[080417klu1100]{.underline}

Mary Lou Reker:

Greetings, my name is Mary Lou Reker, and on behalf of the Office of
Scholarly Programs and the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress
\[Library\] I want to welcome you to today's talk by Jennifer Sessions
entitled, "An Empire for a King: The Conquest of Algeria and
Louis-Philippe's Versailles." Dr. Jennifer Sessions holds a 2007 Kluge
Fellowship, a fellowship made possible through a generous endowment
given to the Library by the Library's benefactor, John W. Kluge. Dr.
Sessions is, in her life apart from the Library, an assistant professor
of modern French history in the Department of History at the University
of Iowa. Dr. Sessions's Ph.D. in history was awarded along with a
certificate in African studies from the University of Pennsylvania. She
has received a significant number of grants and fellowships from
organizations such as the Getty Foundation, the National Endowment for
the Humanities, the Society of French and Francophone Professors of \[
*sic*, in\] America, and from the cultural services section of the
French government. She has been invited to lecture on her subject both
in the U.S. and abroad, and contributed articles to a variety of both
English and French language journals. And I would do Jennifer an
injustice having just come from the dentist if I even began to try to
pronounce any of these, so I will forgo that.

Her research work focuses on the immersion \-- rather the intersection
of culture and politics, particularly as it relates to France's overseas
empire. Much of her fellowship research here at the Library has been
devoted to the early phase of French military presence in Algeria, a
topic that will be part of her forthcoming book. Today she is going to
speak on one chapter of that book, and I want to also mention that she
has done most of her research here at the Library in the rare books
division \[Rare Book and Special Collections Division\], also using
periodicals and had some help also from the European Division. So the
Kluge Center is certainly grateful to all the folks that have been
involved in helping Jennifer and any of the other Kluge scholars who
have been here.

Today, Dr. Sessions will discuss how the museum of national history that
was located in the Versailles palace presented the French conquest of
Algeria to those who visited its galleries. She will examine the
creation of and the public reception to those galleries, which were
decorated with works commissioned by King Louis-Philippe and created in
large measure by Horace Vernet, who has been called the chief
hagiographer of Algerian campaign. Dr. Sessions, I turn the mic over to
you.

\[applause\]

Jennifer Sessions:

Thank you, Mary Lou, for that very kind introduction, and there's some
other thanks that I owe as I come to the end of my stay here at the
Kluge Center before I begin the formal lecture. So I think the first
debt of gratitude, which is really enormous, goes to the Kluge Center
itself. To John Kluge for making the fellowship possible, to Mary Lou
and to Carolyn \[Brown\] for being such a welcoming presence at the
Kluge Center and for making my stay here so incredibly pleasant. I also
owe a debt of gratitude to my fellow fellows, many of whom are here, for
keeping me company, eating lunch and talking about many of the issues
that have come out of my research and theirs. In addition to the
reference staff and the rare books room and the European Division, I
also need to mention the incredible help of both the reference
librarians and circulation staff in the Main Reading Room who have put
up with the inordinate requests for all of the books that are now
overflowing my carrel in the Kluge Center. So those people have also
made a huge difference to my time here. And finally, two people who have
contributed very directly to the research in this book. Not necessarily
the chapter that I'm going to talk about here, but to the book overall.
The first is Noel Yesso who unfortunately couldn't be here today, but
who has been a student intern working with me from Georgetown
University, and she's really been invaluable in some of the other
aspects of the book project; and also my father, John Sessions, who is
here today, who has also been doing an uncalled for amount of research
assistance in some of the other parts of this book project. So when the
book comes out both of them will have been a big part of it.

Okay, so let me start here and make sure the technology is working
properly. Okay, and it's giving you the titles, I don't need that. So
what I'm going to be talking about today is, as Mary Lou said, from one
chapter of the book, which focuses on the visual representations of the
conquest of Algeria, which began, as I'll talk about in a minute, in
1830. And the other piece of background I guess to have before I start
is to realize that the period of time that I'm talking about, which is
primarily between 1830 and 1848, falls in the middle of an incredibly
tumultuous period of French history. The French Revolution of 1789 had
overthrown the monarchy, and there had been a sequence of other changes
of regime in that period. So politics were a very troublesome matter in
the time that I'm going to be talking about today, which is what \-- why
the pictures I'm going to be talking about also mattered so much.

