“The Aesthetics of Expiation:  Louis XVIII’s Cult[ural] Politics, 1815-1820”

Todd L. Larkin, Montana State University, Bozeman

            After the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, the victorious allies led by Britain determined that the best insurance against any future disruption of the balance of power in Europe would be the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy to France.  To his credit, the Bourbon claimant, Louis XVIII, understood that the tumultuous political events of the last twenty years had divided the French people into legitimist, republican and Bonapartist factions.  He therefore determined on the formation of a government which would be tolerant of different political views and “moderate” in its legislation.  Opposing him in his attempt to keep France on a course for constitutional monarchy were the more reactionary right-wing members of his court and parliament, the so-called “ultra-royalists,” who demanded that France return to the pre-Revolutionary status quo, when clergy and nobility seemed to have been acting together for the common good.  Led by embittered aristocrats such as Monsieur, the former Comte d'Artois, and Marie-Thérèse, the only surviving issue of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, the Ultras professed a message of public atonement for the “sins of the Revolution” and lobbied for a new political order in which the King of France would be made answerable to the Catholic Pope.    

            Raised in an age of Voltairian skepticism, Louis XVIII had great misgivings about a new order which would antagonize the populace and hamper his ability to rule.  He saw in the new religious orders formed to expiate the “crimes of the Revolution” and to reconvert the “heretical” a means of diverting right-wing passion for retributive political initiatives into harmless culture and ceremonial.  Accordingly, the monarch promulgated a series of commemorative events in Paris to mark the anniversaries of the execution of the “royal martyrs” Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, approved the erection of funerary monuments in their honor, and commissioned emotion-stirring paintings and sculptures for the Salons.  While Louis XVI was rendered in a manner suggestive of the compassionate Jesus Christ, the errant Marie-Antoinette was made a penitent Mary Magdalene.  It followed, therefore, that the most successful images of Louis XVIII would propound his physical and mystical relation to his brother, suggesting that the restored monarch also shared Christ’s divine mandate.  In the end, however, Louis XVIII made a major miscalculation in tying his authority so ineluctably to the “saintly” attributes of his predecessor, for the assassination of another royal family member, the Duc de Berry, in 1820, finally gave extremists the mandate they needed to gain control of the legislature and to appropriate the cult of the “royal martyrs” for their own ends.