| Personifications remain the most enduring allegories of the French Revolution and the subject of much scholarship and debate. This study expands and deepens our understanding of the deployment of Revolutionary personifications while challenging prevailing views of their formal, iconographic, and chronological development. By privileging the most widely seen and disseminated personifications, this study breaks from contemporary scholarship and the highly selective and therefore often misleading set of examples usually addressed. The most prevalent Revolutionary personifications turn out to be the least acknowledged or studied. This is especially so for official imagery appearing on Revolutionary currency, legal bulletins, and monuments created in conjunction with Revolutionary festivals. Research into French neoclassicism proves pivotal in reevaluating official personifications, in part, by isolating a Revolutionary form of neoclassicism. A reevaluation of the chronological distribution of Revolutionary symbols will overturn contentions that official personifications transitioned from standing and active to seated and inert forms, with the purported message that women should sit down and leave politics to men. On the contrary, evidence shows that from the Revolution's beginning to its conclusion, seated or recumbent forms remained dominant in the public realm. These images were often formally and iconographically rooted in a peculiar type of artistic retrospection that blended ancient stylistic attributes, thereby merging past and present with an idyllic vision of the future. Associated personifications also provide clues into the development of distinct yet largely unacknowledged iconic and narrative modes of presentation. In turn, these modes have a bearing on form, function, and interpretive meaning. Personifications appearing on currency and in the context of Revolutionary festivals conjoined with the Revolutionary aim of remaking France. The introduction of new currency and its valuation through the nationalization and liquidation of church property through a program of land redistribution hoped to win over citizens who might otherwise have resisted Revolutionary initiatives. Revolutionary personifications appearing on currency served as the face of these initiatives, giving new meaning to the commonly accepted view that Revolutionary personifications were surrogates for Christian icons. |