So let me begin. What you're seeing here is a gallery in the museum of
the chateau of Versailles, which was unveiled to King Louis-Philippe on
the 18 of March 1842 by one of his favorite artists, the painter Horace
Vernet. The Chateau of Versailles in 1842 had been converted into a
pictorial museum of national history, and Vernet had just unveiled what
was the most recent chapter in the history on display elsewhere in the
museum, the siege of the Algerian city of Constantine, which had fallen
to the French in October of 1837. Vernet had worked for four years to
decorate the room's vaulted ceiling, and to paint 14 mural-sized
canvases, and you can see the ceiling here and the size of the canvases
on the walls and a huge triptych depicting the siege of Constantine was
to be the centerpiece of the gallery, which you actually unfortunately
can't see in this. You can only the corner of it over on the edge of the
slide there.

On seeing the finished gallery, Louis-Philippe declared himself thrilled
with the results and presented Vernet with a cross of the Commander of
the Legion of Honor, one of the highest awards given to civilians in
France. Vernet then gave the king and his entourage a tour of the room,
and it opened to an admiring public the next day. Now the modern day
visitor might be a little bit surprised by the very existence of this
museum. Today we know Versailles primarily as the palace of the French
kings, a gilded temple to the absolutist power of the Sun King, Louis
XIV, and playground to Marie Antoinette. And it's taken nearly 50 years
of very painstaking renovation to return the chateau to its 17^th^ and
18^th^ century glory. And this is a 17^th^-century image of the chateau
in its early stages. But recreating the most spectacular royal residence
in Europe has also erased the history of the museum that occupied the
chateau for over a century, from the mid 19^th^ to the mid 20^th^
century.

Let me start with a little background on how this museum came about.
During the French Revolution, Versailles had suffered basically the same
fate as its royal residence. After Marie Antoinette and her husband went
to the guillotine in 1793, the palace was essentially abandoned. The
revolutionaries had preserved the building; they thought it could be a
warning to future generations about the dangers of tyranny, but they
didn't quite know what to do with it. They sold off the furnishings and
used the empty palace for some popular festivals very briefly as a
cultural center but then essentially abandoned it once again. Both
Napoleon Bonaparte and then the restored Bourbon kings, when they came
back into power, considered refurbishing the chateau as a royal
residence, but the necessary work was never completed by either.
Napoleon completed some rooms, but could never bring himself to actually
live there, and the Bourbons ran out of money before they could get very
far with their renovations. So by the time King Louis-Philippe came into
power in 1830 following the July Revolution, the Chateau de Versailles
had lain essentially unused for nearly 40 years.

The new king, Louis-Philippe, was very media savvy guy. He had paid a
lot of attention during the revolution of the Napoleonic Empire and
learned a lot from the Republicans and Napoleon himself about
propaganda. And he saw in the chateau an unparalled opportunity to turn
it into a cultural institution that could simultaneously heal the
political divisions of the revolutionary decades and legitimize his own
new dynasty. He was inspired by contemporary ideas about the educational
power of images, which was considered in the 19^th^ century to be much
greater than that of words \-- it was, you learned a lot more from
looking at a picture than from reading a book \-- as well as his own
ideas about the political uses of history. So Louis-Philippe envisioned
a historical museum that would function as a kind of giant, illustrated
picture book to teach visitors about the great men and the great events
of the French past. It was to be dedicated to all the glories of France,
as the inscription over the entrance informed visitors, and it was
intended to unify the nation around the past depicted on its walls. And
this really was an enormous undertaking. From the time that the idea was
first hatched in 1833, Louise-Philippe invested enormous amounts of
money, about \$85 million in today's dollars, and an extraordinary
amount of personal energy in the project. He funded the construction of
the museum out of his own royal household budget, and personally he
oversaw nearly every detail of construction and decoration. For the next
15 years, from beginning in 1830, he made almost 400 visits to the
château to consult on everything from the selection and arrangement of
artworks to the color of the paint on the walls, and he really did
actually care a lot about what color the walls were. It works out to
about once a week that he was out on the construction site, which for a
king is an awful lot of time.

