Date: 22-05-2005
Owning Institution: Musee Carnavalet
Publication:     Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”  
Subject:   18th Century    

The great French painter of imaginary landscapes and ruins, Hubert Robert, was born on this day in 1733. This week’s picture is one of his darkest and most dramatic works, The Violation of the Tombs of the Kings in the Basilica of Saint-Denis. It can be seen at the Musee Carnavalet in Paris.

The picture was painted in late 1793, during the French Revolution, at a time when the artist had recently been incarcerated in the prison of Saint-Lazare. Robert had neglected to renew his “carte de civisme”, or identity card, an offence for which the mandatory punishment laid down by the Law of Suspects was incarceration. He spent ten months in jail before being released without further charges in the summer of 1794. He was subsequently reinstated to a senior post on the Revolutionary committee responsible for refashioning the Louvre. But the evidence of his later works suggests that he took a sceptical and disenchanted view of the Revolution – “the most astonishing event that has hitherto happened in the world,” in the words of Hubert’s English contemporary, Edmund Burke.

The Violation of the Tombs of the Kings in the Basilica of Saint-Denis was inspired by a notorious act of desecration sanctioned by the Revolutionary government in the months shortly before Robert’s imprisonment. Ever since the declaration of the Republic, which had taken place in September 1792, there had been calls for the destruction of the royal sepulchres in the abbey of Saint-Denis. Sylvain Marechal, rejoicing in the swiftly accomplished destruction of all “statues, bas-reliefs, paintings, drawings, all images whatsoever of the French kings”, encouraged his revolutionary brothers and sisters to go yet further and “destroy even their last relics, conserved within coffins of lead”. In January 1793 Louis XVI was executed, and a month later the journalist Lebrun published a Patriotic Ode in Le Moniteur, putting Marechal’s motion into verse form: “Let us purge the patriot soil / Infected still by kings. / The fertile earth of Liberty / Rejects the bones of despots past…” Shortly afterwards, the Committee for Public Safety went ahead and ordered the destruction of “the mausolea of the kings in Saint-Denis.”

The most memorable literary description of the desecration of the royal tombs was written by the novelist Alexandre Dumas, in his book One Thousand and One Ghosts. Dumas’s wrote long after the actual event, in 1848 – another year of European revolutions – but his account was based none the less on a number of contemporary eyewitness reports. It was also, quite possibly, coloured by Robert’s painting, which Dumas certainly knew.

“Here is what happened… The hatred that the revolutionaries had managed to instil in the people for King Louis XVI, and which his death on the scaffold  on 21 January had not been sufficient to assuage, had now reached back to the kings of his race: they wished to harry the monarchy all the way back to its source, and the monarchs into their tombs, and scatter the ashes of sixty kings to the four winds. And then, perhaps, they were curious to see if the great treasures that it was claimed were hidden in some of those tombs had indeed been preserved intact. So the people rushed over to Saint-Denis. From the 6^th to the 8^th of August, they destroyed fifty-one tombs – twelve centuries’ worth of history… Then it became a matter of wiping out the very name, the very memory and the very bones of the kings; it became a matter of eradicating fourteen centuries of monarchy from history. Poor mad fools – they don’t understand that men can change the future