Abstract
This chapter follows a politico-theological approach to the law, which also includes among other trappings of theology, icons. The law’s image is based on command, authority and sovereignty and relates to the order of the Lacanian big other, or the symbolic order. Subjects, however, respond to this symbolic order in different ways: some may hysterically call out to be recognised and some may follow blindly. This chapter looks at art in early modernism when the authority of the law and particularly sovereign power is still effective. We will explore early modernism as the original attack against the State’s right to make and control images. On the cusp of monarchical control and the birth of democratic freedom, a particular challenge was mounted by Honoré Daumier’s paintings and caricatures. His battle and jailing for his terrible indignity against the king’s body marks the birth of an emancipated space for the modernist artist (outside the power of the court). His freedom is guaranteed from some other sovereign body outside the frame. This chapter suggests a new approach to the modernist canon and the avant-garde. It suggests that modern art’s seminal attack was an attack against the sovereign (monarchical) effigy and its replacement by the republican effigy or Marianne. In this way even in democracy the effigy is persistent; democracy was still imaged in relation to the monarch and an alternative sovereign body.
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Notes
- 1.
Auguste Marmont, Duke of Ragusa, major general of the Royal Guard in a note to Charles X during the 1830 July Revolution.
- 2.
Casimir Périer to Odilon Barrot 1831, quoted in Petrey (1991, 65).
- 3.
There was an even more radical fringe the Montagnards.
- 4.
Fortescue sees the failure of the July Monarchy as the inability to reach a consensus. As a matter of interest, Fortescue, contra Furet, sees 1848 as the end of the monarchy because Napoleon III was forced to give away so many absolutist, monarchical rights.
- 5.
Rosanvallon, like Pierre Legendre, is influenced by Claude Lefort on this score and sees the ‘unknowability’ of democracy as a primary characteristic. Rosanvallon follows Lefort and Francois Furet (a mentor of Rosanvallon) in seeing democracy in Rousseau’s terms as a unified popular sovereignty, which replaces the absolute sovereignty of the king.
- 6.
Literally ‘the hidden enemy’ as opposed to the hostis, which was a foreign enemy.
- 7.
In the English system, the crime is subsumed under treason and is presently based on the Great Statute of Treasons, 1351. Treason here is understood as distinguishable from the crimes of murder and even regicide; treason is a symbolic crime against a ‘symbolic body’ or ‘second body’ of the king. First codified in England by the 1351 Statute of Treasons (25 Edward III, St 5, c 2) during the reign of Edward III, treason has as a central aspect in imagining or compassing the death of the King. In 1534 Henry VIII passed legislation which made it possible to commit treason by words or writing (Act of Treasons Henry VIII c 13) further clarifying the ways in which such an ‘imagining’ could manifest. In the English system, this was considered ‘treason by words’, a designation suggested by Henry VIII on his road to absolute power; the crime of lèse majesté was thus made redundant. This had the paradoxical effect in England, of increased debate and dissent over the definition of treason (see Lemon 2006).
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Watts, O. (2014). Daumier and Replacing the King’s Body. In: Wagner, A., Sherwin, R. (eds) Law, Culture and Visual Studies. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9322-6_19
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