REVOLUTION AND ART: DEBAUCHERY MUST GIVE BIRTH TO VIRTUE

Jean Starobinski, 1789: The Emblems of Reason, translated from the French by Barbara Bray (Charlottesville: U. of Virginia, 1982) ("The year 1789 is a watershed in the political history of Europe. Is it also a turning point in the evolution of style? At first sight it does not seem to have produced any major event or significant development in the history of art. [] What the Revolution can be credited with is its fervent stress on the Roman and republican rather than the Alexandrian elements in neoclassicism; its widespread dissemination of imagery through propaganda and counterpropaganda; and its introduction of public ceremonial. [] Art is probably better at expressing states of civilization than moments of violent change. More recent examples have shown that revolutions do not immediately discover an artistic language corresponding to the new political order. Inherited forms continued to be used even though people want to proclaim the old world a thing of the past." Id. at 5-8. "The first act of freedom clears the way and opens up a limited field of possibility. But no one can remain forever on this momentary crest, when darkness rolls away and the light of the future present all faces because it as yet has none. The new space has o be filled, the god who will be at the center has to be named, the power that is to rule It has to be recognized or created. The fact of having darkly overthrown the reign of darkness determines only a possibility of beginning and not the nature of what is going to begin. All that emerges at first is the fact that the field is open to universal principles, For a principle is the word of beginning, the founding utterance that tries to contain and fix in itself beginning's bright authority. The nothing in which debauchery ends must give birth to resolute virtue."Id. at 55.).