Vercingetorix throws down his arms (1899)

Lionel-Noël Royer: Vercingetorix throws down his arms at the feet of Julius Caesar

The Sack of Rome by the Barbarians (1890)

Joseph-Noël Sylvestre: The Sack of Rome by the Barbarians in 410

The Entrance of Joan of Arc into Orleans (1887)

Jean-Jacques Scherrer: The Entrance of Joan of Arc into Orleans

The Agitator of Languedoc (1887)

Jean-Paul Laurens: The Agitator of Languedoc

The Revolutionaries of Fouesnant (1886-87)

Jules Girardet: The Revolutionaries of Fouesnant 

Rounded Up by the National Guard in 1792

The Death of Chilperic (1885)

Evariste Luminais: The Death of Chilperic

Chilperic I is not to be confused with the better-known Childeric I (440-481/2) who was the father of Clovis I. Just to make matters more complicated, there was also a Chilperic I who was the king of Burgundy from 473 until about 480. I believe that this painting shows King Chilperic I of Neustria (or Soissons), born in around 539, crowned in 561, and murdered in September 584.

Although they were not entitled, Chilperic’s brothers forced him to share his kingdom, with his eldest brother Charibert becoming king of Paris until he died in 567, when Paris was shared between the four brothers. Unpopular with the church, he was returning from a hunting expedition to his royal villa of Chelles when he was stabbed to death. [Eclectic Light]

The Massacres of Machecoul (1884)

François Flameng: The Massacres of Machecoul

François Flameng (1856-1923) was a portrait, landscape, illustrator, printmaker and painter of history. He was commanded by the State to produce historical scenes to decorate public buildings, such as the National Assembly. The painting The Massacre of Machecoul belongs to this historical vein.

The scene takes place in the moat of the old castle of Machecoul where insurgents imprisoned patriots. In the foreground to the left, number of victims lie at the foot of high walls: a sans-culotte, easily identifiable in his striped trousers, a woman with chest bared, lying on her side next to a child. Tied to a tree is a man with gray hair with a bare chest. A large spot of blood smears his clothes at the pelvis. Probably it is the parish priest Le Tort, pierced with bayonets by insurgents; many documents say that "a woman took off his manhood." To the right, one of the leaders of the insurrection, François de Charette, walks on the scene of these summary executions, accompanied by three elegant aristocrats. Two of them lean to observe the bodies curiously. The third makes a gesture of repulsion. To the right of these three, an armed insurgent with a gun has a white cockade in his hat and holding a dog leash. In the background, the silhouettes of a group of armed men stand in front of the burned huts. [L’Histoire par L’Image]

The Siege of Paris (1884)

Ernest Meissonier: The Siege of Paris

At the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, Ernest Meissonier sketched out an initial idea for a painting that would symbolise the Siege of Paris. He would only take this up much later, finishing the work in 1884. His vision combines reality and allegory. The figure of Paris - represented by Madame Meissonier, draped in a black veil and a lion skin, in front of a tattered French flag – rises above the ruins of a barricade. Above her, in a sky of billowing clouds of ash and unfolding tragedy, the spectre of famine hovers over a Paris destroyed by fire.

All around, in a scene of confusion, dead and dying soldiers lie stretched out on the palm leaves of martyrdom. With his characteristic, highly detailed realism, Meissonier describes each face, each detail of clothing. Collapsed against the personification of Paris, the painter Henri Regnault, lies dying. He was killed at the age of 27 during the second battle of Buzenval in January 1871. He symbolises a young generation full of promise, decimated by the conflict.

Although defeated, the uninjured soldiers continue to fight. They can be seen on the left of the painting loading a cannon and sounding the charge. Finally Meissonier evokes the suffering of civilians through a few scenes observed with compassion: an old man looks for his son amongst the bodies, a woman shows her husband their dead child, another woman cries over the body of her husband.

The defeat had a profound and long-lasting effect on France at the end of the 19th century. This trauma explains why, for many years, the 1870 war was a common theme in art, and remained popular with the public. Like other painters, sculptors and writers, Meissonier glorifies the spirit of sacrifice and heroism of his compatriots, in a conscious desire to increase national feeling and prepare for revenge. [Musée d’Orsay]

The Rout of Cholet (1883)

Jules Girardet: The Rout of Cholet, October 1793

The Battle of Cholet was fought on 17 October 1793 during the French Revolutionary Wars, between French Republican forces under General Jean Léchelle and French Royalist Forces under Louis d'Elbée. The battle was fought in the town of Cholet in the Maine-et-Loire department of France, and resulted in a Republican victory. [Wikipedia]

The Death of Joseph Bara (1883)

