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War within the Walls: Conflict and Citizenship in the Murals of the Hôtel de Ville, Paris

2013; Routledge; Volume: 6; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1179/1752627212z.0000000002

1752-6280

Claire O’Mahony,

Historical Art and Culture Studies

While the Siege of Paris and the Commune have long been recognized as uncontested watersheds within modern French history, this attentiveness has principally been focused on the capital as a cipher for national paradigms. Recent historical scholarship has opened up new perspectives on Parisian civil unrest through the lens of Parisian particularism, while art historians have begun to assess the impact of the ‘terrible year’ upon the imaging of modern Paris, be it as representation or obfuscation of its ruptures. The reconstruction and decoration of the Hôtel de Ville of Paris affords a multivalent lieu de mémoire worth revisiting in light of these new strands of enquiry. This unique site of municipal enfranchisement was burned down by the Communards in 1871. The ensuing pragmatic problem of whether to preserve, to reconstruct, or to neglect the site highlighted the complex task of renegotiating the ideological legacy of the capital as a unique locus of cycles of civic unrest. The reconstructed Hôtel de Ville was filled with mural decorations; the method of their commissioning, iconography, and critical reception reveal the volatile relationships between the state, the municipality, and the art criticism. The decorative ensemble painted by Jean-Paul Laurens for the Salon Lobau, office of the President of the Municipal council, merits particular scrutiny in its adroit use of the rhetorics of la grande peinture (history painting) to articulate a localized historiography of civil unrest from the Middle Ages to the Commune, which would be avoided or neutralized in the vast decorative programme of the rest of the building. Laurens's decoration deployed subjects and pictorial effects through which municipal memory, rather than national history, could represent Parisian identities which remained deeply contested in late nineteenth-century France.