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

Peter Benson Miller

On May 23, 1871, the Palais d'Orsay was ravaged by a fire during the wave of incendiary violence set off by the popular uprising in Paris following the Franco-Prussian War. As the seat of two powerful government agencies, the Cour des Comptes and the Conseil d'Etat, the Palais d'Orsay became a target of the Communards' iconoclastic rampage claiming monuments associated with the autocratic regime of Napoleon III. A further casualty of the conflagration was the mural cycle painted by Theodore Chasseriau between 1844 and 1848 along the grand staircase leading to the Cour des Comptes, the institution charged with the regulation of government expenditures. (1) Those fragments of Chasseriau's program initially spared remained exposed to the elements for almost three decades while officials argued over the fate of the gutted building (Fig. 1). (2) As a result, the posthumous fame of Chasseriau's murals became inextricably bound to the renown of the picturesque modern ruin in the heart of Paris. (3) To some, the vestiges of these paintings--often called frescoes, but actually oil and encaustic applied directly to dry plaster--resembled the remnants of a Roman decorative cycle. (4) Maurice Denis wrote in 1902, "The fate of this great work in its crumbled ruins has rendered even more evident the real analogies between Chasseriau's art and the antique frescoes rediscovered in the ruins of Pompeii." (5)

Paradoxically, the deterioration of Chasseriau's decor provides an avenue to reconstruct the experience that the artist engineered for his contemporaries at the Cour des Comptes. An august classicizing style shaped the contours of an allegorical program arrayed over an expanse of more than four hundred square meters (almost three thousand square feet) featuring, principally, the personifications of Peace, War, Commerce, Force, and Order (Fig. 2). (6) An antique paradigm guided Chasseriau's choice of allegory, just as it structured the reactions to the cycle in ruins. Indeed, its archetypes pervaded many aspects of mid-nineteenth-century art criticism, particularly those arguments championing mural painting. A classical model also drove public discourse about the conquest and colonization of Algeria, the so-called African question, throughout the course of the July Monarchy. Interrogating the convergence of the various uses of this paradigm at the Cour des Comptes and the political context surrounding the African question in the 1840s offers a road map to track how Chasseriau's allegories, in a program devised by the artist himself, resonated with references to the Algerian campaign and contested plans for the development of the French colony launched by the military in 1830. (7) Due in part to the legacy of modernism, the prestige of easel painting, and the authority of social art history, however, the examination of the ways that mural paintings convey meaning in concert with their architectural context has been all too rare in the study of nineteenth-century art. (8) By redressing this gap and exploring the function of monumental imagery and allegory during the July Monarchy, we can gain insight into the way visual representation was harnessed to political discourse.

The circumstances surrounding the commission and the function of the Cour des Comptes reinforce the status granted to Algeria and its politics as a frame of reference in Chasserian's conception of the project. After his pursuit of the project through the usual administrative channels stalled, he had his brother Frederic Chasseriau--an official in the Ministry of the Navy and of the Colonies and the principal aide to Admiral Victor-Guy Duperre, who led the marine invasion of Algiers in 1830--press his case with the influential statesman and parliamentary deputy Alexis de Tocqueville. (9) The latter, who was instrumental in securing the commission, was also one of the best-informed and most authoritative voices in the development of Algerian policy. While he had reservations about certain initiatives. Tocqueville wrote in his 1847 Rapports sur l'Algerie that "our domination in Africa should be firmly maintained." (10)

A member of a special commission created in 1842 to examine the Algerian problem. Tocqueville intervened in the contentious debate that erupted in the National Assembly in June 1846 concerning the funds allotted to the African campaign. Because of its accounting and regulatory responsibilites, the Cour des Comptes was integral to the polemics generated by the uneven results of the costly war effort. (11) Discussions about the government expenditure in Algeria continued up to the collapse of the July Monarchy and the unveiling of Chasseriau's decorations in 1848. In light of Tocqueville's decisive role in obtaining the commission, his long-standing involvement in Algerian affairs, and his participation in budgetary battles concerning the ongoing conquest, the timing of Chasseriau's three-month voyage to Algeria, from May to July 1846, in the midst of his work on the Cour des Comptes, seems hardly fortuitous.

Reformulating Allegory

Among the institutional constraints governing Chasseriau's cycle were two interrelated agendas with significant investments in the decoration of public spaces. The first, manifest in the number of government commissions between 1830 and 1848, was the use of mural painting to spell out the goals of Louis Philippe's constitutional monarchy. The second was the call from critics and arts administrators for a reinvigorated monumental art expressive of high-minded civic values. Decorative cycles from the ancient world were integral to these arguments, as both an aesthetic standard and a model for art in tune with public concerns. Invoking examples from Athens and Rome, voices from across the political spectrum demanded that murals regain their social agency, the power to educate and unify a national polity riven by factionalism and self-interest. (12) The grandeur of the French nation required artists to set aside their squabbles and contribute selflessly to the collective good. Convinced that civic spaces were the most ennobling and accessible venue for art--"salons of the people"--poet and arts administrator Louis de Ronchaud lobbied in 1847 for a didactic monumental art galvanizing a collective national spirit. (13)

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

In attempting to gauge Chasseriau's response to this challenge, we must contend with his use of allegory. With its emphasis on personification and topical allusion, allegory has a long association with political discourse. (14) During the French Revolution allegory was revived as a vehicle to express the events and values of contemporary history. (15) As Craig Owens points out, French history painting relied on allegory to portray "the present in terms of the classical past." (16) Rather than examine allegory within modernism, as Owens does, we propose it as a viable means of pictorial communication in Paris during the July Monarchy. The question is considered synchronically as opposed to diachronically along a genealogical trajectory beginning with Gustave Courbet, which necessarily consigns the grand manner history painting practiced by Chasseriau to the margins. By the mid-nineteenth century, allegorical visual codes were increasingly beyond the reach of most viewers. (17) Republican critic Theophile Thore complained repeatedly that allegory was made up of "hieroglyphic characters" whose meanings were available only to an erudite few. (18) As such, it was unable to convey meaning to a broad public and effect national consensus. Nevertheless, aesthetic conventions stipulated that allegory was the only appropriate format for buildings that critics envisioned as the nexus of a new collectivity. (19) Those artists who took on the assignment were wedged between conflicting demands; called on to produce edifying civic temples, they had to work within a system ill-equipped to impart legible messages.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Obviously, not all painters accepted the brief. As the headquarters of a government agency with restricted access to the public, the Cour des Comptes was perhaps not the ideal forum that the more republican critics had in mind when they demanded mural paintings for "salons of the people." Moreover, Chasseriau's chief spokesperson, Theophile Gautier, was the exponent of a formalist criticism--"art for art's sake"--that insisted on the autonomy of painting from political expression. Yet mural painting had a status apart in Gautier's reviews; he accorded it more of an integral role in the social fabric than he allowed for works on canvas. (20) We also must be careful not to overestimate Chasseriau's social engagement; he certainly did not espouse radical political views. Keeping these qualifications in mind, we may nonetheless proceed in opening Chasseriau's allegories to interpretation.

For our purposes, the notion of allegory as an airtight code with limited one-to-one correspondences is of little use in exploring the Cour des Comptes murals. Public art envisioned by midcentury critics required that allegory communicate effectively. Moreover, an architectural context shapes and produces meaning differently than do easel paintings. Deployed in three dimensions, allegory could rely on the narrative created by the sequential progression of images and the dialogue between them. Meaning resulted as much from the way allegory addressed and incorporated its viewers moving through space as it did through the associations triggered by the subjects represented. In this sense, Angus Fletcher's model of an allegorical narrative style is tailored to paintings viewed in an architectural context: "emblematic, isolated, mosaic imagery; the paratactic order; the ritual that accompanies religious observance; the lack of perspective that would create a mimetic world." (21) Fletcher's notion of ritual animating allegory and linking its isolated thematic units will help us move up the staircase at the Cour des Comptes.

Thus, the allegory Chasseriau deployed owed less to iconological manuals than it did to a shifting matrix of socially produced meanings. If allegory had retreated into the closets of connoisseurs, it was also sundered from fixed and prescribed signifying processes. (22) Released into the public domain, traditional symbols became porous and absorbed meaning from without rather than producing it autonomously. This polyvalence was enhanced by the decentralized political climate of the July Monarchy. Instability and lack of consensus was a recurring grievance aired by critics demanding the return to a vital public art. Radical critic Eugene Pelletan, for example, blamed the political atmosphere for the decadent state of the arts, bemoaning the lack of a "vibrant communal spirit [croyance vivante commune]." (23) In an article marked by the optimism of the republican interlude following the February revolution in 1848, Gautier underscored that efforts to effect unity required reformulated visual modes of communication. He did not advocate casting off allegory altogether but insisted on the reinvention of its forms for public venues: "the decoration of our great national buildings, the frequency of popular festivals, and the whole movement of a way of life yet unknown necessitate expressing in palpable form the ideas and abstract concepts of which Richardson. Gravelot, Cesare Ripa and the authors of iconography were unaware." (24)

Architectural Context, Ritual and Collective Expectations

It is this appeal to consensus, a monumental art tapping into what Ronchaud called "shared hopes [esperances communes]," that replenished allegory with meaning and opened it to a broader audience. Constituting the immediate artistic context for Chasseriau's project was work by Eugene Delacroix in the Salon du Roi and Horace Vernet at the Salon des Pas Perdus, both at the Palais Bourbon, seat of the National Assembly. (25) They will help us define the uses and the limits of allegory in a civic monument. All three projects enlist allegorical figures arranged in a certain order in an architectural space endowed with an official governmental function. They perpetuate a venerable artistic tradition relying on generalizing allegorical figures to embody lofty values. But a study of the reactions to Delacroix's allegories reveals that the abstracting forms also triggered a specific set of contemporary political references. The African question insinuated itself into both the artist's design and the expectations of his audience. Delacroix originally envisioned the Salon du Roi as a part of a larger program that he proposed to extend into other areas of the Palais Bourbon. His plans for the vaults of the entrance hall, which were never carried out, called for personifications of "the peoples submitted to our arms or civilized by our laws," including one representing the conquest of Algeria. (26)

According to several critics, the novelty of Delacroix's decors at the Salon du Roi resided not only in their stylistic innovation but also in their use of allegory. Arsene Houssaye asserted that he had "rejuvenated the form" of "all these old allegories." (27) Less ambivalent about their ability to communicate meaning, Gustave Planche argued that Delacroix animated his allegories by crowning "a specific action with an allegory that sums it up." As a result, "the eye and the mind [la pensee] wander effortlessly back and forth between allegory and reality." By "reality," Planche presumably meant the everyday exercise of the values and powers of the state. Moreover, this transaction was available not only to initiates but also to a wider public. (28) Ronchaud implied that this cognitive oscillation between sign and referent was encouraged by the placement of Delacroix's personifications and the function of the decorated space. He perceived that their arrangement in relation to the throne occupied by Louis Philippe or his representative during ceremonial festivities was designed to convey clear meanings. (29) Vernet's decorations, too, set the stage for a royal ceremony inaugurating legislative sessions. (30) The effect of these meanings derived their power from a reciprocal exchange occurring during the course of a political ritual. Thus, allegory in a government building was not an arcane system but a vital political tool drawing on contemporary discourse and embodying flexible meanings. Indeed, Ronchaud suggested that contemporary history offered the basis for a collective spirit and a "new path" for public art: "recent dramas, played out in the cradle of our new institutions, are waiting for a patriotic hand daring to bring them to life in monumental murals conceived in close association with those same institutions." (31)

If the example of Delacroix demonstrates how allegory could be reformulated to impart contemporary meanings through ritual, that of Vernet offers a cautionary warning against the explicitly political. (32) The goal of making modern allegories legible and edifying to a general public without compromising their timeless universality was fraught with risk. Vernet's mural placed Peace in classical drapery against a background of factory smokestacks. His Science was framed by a locomotive and an air pump. He referred to Algeria directly through the inclusion of an Arab chieftain--called an "Algerien" by the critic from L'Illustration in 1847--sitting on a balustrade in the fictive architectural setting. (33) In the end, Vernet was chastised for his topical language and attempt to coin modern attributes for traditional symbols. (34) Chasseriau chose a more oblique language and resorted to other means to make his murals legible. In preliminary notes for the project, he clearly indicates this intention: "make it monumental yet real," (35) and "Do nothing impossible, find poetry in the real." (36) Pierre Malintourne, for his part, discerned jarring contemporary references that he felt were inconsistent with a mural aesthetic. Reviewing the finished murals for L'Artiste, he was dismayed by the unvarnished topicality of Chasseriau's Commerce murals (Fig. 13), in particular, bemoaning "this reality thrown abruptly in the middle of all this symbolism." (37) His complaint perpetuates a critical tradition concerned with the marriage of real elements and fictive forms in allegorical paintings. Significantly, the most perplexing works in this regard were those, such as Peter Paul Rubens's War and Peace or his Marie de Medicis cycle and Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, inscribed within specific historical events. (38)