The heart of the museum, original museum, was the elaborate gallery of
battles, which ran the length of the château's south wing and
commemorated the victories of the French armies from the Middle Ages to
the Napoleonic Empire. This gallery, which is really very impressive in
person, and this is a photograph, a late 19^th^-century photograph from
the Library collections that shows it quite well. This gallery was
flanked on either end by galleries dedicated to the campaigns of the
French revolutionaries in 1793 to the battles of the Napoleonic Empire
and to the July Revolution that had brought Louis-Philippe to power. And
together, this suite of galleries told a story of continuous military
and civic triumph that was designed to both appeal to popular
nationalism and to present Louise-Philippe's reign as the culmination of
an age-old partnership between the monarchs and the people for the
defense of the French nation. And this is a formula that proved
extraordinarily successful over the following decades throughout the
19^th^ century, some 20,000 visitors flocked to the chateau every Sunday
to wander the halls in wonder at the thousands of paintings and
sculptures that filled it.

After the gala inauguration of the original museum in June of 1837,
Louise-Philippe gave orders to begin planning a new set of galleries
that would go in the chateau's north wing and commemorate the events of
his own reign. Instead of the domestic and continental events that were
depicted in the southern galleries, however, these new rooms were to
focus on French expansion overseas. And in particular, they would take
as their theme the conquest of Algeria, which had begun just before
Louise-Philippe came to power in 1830. The Algerian war would ultimately
drag on until 1871, long after Louis-Philippe was overthrown in his
term. But that was not yet evident when the king decided to portray the
creation of a new French empire as his dynasty's primary contribution to
the national history laid out at Versailles. And there were two parts to
this new museum. The first, on the ground floor, was a gallery dedicated
to the crusades that represented the 12^th^-century Christian invasions
of Muslim Palestine as a historical allegory for the 19^th^-century
conquest of Algeria. And on the second floor, going back to the original
slide, the second floor, the gallery that Horace Vernet completed in
1842, was the first of what would eventually become three rooms
dedicated to the contemporary colonial war in Algeria.

So I want to talk today about why Algeria was given such a prominent
place in Louis-Philippe's museum. I think the history of these galleries
can tell us a great deal about the political uses of empire in 19th
century France, and especially the ways the colonial expansion was
manipulated by regimes in search of legitimacy at home. And I think it's
worth noting that the French conquest of Algeria was an essentially
political undertaking from the outset. Louis-Philippe's predecessor, the
Bourbon King Charles X, had invaded Algiers, which was then a province
of the Ottoman Empire, in hopes of rallying electoral support for a
tottering government. This was a gambit that failed miserably. The
liberal opposition of 1830, and correctly so, attacked the expedition as
an attempt by a deeply unpopular regime to hoodwink the public just
before parliamentary elections. This is a caricature in the spring of
1830 \-- from the rare books room upstairs \-- that shows the king in
the front here very literally taking the people for a ride with this
whole plan. This is called a military promenade. But even resounding
victory in North Africa could not save the Bourbon Monarchy.

Just three weeks after Algiers capitulated to the French, an uprising in
Paris brought down Charles X and his ministers. And political satirists
absolutely delighted in this course of events, and they produced
hundreds of satires just before and after the revolution mocking the
nearly simultaneous overthrow of the Algerian governor and the French
king. And this is one of my favorites, although it's also rather crude,
that shows King Charles X simultaneously trying to swallow or hunker
Algiers while losing Paris. It's scatological humor, but this is very
typical of the sort of thing that was being produced at the time. So you
have this very sort of stereotypical Islamic architecture meant to
represent Algiers, and then these very typically Parisian buildings
coming out of the other end. And the caption tells us that the child is
saying, "Oh! How funny. I've swallowed Algiers but I'm giving up Paris."

So in the aftermath of these events, Louis-Philippe faced a particularly
thorny political problem: how to re-establish royal authority in an era
when revolution posed a constant threat to it. There were many competing
alternatives to monarchy as a political system, primarily the republic
and the Napoleonic Empire.

