Funerary Arts and Tomb Cult: Living with the Dead in France, 1750-1870

Suzanne Glover Lindsay, Funerary Arts and Tomb Cult: Living with the Dead in France, 1750-1870 Farnham and Burlington VT, Ashgate, 2012, 254 pp., 40 bw as the author states, this is not a survey, nor does it treat its topics in chronological order. It is the fruit of extensive research and we should applaud the fact that it has been brought together as a considered whole. We begin with Godefroy Cavaignac in the cemetery of Montmartre, as depicted by Francois Rude (and Ernest Christophe, his student) in the novel form of a latter-day gisant, and as a way into discussing tomb formats, their significance and social life. In a sense Lindsay wants to put death back at the centre of funerary imagery and ritual.Chapter 1 is an overview of the funerary cult in France from 1750 to 1870, which emphasizes the retention of cemeteries as part of Parisian life, despite the legacy of late eighteenth- century reforming urbanism and initiatives to improve public hygiene. There was both an administrative politics of death, managing the physical consequences of collective mortality in an expanding city, but also a deep-rooted attachment to public mourning, which acted as much as a conduit for dissent as for reinforcing adherence to the status quo. Chapter 2 is primarily focused on the Revolution, set against eighteenth- century precedent. Three famous works - Guillaume II Coustou's rather cerebral monument to the Dauphin and Dauphine in Sens Cathedral, Pigalle's theatrical tableau-style tomb of Comte Henry-Claude d'Harcourt in Notre-Dame and Pigalle's monument to the Marechal de Saxe - provide a grandiose prelude to developments during the Revolution, for which Voltaire and his 1791 panthe- onization provides an illustration. In the case of Voltaire, as later with Napoleon, exhumation was part of the process, inscribing a curious sense of time, at once elastic and compressed, as if a stage of collective mourning had been held back until release was feasible. In this respect, that there were fewer monuments realized during the Revolution is not an impediment to studying changing attitudes to death and its legacy; the many projects and debates demonstrate the high degree of ideological investment in these matters, pitting innovation against conservation. The extreme conditions under which monuments, or their temporary versions, were proposed certainly enriched the discourse around commemoration. This also destabilizes the sense that there was somehow a continuous tradition which was reinvented, rather than successive individual examples being more of a contingent series of solutions to specific demands and pressures - a feature shared by the fate of Voltaire and Marat. …