Malintourne's testimony permits us to interrogate the relation of Chasseriau's program with his historical context. We should therefore look to the preoccupations of public discourse for the vocabulary that Chasseriau's audience brought to the visual and cognitive encounter. In 1836, Gautier sanctioned the enduring viability of allegory. (39) We have seen how the republican victory in February 1848 added impetus to preexisting efforts to revitalize allegory. At the unveiling of the Cour des Comptes in December 1848. Gautier was as unambiguous in his identification of Chasseriau's paintings as allegories as he was ambiguous about their political context. (40) He only hinted at the extrapictorial concerns that Chasseriau's public brought to the murals:

  These beautiful paintings have a rare and singular look that clearly
  separates them from ordinary allegories.... They have a certain
  bizarre and mannered grace, a certain weird charm, in the Florentine
  taste. As for his general character, one might say that M. Chasseriau
  is an Indian who studied in Greece. He projects onto the ancient
  classical world the unknown beauty of new races or, at least, races
  that until now the paintbrush has scorned. (41)

Gautier makes several useful points here. He indicates that Chasseriau imbued a conventional classical syntax with an exotic flavor. Secondly, he implies that this overlay was indebted to the merging of cultures, perhaps as a result of an overseas voyage. Lastly, he specifies that this idiosyncratic method shaped the contours of an allegorical vision featuring a new kind of protagonist, whose difference Gautier defines in racial terms. The source of that protagonist steers us toward the context that was second nature to Gautier but lost to us today. Algeria offered a laboratory for research on its wide spectrum of "races nouvelles" and the resources for a new era in painting. (42) Gautier had declared in 1844 that the "Orient is open" and encouraged painters to draw from Algeria's indigenous population, which he felt had preserved its "primitive beauty." (43) The artist revealed the cross-pollination of anthropology and his artistic project when he placed a "young savage with multicolored tattoos" on the knee of the allegorical figure representing Science in his Peace mural. (44) Chasseriau gave his figure, like Vernet's Science, an attribute reflecting the preoccupations of contemporary scientific inquiry. We may take all this to mean that the catalyst separating Chasseriau's murals from "ordinary allegories" was the North African Orient. (45) Algeria appeared to Chasseriau's contemporaries in the same hybridized light that Gautier sheds on the artist's murals. It provided a glimpse into a classical world, but one dressed up by an exotic veneer after several centuries of Arab presence in the Maghrib.

Allegorical Meaning and Saint-Simonian Doctrine

Algeria and the utopian ideals that took root there contributed to replenishing allegory as an agent of meaning. Aspects of Chasseriau's program, as well as its hybridized language, demonstrate sympathy with Saint-Simonian doctrine, which the artist encountered through its adherents among French military officers in Africa. (46) In Saint-Simonian thinking, art had an important role to play. As Neil McWilliam has shown, the disciples of Saint-Simon preached that art could "contribute powerfully to tightening social bonds, or to increasing their strength by expanding them." (47) Prosper Enfantin, the most influential second-generation Saint-Simonian, traveled to Algeria in 1839 and published his idiosyncratic proposal for the colonization of the territory in 1843. (48) Many of Enfantin's chapter headings correspond to the themes enshrined in Chasseriau's murals: Force, Order, Justice, Commerce, War, and Agriculture. If we return to the expectations of those critics cited above promoting mural painting, it appears that they tally with the ideals underwriting Saint-Simonian policies implemented in Algeria. Monumental decors offered the most effective artistic means to achieve the social solidarity envisioned by the Saint-Simonians and the art critics under their spell.

Equally important is the status that the Orient enjoyed in the Saint-Simonian conception of social art. Concerning the Orient as a source of artistic regeneration, McWilliam writes that artists were encouraged to fuse the "West's spiritual tradition with the materialist sensuality of the East." (49) We have already mentioned Gautier's exhortation to artists to profit from the Orient's "inexhaustible treasure of information" for all kinds of art, from landscape to religious painting. (50) Echoes of the Saint-Simonian call for hybridization surface repeatedly in criticism concerning Chasseriau. It can be heard in Houssaye's characterization of Chasseriau's artistic training. He "seems not to have studied with the Greeks of the golden age, nor with the Spanish, nor the Flemish, nor 'those of his own country.' ... "He is a painter of the Orient who has visited the magic court of the Queen of Golconda." (51) Notwithstanding Gautier's apparent disdain for the artistic activism of the Saint-Simonians, their emphasis on cultural fusion was a staple of his comments about Chasseriau, who was "a greek returned from India," "filling the white eyes of Greek statues with the large black pupils of the daughters of the Ganges." (52) The African Orient assumed an increasingly important role in this synthesis. After the arist's death, Gautier insisted that "a voyage to Algeria had led [Chasseriau] away from Greece, without letting him forget it." (53) Summing up the artist's meteoric career in 1855, Gautier declared that the African sojourn "confirmed" the painter's proclivity for blending cultures. (54) As we have seen in Gautier's comments about the Cour des Comptes, the artist's melding of East and West was central to Chasseriau's allegories. This was as true of his distinctive style as it was of the thematic tenor of the Commerce pendants emblematizing mercantile and cultural exchange. At the risk of suggesting that Gautier's testimony indicates Chasseriau's conversion to Saint-Simonianism, it is not impossible that the artist borrowed elements of that doctrine, which flourished in Algeria, to impregnate his allegorical murals with meaning.

As we saw with Delacroix's work in the Palais Bourbon, the function of official space also played a significant role in conveying meaning. Chasseriau acknowledged in 1844 that he had chosen subjects that "seem to me best suited to the style and the purpose of the monument." (55) Officials who worked in the Cour des Comptes were responsible for checking government accounts, including those relating to the war effort in Algeria (Fig. 3). But how might that function have shaped Chasseriau's choice of subjects and the meaning of his allegories? The war in Algeria sapped the country's resources and was a hotly contested budgetary issue during the period in which Chasseriau conceived his program. Due to its accounting function, the Cour des Comptes was integral to the debates generated by the uneven results of the French campaign. Discussions concerning government expenditure in Algeria, once the campaign was concluded, continued up to the collapse of the July Monarchy and the unveiling of Chasseriau's completed decorations in 1848.

We can therefore assume that a visitor to the Cour des Comptes passed between the murals impressed by the discretionary power of the offices for which Chasseriau's "frescoes" acted as a ceremonial preface. He harnessed the awe inspired by the institutional role of the Cour des Comptes to a processional ritual that announced what it required of the viewer at the outset. A grisaille figure of Silence greeted visitors at the base of the stairwell with a finger to her lips, reminding them that they were entering hallowed civic space. Gautier insisted that she "indicates the respect due a serious place." He further characterized the viewer being taken in hand by this figure--"the genius loci, the serene and calm initiator"--as tantamount to a sacred rite. (56)

Here again we encounter a central tenet of Saint-Simonian thought, namely, the "preococcupation with artistic utterance as a medium for transmitting moral and social imperatives." (57) According to McWilliam, Saint-Simonians privileged the savant, a category that included scholars, thinkers, artists, writers, and poets. Savants were granted the powers of a priest figure to accomplish social solidarity through proselytizing discourse and imagery. (58) Featured in the same panel as Silence, Chasseriau's Study and Meditation seem to pay tribute to the work of savants in Algeria, many of whom were Saint-Simonians. These ranged from Enfantin himself to the archaeologists and authropologists working for the Commission d'Exploration Scientifique d'Algerie, a multidisciplinary survey of the colony begun in 1839. More important, though, Chasseriau himself seems to have taken on the role of the savant in the Saint-Simonian sense, organizing a visual experience, a panoramic allegorical rite in three dimensions, that promoted the communal solidarity envisioned by utopian art critics.

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Algeria and the Building of National Consensus

According to proponents of colonization, Algeria offered salvation for the French nation in the same way that edifying monumental decoration was expected to galvanize communal identity. Tocqueville defended the Algerian project in precisely these terms: national glory in Africa was essential to counteract the debilitating effects of individualism unleashed by democracy. (59) It was therefore an ideal subject and source for a painter charged with murals for an important public space. Algeria was by no means an uncontroversial subject, but its champions believed fervently that the conquest would unify France. It promised to efface political differences and generate the "communal hopes" and "common goals" that modern allegory required to release its meaning.

No study to date has proposed a comprehensive reading of Chasseriau's allegories as an ensemble from the perspective of French interventions in North Africa. (60) Yet Algeria provides the most satisfactory explanation of how form, context, style, and purpose together contributed to a meaningful visual experience at the Cour des Comptes. Launched by Charles X in 1830 and inherited by Louis Philippe, with whose dynastic aspirations it is closely identified, the Algerian enterprise and its vicissitudes dominated French public discourse for the duration of the July Monarchy. (61) Chasseriau interrupted his work at the Cour des Comptes in 1846 to travel to Algiers and Constantine, a voyage that left an indelible mark on his subsequent career. In 1852, Gautier--who went to Algeria in 1845--attested to the effect exerted by Chasseriau's experience there on the War mural, pointing to an almost military assurance in Chasseriau's style. (62) In so doing, he aligned Chasseriau with Horace Vernet, the chief hagiographer of the Algerian campaign, who was caricatured by Benjamin Roubaud charging at his canvas with his brush drawn like a sword. (63) To be sure, Chasseriau's elegiac pictorial language differs from Vernet's profusion of documentary detail. Even as a foil, however, Vernet's series of battle paintings of the Algerian conquest commissioned by Louis Philippe for Versailles Served as an inescapable point of reference. The younger artist was as committed as Vernet to the valorization of the war. This shared purpose stemmed from the intimate association between these artists and their military guides and interpreters in Algeria. (64) Chasseriau's imagery so accurately expressed the sensibility of the army that Gautier repeatedly identified Chasseriau as an official artist charged with representing the heroic feats of a conquering monarch, exactly the role that Vernet performed in his capacity as painter to the king. In Gautier's words, Chasseriau "seemed, like Apelles, to have followed the campaigns of Alexander." (65) Vernet, too, was likened to Apelles by a critic, Charles Blanc, who compared The Siege of Constantine to the Batailles d'Alexandre painted by Charles Le Brun. (66)

Although historians have tended to portray Chasseriau as indifferent to colonial politics, he appears to have been one of its more astute observers. In a letter sent from Philippeville to his brother on June 13, 1846, Chasseriau defended a beleaguered Marechal Thomas Robert Bugeaud de la Piconnerie, whom he was to visit in Algiers almost a week later. (67) His comments endorsed the French investment in Algeria:

   Besides, all construction in this country will become French before
   long, and the town where I am now is as big as Chalons, Macon, etc.,
   and it was built in four years. It is thus false to say that we
   haven't had any results. The results achieved are great on a fertile
   and savage land, and even if we pay for all this with sacrifices, at
   least we have real results. (68)

Chasseriau's letter was dated three days after, and is clearly a response to, a scathing critique of the war effort by poet and parliamentary deputy Alphonse de Lamartine. The latter's diatribe punctuated the aforementioned debate concerning the release of additional funds for Algeria in which Tocqueville also participated. (69) In addition to Bugeaud, Chasseriau's letters praise two of the marechal's lieutenants, both of whom were named in Lamartine's speech. (70) It is surely significant that Chasseriau defended the military men with whom he explored Algeria. It is even more so--especially in light of his admission that he had chosen subjects suited to the purpose of the monument--that he should be so attentive to parliamentary polemics involving the Cour des Comptes directly in its role as the fiscal auditor of Bugeaud's enterprise.

