The Death of Marat is a remnant of a historical event: the people’s entry into history. For Clark, this is the cause of modernism itself, even if it doesn’t usually know it. Robespierre and the Jacobins claimed to represent a pure and united people, forever to be purged of traitors, but this double act of representation, at once political and aesthetic, required vigilance. As for the people, as Clark put it with a chilling phrase: “It had to be killed in order to be represented, or represented in order to be killed.”10 Marat dead stood for the people, but the body was not up to the task. Representation as a whole isn’t up to the task, but doesn’t see it. The obsession with the false during the revolution did not lead to a questioning of representation in general.
Not the least extraordinary thing about David’s version of Marat is that the whole top half of the portrait is a vast, blank space, a tissue of empty brushwork. It signals, in part, Marat’s self-sacrificing austerity. For Clark, it is something more. Marat could hardly embody a revolution when nobody could confidently claim possession of its spirit. David’s portrait could not quite work the old magic of the religious image, but nobody was quite ready to let the spiritual charm of images die. “Art had come out (been dragged out) of the Palais de Fontainebleau. That did not mean it was ready to understand its place in the disenchantment of the world. The whole history of modernism could be written in terms of its coming, painfully, to such an understanding.”11
The blank wall behind Marat is “the endless, meaningless objectivity produced by paint not quite finding its objects, symbolic or otherwise, and therefore making do with its own procedures.”12 The revolution put in place a regime of the image in which for the first time the state was the representative of the people, but the people themselves could hardly be represented. The Jacobin notion of the people was empty, pure opposition to the parasites of the aristocracy. It was a problem that would take a century to resolve, and the name of that solution is the spectacle, but in solving the problem, the spectacle dissolves the people into itself—then itself dissolves.
The people appear on the historical stage in Liberty Guiding the People (1831), by Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863). It is an image of the myth of a revolution in which the bourgeoisie believed, if only for a little while. In 1830 the bourgeoisie has defeated tyranny and gained a constitution, all in three glorious days at the barricades. Delacroix’s painting both restates and rephrases this myth. It repeats the forms of the popular lithographers, in that the barricade has become a stage, with characters propped on it rather than cowering behind it. Delacroix’s Liberty is a woman, but not quite the conventional symbol. What unadorned Liberty reveals a little too much is the naked power of popular revolt. Delacroix’s contemporary Honoré de Balzac saw in her eyes only “the flames of insurrection.”13 This is not exactly the liberty the bourgeois revolutionary bargained for.
Who exactly is Liberty guiding? The bourgeois in his top hat is surrounded by the rabble. If revolution is the door through which the people enter history, then it makes a troubling figure for bourgeois thought. Outnumbered, it might only be a matter of time before the rabble turns against their allies of the moment. And they did: By the time Delacroix’s picture was hanging in the Salon of 1831, a new class war was on in earnest. The people didn’t particularly want a constitution; they wanted bread and work and wages. They wanted a social revolution. The picture was an anachronism. It was quickly spirited out of sight, not to be seen again until the next revolution. What the bourgeoisie wants to remember henceforth is not revolution, but restoration. The revolution through which the people enter history is the revolving door that also spirits them back out if it again.
Delacroix’s picture resurfaced in 1848, but he was not the painter of that revolution. Clark assigns that honor to Gustave Courbet (1817–77). By the 1840s, when Courbet came into his own as an artist, bourgeois power was an established fact. An insecure one, to be sure, but established, and artists could not but wonder “whether bourgeois existence was heroic, or degraded, or somehow conveniently both.”14 What would come to be known as the artistic and literary avant-garde was already an established part of cultural life, the antechamber of success. Also already in play was the avant-garde gambit of attacking the forms of the dominant order, whilst offering that order, knowingly or not, new forms.
The avant-garde rubs shoulders with, but is not the same as, bohemia. In mid-nineteenth-century Paris, bohemia was not yet a fantasy spun out of the Scenes from Bohemian Life of Henri Murger as La Bohème of Giacomo Puccini, let alone Rent by Jonathan Larson.15 It was a genuine social class, outside of the ruling order, closer to the dangerous classes than the intellectuals. Clark calls them “the first debris of industrialism.”16 What bohemia lacked in aesthetic sophistication it made up for in recalcitrance. It was the genuine unassimilated force: “the real history of the avant-garde is the history of those who bypassed, ignored, or rejected it; a history of secrecy and isolation; a history of escape from the avant-garde and even from Paris itself.”17 Or in short, the only avant-garde worthy of mention is that which was unacceptable even to the avant-garde. Bohemia contains at least some element of the inassimilable waste product of spectacular society, what it pushes on ahead of itself, rather than what it leaves behind.
Clark identifies the bohemian’s game as what Slavoj Žižek would later call over-identification. Clark: “the Bohemian caricatured the claims of bourgeois society. He took the slogans at face-value; if the city was a playground he would play; if individual freedom was sacrosanct then he would celebrate the cult twenty-four hours a day; laissez-faire meant what it said. The Bohemian was the dandy stood on his head.”18 Such a strategy had its limits. By the 1840s it offered little more than a shopworn romanticism, turned more toward nostalgia for the past that to present exigencies.
For Henri Lefebvre, romanticism is a viable strategy for advancing onto the symbolic terrain within what he calls the total semantic field.19 It digs into the past to find the figures that still trouble the present. For Clark this is a temptation to be resisted. The promise of transforming everyday life has to be rooted in the materiality of everyday life itself. For Courbet, bohemia nevertheless offered a space within which to make a break with the expectations of the art world. His break from bohemia and its tired romanticism, in turn, would come via a return to his provincial roots.
From the bourgeois point of view, February 1848 was the beautiful revolution, but soon the bloom faded. Karl Marx: “The June revolution is the ugly revolution, the repulsive revolution, because realities have taken the place of words, because the republic has uncovered the head of the monster itself by striking aside the protective, concealing crown.”20 February was a bourgeois struggle to make again a constitution and secure its own power, with some few concessions made to popular power to secure its support. June was the uprising against bourgeois power when concessions proved not to concede enough. The avant-garde was for the revolution in February but against it in June; bohemia was not so biddable.
With the suppression of the popular forces, Courbet retreated to Ornan, and discovered, in the countryside, the missing element, something bohemian life couldn’t supply—everyday life: “Courbet saw that the commonplace was not the life of other people, but his own life.”21 For Clark, the Burial at Ornans (1851) is one of Courbet’s greatest achievements. It is an image of a religious ceremony, but it is not a religious image. It dissociates ritual from belief. It is not explicitly anti-clerical, which makes it all the more effective. Courbet pictures a kind of collective distraction, at once religious and secular, comic and tragic, sentimental and grotesque.
More challenging still is that it pictures the rural bourgeois. It confounds the myth of the unitary character of rural life, and at a time when the bourgeois replaced the aristocrat as the locus of peasant hatred. Courbet pictures the countryside at a time when power within it shifts toward the rural towns, and the countryside as a whole is absorbed within capital. Courbet at his best limns the relation between forces that animate the scene. His is a realism that thwarts art’s supposed mission to imagine the ideal. The working of the canvas doesn’t purify appearances, revealing