Charles X had tried to revive the old regime model of divinely inspired
royal power, and had ended up getting pushed out by a collation of
disgruntled workers and liberal politicians. The revolutionaries of 1830
instituted a new form of constitutional monarchy that was meant to try
and resolve the dilemma. It combined a hereditary monarchy with the
egalitarian and meritocratic principles of the French Revolution in an
elected -- in the form of an elected parliament. Under the
constitutional charter, Louis-Philippe would reign not as the king of
France, but as king of the French, a telling change of title from the
traditional title of the French kings to indicate that sovereignty,
under what came to be known as the July Monarchy, resided not in the
royal person but in the people of France. And in keeping with the same
revolutionary ideals, the charter abolished all forms of inherited
privilege \-- and this is key \-- except for the throne itself. That
hereditary monarchy became the only form of political power still
transmitted by birth after 1830. And this fact offered a very troubling
contradiction to the principles laid out elsewhere in the constitution.
So Louis-Philippe's mission was to find a solution to this paradox,
which he located in an embrace of the meritocratic code of male honor
that had emerged after the French Revolution. This code was one of
essentially equality between individuals who could make their own way in
the world. So Louis-Philippe combined the old regime's aristocratic
tradition of military service with the meritocracy of the Napoleonic
Empire and the professionalism of the 19^th^-century bourgeoisie to
argue that he had earned his right to rule through dedicated service to
the nation: first in the revolutionary armies of 1792, with whom he had
fought in the national guard in the 1920s -- sorry, 1820s and in 1830,
and as a hardworking, professional kind of king. And he was widely known
for staying up well past midnight to read reports, write letters,
carried on voluminous correspondence with his ministers, and worked
very, very hard like a good businessman should.

The strategy also carried over into royal iconography and into the
symbolic politics of the regime, particularly in official portraits.
This is very evident where Louis-Philippe wore not the urman robes,
scepter and crown that had identified the French kings for so long. This
is a very famous portrait of Louis XIV by Hyacinthe Rigaud. Instead,
Louis-Philippe consistently depicted himself in his military uniform,
because, as he wrote to a friend around 1815, "...in all contemporary
monarchies and armies, kings identify themselves with their armies and
identify the princes with them as much as possible." And you can see
Louis-Philippe here in his national guard uniform. And these are
actually plans for the chateau, the Versailles museum that's he leaning
on with his left hand there.

Louis-Philippe's insistence that military service in particular would be
a pillar of masculine royal authority was problematic for his sons,
because Louis-Philippe also espoused a conservative foreign policy that
contemporaries mocked as being one of peace at all costs. His sons, the
princes, could not hope to serve the nation as their father had done
when he refused to intervene militarily in European affairs and forged
diplomatic alliances designed to contain any potential invading powers
that might need fighting off. And an 1834 print by the noted republican
satirist Honore Daumier, highlights the way that this combination of
militaristic iconography and diplomatic caution weighed on the Orléans
princes. The Duc d'Orléans, he's the heir to the throne, is standing
actually before two paintings that ended up at the Versailles museum,
both by Horace Vernet, the battles of Valmy and Jemmapes, battles from
1792 where Louis-Philippe had served. And the caption translates the
thought of the prince: "Philippe, my father, will leave me no more glory
to acquire." And on this particular occasion, Louis-Philippe had just
concluded a quadruple alliance that was designed to ensure peace in
Europe forever. This did not work out, but it did last for quite some
time.

Now the opposition press took great delight in mocking the pretentions
of the princes when they did take part in the rare European engagements
that Louis-Philippe allowed. And an anonymous print from 1832, for
example, ridicules the Duc d'Orléans and his participation in 1832
expedition to Antwerp in Belgium, which was depicted here as a reward
from doting parents to a spoiled child. The Duke in his military uniform
complete with a very suggestively placed sword, a cartridge pouch
decorated with a pear, which was already emerging as a satirical icon of
Louis-Philippe himself at this time, and he blows a toy bugle while a
map of the fortifications of Antwerp, a wooden horse and a toy cannon
lie on the floor about his feet. And the caption, which I just think is
very funny says, "He's been very good. His little papa and his little
mama have given him little toy toys. He's their sweetie and their
poppet." And the sign he's actually holding says, "Who wants to marry
me? I'm very sweet," because at this moment Louis-Philippe was also
trying to find the proper princess for him to marry.