Jean-Joseph Weerts: The Death of Joseph Bara

Joseph Bara, also written was a young French republican drummer boy at the time of the Revolution. He was in fact too young to join the army but attached himself to a unit fighting counter revolutionaries in Vendée. After his death General J.-B. Desmarres gave this account, by letter, to the Convention. "Yesterday this courageous youth, surrounded by brigands, chose to perish rather than give them the two horses he was leading." The boy's death was seized on as a propaganda opportunity by Robespierre, who praised him at the Convention's tribune saying that "only the French have thirteen-year-old heroes". But rather than simply being killed by Breton royalists who solely wanted to steal horses, Bara was transformed into a figure who denied the Ancien Régime at the cost of death. His story became that having been trapped by the enemy and being ordered to cry "Vive le Roi" ("Long live the King") to save his own life, he preferred instead to die crying "Vive la République" ("Long live the Republic"). [Wikipedia]

La mort du Prince impérial (1882)

Paul Joseph Jamin: La mort du Prince impérial

In 1874, date of its coming of age, the imperial prince was the legitimate pretender to the succession of Napoleon III. Although exiled, he was the leader of the unfortunately divided Bonapartist party, but which nonetheless represented a potential danger to the Republic. However, the Universal Exhibition of 1878, which was a success comparable to that of 1867, revealed to the eyes of France and the world a Paris raised from its ruins, and the Republican regime grew in stature, both in the country and abroad.

In his English exile, the prince chafed at the inaction forced on him. He wanted to demonstrate his military valor and thus show himself a worthy heir of Bonaparte. He dreamed of glory. He asked to fight in Tonkin, but the French Republic objected. He applied unsuccessfully to the Emperor of Austria for permission to participate in the fight against the Turks in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Finally, Queen Victoria allowed him to take part in a punitive expedition against the Zulus who attacked the British Army in South Africa 15 February 1879. On 29 February, the imperial prince sailed from Southampton to Cape Town, not as an officer, but as a simple witness. He was able to participate in some reconnaissance in enemy territory, during which he distinguished himself by his valor.

On June 1, 1879, about four in the afternoon, the Crown Prince and his English escort were surprised during a halt by forty Zulus. Two British soldiers were killed and the others fled, while the prince tried in vain to mount his horse engaged in a frantic race. The saddle he kept for sentimental reasons - it had belonged to his father Napoleon III - was used: the belt broke, the rider fell and his horse continued his wild journey. The Crown Prince found himself alone against a horde of menacing Zulus.

It is this moment that the painter has chosen to capture on his canvas. Visible in the distance are the fleeing English and the galloping horse. The imperial prince defends himself courageously. He has lost his sword and points his gun in the direction of four Zulus, whose representation is characteristic of the image of the "native" aired in this time of recovery of colonial expansion. He will shoot three times but will eventually fall, pierced by seventeen spears. The prince died, and the Zulu also stripped his body of its clothes, leaving him only the gold medallion he wore neck and containing the portrait of the Empress Eugenie. [L’Histoire par L’Image]

The Pope and the Inquisitor (1882)

Jean-Paul Laurens: The Pope and the Inquisitor

The Pope and the Inquisitor shows Pope Sixtus IV with Torquemada, who is examining the Papal Bull making him Inquisitor General of Castilla and Aragon in 1483.

The Last Moments of Maximilian (1882)

Jean-Paul Laurens: The Last Moments of Maximilian

Maximilian was installed as Emperor of Mexico by Napoleon III. This didn't end well for him.

Cardinal Richelieu at the Siege of La Rochelle (1881)

Henri-Paul Motte: Cardinal Richelieu at the Siege of La Rochelle

 

The Siege of La Rochelle was a result of a war between the French royal forces of Louis XIII of France and the Huguenots of La Rochelle in 1627–28. The siege marked the apex of the tensions between the Catholics and the Protestants in France, and ended with a complete victory for King Louis XIII and the Catholics. [Wikipedia]

The Sons of Clovis II (1880)

Evariste Luminais: The Sons of Clovis II

This demonstration of parental discipline of the Merovingian period remains shocking more than a century after its completion. It says much for the grotesquery of nineteenth-century Salon painting, of which it is so spectacular an example, that The Sons of Clovis II is still a collection favourite. Alarmed by her sons' rebellion against their absent father, King Clovis, their mother - the regent Sainte Bathilde - has their tendons cut before sending them, immobilised, downstream on a barge to their fate. Though Luminais foreshadows the salvation of the malefactors in the distant shape of a Benedictine monastery, he is clearly more concerned with their present gruesome predicament. His great success with this painting in the Paris Salon of 1880 was not repeated, its cadaverous sensationalism proving a hard act to follow. [Art Gallery NSW]

The Defense of Rorke's Drift (1880)