Chasseriau's insistence that the results were worth the considerable sacrifices echoes Bugeaud's statement, quoted in the second edition of E. Quetin's Guide du voyageur en Algerie published in 1846. The hero of the Battle of Isly claimed that "we will find in this possession indirect but important compensation for the sacrifices they have cost." (71) A year later, Tocqueville sought to reassure those members of the Chamber of Deputies alarmed by the "gradual and continual extension of our domination and our sacrifices." (72) This language also permeated the due d'Orleans's demand that the Arch of Djemila (ancient Cuiculum) be transported stone by stone to Paris and reassembled "as consecration and trophy of our conquest of Algeria." The prince felt that the monument would "recall the efforts and perseverance of our soldiers to arrive at this result." (73) Chasseriau clearly sided with the military against critics who advocated scaling back operations in North Africa. More important, he seems to have appreciated the way that the Algerian project looked to visual symbols, particularly the vocabulary provided by the excavation and reconstruction of Roman monuments to justify national sacrifice and herald its results.

Classisicm and the Roman Paradigm

The restrained classicism at the Cour des Comptes seems at first glance opposed to the manner in which the artist usually chose to represent North Africa. Even a cursory review of his career reveals that his voyage inflamed an enthusiasm for Oriental subjects and encouraged an exuberance in his work that critics attributed to his emulation of Delacroix. Other than the loose handling in War, a rich palette and exotic physiognomies in the surviving Commerce mural (Fig. 13) are the only concessions to Chasseriau's Orientalist fervor, to which he gave freer rein in several works painted in the late 1840s, most notably Sabbath Day in the Jewish Quarter of Constantine (exhibited at the Salon of 1848; presumed destroyed). Yet Algeria imparted a classical ingredient to Chasseriau's work as much as it fanned his penchant for Oriental excess. In a defense of Sabbath Day after its rejection by the Salon jury in 1847, Gautier wrote of "a dazzling vision of the Orient in a proud Greek outline that seems borrowed from the artists of Pompeii and Herculaneum." (74) Critics believed that the tension between these stylistic extremes was stretched to the limit in Chasseriau's subsequent Algerian imagery, particularly in his submissions to the Salon of 1852. (75) Nonetheless, it is clear that Chasseriau understood disciplined classical contour--the legacy of his apprenticeship under J.-A.-D. Ingres--to be at least as synonymous with and evocative of North Africa as pulsing Oriental color and spontaneous brushwork.

The classical vocabulary found in Algeria and invoked in the language and symbols of the colonial debate explains the artist's recourse to allegory at the Cour des Comptes. Put another way, the problem of reconciling traditional allegory and political reality was resolved in the horizon of possibilities opened by the annexation of Algeria as a colonial and artistic realm. Yielding a classical language that was at once oblique and specific. Algeria offered the means to talk about itself in terms peculiar to it without seeming to do so. Allegory conceived in vocabulary identified with Algeria communicated topical issues while transcending them. By the time Chasseriau sojourned there in 1846, specialists working in tandem with the French army in Africa had made significant progress in documenting Algeria's Roman heritage, (76) a process intimately bound up with French imperial ambitions. The Ministry of War sponsored archaeological investigations, launched in 1839 under the aegis of the Commission d'Exploration Scientifique d'Algerie, for strategic aims: study of the Roman precedent would ensure the longevity of French domination of North Africa. (77) Inevitably, antique remnants from Roman sites in Algeria were shipped to Paris for display in a permanent installation at the Musee du Louvre. (78)

At this point we can begin to sort out the apparent paradox inherent to the use of allegory in public monuments in a way that will allow us to unravel Chasseriau's program. Not only was allegory appropriate for a monumental decor and a suitable aesthetic choice for the representation of Algeria, but also excavations carried out there refreshed the ability of allegory to communicate by reintroducing a classical past and its symbolic language into the Parisian vernacular. Emerging out of the dialogue between the rediscovery of this Roman exemplum and the rhetoric that it nourished, Chasseriau's paintings engaged pressing contemporary political debates. Everywhere that French scholars and artists looked in Algeria they found vestiges of the prior Roman occupation, ranging from the Arch of Djemila to the garments worn by the indigenous population, the folds of which recalled those of a senatorial toga. (79) This "living antiquity" was quickly integrated into discussions justifying the modern colonial project. While certainly inflected by his prior voyage to Italy, Chasseriau's classicism owes just as much to Algeria, where antiquity appeared less ossified than in the remnants he had seen in Rome. (80) Military officers, the architects of the French conquest and more often than not the excavators of the Roman past, (81) were highly attuned to the accomplishments of their classical precursors and the usefulness of their example for their own aims. Leroy de Saint-Arnaud, for example, the founder of Orleansville in Algeria, wrote to his brother of "this ungrateful land," "still full with the memory of the Romans whose tracks we follow." (82)

The affinities between the preoccupations of these officers, the research undertaken by savants sponsored by the Armee d'Afrique, and Chasseriau's project derived from their reliance on Sallust's Jugurthine War. In his preparatory notes among the drawings that document the evolution of his design for War, Chasseriau made reference to this text, written during Sallust's tenure as Caesar's consul in Constantine (ancient Cirta). An essential tool for historical analyses of Roman North Africa, it was also one of the primary ancient narratives cited to justify French intervention in Algeria. (83) As such, Sallust was required reading for French officers, who saw in its narrative of Roman conquest of North Africa a model for their own colonial ambitions. (84) Sallust's text offered more than simply an instrument to endorse French designs; it prescribed a plan of action guaranteeing the success of the mission. (85) On one sheet Chasseriau wrote: "for my series of heroic compositions of War represent the assault upon a town troops that climb up the walls--think of the taking of the city of Capsa that Sallust describes in his Jugurthine War...." (86)

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

In addition to his careful study of Sallust, Chasseriau was apparently attentive to the archaeological investigations conducted by his contemporaries. The preparatory drawing for Peace now in the Louvre (Fig. 4) tells us that the right-hand portion of the finished mural showed a scene of a coordinated network of seminude figures heaving stones in the direction of a classical building under construction. Here is Gautier's account: "On the same level, further to the right, rises a town under construction. The workers secure the structure, pull blocks, raise stones along an assembly line, and provide the spectacle of human activity that develops during peacetime." (87) Both the drawing and Gautier's report second Chasseriau's notes on an earlier sketch for this motif, showing a line of men, their muscles tense with the weight of their heavy loads, passing along large stones (Fig. 5). On the same drawing Chasseriau expressed his thoughts about the fundamental contrast at the core of his program between the devastating effects of war and the benefits of peace, "which causes immense cities to be built." (88) In the drawing for the full composition, the personification of architecture holds a model of a structure with Doric columns. This figure looks over his shoulder at the workers behind him as if to supervise the carrying out of the design. Gautier confirms that this detail made it into the finished mural. (89) The valorization of this communal effort pervades the entire composition: the pyramidal disposition of bodies continues to rise beyond the statuesque figure of Peace and peaks only at the top of the ladder mounted by the workers. The pliant bodies of fertile young mothers culminate in, and are supported by, a rigid compositional framework embodied by a classical monument under construction. The artist also parallels the columnar folds of Peace's drapery and the regular fluting of the columns behind her. Architecture is both the foundation of a peaceful society and the compositional framework for Chasseriau's allegorization of it.

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Chasseriau's use of Roman architecture recalls a popular theme among French painters sojourning in Algeria. Adrien Dauzats, to cite a case in point, rendered the Arch of Djemila for a painting that he sent to the Salon of 1843. Eugene Fromentin and Victor Pierre Huguet both painted the ruins of an aqueduct near Cherchell (ancient Caesarea). (90) Yet in contrast to Dauzats, whose abandoned arch is a nostalgic reflection on vanished hegemony, Chasseriau pictured the building of an empire--in short, its activity, not its decay. In a parallel with the masonic alchemy transforming rude stones into a pristine temple in Chasseriau's vignette, Saint-Arnaud reflected on the Roman remains at Castellum on which the new town he was building was constructed: "We are living on a Roman town.... I am having my main road leveled, and in excavating the earth we have found superb stones, marble columns, well-conserved tombs.... The ancient town sleeps beneath our feet." (91)

In the context of the building program sponsored by officials such as Saint-Arnaud, Chasseriau's mural represents more than a generic allegory of building a civilization from scratch. It reenacts the unearthing and reassembly of a society and its structures based on the same classical paradigm that provided the blueprint for both the stylistic tenor of the entire decorative cycle and the colonization of Algeria. As in the case of Orleansville, Chasseriau's temple rises right out of an archaeological site. The preparatory sketch for the construction motif magnifies this labor. Men heave boulders along an assembly line and up a ladder to the building; they are excavating and building simultaneously. In his representation, the conceptual link between the Roman past and the French colonial present is overdetermined: the new construction is actually achieved with the disinterred fragments transformed into a uniform whole out of a construction site that is also an archaeological dig.

This passage mirrors actual developments in Algeria in the 1840s. French soldiers routinely recycled blocks from abandoned Roman installations and incorporated them into new buildings. Saint-Arnaud attests to the rhetorical power and the utility of such fragments but glosses over the fact that their pillaging threatened efforts of archaeologists to carry out their assignments. Despite working under the same banner, soldiers and archaeologists often labored at cross-purposes. Algeria's Roman heritage was vanishing faster than it could be recorded for posterity. Amable Ravoisie, entrusted by the Commission Scientifique with an archaeological survey, rushed to complete his detailed studies of ruins and their context before they were razed by soldiers looking for building materials. (92) The day-to-day conflict between the documentation of Roman ruins and their demolition--their symbolic currency versus their practical utility--is clearly not reflected in Chasseriau's drawings, which deny any paradox in a harmonious scene of cooperation. Nevertheless, the image brings into play the efforts of the two men responsible for exhuming and recording the material remains of Algeria's Roman past in the 1840s. Specific discoveries by Ravoisie and Captain Adolphe Delamare, artillery officer and chief archaeologist for the Commission Scientifique, may force us to revise our assumptions about Chasseriau's formal sources for the program at the Cour des Comptes. Between 1840 and 1845 both men traversed Algeria conducting excavations and exhaustive studies. The resulting drawings fill out the panoramic visual field that fueled French colonizing ardor. (93)

The most significant archaeological discovery of the 1840s was a large pavement, known as the mosaic of Coudiat-Aty for the site where it was uncovered on the outskirts of Constantine. (94) Delamare dismantled it for removal to the Louvre and installed it there as a war trophy in the Galerie d'Alger by 1850. (95) Before that date, the mosaic, like the Arch of Djemila, emerged as proof of reawakened French imperial glory. In 1843, it was reproduced in Le Magasin Pittoresque and catalogued in Ravoisie's survey of monuments (Fig. 6). (96) As we will see, a variation of the mosaic's central panel depicting Neptune and Amphitrite enthroned was incorporated into the nucleus of Chasseriau's cycle. (97) This allows us to tie the Cour des Comptes even more firmly to the visual arena in which the conquest was played out for a Parisian public. (98)

Drawn from the same classical terminology as the syntax of colonial rhetoric, the overall program for the Cour des Comptes, which Chasseriau had been cultivating since 1839--in advance of obtaining the commission--reflects a long-standing awareness of the African question. Indeed, the question intensified and gained added nuance as a result of his voyage. (99) Although the artist's actual journey to Algeria occurred rather late, (100) the themes identified in drawings executed prior to the granting of the commission in 1844 correspond to the main issues that surfaced repeatedly in the ongoing debate over France's intervention in Algeria. The seed for his opposing allegories of Peace and War, together with figures representing the other themes that he would choose for the principal panels, is contained in two sketches executed in 1839. (101) Another annotated drawing, dating to 1841 (now in the Louvre), records his elaboration on the linked subjects of Peace and Commerce. (102) Clearly, circumstances changed between 1839 and 1848. A general feeling of pessimism engendered by the uneven results of the campaign was gradually replaced by a guarded sense of optimism, following the capture of the encampment of the rebel leader Abd el-Kader in 1843 and the decisive victory against him and his Moroccan allies at Isly in 1844. Yet 1847 was a crucial year of national accounting and public discussion about France's future in North Africa.