So to put it simply, the Orléans men had an image problem to which
Algeria seemed to be the ideal solution. On the one hand, the princes'
service in Algeria could be a means of identifying the royal family with
the army, as Louis-Philippe had suggested was necessary for modern
monarchs. And the Armée d'Afrique, the army fighting in Algeria, had
been represented in the literature in the press at that period as a
reincarnation of Napoleon's beloved Crna Gora giving this strategy
another added benefit by appealing to the Bonapartists who were very
numerous in 19^th^-century France. On the other hand, compared to these
very tidy and minor European confrontations of the early 1830s, the
colonial war in Algeria offered real action against a real enemy; an
opportunity for the princes to justify their position in France with
truly honorable service. And the princes themselves were very clear on
this point. They definitely saw serving in Algerian campaigns in these
very explicitly meritocratic terms. The Duc d'Orléans wrote to a friend
in 1837 when he was actually petitioning to leave the Constantine
expedition that I started with here. And he wrote, "My ambition is to
claim my privilege as the first citizen of France only where there is
physical or moral danger to be found: to earn my political rank by
giving my country more in devotion and services than I receive in honors
and dignities." And all of his four brothers had very similar sorts of
things in their private correspondence; this ideal of princely service
that the Algerian galleries at Versailles were meant to celebrate.

So plans for the gallery commemorating the fall of Constantine had begun
almost immediately after news of the city's fall reached Paris in
October of 1837. Louis-Philippe's second son, the Duc de Nemours, had
commanded assault columns at the siege. And the king seems to have moved
very quickly to capitalize on this effect -- on this fact. He dispatched
Horace Vernet to Algeria to gather material for a major painting, and
then on his return commissioned an entire gallery dedicated to the
military highlights of his reign; "The Siege of Constantine" would be
its centerpiece \-- sorry, I thought I had another copy of that original
slide \[inaudible\].

The finished 'Constantine gallery,' as it quickly became known,
glorified both the French colonial project in Algeria and the military
conquest. And it should be noted that this was an extraordinarily
violent war; one in which massacre and torture were very widespread. And
that these were aspects of the Algerian war that were not even hinted at
in the galleries at Versailles. Instead, the elaborate decorative
program around \-- that framed the gallery. And this here is, you're
looking up at the molding essentially around the ceiling. And I'm sorry,
it was quite dark in the gallery when I took this picture so it's not
terribly in focus, but it gives you a good sense of what you are seeing
here. And basically what the ceiling decorations offered was a very
didactic allegory of the French army's colonial activities, which were
depicted here as being essentially peaceful ones. There's a painted faux
frieze in here that shows what a guidebook called "the fruits of
colonization." And if you go around the room, there are French officers
drilling indigenous Algerian troops, engineers building roads, soldiers
cultivating fields and feeding Algerians, and French merchants trading
with the inhabitants of the Sahara desert. And punctuating the frieze
are these gilded medallions, which are decorated with allegories of the
colonial virtues of perseverance, valor, temperance, fidelity,
vigilance, and strength. And in the corners of the room are gilded
trophies representing the spoils of war.

The decorations' neoclassical and specifically Roman style invoked the
model of Roman Empire that the French were very explicitly trying to
emulate in Algeria. All of the values in the ceiling here come back to
the Roman Empire and were being reproduced in French colonial painting
at this time. The most impressive elements of the room, however, were
the enormous battle paintings that covered the walls. The central
triptych of "The Siege of Constantine" measures almost 70 feet long by
16 feet high. And these galleries celebrated, sorry these pictures
celebrated the military exploits of the French army and especially the
role of the Orléans princes in their campaigns, from the military debut
of the two eldest at Antwerp in 1832 to Algerian expeditions involving
the Duc d'Orléans and the fourth son the Duc d'Aumale in 1840.

Now in these paintings, Vernet was faced with the very delicate task of
reconciling the propagandistic functions of royal iconography with the
meritocratic ideology that was so important to Louis-Philippe and his
sons. In traditional battle painting \-- and here's an example of one
from Louis XIV's time by Adam Van der Meulen showing Louis XIV crossing
the Rhine \-- the king and his general staff dominate the picture right
here in the front, while the decisive moment of the battle plays out in
the background. To showcase the prince's military valor, however,
without violating the egalitarian principles of the citizen soldier that
underpinned Louis-Philippe's ideals, Vernet modified these conventions
to show the princes in traditionally heroic poses, but reducing their
importance with any overall composition. In the first section of the
triptych, the Duc du Nemours silhouetted against the sky at the center
of the canvas, and he's not immediately evident but he's right there,
leads a French counter-attack from a hillside encampment above
Constantine. Vernet's description of the scene, which was published at
the time, notes that the commander of the battle, the general Damrémont
is down in the right-hand corner \-- and I actually can't see him, so
hopefully I'm just pointing to the right place \-- Vernet noted that
Damrémont had ordered the attack but that it was the prince who threw
himself forward at the head of the battalion. Now not all viewers who
saw these paintings thought that this was a sufficiently royal pose, but
it did reflect the royal family's meritocratic ideals by showing the
prince plunging into battle alongside his men.

