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

11. The powers of the Cour des Comptes are explained in detail in "Cour des Comptes," L'Illustration 16, no. 9 (Aug. 9-16, 1850): 87-90. Among the images accompanying the article is the engraving by Michel Charles Fichot of Chasseriau's murals in the escalier d'honneur (Fig. 3).

12. See Louis Peisse, "Le Salon de 1842," La Revue des Deux Mondes 30 (Apr. 1, 1842): 127; Eugene Pelletan, "Salon de 1845," La Democratie Pacifique 4, no. 97 (Apr. 7, 1845): 2; and Ronchaud, esp. 22-35, all of which are cited by Rosenthal (as in n. 8), 310-12. On the politicized context for the revival of monumental painting, see Shelton (as in n. 8).

13. Ronchaud, 28. On mural painting as an antidote to the commercialization of the Salon, see Shelton (as in n. 8), 179.

14. The political uses of allegory can be traced to the origin of the word itself: allos + agoreuein (other + to speak in the assembly). On allegory as the inversion or masking of political speech, see Fletcher, 2.

15. Antoine de Baecque, "The Allegorical Image of France, 1750-1800: A Political Crisis of Representation," Representations 47 (summer 1994): 111-43.

16. Craig Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism," in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 58, his emphasis.

17. Allegory was already in retreat in the 18th century. Denis Diderot argued in his Salons that the new bourgeois public did not have the necessary knowledge at its disposal to understand allegory. The Revolution of 1789, however, generated both the collective goals and a propagandistic art, exemplified by the work of Jacques-Louis David, that combined to replenish allegorical expression. See de Baecque (as in n. 15); and Evert van Uitert, "Die Allegorie in der franzosischen Malerei des 19 Jahrhunderts," in Allegorie und Melancholie, ed. Willem van Reijen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), 177.

18. William Burger, Salons de T. Thore, 2nd ed. (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1870), xxiii. The preface was penned in 1857 and returns to a theme that Thore-Burger first broached in his "Salon de 1844," 60-71.

19. Eugene Delacroix defended his brand of allegory in 1846 in his "Peintres et sculpteurs modernes, II: Prudhon," La Revue des Deux Mondes 16 (Nov. 1, 1846): 445-46. Theophile Gautier, in his review of Delacroix's murals at the Salon du Roi ("Beaux-Arts: Peintures de la Chambre des Deputes--Salle du Trone," La Presse, Aug. 26, 1836, 1), commends Delacroix's use of allegory, saying that "all other types of subjects would be out of place and ridiculous [tout autre genre de sujets serait deplace et ridicule]."

20. Theophile Gautier, "L'art en 1848," L'Artiste, 5th ser., vol. 1 (May 15, 1848): 114-15.

21. Fletcher, 171.

22. Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1981), 20 and nn. 35-37 (quoted in Linda Nochlin, "Courbet's Real Allegory: Rereading 'The Painter's Studio,'" in Courbet Reconsidered [Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum of Art, 1988], 27), has emphasized that "if [allegory] has become in one sense embalmed, it has also been liberated into polyvalence."