By the Sword and the Plow

Taking Chasseriau's defense of Bugeaud as a point of departure, we will use Bugeaud's contested plan calling for continued government funds to support the further colonization of Algeria as a guide to unpack Chasseriau's allegorical program. Seen in this framework, the murals engage critical topics of discussion pitting advocates of the colonial project against critics of the government's initiatives. Invested with the title of duc d'Isly in 1844, Bugeaud took as his motto Ense et aratro, "By the sword and the plow," which summed up the methods of conquest and colonization of Algeria under his leadership. These symbols occupied important positions in Chasseriau's mural project. According to Gautier's description of the lost panel depicting War, a group of seminude men working at a forge in the right foreground "beat the iron and manufacture weapons, swords, breastplates, spearheads, thrown on the ground around the anvil." (103) This motif is shown on the right-hand side of Chasseriau's preparatory drawing. On the opposite side of the same sheet, a seated soldier is surrounded by these implements of war (Fig. 7). The second symbol named in Bugeaud's insignia, the plow, is evoked by the agricultural backdrop featuring farmers driving oxen in harness behind the group of young mothers in Peace (Fig. 8).

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

Swords and farming equipment were also the principal attributes of the French soldat-laboreur. Originating in biblical antiquity and elaborated on in Virgil's Georgics as a symbol of republican virtue, the soldat-laboreur emerged as an agent of chauvinistic imperial ambition under Napoleon. It later came to embody Bugeaud's designs for Algeria. In 1832, Bugeaud himself claimed: "I am but a soldier-worker [Je ne suis qu'un Soldat-laboreur]." As the primary focus of military energies during the July Monarchy, Algeria contributed to the development of the politically potent myth of the humble yet patriotic French soldier with his close ties to the land. This myth played an important role in Algerian debates and loomed large in the public imagination. A character based on the prototypical French soldat-laboreur figured in La cocarde tricolore, a vaudeville performed in Paris in 1832 and set during the taking of Algiers two years earlier. (104) In 1842, Ernest-Francois Vacherot, who probably collaborated with Vernet on the Taking of the Smala of Abd-el-Kader (shown at the Salon of 1845, Musee National du Chateau, Versailles), exhibited a painting entitled France Leading a Soldier-Colonist by the Hand. (105) Chasseriau's most important murals, War and Peace, create a thematic dialogue between the two roles played by the soldat-laboreur, a mythic figure derived from a classical paradigm that came to embody the basic values of France's colonial enterprise under Bugeaud's leadership. Whereas Vernet had used this figure to convey the delusion that accompanied the collapse of the empire, (106) Chasseriau mined it to broadcast the belief that Algeria had reignited national pride. For those Napoleonic veterans marginalized by the Restoration, Algeria offered both newfound imperial glory and a safe haven. Moreover, the allegorical contrast of the double attributes of the soldat-laboreur typifies the multivalent address of Chasseriau's cycle as a whole. Both imminently legible to a public familiar with the African question and indebted to a classical idiom, the sword and the plow crystallized the Roman ideal that animated Bugeaud's vision for the future of Algeria. The exhumation of Roman artifacts reinforced the enduring power of such symbols. It was a corps of French soldiers performing routine agricultural labor, vivifying Bugeaud's ideal, that discovered the mosaic of Coudiat-Aty in 1842. (107)

[FIGURE 7 OMITTED]

In deciphering the way that the African question inflected Chasseriau's murals, we will consider the plans proposed for the future of the colony. Responding to Bugeaud's policies, reports on Algeria cited herein sought to delineate blueprints for the most efficient and cost-effective strategy for its subjugation and colonization. The framework of these proposals and the terms that they employ offer interpretative keys to reconstruct the lost referents to Chasseriau's allegories. The entire ensemble and its visual effect buttress Bugeaud's tract, De la colonisation de l'Algerie, the text published in 1847 of an address he delivered to the two chambers of the French parliament. In it, he argued in favor of the government's continued subsidization of the colonial enterprise. Answering critics who claimed that the state's fiscal responsibility ended with the successful completion of the conquest, Bugeaud laid out why it was imperative to follow through with active government participation and funding in addition to the considerable resources already dedicated to the cause: "we cannot do anything great with regard to the colonization in Africa without the help of the government and the powerful means to be found in the organization and the numerous and intelligent arms of its army...." (108)

The timing of these comments is crucial. The terms of Bugeaud's address continued to structure debate when Chasseriau's decor was unveiled. Forestalling those liberal voices that seized on the defeat of the Arab resistance as an excuse to call for demobilization of French troops, Bugeaud insisted that, for reasons of security, the army continue to maintain its presence in the territory. Thus, 1847 was an important moment of transition from an active military campaign to a more peaceful process of colonization. Chasseriau's Cour des Comptes murals, completed during this critical period for a government organization caught up in the very polemic that Bugeaud's plan addressed, seem to capture that transition from all-out war to the erection of peacetime infrastructures that would guarantee French interests. In the same year, in his address to the Chamber of Deputies. Tocqueville declared that "it is the success of our arms and the peace that was the result that create today a new state of affairs calling for new resolutions." (109)

In 1848, Gautier described the relation between the two main murals as one of antithesis. (110) To be sure, the symmetrical opposition of Peace and War resulted, in part, from the structure of the space itself: the murals faced each other across the space of the Cour des Comptes staircase. (111) Gautier acknowledged that "the strange shape of a compartment often yields an ingenious composition." (112) The fundamental contrast between war and peace was also a pivotal aspect of the treatises concerning the controversial Algerian project from 1839, when Chasseriau first conceived of his plan, through the parliamentary discussions in 1847. For almost a decade, a controversy raged over the sacrifices and the results mentioned by Chasseriau in his letter to his brother. Faced with the mounting costs of a war that had produced only mixed results until 1843, commentators worried over Bugeaud's aggressive policy of total conquest. Even proponents of the Algerian campaign questioned some of the army's harsher tactics. Voices from some quarters called for a scaling back of French ambitions, proposing a limited occupation of coastal areas and the abandonment of the annexation of the vast interior. These were countered by hawks who felt that such a policy would never work in Algeria, where hostile natives would constantly agitate against French interests.

[FIGURE 8 OMITTED]

Evariste Bavoux captured the general feeling of frustration with the state of affairs in 1841 and the yearning for an end to the war when he wrote. "Indisputably war and incertitude are disastrous, peace and security will bear happy fruit." (113) This juxtaposition of before and after or, more accurately, present and future, presents a conceptual framework for Chasseriau's confrontation of War and Peace. In keeping with this basic contrast, Bavoux's book was a heavily documented plea for a shift in policy from total conquest to colonization, from the destructiveness of war to the painstaking construction of the means to take advantage of Algeria's abundant natural resources. Similarly ambivalent about the more brutal aspects of the campaign, Chasseriau may have intended War to evoke a necessary but hard-fought campaign whose conclusion promised the bounty pictured in Peace. In a note accompanying a preliminary drawing for Peace, Chasseriau pointed to just this kind of contrast in his program between war ("on the side of war everything is destroyed") and peace ("which has things built"). (114)

Architectural Space, Light, and Temporal Narrative

Any interpretation of the meanings conveyed by each mural individually and their dialogue must also account for the space between them and its meaning. Fletcher asserts that symmetry and ritual occasionally work together to generate meaning in allegorical narrative. (115) We can borrow this mechanism to characterize the experience of the viewer in the late 1840s suspended bodily between the confrontation of War and Peace. The architectural context governed the meaning in that it required those viewers to swivel 180 degrees to take in the entirety of the visual experience created by the contrast of the two horizontal friezes. In performing the physical act of turning from one vast panel to the next, the viewer felt the moment of pause between the two antithetical extremes represented. This sense of transition bred of the movement from one mural to the next may have been one of Chasseriau's deliberate effects. Gautier underlined the murals' address to an active spectator, and the importance of movement to the way they were to be read and interpreted, by structuring the sequence of his descriptions to follow the order in which the visitor to the Cour des Comptes encountered them: "we are going to analyze this large composition according to the way it presents itself to the eyes while one mounts the stairs." (116) It is clear from the itinerary inscribed in Gautier's text, Gerard Doyon's reconstruction of the program (Fig. 2), and Fichot's rendering of it (Fig. 3) that once the viewer began climbing the last part of the staircase, War was the first composition to come completely into view. Peace, immediately to the left on the wall flush against the steps, did not appear in its entirety until the viewer reached the top level and turned to contemplate it after having taken in War. (117) Gautier confirms this visual order: "Let's begin with War in order to finish as everything should finish, with Peace." (118) The critic's wording recalls comments in L'Artiste (for which Gautier was a frequent contributor) in 1844 occasioned by the publication of Leon Galibert's L'Algerie ancienne et moderne. The review insisted that "Algeria is no longer a battlefield, it is a conquest, it will soon be a flourishing colony, and then, like our mother country, she will enjoy the enlightened and peaceful reign that we have spread all over Europe." (119) In this way, the viewer's physical experience of the murals mirrored the contemporary political context. The transition from active conquest to peaceful colonization, anticipated in 1844, became an urgent issue three years later as the Algerian debate reached a climactic stage. The dialogue between the two panels offered a result held in suspense, just as Bugeaud and Tocqueville promised colonial bounty with certain conditions in their 1847 reports.

Light played a crucial role in the orchestration of this viewing experience and the progression of the narrative. In mounting to the highest level of a staircase illuminated by skylights in the ceiling, visitors were required first to pass through the shadowy spaces of the ground floor, decorated with scenes in grisaille, before reaching the upper landing flooded with natural light. (120) Gautier dedicates a significant portion of his text to the amount and quality of light reaching each panel. The indirect light cast on the lower floor gave way to a burst of light that announced itself once the visitor reached the first landing and turned to confront the decor in its entirety. Gautier exclaimed that, from that standpoint, "And day has come, the light coming from above the stairs flows over the paintings on the upper level like a waterfall." (121) His description of this radiant epiphany reinforces the ritual air in which Chasseriau's program unfolded. On a symbolic level, the revelation of cascading light evokes the notion that colonization brought enlightenment to backward peoples, a cornerstone of the Saint-Simonian doctrine put into practice by many military officers in Algeria and the standard mantra of procolonial rhetoric. (122)

The contrast between the dimly lit lower depths of the staircase and the light bathing the walls of the upper level of the Cour des Comptes also places the cycle squarely in an Oriental orbit. Famous for his exotic genre scenes, Alexandre Gabriel Decamps never traveled to North Africa, but he nonetheless provided illustrations for the published account of the duc d'Orleans's 1839 mission to Algeria. (123) Frustrated in his own attempts to secure a mural commission, (124) Decamps was lampooned as a mason in a caricature by Roubaud for his method of replicating the material surfaces of walls in paint. Decamps's rich impasto gilded with light was such a signature motif in his Orientalist compositions that it became synonymous with his virtuoso technique and its imitative powers. The critic Pierre Petroz asserted that this dramatic juxtaposition was characteristic of Decamps's pictures of the Orient: "The subject ... is almost always merely a pretext for opposing brilliant light to a vigorous shadow." (125) Although surely dictated in part by the configuration of the space and the light source in the ceiling, Chasseriau's murals structured around this chromatic disparity translate Decamps's trademark into a three-dimensional experience.

The stage-managed access to the principal murals--the passage from a shadowy interior to the bright light of day--and their climactic panoramic address to the viewer did more than reenact the discovery of the Orient as enshrined in Decamps imagery. It borrowed defining features of pictorial responses to the occupation of Algeria. To view Charles Langlois's panorama of Algiers, which opened to the public in Paris in 1833, visitors negotiated a path that climbed through the re-created inner chambers of the palace of the dey before reaching a viewing stand. Emerging from semidarkness, they were treated to an all-encompassing rendition of the city of Algiers and the arrival of the French fleet in 1830 unfolding around them. (126) The revelatory experience of the panorama allowed its viewers in Paris to annex Algeria in their imaginations and in so doing ratify internally the colonial policies of Louis Philippe's government. (127)

Moreover, as Michael Marrinan has demonstrated, Vernet's treatment of both the tripartite Siege of Constantine (a format that Chasseriau chose for Peace flanked by the two Commerce panels) and the Taking of the Smala of Abd-el-Kader enveloped the visitor to the African galleries at Versailles in a panoramic spectacle. (128) In taking on a vast surface, Chasseriau worked on the same epic scale as Vernet's treatment of the African conquest. More high-minded than Langlois's cityscape of Algiers, more cohesive than Vernet's disjointed roll call of the Algerian campaign, and more allusive than both, the Cour des Comptes cycle recalled their panoramic address and impressive dimensions. Using the full extent of the space at his disposal, Chasseriau managed, by employing an allegorical language, to magnify references to the data that Langlois and Vernet itemized into an august tribute to the forward march of French civilization and its imperial aspirations.

