By the sword and the plow: Theodore Chasseriau's Cour des Comptes murals and Algeria

The agricultural tableau of farmers and oxen backed by a grove of olive trees onto which Chasseriau superimposed this frieze, producing a vibrant allegory of abundance, can be traced to the artist's sojourn in Italy in 1840. Nonetheless, its assimilation into the composition of Peace speaks to an Algerian issue. During the retreat from the disastrous attempt to take Constantine in 1836, Marechal Bertrand Clauzel praised the fertility of the countryside and the beauty of the hills planted with olive trees. He promised that he would bring over five to six thousand laborers to cultivate the land. (145) This idea was taken up by Bugeaud, one of whose principal strategies to ensure the permanence of French presence in the territory was the importation of young women from France as wives for soldiers who sought to resettle in the colony with compensation for their service. On the heels of an edict dated April 18, 1841, which established a government subsidy for the civilian settlement of conquered territory, the "Marechal agronome" (146) requested of the mayor of Toulon a supply of healthy young women to jump-start the European population of French-controlled areas. (147) Bugeaud acted out of his conviction that Algeria could be secured only by breeding future farmers to settle tracts of land and thereby displace nomadic Arabs. In 1847, Bugeaud was still speaking of the need for the government to find "good agricultural families" and subsidize their efforts to settle in Algeria. (148) In the months leading up to the unveiling of Chasseriau's finished decor, the National Assembly approved a credit of fifty million francs toward the creation of agricultural colonies. (149)

The utopian community peopled by soldat-laboreurs that Bugeaud had in mind had a conceptual precedent in the Champ d'Asile, an agricultural community in Texas founded by veterans of the Napoleonic Wars. (150) While the settlement lasted barely a year, the iconography of the Champ d'Asile episode demonstrated that the ideal terrain for the soldat-laboreur was a fertile haven outside the perimeters of factionalized France. The tableau of mothers in Peace enlarges an important detail from a print after a painting by Charles Abraham Chasselat, in which a mother breast-feeds her infant and a young child stands at her knee (Fig. 11). (151) The emphasis on nurturing female charity and procreation in the midst of a verdant arcadia links the mural to Bugeaud's policies, the Roman archetypes on which they were based, and the colonial ideal first envisioned by Napoleonic veterans. The Champ d'Asile episode must have struck a chord with Chasseriau, the son of an avowed Bonapartist whose marriage into a landowning family in Santo Domingo is redolent of the aspirations of the soldat-laboreurs and their failed American dream. The painter was torn from his Caribbean Eden at an early age. As a result, nostalgia for Napoleonic grandeur, colonial enterprise, and painterly ambition were all bound up with Chasseriau's feelings for his absent father, whose itinerant career was beset by scandal before he ended his life by suicide in 1842. With the fertile mothers in Peace, Chasseriau reunited his scattered family and realized the frustrated ambitions of his father's generation under the protective umbrella of the Algerian project. The painter's psychic needs were in this sense perfectly consistent with those of the nation.