the law of December 13 and a coat of arms of the city of Paris. Beyond the conservative turn of the 1830s, the attacks on liberties, and the repression of the republican movement, the regime still displayed its revolutionary and popular origins.

15The statue of the Genie, Maurice Agulhon has analyzed, showed on the other hand Thiers' will to avoid a statue of a woman that could have established a confusion with the republican Marianne. But Dumont's Genie, inspired by the ancient Mercury, remained charged with a progressive meaning: "Genie of liberty who has broken the chains of Despotism and carries in his right hand the torch of Civilization. Beyond the golden statue that stood out from the dark ensemble of the column, there was still a desire to display - which would be much more difficult in the Guizalist years - a message of progress that was certainly not in the wake of Marianne and a reference to the French Revolution seen as a block, but which closely associated freedom, progress, and always the founding event of the Three Glorious Years. Wasn't this the meaning, in the context of the time, of the Guizot law of 1833, of the revision of the Penal Code of 1832, of the municipal law, of Thiers' patriotism, of the declericalization of the Pantheon?

books.openedition.org/psorbonne/59582?lang=fr

Taken on: December 21, 2022

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