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The temporal trajectory constructed by Chasseriau, calling on the collective memory of recent history and its representation, reinforced the viewer's sense of passing through time, from the "dark" years of violent conflict and uncertainty to the bright promise of future prosperity embodied in the figure of Peace. In a pictorial argument that crystallized that transitional moment, Chasseriau placed his audience between the cost of the "sacrifices" and the promise of the "results," suspending viewers in the interval between the two. Indeed, one can find in Bugeaud's speech another clear echo of Chasseriau's comments to his brother: "the results of the sacrifices required to create this foundation will be of various types." (129) The pregnant pause, giving the sense of being on the threshold between the respective stages epitomized by the two murals, corresponds to Bugeaud's appeal in 1847, a moment of national accounting, for further reserves of patience and resources from the government that had already given so much. Bugeaud thus regrets that "it is painful indeed not to be able to say to the nation: the conquest is accomplished, you are at the end of your sacrifices." (130)

The Civilizing Mission

A scrutiny of the individual elements of Chasseriau's murals reveals that they activate many of the specific terms expressed by treatises concerning Algeria in the 1840s and the programs enacted by politicians and military administrators. In a triangular section located below the frieze of warriors running along the bottom edge of War, Chasseriau painted a scene that he called The Return of the Captives (Fig. 9). As it occupies the transitional space between the obliquely lit lower level and the vast illuminated upper levels of the staircase, the movement of the returning troops and the prisoners in their charge in the scene shadows that of the visitor climbing the steps, reinforcing the temporal progression from War to Peace. Gautier called them warriors who "return victorious, bringing back captives." It is in the lengthy section devoted to the various prisoners that Gautier betrays the extent to which Chasseriau's allegorizing here was inflected by the French campaign. Gautier insisted that such prisoners, "of an exotic turn of phrase," "characterize the least stupid and least terrible of all wars between races, because they are the mysterious link between civilization and barbarity." (131) He touched here on one of the themes most often invoked by contemporary texts: the civilizing mission. France firmly believed in its responsibility to export Enlightenment values and orderly administration to a territory long ruled by autocratic Ottoman deys harboring ruthless pirates, the scourge of Mediterranean trade. The correspondent for L'Artiste wrote in 1844, apropos of Algeria, "the use of brutal force is legitimate and possible in the future only against the remnants of barbaric races." (132)

[FIGURE 10 OMITTED]

Although this mural has suffered a great deal, it is clear that two half-naked white women occupied the central portion of the composition. White captives taken at sea and spirited away into harems were virtually synonymous with the infamy of the Regency of Algiers, and the subject became a staple of visual representation. Vernet executed a canvas depicting the abduction of a swooning, half-clad woman by pirates in 1819. (133) Their plight served as an important rallying cry to justify the invasion of Algeria in 1830. (134) Even after the occupation of Algiers, white slavery remained an argument in favor of the ongoing campaign. In their Voyage pittoresque dans la Regence d'Alger, published in 1835, Emile Lessore and William Wyld depicted the former haunts of Barbary corsairs and the slave market in the Place Juba. The accompanying text congratulated the French for ridding Algiers of these slave traders. (135) Vacherot exhibited his picture of the slave market at the Salon of 1841. (136) Under the haughty gaze of a Turkish client, a white odalisque, naked apart from a white sheet drawn across her midsection, reclines in the foreground, immediately in front of a black woman with clasped hands. Prints deploring the slave trade, such as Vente d'esclaves from 1838 by Nicolas Eustache Maurin, featured the same repertory of characters: scantily dressed women supplicating their captors or prospective purchasers (Fig. 10). This racial contrast is central to the series of pictures set in the harem that Chasseriau painted after his return from Algeria. (137) In the mural, his juxtaposition of a black captive with her arms drawn up to her face and the defenseless white flesh of her fellow prisoners echoes the racial diversity of, and the positions assumed by Maurin's female slaves. It is above all in Chasseriau's adoption of the exposed and vulnerable back of the woman in the left of the lithograph for the central figures of his mural that suggests the imprint of the Barbary slave trade in The Return of the Captives. Chasseriau took Maurin's figure and duplicated her, giving the unbound hair cascading down her back to one of his faceless captives and the erotically charged drapery slung low across her naked hips to the other. (138)

Desirable female bodies such as these were as much a feature of imagery generated by the taking of Algiers as they were emblematic of the slave trade. Exotic women--whether "liberated" from their cloistered existence or taken as spoils of war--were paraded across popular prints in the 1830s that reenacted the conquest of Algiers within the titillating confines of the harem. (139) The connection between Chasseriau's female prisoners seen from behind in the Cour des Comptes panel and the harem as a symbolic site in the occupation of Algeria is reinforced by comparing the figures to those in the artist's imagery in which the connection to North Africa is more explicit. Chasseriau also chose the rear view for his Jewish Women on a Balcony (1849, Musee du Louvre). In 1856, Gautier likened Chasseriau's harem denizens to "captive barbarians brought back to our civilization," which is the same phrase he used to characterize the hostages at the Cour des Comptes.(140)

Like emancipated concubines, prisoners of war were enlisted to rationalize the conflict as a civilizing mission. Gautier refers to the flow of Arab hostages back to France in his assertion that the soldiers in Chasseriau's mural "return victorious," bringing captives "of an exotic turn of phrase." Prior to the artist's departure for Algeria, there were numerous reports concerning Arab prisoners interned in France. Combining journalistic shorthand and amateurish ethnographic analysis, the illustrations accompanying these exposes focused on the prisoners' physiognomies. (141) Clemency accorded to such prisoners offered the Orleans regime a powerful propaganda tool. Henri Felix Emmanuel Philippoteaux, who accompanied the duc d'Orleans on campaign in 1840, painted the heir to the throne pardoning two Arab prisoners outside Blida (1841, Versailles). (142) The media flurry attending Abd el-Kader's internment at Toulon and then Pau after his surrender in 1847, followed by his transfer to house arrest at Amboise, confirmed prisoners of war as a primary feature of the French conquest of Algeria in the minds of the Parisian public. Chasseriau suggests the imperial benevolence of France and its efforts to reform savage races in the placement of his captives on the upward ramp, with the flow of their bodies leading inexorably toward those values represented in Peace.

Throughout the lengthy conflict, articles and prints expressed their indignation at the treatment suffered by French soldiers at the hands of their Arab captors. (143) Underlining the barbarity of France's foes, the predicament of these men was manipulated by critics and proponents of the campaign alike. For the former, their plight reinforced arguments that Algeria was a never-ending drain on French manpower and resources. Champions of the conquest insisted that these soldiers were latter-day white Barbary captives who required redoubled efforts to free them and eradicate their tormentors. In 1841 Victor Adam visualized this debate in his lithograph La Barbarie: Traitement que subissent les prisonniers francais en Algerie, showing a bound soldier confronted with an enemy leader sitting beneath the decapitated heads of dispatched prisoners strung up on the poles of his tent.

Agricultural Utopia

In addition to crystallizing issues pertaining to the conflict, the murals evoke certain of the policies Bugeaud implemented in Algeria and the controversy they generated. Dwelling on one of the central motifs of Peace, Gautier described a "group of young women whose freshness is a sign of health and well-being, breast-feeding beautiful children, tossing them in their arms or rocking them to sleep singing a lullaby." (144) Seated or standing in the midst of a scene of agricultural productivity, protected by the outstretched olive bough held by Peace, the young women exude youth and vitality, Chasseriau made a visual analogy between ripe women and the fruit they have borne, on the one hand, and fertile soil yielding its crop into which they have been integrated, on the other, by placing them on sheaves of wheat, the stalks of which rhyme with the folds of their drapery.

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.

Other commentators saw Algeria as the solution to "the excessive exuberance" of the French population. Touching on the themes that Chasseriau would address in the series of murals along one whole wall at the Cour des Comptes, Peace flanked by the pendant Commerce panels, Charles-Pierre de Nazarieux wrote in 1840 of France's need for the Lebensraum that Algeria could provide: "There is social malaise when a nation reaches a population that is commensurate neither with its landmass nor the requirements of agriculture, commerce and the arts...." (152) Expansion into North Africa would relieve some of the mounting pressure, diverting the multiplying population in order to prevent domestic unrest. Frederic Chasseriau echoed this theme in 1846: "the exuberant society spreads beyond its borders to escape from interior convulsion." (153) Victor Hugo, too, voiced his support for the colonization of Algeria on the grounds that it would absorb the growing urban proletariat in France. (154) According to Nazarieux, the benefits of additional territory were multiple, and Chasseriau itemized them in a set of monumental images. The harvesters celebrate the vast expanse of fertile land for agricultural production, bringing to mind Galibert's 1844 citation of Pliny, who called North Africa "the Empire of Ceres." (155) The Commerce murals extol the opening of ports for mercantile exchange, while the young mothers procreate at no risk to the social and political stability of the nation. Nazarieux's notion of the colony stimulating cultural innovation appears in the personifications of architecture, poetry, sculpture, and other artistic pursuits in the foreground of Peace.

[FIGURE 11 OMITTED]

The "fertile land" that Chasseriau described to his brother becomes in this tableau an agricultural utopia, which evokes the promise of France's imperial ambitions founded on the Roman model. Bavoux was only one of many writers who identified Algeria as a breadbasket. He wrote that it "had long fulfilled on her own the double wish of the Romans: bread and circuses; the one for its agricultural fertility, the other for the terrible plentitude of ferocious beasts." (156) In 1845, Victor de Saint-Pierre crowed about the agricultural bounty of an Algeria "flourishing at the time of the Romans for whom it was the granary of abundance." (157) Testifying to the continued currency of this theme, a cultivator named Bailly compiled an agricultural report for the French Ministry of War in 1855 in which he asserted that Algeria would emerge as the granary for France as it had been for Rome: "grain will occupy the first rank. Numidia, which, in antiquity, was the granary of Rome, will become before long that of France, Already huge expanses of land are covered with wheat, and, despite the imperfections of a cultivation still in its infancy, they offer the hope of a rich and abundant harvest." (158) A decade earlier, Quetin's guide provided this kind of technical information for arriving colonists interested in farming tracts of land made available by the French conquest. (159)

The agricultural fertility associated with Algeria is also invoked in Chasseriau's murals by the horizontal frieze placed beneath Peace depicting a row of grape pickers, classically robed youths harvesting and carrying baskets of large bunches of grapes (Fig. 12). (160) The anonymous author of Voyage a Alger, published in 1830, testified to the abundance of this crop, (161) alleging that it was precisely the quality of the grape harvest that established Algeria's promise as a fruitful enterprise. The author notes that "the vine that could not succeed in the Antilles yields grapes here that weigh up to 15 livres." (162) In a triangular panel beneath the Grape Pickers, Chasseriau painted another harvester prostrate, holding bunches of grapes over a deep platter. (163) A note written by the artist on a preliminary sketch for this composition suggests that he may have been impressed enough by the size of the grape harvest predicted by such reports to allegorize it in his program: "either sleeping or pressing white grapes into a dark vat--enormous grapes...." (164)

Chasseriau's handling of these images puts a positive gloss on a controversial issue central to the French claim to Algeria. Agriculture and land use in general were highly contested areas, pitting champions of the war against its opponents and colonists versus the indigenous population. Chasseriau's scene of untroubled agrarian bliss is a French ideal that, as Bailly's report in 1855 demonstrates, remained even then in its infancy. As Bugeaud mentioned several times in his 1847 speech, the development of prosperous agricultural operations of the type that Chasseriau allegorized would require further sacrifices. Algeria's agricultural potential was central to the cost-benefit analyses that drove political debate. A detailed study published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in October 1846 reported that despite the challenges ahead, "Algeria's agricultural resources justified France's enthusiasm for its conquest."(165)

[FIGURE 12 OMITTED]

Furthermore, the conversion of Algerian land to industrial-scale wheat farming threatened the pastoral way of life of the native population. Several government officials, Lamartine most notably, were scandalized by the army's use of the razzia, or raid, derived from a tactic used by the Roman army. In the oration cited above, Lamartine decried the practice of sweeping down on native encampments, appropriating their herds, and striking at their livelihood. He claimed that it was a part of a larger strategy to expel them violently from areas to be farmed by colonists. (166) The currency of this debate is demonstrated by its absorption into images by Chasseriau's contemporaries. Auguste Raffet executed a lithograph of a razzia, while Philippoteaux exhibited his version of the maneuver at the Salon of 1844. (167)