The central image shows the final attack on the city three days later.
The prince, now commanding the assault forces himself, stands slightly
apart from his staff at the center of the picture with his arm raised as
he orders the columns into motion. Now this group is still in theory the
focus of the picture. There's a puff of white artillery smoke here that
draws your eye, but it's far from the dominant element that the king had
been in paintings like Van der Meulen's. And the guidebook sold at the
chateau emphasized the modesty in this portrayal: "Ordinarily in battle
painting," it said, "the general staff draws and holds almost the entire
attention of the spectator at the expense of the rest of the army. But
here, each is given his fair share. The simple soldiers in the
foreground, while the crux of the action rests on the generals."

In the third and final image from the series, which shows French
soldiers pushing through the breech in the city walls, the prince
disappears entirely. Instead, the heroes \-- and again, they're also
rather hard to see of this picture, there's one there \-- are identified
in the literature as "simple officers, a colonel, and a lieutenant
colonel who lead the assault columns into the breech." And
significantly, of all three paintings, this is the one that people like
the best. Critics of all political stripes called it a masterpiece of
its genre, and others described it as "so real that the scene
practically smells of gunpowder." And I think much of the reason for the
painting's success lies in this popular sense of its realism and its
truthfulness, which also in turn depended partly on its resonance with
other contemporary accounts and images of the battle. French audiences
had a great deal of information available to them about the war in
Algeria. In this particular case, they had already learned about the
battle, not only from army reports that were printed in the press, but
also from lithographic prints, like this one by the Bonapartist
printmaker Auguste Raffet, which shows actually almost exactly the same
scene as this painting from illustrated news broadsides called canards
that promised readers new and exact details of things that had happened,
or popular images that were carried by peddlers to the farthest reaches
of the French countryside. Together, all of these different sources
provided a kind of historical record against which Vernet's paintings
would be measured for truthfulness. One newspaper was very explicit
about this. When writing about the Vernet gallery, said that "when it
came to such a recent feat of arms, for which accounts are too precise
and for which there are too many eyewitnesses, it is impossible and
inappropriate to sacrifice exactitude to pictorial convention." So to
have painted the kind of painting that Van der Meulen did would have bee
interpreted as a lie. "Such an event whose details are known to
everyone," the newspaper continued, "suffers no alteration."

For many observers, it was not only the local color of the landscapes
and the costumes that Vernet had drawn from life during his trips to
Algeria, but above all his attention to the ordinary soldiers of the
rank and file. So it is in many ways the absence of the Duc du Nemours
from the third picture of the triptych that made it so popular with both
critics and the viewing public. This fact reflects a persistent
difficulty in representing the princes in the Versailles museum. Images
that gave the prince a central place could be perceived as too overtly
propagandistic, but his absence opened the door to a vision of national
glory in which the royal family had no part, thereby undermining the
whole purpose of the museum enterprise.

Now in the subsequent galleries that he painted for Versailles, Vernet
focused to an ever-increasing degree, on lesser figures at the expense
of the princes, and was met in each case with correspondingly greater
acclaim. The central painting that depicted the capture of the Algerian
resistance leader Abd el-Kader's mobile camp, which is called a Smalah,
which gives the painting its name, was finished just a couple of years
after the Constantine gallery. Louis-Philippe had been eager to exploit
this symbolic blow against the main obstacle to French control in
Algeria, and immediately asked Vernet to paint a great battle painting
and as many small ones as he could manage for the room adjacent to the
Constantine gallery. At this point, the gallery next door had actually
almost been completed as a gallery devoted to Louis-Philippe's own life,
but when Vernet suggested that it be devoted to Smalah and other recent
Algerian battles, he agreed immediately and the Louis-Philippe gallery
was dismantled literally in a couple of days to make room for this new
Algerian-themed gallery.