Alphonse de Neuville: The Defense of Rorke's Drift

The so-called Zulu War came at the moment of greatest British imperial presence in South Africa. Though understood differently today, in 1879 - the year of the event depicted in de Neuville's famous canvas - the violent exchange was seen in terms of Britain's rightful defense of its own colonial prestige. Rorke's Drift was a small outpost on the banks of the Buffalo River in Natal Province. A large Zulu force, having slaughtered around 900 troops and native levies at nearby Isandlhwana, set upon the eighty soldiers of the Warwickshire Regiment stationed at Rorke's Drift. The defenders managed to hold off their attackers, usually characterized as an undisciplined horde, in a bloody hand-to-hand battle of Boys' Own proportions. The subsequent awarding of eleven Victoria Crosses confirmed the heroic dimension of the skirmish, though it hardly explains the interest of a Parisian Salon painter in this quintessentially English subject. De Neuville based his pre-cinematic version of events on military reports and survivors' accounts.  [Art Gallery NSW]

The Reception for Duc de Condé at Versailles (1878)

Jean-Léon Gérôme: The Reception for Duc de Condé at Versailles

The year is 1674, and on the great Escalier des Ambassadeurs, in Versailles, Louis XIV is welcoming the Grand Condé, who has just defeated William of Orange in the battle of Seneffe. This event marked the end of almost fifteen years of exile for the Grand Condé, which had been designed by the king to punish "his cousin" for leading the Fronde against the monarchy.

Gérôme concentrated all his passion for historical reconstruction into this modest-sized painting, making use of different iconographic sources to lend the scene more credibility such as engravings of the Château de Versailles and portraits of the various persons represented.The composition is made dynamic by the high-angle view and the off-centring of the large compositional X structure. Gérôme employed a delicate palette in which the overall sense of clarity and the cool tones of the marble are invigorated by the colours of the costumes and flags. [Musée d’Orsay]

The Cuirassiers Before Their Charge at the Battle of Austerlitz (1878)

Ernest Meissonier: The Cuirassiers Before Their Charge at the Battle of Austerlitz, 1805

The Excommunication of Robert the Pious (1875)

Jean-Paul Laurens: The Excommunication of Robert the Pious

Jean-Paul Laurens was one of the last great history painters of the late 19th century, when the genre was in inexorable decline. The author of several very famous paintings in the Salon, widely circulated through reproduction and perfectly symbolised by The Excommunication of Robert the Pious, Lawrence was also an inspired decorator of the Pantheon and the Capitole in Toulouse in particular, and the main illustrator of the Récits des Temps Mérovingiens by Augustin Thierry.

Highly attached to Republican values and ferociously anticlerical, Lawrence chose obscure episodes in medieval history which enabled him to denounce religious intransigence in all its forms. Robert II, known as the Pious, the son of Hugues Capet, was excommunicated for incest by Pope Gregory V after refusing to repudiate his second wife and distant cousin Berthe of Burgundy.

As often in Laurens' work it is not the act itself but its eloquent consequences which are portrayed. The painting describes the moment after the announcement of the Pope's decision. The diagonal framing shows us the departure of the priests balanced by the prostration of the sovereigns, left alone to face a cruel, terrifying dilemma. Laurens here mobilizes all his skill in staging, distilling the signs of condemnation in the silence and emptiness which followed the dramatic sentence: the scepter that had fallen from the king's terrified hand and the taper symbolically knocked to the floor. [Musée d’Orsay]

Henri IV at the Battle of Arques (1873)

Eugène Lami: Henri IV at the Battle of Arques

In August 1589, following the assassination of Henri III, Henri IV became king of France. One of his first tasks was to bring peace to France. To do so, he lifted the siege of Paris, which was in the hands of the Catholic League, in order to begin a military campaign in Normandy. Henri set up camp near the Chateau d'Arques near Dieppe, and prepared to do battle with the duc de Mayenne. He was outnumbered –pro-Catholic forces numbered between 25,000 and 30,000 soldiers, whereas he had only 8,000 men. (He was eagerly awaiting the arrival of reinforcements from England.) On 21 September 1589, Henri was victorious, particularly thanks to his artillery, which was under the command of the duc de Sully. After this initial success, and that of the Battle of Ivry, not far from Dreux, Normandy rallied to his cause, and Henri could once again turn his attention to Paris.

Eugène Louis Lami was a romantic artist of the 19th century who had made a name for himself as a battle painter, particularly under the July Monarchy. In this work, he has taken great pains to depict not only the two armies but also the landscape, and he has included some picturesque details. In this work, the Leaguers can be identified by their red sashes, but also by the cross of Lorraine. At the centre of the picture, Henri IV leads the charge, holding high his hat with the white plume – which actually would become celebrated later, at the Battle of Ivry. The artist emphasizes the role of the cavalry, suggests the artillery's firepower and shows the arquebusiers in action. This representation of the king is also an idealized one, but it also factors in a certain number of historical details as well. [Henry IV, The Interrupted Reign]