In contrast to the pastoral and nomadic way of life of many of Algeria's rural natives, whose livelihood was compromised by the French occupation, Chasseriau's community is visibly stationary and connected to the tilled land. There is a marked divergence between the fertility thematized in Peace and the scavenging habits and desolate landscapes that were discussed as characteristic of life on the Arab douar, tent villages inhabited by nomads. (168) The general consensus that rural Arabs were dangerously itinerant and unwilling to settle down led many officials, including Tocqueville, to the conclusion that the only way to secure Algeria for France was the arrival on African territory of a European agricultural population. Bugeaud insisted that converting rural Algerian Arabs to an agrarian lifestyle should be a priority. (169)

Chasseriau's comment to his brother regarding the "sacrifice" necessary to reap the benefits from Algeria can be found in yet another contemporary source, this one authored by a rabid imperialist, an officer retired from the Hussards, who did not hide his antagonism toward the Algerian natives. His opinionated treatise advocated such sacrifices while, at the same time, making reference to Bugeaud's plan to import settlers to Algeria and the prestige that would accrue to France with the colonization of the territory: "That France hire peaceful and honest farmers to establish themselves in Algeria to clear it. Then France will applaud itself for its immense sacrifices; she will find at her door that which she had lost in the rest of the world." (170)

The consolidation of this policy aimed at settling intransigent Arabs dovetailed with numerous accounts that established the stability of the Kabyles' agrarian lifestyle. Berbers who inhabited the Atlas Mountains southeast of Algiers, Kabyles were the fiercest opponents of the French occupation, submitting to it only in 1857. They became subject to a considerable amount of speculation by French ethnographers as to their origins and customs. As Patricia Lorcin has shown, the valorization of the pastoral Kabyle was achieved at the expense of the nomadic Arab. Dr. Eugene Bodichon, for example, shared Tocqueville's view that Kabyles were innately predisposed to adopt European civilization. He asserted that they were an agricultural people who did not disdain hard work. (171) This image gained increasing authority in midcentury French paintings depicting Kabyle agriculture in terms similar to those deployed in Chasseriau's Peace mural. (172)

The Benefits of Commerce

Flanking the larger Peace panel in Chasseriau's original cycle stood a pair of murals illustrating the theme of commerce (Fig. 13). Only Eastern Merchants on a Western Shore survives more or less intact. Its pendant, Western Merchants in an Oriental Port, was irretrievably lost during the initial fire in 1871. A preliminary drawing in the Louvre combines motifs from the extant mural with notes that seem to refer to the composition of the other panel. Surrounding a figure leaning forward slightly that Chasseriau incorporated into Eastern Merchants (the tunics worn by the figures in the drawing and the final mural are almost identical), the artist reminded himself to include "all the rosy blond races" and "all the Moorish and African races." (173) The interest in racial distinctions, especially the differentiation of skin color, is clearly evident in the surviving mural, where the two merchants and their standing black oarsman are shown with contrasting complexions. Chasseriau's Algerian albums dwell in specific terms on the skin tone and physiognomy of Arabs and Moors that he encountered. This information informed the features of the bowing merchant in preliminary drawings. (174)

[FIGURE 13 OMITTED]

Marked by research carried out during his voyage, Commerce also demonstrates Chasseriau's attentiveness to a central issue of the Algerian campaign. As allegorical treatments of commercial exchange, the pair of Commerce murals bear witness to the importance of the sea and international trade to Chasseriau's family, which, even before his father's service in Egypt under Napoleon and peregrinations around the Caribbean, had ties to the Atlantic port of La Rochelle. (175) Christine Peltre notes that the timing of the publication of Frederic Chasseriau's Vie de l'amiral Duperre in 1848 coincided with the completion of Theodore's murals. (176) Chasseriau's Commerce murals, like his brother's text, seem to celebrate the opening of international trade as a result of the French conquest of Algeria, which effectively deprived the Barbary pirates of their lair. Frederic underlines this "security returned to the Mediterranean destined perhaps to become once again the center of political commercial activity in the world." (177)

The commercial benefits accruing to France with the defeat of the dey and the annexation of Algeria was a constant theme in the treatises published in the two decades that followed Duperre's victory. Galibert, for example, reassured his readers that "commerce in Algeria has assumed an importance that will steadily increase and which merits the attention of the metropole." (178) Quetin attested to the dramatic growth in shipping between the outset of the colonial adventure and the moment of his writing: "In 1831, Algeria received only 123 ships from France. This year there have arrived almost 1,900 carrying around 154,000 tons." (179) Such boasting asserted the improved international networks and expanded volume brought to a territory already well known for its commercial activity. Prior to 1830, the American consul William Shaler, an astute observer of economic indicators, praised the Moors for their efforts to foster international trade. In a phrase that suggests the reasons behind Chasseriau's choice of the title Commerce Brings Peoples Together and its emphasis on reconciliation, Shaler described commerce as "the all powerful mollifier of national and religious animosities." (180)

Alongside their enumeration of the apparent benefits for French mercantilism, authors incorporated the theme of commerce into discussions regarding the fundamental differences between Kabyles and Arabs. Edmond de Pellissier de Reynaud insisted that a class of merchants and artisans was conspicuously absent from Arab hierarchical society. Theorists such as Tocqueville felt this lack needed to be addressed if French domination over Algeria was to succeed. (181) Kabyles, however, as early as 1830, were identified as industrious and Kabylia as a source of trading commodities. In notes taken during his voyage to Algeria, Tocqueville lamented that the French seemed unable to cement commercial ties with the Kabyles. In an 1847 report, he favored cultivating economic links with Kabylia rather than resorting to conquest, advocating the kind of rapprochement that Chasseriau thematizes in his Commerce pendants. (182)

Quetin traced this theme to a Roman precedent: "it is therefore with the Kabyles that it is necessary to hasten to establish natural links of commerce and exchange, and to create direct and positive interest, just as the Carthaginians and the Romans did with the Berbers." (183) The archaeologist Adolphe Dureau de la Malle, too, insisted that trade between ancient Berbers and Romans and Carthaginians provided a useful model for similar networks between France and modern Kabyles. (184) One of the cornerstones of Bugeaud's Algerian policy was the promotion of commerce between French authorities and recently subjugated Arabs and Berber tribes. Believing that "it will be trade that subdues the Arabs" and binds them to France, Bugeaud endorsed commerce with all indigenous peoples that pledged to cease acts of war. (185) Bugeaud's edict (March 6, 1841) to this effect was issued only months before Chasseriau first outlined his plan for a composition on the theme of commerce in an annotated drawing dated July 1841. (186) The final composition painted by Chasseriau in the Cour des Comptes, and its placement flanking Peace, obeyed the general contours of the design articulated on that sheet.

Revising Ripa: Allegory, Archaeology, and Algerian Policy

Predicting that commercial prosperity would develop as French interests in Algeria multiplied, Quetin's guide quoted Bugeaud's insistence on the continued presence of a military government in the territory. The marechal asserted a direct link between commerce and force: "Everything is moving forward: Algerian commerce, already interesting for France and the rest of Europe, will soon grow as a result of the pacification of the territory supported by force." (187) The notion that commercial interests depended on the military is embedded in the placement and interaction of Chasseriau's murals. According to Gautier, the two main murals were linked compositionally and conceptually by the panel entitled Force and Order (Fig. 14). He wrote, "Order and Force ... entwining themselves by the arm and holding out the other, each toward the series of compositions that emerge from their respective power: Force toward the War mural, and the other toward the Peace mural." (188) Thus, despite their antithetical relation, the two principal panels were incorporated into the single overarching design by the intertwined bodies of these allegorical figures surveying the expanse of the staircase and the other murals from their perch high above the penultimate landing. Serving as compositional hub and providing moral ballast, Force and Order held the whole cycle together through the figures' linked arms and their protective outstretched gestures, part benediction and part strong-arm warning. Like Silence, which set the initial tone for the unfolding ritual, the gestures of Force and Order cast a sacramental air over the proceedings. Commanding attention and directing vision, their arms, like those of a conjurer, brought the imagery under their control to life. According to Fletcher, the allegorist often employs imitative magic in ritualized plots in lieu of the plausible connection of events. In this light, we might think of Chasseriau's program as an effort to bring real events into alignment with their emblematic counterparts. (189) Under the spell cast by Force and Order, the allegories resonated with issues vital to the security of French interests in North Africa.

It is with this panel that we can trace to a common source the themes enshrined in Chasseriau's murals and the language he used to represent them. As we have seen, political debate and archaeology were firmly intertwined. The Roman paradigm burnished by excavated monuments in Algeria charted a course for future action. It is this temporal reflexiveness that underwrites the visual effect of Chasseriau's ensemble. Incorporating formal references to objects uncovered in Algeria opened his images to readings that drew on the African debate. To be sure, force as a concept had been embedded in political discourse for centuries, but it had an immediate currency in the Algerian visual arena and in the terminology of Bugeaud's rhetoric. An allegory of Force also appears in one of the medallions painted by Eloi Firmin Feron in the decorative frieze commissioned by Louis Philippe in 1844 for the Salle de Constantine at Versailles. It appears that the model for Chasseriau's conjoined figures, too, was drawn from the Algerian sphere. The pair, Male (Order) and Female (Force), reminded Gautier of the pose of Neptune and Amphitrite by Giulio Romano. (190) Chasseriau's attenuation of his figures certainly borrows a Mannerist aesthetic. (191) But Gautier's reference to the mythological couple is equally revealing. Although Chasserian may have looked to Romano for lithe bodies and elegance of gesture, he probably sought elsewhere for their conjoined pose. Apart from the outer arms, the composition of Force and Order corresponds to that of Neptune and Amphitrite in the late Roman mosaic of Coudiat-Aty found at Constantine and brought back to the Louvre by Delamare (Fig. 6). Their interlaced inner arms and contiguous bodies offered a fluid linchpin for Chasseriau's program. His recourse to this work for the monumental seminude figures explains the unprecedented coupling of these two allegorical figures even as it underlines the debt of the Cour des Comptes murals to archaeological excavations in Algeria. (192) Gautier suggested that the artist wanted his robust personification of Force to express moral rectitude rather than physical strength. (193) Invoking the mythological narrative linking Neptune's queen to North Africa offered a solution. Amphitrite, called Salacia by the Romans, wanted to remain a virgin and took refuge in the Atlas Mountains before agreeing to marry the god of the sea. Gautier compares the strength of conviction embodied by Chasseriau's figure to the fortitude possessed by Prometheus in his standoff with Jupiter. (194) This determination to defend a principle whatever the cost was exactly the perseverance Bugeaud demanded of his government when he requested continued sacrifice.

[FIGURE 14 OMITTED]

Moral force was backed by concrete action. Just as the model for Chasseriau's mural came to light as a result of a military intervention, the painting seems animated by Bugeaud's strategy. In a diary entry dated to between 1835 and 1840, Victor Hugo remarked apropos of Algeria, "Military colonization should cover and envelop civilian colonization like a wall covers and envelops the city." (195) In 1847, Bugeaud was unambiguous on this issue: "we can perpetuate ourselves in Africa only by force." (196) Later in the same exhortation, Bugeaud made a point that may explain Chasseriau's choice of the extended arms linking Force and Order to the rest of the program. The duc d'Isly claimed that no progress was possible in Algeria "without the support of the government and ... the numerous and intelligent arms of its army...." (197) In this light, Chasseriau's images appear to endorse Bugeaud's claim that the realization of results justifying the sacrifice already made in Algeria required the continued investment of forces to maintain order and security.

