The Apotheosis

The general amnesty for the Communards, passed in 1880 by the government of Jules Ferry—the first truly republican government since the beginning of the Third Republic—ten years after the Paris Commune uprising, sparked strong reactions among conservatives and royalists, who had until then held a majority. For the public in 1885, there was no doubt that the grand allegory Boutet de Monvel submitted to the Salon under the title *L’Apothéose*—which would go on to win a gold medal—was a scathing condemnation of the new regime, which was definitively turning the page on the idea of a return to the monarchy. No doubt to avoid censorship, the painter goes back a generation, to the birth of the Second Republic, proclaimed in the wake of the February Revolution of 1848, which led to the fall of Louis-Philippe. It is this Republic—born of riots, from the ashes of the Palais Royal—that he captures, at the very moment when the people are looting the Tuileries and carrying the last king’s throne to the Place de la Bastille to burn it at the foot of the July Column. The bandit Robert Macaire, hero of the famous melodrama of the July Monarchy, *L’Auberge des Adrets*, accompanied by his accomplice Bertrand—who beats the bass drum amid the crowd’s cheers—orchestrates the parody of the coronation of a drunken man in rags; wrapped in the deposed king’s cloak and perched on his throne, he has just received the crown stolen from the palace’s bag. The peasant tramples with his dirty foot a woman—an allegory of France—who lies sprawled on the ground with the National Guard’s flag adorned with the Gallic rooster. The low-angle composition and caricatured foreshortening strike the viewer with their power as well as their originality. The color scheme is symbolically tricolor: the blue of the mob’s jackets, the white of the barricade and the flag, and the red of the cloak and the other flags brandished by those hands with black fingernails. Like Zola in *L’Assommoir* (1877) and *Germinal* (1885)—both contemporaries of the painting—Boutet de Monvel depicts with striking force these “working classes, dangerous classes,” whose revolts made and unmade regimes throughout the nineteenth century. The rabble, along with the Republic, becomes the new ruling class. Fears of the disturbances that this fiercely anti-republican pamphlet might provoke led the Minister of Fine Arts to have the painting removed from the exhibition walls the day before the Salon opened. This decision set the powder keg ablaze: in the name of artistic freedom and to allow its readers to judge for themselves, *Le Figaro* decided to exhibit the painting on its premises, while the Communard Henri Rochefort also condemned this measure in the name of artistic freedom. Boutet would harbor an eternal grudge against his contemporaries, whom he blamed for preventing the triumph of a painting that should have established him as one of the greatest historical painters of his time—and which sounded the death knell for his ambitions in this genre. The reappearance in 1980 of this icon of the Third Republic presented a tremendous opportunity to acquire the legendary painting by this Orléans-born artist, just as the new museum, then under construction, was finally set to be equipped with a gallery suited to large 19th-century canvases.