The preliminary plans show that this was also going to focus on the
exploits of Louis-Philippe's sons, showing them in action in Algeria.
But Vernet only ever finished the title work, which you can see here.
And when the gallery opened to the public in 1845, this picture was
surrounded by smaller ones by other lesser-known artists. This one was
so astonishing though that it totally absorbed public opinion. And
contemporary accounts don't even mention the rest of what was in this
gallery. Because of the Constantine triptych had departed from the
conventions of traditional battle painting, this new picture jettisoned
them all together. As several scholars have noted, the painting owed
more to its size and composition to the panorama, which is a popular
19^th^-century spectacle designed to give viewers a 360-degree view of a
scene. This picture runs the entire length of the gallery's front wall
at over 70 feet long by itself; it's actually larger than the three
Constantine paintings together. And in the gallery space at Versailles
\-- you get a good sense of the scale of it here \-- it's literally
impossible to get far enough away to see the whole thing at one time. So
Vernet could not give this picture a central focus of any sort. Instead
he composed a picture of a series of episodes that are arranged along
the length of the canvas. The viewer walks along and looks at them
individually.

To some this was an absolute outrage to both artistic tradition and good
taste. But others thought that this was misplaced, that this was such an
exceptional work it just couldn't be judged by the old rules.
Louis-Philippe himself was quite pleased even with the pose of his son
who's here on the white horse in the middle. The construction of the
picture, this episodic nature, meant that this royal figure who's making
an eminently royal gesture of clemency, sort of pardoning these pleading
Algerian figures, means that this scene is put on essentially equal
footing with everything else in the picture, all the other vignettes.
But Louis-Philippe found this perfectly acceptable. He was very cautious
about even a hint of unjustified self-aggrandizement, and wrote to his
son that however much he might regret that the prince was not in the
foreground, he much preferred that he was where he was put which had in
any case to be the truth. And as with the Constantine gallery, the
public saw the truth of this new painting in its careful depiction of
ordinary soldiers. The painting was embraced not as a celebration as the
Duc d'Aumale, but as an homage to the ordinary conscripts of the
Algerian army. And even Vernet attributed the success of this picture
not to any public enthusiasm for princely heroics, but to the affinity
of true Frenchmen for the glory of their African army. So, public
responses to the Smalah made clear that even this compromise had failed
to visually express the ideals of the royal citizen soldier in an
effective way. And Louis-Philippe seems to have grasped this situation
quite well. When he had ordered the creation of a third Algerian
gallery, he announced that it would be dedicated not to the princes but
to the Algerian army as a whole.

This final gallery was designed -- was intended to commemorate a
combined army and naval victory over the sultan of Morocco, which took
place in August of 1844 when a French naval squadron, commanded by
Louis-Philippe's third son, had bombarded the port of Tangiers and the
island of Mogador off just off the port. While French general Bugeaud
defeated the sultan Abd-el-Rahman's regular army in the plain of Isly
near the Algerian-Moroccan border.

French opinion was absolutely delighted that this victory came \-- not
only meant a new phase in the Algerian conquest, but that it came at the
expense of the British who had systematically opposed any French
intervention in Morocco. So planning for the gallery again began almost
immediately after news of the victory came. The complicated project soon
fell behind schedule and even the painting of the ceiling wasn't
completed until July of 1847. And Vernet's work on the paintings for the
gallery was interrupted by the February Revolution of 1848 that
overthrew Louis-Philippe and the July Monarchy. He only managed to
complete one of the intended pictures for the gallery, which was
exhibited at The Louvre in 1846. It shows the aftermath of the battle of
Isly with the victorious General Bugeaud accepting the flags and the
commander's parasol from the Moroccan commanding general, and he's right
in here.

This is still a very large picture, although it's only half the size of
Smalah and has something of the episodic qualities of its larger cousin.
And Louis-Philippe was, as usual, quite pleased. But public response was
very lukewarm; nobody really had very much to say about this at all,
except that they thought the whole idea of an umbrella being a trophy of
war, they didn't understand the symbolic meaning of the parasol as an
indication of military leadership. And they thought this was really a
quite silly thing to paint a picture of.