Chasseriau painted the entwined pair of limbs that joins the two bodies and marks the nucleus of the cycle attached to the tawny mane of a lion. The way the three figures fit together, the lion providing a seat for, but also subdued by, the two monumental bodies above him, suggests a degree of compositional tension between them. The lion, long an attribute of allegorical representations of Force, was also widely identified as the symbol of Barbary, an embodiment of the savage state of Algeria before the arrival of civilization with the Romans. It was the "ferocious beast" trapped and shipped to the capital for bloody spectacles staged in the Colosseum and other arenas. Contemporary variations of this kind of sport were seized on by Horace Vernet, who depicted lion hunts showing French officers and indigenous Arab cavaliers performing acts of equestrian derring-do locked in combat with carnivorous beasts. (198) Victor Adam framed his lithograph La chasse a la lionne with the decapitated heads of male lions, hung in the upper corners like hunting trophies (Fig. 15): these bear a striking resemblance to the disembodied and strangely one-dimensional lion's head in Force and Order. The African resonance of Chasseriau's lion was also encouraged by the publication of Gautier's poem "Le lion de l'Atlas" in the Revue des Deux Mondes in August 1846. (199)

[FIGURE 15 OMITTED]

To a Parisian audience lions and the lion hunt signaled that the French were following in the footsteps of their Roman predecessors in the Maghrib. Bavoux captured the aspects of the beast synonymous with North Africa that Chasseriau surely had in mind: "The lion established in Africa, as he has elsewhere, his royal superiority; magnanimous, noble in his commanding presence and character, he parades his majestic authority in vast deserts and forests." (200) There is a certain amount of give and take in the compositional rapport between Force and Order and their leonine companion. On the one hand, the lion lends greater clout to their controlling air. On the other, he is subdued, kept under control by the weight of their bodies and their clasped hands entwined in his luxuriant mane. Chasseriau thus allegorizes the French predicament in Algeria in about 1847 as it was presented in Bugeaud's speech. Having conquered, although just, a vast, virgin territory full of intransigent local inhabitants, French forces had a firm although not completely secure foothold, requiring constant vigilance and renewed investment. At the same time, the lion, momentarily restrained by his captors, lends them some of his majesty, in the same way that the rich natural resources and commercially viable ports of Algeria provided France with much-needed prestige at a crucial juncture.

Even the placement of Force and Order high above the stairwell, suspended in the bright expanse of the upper story of the Cour des Comptes, points to a monument decorated with lions associated with the port of Algiers that Chasseriau might have heard or read about. J.-A. Bolle, in his Souvenirs de l'Algerie published in 1839, noted that the entrance into Algiers through the Porte de la Marine was decorated with a "crude fresco" depicting "two chained lions." At the time of Bolle's voyage in 1838, the fresco had already been painted over by an overzealous mayor, so it certainly no longer existed when Chasseriau arrived in Algiers in 1846. (201) Nonetheless, the link between this historic and multivalent symbol of the Barbary Coast, at once noble, ferocious, and evocative of an ancient heritage, and the rough fresco painting decorating a public monument is suggestive of Chasseriau's own project at the Cour des Comptes. Moreover, the location of the chained lions in the space over the archway leading into the city of Algiers from the harbor may be evoked in Chasseriau's placement of Force and Order high above the viewer entering the Cour des Comptes. Like the chained lions standing sentry over the entrance to the city of Algiers. Chasseriau's mural guarded, as it were, the entry to the precincts of the government offices. The medium of the lost fresco, too, was recalled by Chasseriau's distinctive frescolike style and its historical allusions.

North Africa as a living antiquity is a central topos of nineteenth-century French Orientalism. Algeria's special agency as the more direct conduit to a vanished classical world explains why Chasseriau felt it necessary to travel there while his work on the Cour des Comptes was still in process. He went armed with letters of introduction written by Tocqueville, who engineered the commission and knew Algeria from firsthand experience. At the very least, the rediscovered antiquity offered a rich inspirational realm for a painter charged with covering a vast staircase of a public building with allegorical figures. Yet the sources and political resonance of his stylistic vocabulary should not be overlooked in the analysis of the overall program. In addition to underpinning grand public art, classicism and its lexicon set the terms of debate for the African question. Algeria, as a source for this language, promised redemption for both the French nation and its modern art. Monumentalizing images drawn from the North African theater presented the means to consolidate a collective sensibility that critics demanded of artists and public alike. In fact, the preface of an article published in L'Illustration reviewing the Salon of 1846, which opened a few months before Chasseriau's departure for Algeria, demonstrates how closely linked were the political and artistic spheres. The author, calling for a painter with Homeric vision, complained that no artist had yet produced images of epic proportions that the conquest of Algeria required. (202)

We have proposed the ways in which Chasseriau's project responded to the appeal for a consensus-building monumental art. His allegorical program, both in the manner it functioned in a particular space that no longer exists and in the various motifs that the artist incorporated into his design, addressed arguments deployed in favor of continued investment in Algeria and, in particular, the delicate situation in which the champions of the Algerian enterprise found themselves in 1847. The affinities between Chasseriau's cycle and Bugeaud's arguments in favor of continued state funding for the colonial project take on added significance within the confines of the Cour des Comptes. Taking advantage of how the staircase moved the viewer through space and located the spectator within the oppositional relation of two long horizontal facing walls, Chasseriau seems to have created a temporal experience that spelled out in allegorized terms what was at stake for the French nation in Algeria at a crucial moment of national accounting.

Returning to Ruins

In 1871, Theophile Gautier, Chasseriau's friend and critical champion, returned to the Cour des Comptes, where he confronted the artist's deteriorating "frescoes," which, in their prime, had articulated French designs in Algeria. Following the same route that he had taken in 1848, Gautier became during this second visit a kind of archaeologist picking his way through the debris and reconstructing a monument in his mind from a few damaged fragments. (203) In the wake of the Paris violence wrought by the Commune, where it seemed to Gautier that "two thousand years had passed in a single night," Chasseriau's murals were turned into a Roman ruin not unlike those dotting the Algerian landscape. Yet whereas Adrien Dauzats's melancholic view of the Arch of Djemila was part of the terminal moraine left by the ebb of Roman expansionism, Chasseriau's paintings languishing in the shell of the Palais d'Orsay seem to have foretold the fate of the troubled French attempt to emulate their imperial forebears. Assembled from classical vocabulary, elements of which came into focus with the excavation of a Roman past under the sponsorship of the French Ministry of War, Chasseriau's Cour des Comptes murals, while still intact, echoed the rhetoric of the colonial enterprise. His panoramic vision of the "results" of many years of "sacrifices," an idealized arcadia annexed to the metropole, was brought to a premature end by an incendiary act of violence. Reduced to a ruin, Chasseriau's murals were transformed from an allegory of a promising colonial future into a premonition of its eventual demise.

Notes

This article began as a chapter in my doctoral dissertation written under the supervision of Linda Nochlin. I am very grateful to her and all those who offered editorial and bibliographic suggestions as I revised it to its present form: Robert Rosenblum, Robert Lubar, Stephane Guegan, Mark Haxthausen. Amy Hamlin, Charlotte Mosley, Emmanuel Ducamp, Deepak Ananth, and Jennifer Olmsted. I am particularly indebted to Marc Gotlieb, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, and the anonymous reader, as well as Lory Frankel, from The Art Bulletin for their perceptive readings of the manuscript. Special thanks to Etienne Hellman. Giovanni Panebianco, and Seema Srivastava. Preliminary research was supported by a Theodore Rousseau Fellowship awarded by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

1. On the building itself, see Jean-Marc Leri, "Le Palais du Quai d'Orsay (1810-1871)," Bulletin de la Societe de l'Histoire de l'Art Francais, 1978: 387-93.

2. For the most recent resume of the misfortunes suffered by these murals, see the entry by Vincent Pomarede in Chasseriau, 214-17.

3. Marius Vachon, "A M. le Directeur des Beaux-Arts," La France, Jan. 9, 1879, 3, confessed, "The building on the quai d'Orsay was never more beautiful or picturesque than since it burned [Jamais la batiment du quai d'Orsay n'a ete si beau et si pittoresque que depuis qu'il est incendie]." Vachon's comments were echoed by Arsene Alexandre, "Les fresques de Chasserian," Album des Musees, no. 5 (Nov. 7, 1891): 17-18: "Beaucoup de curieux ont visite le lamentable, mais bien pittoresque tohu-bohu de la Cour des Comptes...." (Many curious onlookers have visited the pathetic, but very picturesque confusion of the Cour des Comptes....) and reprinted in Ary Renan, "Les peintures de Chasseriau a la Cour des Comptes," Revue Populaire des Beaux-Arts, 2nd year, no. 14 (Jan. 22, 1898): 221.

4. For a summary of the restorations to the extant mural fragments, see Cinzia Pasquali-Vidler, Veronique Sorano-Stedman, and Beatrice Lauwick, "Les peintures de la Cour des Comptes," Dossier de l'Art 85 (Apr. 2002): 52-67.

5. Maurice Denis, "Les eleves d'Ingres," L'Occident (1902): 147: "La fatalite qui s'est attache a ce grand ouvrage a rendu plus evidentes encore par ces ruines effritees les analogies reelles entre l'art de Chasseriau et les fresques antiques retrouvees dans les decombres de Pompei." See also Ary Renan, "Theodore Chasseriau et les peintures du Palais de la Cour des Comptes," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 3rd ser., 19 (Feb. 1, 1898): 94.

6. For a reconstruction of the mural program, I have relied on Gerard M. Doyon, "The Positions of the Panels Decorated by Theodore Chasseriau at the Former Cour des Comptes in Paris," Gazette des Beaux-Arts 73 (Jan. 1969): 47-56.

7. There are few clues in the existing documentation relating to the commission as to whether Chasseriau was assigned a program by the minister of the interior. The outlines of the design were most likely fixed by late December 1843, six months before the commission was entrusted to the artist. On that date, Frederic Chasseriau, the artist's brother, wrote to the comtesse de Tocqueville in order to enlist her support for Theodore's candidacy. See Frederic Chasseriau to the comtesse de Tocqueville, Dec. 27, [1843], quoted in Chasseriau, 186: "Ce que mon frere souhaite ardemment, c'est de consacrer tout ce qu'il a de facultes a une oeuvre serieuse et belle dont deja la composition est arretee dans sa pensee" (what my brother so fervently wishes is to devote all of his abilities to a serious and beautiful work, whose composition is already established in his mind). This letter suggests that the program originated in Chasserian's imagination rather than from a directive of the Fine Arts Administration. The commission was approved by the minister of the interior on June 11, 1844, and Chasseriau indicated in his acceptance letter five days later that he would soon be able to show the subjects that he had chosen and the sketches of them that he had prepared.

8. I am focusing here on the political uses of allegory in civic monuments on the basis that its use in that context appealed to a different set of concerns than did religious allegory. For mural painting considered against the political climate of this period, see Michael Marrinan, Painting Politics for Louis-Philippe: Art and Ideology in Orleanist France, 1830-1848 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). On 19th-century mural painting more generally, see Marc J. Gotlieb, The Plight of Emulation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 9-95; Louis Scott Goehring, "Elevating Environments: Reflections of an Ideal Order in French Mural Decoration 1830-1860," Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1989; Stefan Germer, Historizitat und Autonomie: Studien zu Wandbildern im Frankreich des 19. Jahrhunderts: Ingres, Chasseriau, Chenavard und Puvis de Chavannes (New York: Hildesheim, 1988), esp. 1-117; Leon Rosenthal, Du romantisme au realisme: La peinture en France de 1830 a 1848 (Paris: Macula, 1987), 298-344; and Michael Driskel, "An Introduction to the Art," in The Art of the July Monarchy: France 1830-1848, by the Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Missouri, Columbia (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990). For murals as church decoration in the period, see Bruno Foucart, Le renouveau de la peinture religieuse en France (1800-1860) (Paris: Arthena, 1986); Driskel, Representing Belief: Religion, Art and Society in Nineteenth-Century France (University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 1992); and Andrew C. Shelton, "'Les Marchands Sont Plus que Jamais dans le Temple': The Revival of Monumental Decorative Painting in France during the July Monarchy (1830-1848)," in Art in Bourgeois Society, 1790-1850, ed. Andrew Hemingway and William Vaughan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 178-99.

9. Tocqueville's intervention is recounted by Marius Vachon, Le Palais du Conseil d'Etat et de la Cour des Comptes (Paris: A. Quantin, 1879), 20-21. In this context, it is also noteworthy that Frederic Chasseriau was the author of a guide to colonial administration entitled Des colonies (extrait du Dictionnaire general d'administration) (Paris: Paul Dupont, 1846).

10. Alexis de Tocqueville, Rapports sur l'Algerie (1847), excerpted in De la colonie en Algerie, ed. Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: Complexe, 1988), 155: "Nous admettrons donc, comme une verite demontree, que notre domination en Afrique doit etre fermement maintenue." On Tocqueville and Algeria, see Andre Jardin, "En Algerie: Notice," in Oeuvres completes, by Alexis de Tocqueville, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 1493-1500; idem, "Tocqueville et l'Algerie," Revue des Travaux de l'Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, 4th ser., 115 (1962): 61-74; Todorov, "Tocqueville et la doctrine coloniale," in Tocqueville, 1988, 9-34; and Francoise Melonio, "Le choc des civilisations: Chasseriau et Tocqueville en Algerie," in Chasseriau (1819-1856): Un autre romantisme; Actes du colloque (Paris: Louvre/La Documentation Francaise, 2002), 171-96.

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."

23. Pelletan (as in n. 12), 2.

24. Gautier (as in n. 20), 114: "De meme l'ornementation de grands edifices nationaux, la frequence des fetes populaires, tout le mouvement d'une vie generale inconnue jusqu'a present, vont necessiter de realiser sous forme palpable des idees et des abstractions dont ne s'etaient pas avises Richardson, Gravelot, Cesar Ripa et les auteurs d'iconographie." Gautier refers to the following works: George Richardson, Iconology (London, 1779); Hubert-Francois Gravelot and Charles-Nicolas Cochin, Iconologie, ou Traite de la science des allegories et emblemes (Paris, 1791); and Cesare Ripa and Jean Baudoin, Iconologie (Paris, 1644). Ripa's manual was first published in 1593.

25. Ronchaud, 23. On these decors, see Arlette Serullaz, ed., et al., Eugene Delacroix a l'Assemblee Nationale: Peintures murales, esquisses, dessins, exh. cat. (Paris: Assemblee Nationale / Seuil, 1995); Maurice Serullaz, Les peintures murales de Delacroix (Paris: Editions du Temps, 1963), 27-48; and Robert N. Beetem, "Horace Vernet's Mural in the Palais Bourbon: Contemporary Imagery, Modern Technology, and Classical Allegory during the July Monarchy," Art Bulletin 66, no. 2 (1984): 254-69. On Chasseriau's indebtedness to Delacroix's murals in the Salon du Roi, see Vincent Pomarede, "The Cour des Comptes Years," in Chasseriau, 192.

26. Todd Porterfield, The Allure of Empire. Art in the Sevice of French Imperialism 1798-1836 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 137.

27. Arsene Houssaye, "Beaux-Arts: La Chambre des Deputes et les peintures de M. Eugene Delacroix," L'Artiste, 2nd ser., vol. 1, no. 27 (1839): 391. The full sentence reveals Houssaye's ambivalence: "Mais, en meme temps, on pourrait, avec raison, accuser l'insignificance de toutes ces vieilles allegories dont il a rajeuni la forme, sans en mediter profondement la pensee."

28. Gustave Planche, "Eugene Delacroix: Le Salon du Roi," in Portraits d'artistes, peintres et sculpteurs, 2 vols. (Paris: M. Levy, 1853), vol. 2, 29, differentiates Delacroix's murals from traditional allegory: "Allegory reduced to itself pleases only those spirits used to looking in painting for painting itself, and rarely affects the larger public [L'Allegorie reduite a elle-meme ne peut plaire qu'aux esprits habitues a chercher dans la peinture la peinture elle-meme, et n'agit que bien rarement sur la foule]."

29. Ronchaud, 44-45: "Pour celui qui serait assis sur le fauteuil royal la figure plus proche serait la Justice, et plus eloignee la Guerre; l'Agriculture se trouverait a droite et l'Industrie a gauche. Cette disposition n'est sans doute pas arbitraire. M. Delacroix a voulu qu'en levant les yeux le prince recontrat pour premier conseil celui de proteger l'innocent et l'oprime; il a indique la justice comme la premiere des vertus royales" (The closest figure to the person sitting on the throne would be Justice and the furthest away War; Agriculture is located to the right and Industry to the left. This arrangement is undoubtedly not arbitrary. M. Delacroix wanted the prince, in raising his eyes, to encounter as his primary counsel the figure protecting the innocent and the oppressed; he indicated Justice as the first of the royal virtues).

30. Beetem (as in n. 25), 255.

31. Ronchaud, 27: "mais encore des drames recents, joues sur le berceau meme de nos institutions nouvelles, attendant qu'une main patriote ose les faire reviver sur les murailles des monuments dont la destination est dans un rapport etroit avec ces institutions memes."

32. On the problems of modern allegory, see Beetem (as in n. 25), esp. 264-69.

33. For the identification of Vernet's figure in North African dress as an Algerian, see A. J. D., "Plafond du Salon de la Paix, a la Chambre des Deputes, par M. Horace Vernet," L'Illustration 10, no. 252 (Dec. 25, 1847): 264.

34. Louis Clement de Ris, "La Bibliotheque et le Salon de la Paix a la Chambre des Deputes: Peintures de MM. Eugene Delacroix et Horace Vernet," L'Artiste, 4th ser., vol. 11 (Jan. 9, 1848): 156.

35. Chasseriau, quoted in Prat, vol. 1, 244-45, cat. no. 514: "faire monumental mais pourtant reel."

36. Chasseriau, quoted in Leonce Benedite, Theodore Chasseriau: Sa vie, son oeuvre, 2 vols. (Paris: Braun, [1931]), vol. 2, 282: "Ne rien faire d'impossible, trouver la poesie dans le reel."

37. Pierre Malintourne, "Art monumentale: Les peintures de M. Theodore Chasseriau, au Palais d'Orsay," L'Artiste 2, no. 8 (Dec. 15, 1848): 123: "cette realite, jetee brusquement au mileu de tout ce symbolisme."

38. Van Uitert (as in n. 17), 173-77.

39. Gautier (as in n. 19), 1: "Je ne partage pas les modernes repugnances a l'endroit de l'allegorie" (I do not share the modern repugnance for allegory).

40. In 1847 Gautier, after a partial viewing of the project still in progress, called the murals "colossal allegorical compositions [colossales compositions allegoriques]." See Theophile Gautier, "La Croix de Berny," La Presse, Jan. 31, 1847, 1.

41. Gautier, 1-2: "Ces belles peintures ont un aspect rare et particulier quiles separe nettement des allegories ordinaires.... Elles ont une certaine grace bizarre et manieree, un certain charme fantastique dans le gout du florentin. Pour le caractere general, on pourrait dire de M. Chasseriau qu'il est un Indien qui a fait ses etudes en Grece. Il jette dans le monde antique la beaute inconnue des races nouvelles ou du moins que jusqu'ici le pinceau a dedaignees."

42. On colonial-era anthropology in Algeria, see Lorcin.

43. Theophile Gautier, "Salon de 1844," La Presse, Mar. 26, 1844, 2.

44. Gautier, 2. Ethnographers in Algeria examined body markings in their studies of the racial origins of the indigenous population. See Edouard Lapene, Vingt-six mois a Bougie (Paris: Ancelin, 1839), 123, cited by Lorcin, 22: and Francois Ducuing, "La guerre de montagne: La Kabylie," Revue des Deux Mondes 10 (Apr.-June 1851): 234. Chasseriau featured a young mother with her face and forearm covered in blue markings in Arab Horsemen Leaving for the Fantasia (watercolor, 1847, Musee du Louvre, Paris).

45. Gautier's characterization of the hybrid qualities of these allegories repeats the critic's comments regarding Chasseriau's Sabbath Day in the Jewish Quarter of Constantine, the painter's manifesto on canvas defining the new aesthetic he pioneered out of the raw material gathered in Algeria. The importance of this work, according to Gautier, resided in its presentation of "the faces of Africa," "a bouquet of the purest types of these beautiful races that are now under our control.... [Le tableau ne fut-il pas--ce qu'il est--de premiere force, cette idee de reveler a la France les physiognomies de l'Afrique, de lui presenter comme en un bouquet, les plus purs types de ces belles races qui nous sont maintenant soumises....]." Gautier, "Exposition de 1847," La Presse, Mar. 31, 1847, 1. On Sabbath Day, see Stephane Guegan, "L'Algerie au Coeur: Note sur un tableau perdu," in Chasseriau: Un autre romantisme (as in n. 10), 319-39.

46. On Saint-Simonianism in Algeria, see Charles Andre Julien, Histoire de l'Algerie contemporaine, vol. 1, Conquete et colonisation (Paris: P.U.F., 1964), 231-32, 256; Lorcin, 99-117; and Marcel Emerit, Les Saint-Simoniens en Algerie (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1941).

47. Neil McWilliam, Dreams of Happiness: Social Art and the French Left 1830-1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 59.

48. Prosper Enfantin (1786-1864) was originally enlisted by the Commission d'Exploration Scientifique d'Algerie to write an ethnographic study of Berbers in the Aures Mountains but instead penned his idiosyncratic Saint-Simonian treatise La colonisation de l'Algerie (Paris: Bertrand, 1843). It was excluded from the thirty-nine volumes produced by the commission.

49. McWilliam (as in n. 47), 114.

50. Gautier (as in n. 43), 2.

51. Arsene Houssaye, "Republique des arts et des lettres: Salon de 1848," L'Artiste, 5th ser., vol. 1, no. 2 (Mar. 19, 1848): 19: "M. Theodore Chasseriau semble n'avoir etudie ni avec les Grecs du siecle d'or, ni avec les Espagnols, ni avec 'ceux de son pays' (comme on disait a la Renaissance).... C'est un artiste d'Orient qui a visite la cour magique de la reine de Golconde."

52. Theophile Gautier, "Salon de 1850-51," La Presse, Mar. 1, 1851, 2.

53. Theophile Gautier, introduction to the sale catalogue of the collection of Khalil-Bey, Paris, 1866, reprinted in Michele Haddad, Khalil-Bey: Un homme, une collection (Paris: Editions de l'Amateur, 2000), 154.

54. Theophile Gautier, Les Beaux-Arts en Europe: 1855 (Paris: Michel Levy Freres, 1856), 245: "Au sentiment de la beaute grec, il joint celui de la beaute asiatique, comme si, forme a l'ecole d'Athenes ou de Sicyone, il avait long-temps habite Sardes, Ephese, Milet ou Suse; ses voyages en Afrique n'ont fait que confirmer cette disposition naturelle chez lui; aussi ce sujet convenait-il on ne peut mieux a son talent" (To the feeling for Greek beauty, he added that for Asiatic beauty, as if, formed at the school of Athens or Sikyon, he had lived for years in Sardis, Ephesus, Miletus, or Susa; his voyages to Africa only confirmed this natural tendency in him; this subject was suited like no other to his talent).

55. Chasseriau, in his letter of acceptance to the minister of the interior, wrote that he would have "l'honneur de lui soumettre les sujets et les esquisses des compositions qui me semblent devoir le mieux s'adapter au style et a la destination du monument." Chasseriau to comte Duchatel, minister of the interior, Paris, June 16, 1844, Archives Nationales F21, 4402, dossier 13, quoted in Chasseriau, 270.

56. Gautier, 1: "En face, dans le panneau oblique qui monte avec l'escalier, le Silence, personnifie par une belle femme le doigt sur la bouche, indique le respect du a un endroit serieux: c'est en quelque sorte le genius loci, l'initiatrice calme et sereine qui prend par la main le visiteur tout assourdi encore des bruits de la rue et l'invite a gravir les degres d'un pas recueilli."

57. McWilliam (as in n. 47), 63.

58. Ibid., 63.

59. Tzvetan Todorov, "Tocqueville's Nationalism," History and Anthropology 4 (1990): 361.

60. I should note that Christine Peltre has considered certain of the panels through the lens of colonial Algeria. She proposes, but does not develop, some of the ideas explored in this essay. See Peltre, 223-40. The standard references for the mural project as a whole are Vachon (as in n. 9); Jean Guiffrey and Andre Linzeler, "Les peintures decoratives de Chasseriau a l'ancienne Cour des Comptes," 241-48, and Linzeler, "Les peintures decoratives de Chasseriau a l'ancienne Cour des Comptes," 249-56, Beaux-Arts, no. 16 (Sept. 1-15, 1926); Benedite (as in n. 36); Gerard M. Doyon, "The Mural Painting of Theodore Chasseriau," Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1964; Doyon (as in n. 6); Marc Sandoz, Theodore Chasseriau, 1819-1856: Catalogue raisonne des peintures et estampes (Paris: Arts et Metiers Graphiques, 1974), 226-47; Germer (as in n. 8), 227-301: Peltre, "La description comme sauvegarde: A propos de la decoration de la Cour des Comptes par Theodore Chasseriau (1844-1848)," in Le texte de l'oeuvre d'art: La description,