So whatever its mixed success, however, this picture would have been
absolutely dwarfed by the painting that was intended to be the focus of
the new gallery, which was a painting of the naval landing at Mogador
that would have covered the longest wall. This new picture set out,
"Smalah" had resembled a panorama, the new picture set out to actually
make itself a panorama by moving painting into a third dimension using
the techniques of the panoramist. And unfortunately this stuff is still
in place but I couldn't get a photograph of it. The picture was meant to
be divided into sections by three-dimensional wooden columns that were
going to be set flush against the wall. And then there was going to be
an open work, kind of a ballast strayed, which was in fact built,
running along the bottom of the picture, which would give the viewer the
impression of watching the events unfold from inside the fort on the
island of Mogador looking out on the French fleet. The idea was that the
viewer would be made to feel as if they were actually there being
invaded. And we can't know for sure exactly what was going to happen
with the paintings themselves, but it seems very unlikely that this
could have prominently featured the Prince de Joinville who had
commanded the naval expedition. Just since the prince had stayed on his
ship during the battle, the idea that someone from the shore could have
seen him seems quite unrealistic. So the monarchies need to avoid the
appearance of unjustified self-promotion would seemed to have preclude
depicting him among the soldiers who presumably would have been visible
in the foreground. This conclusion must remain in the realm of
speculation, since Vernet abandoned the installations unfinished
canvases after 1848. "The Battle of Isly" itself was eventually moved in
to the Smalah gallery and the Moroccan room was given over later in the
century to paintings of the Crimean War in the 1850s.

There are other conclusions, however, that can safely be drawn from the
story of the Algerian galleries at Versailles. It's clear from their
privileged position within the museum that the colonial conquest played
a very important role in the political culture of the July Monarchy, a
much more central role than has generally been recognized. And the
Algerian galleries represented the conquest as the Orléans dynasty's
primary contribution to French history. In doing so \-- seeking to
legitimize both colonial conquest and Louis-Philippe's claims to have
earned royal power through meritorious service \-- Horace Vernet's move
into increasingly spectacular formats and the gradual disappearances of
the princes from his pictures as well as the approving public response
to the changes, highlight the failure of the July Monarchy's efforts to
construct a viable model of militaristic, royal power. The painter and
his royal patron recognized that audiences responded to the Algerian war
by identifying \[with\] the ordinary soldiers of the army rather than
with the princes who served with them. And Louis-Philippe, who was
circumscribed by his own rhetoric, could not ask Vernet to give his sons
a more prominent place without undermining the premise that they were
soldiers like any other. So rather than providing a solution to the
problem of justifying privilege in a meritocratic age, the glorification
of the princes at Versailles collapsed under the weight of its own
contradictions.

The galleries were not totally ineffectual as propaganda, however.
Vernet's paintings continued to resonate with public audiences across
revolution and regime change for over a century. After the Revolution of
1848, the museum's new republican curator considered the Algerian
galleries to be essentially national works that were the cornerstone of
the museum, and they were exempted from the republic's purges of
inappropriately monarchical works from the museum. As late as 1900, the
Baedeker's Paris guidebook recommended the Constantine gallery and its
neighbors as containing some of the finest pictures in the Versailles
collection, particularly the battle scenes by Horace Vernet. But the
African galleries and their celebration of French colonial conquest
remained intact only as the French colony \-- as long as the French
colony in Algeria itself. The violent end of French Algeria made their
message politically explosive, and the galleries were closed to the
public during the Algerian War of 1954 -1962. And since then, they've
been used primarily as store rooms or occasionally temporary exhibition
space where they just install other paintings over the top.
Interestingly, just last December, December of 2007, the new president
of the museum announce plans to re-open Louis-Philippe's historical
museum after half a century of returning the chateau to the days of the
old regime, the new administration now says there's no reason to be
ashamed of this 19^th^-century museum hidden within the chateau. And
they've even suggested they might add to it. The president,
Jean*-*Jacques Aillagon, president of the museum, has mentioned football
star's Zinedine Zidane as someone whose portrait might be included in an
updated display of the great men of France. And this is great; you can
see him here projected on another Louis-Philippe national monument after
the World Cup victory of July -- of 1998. It says across the top, "Zizou
\-- his nickname \-- we love you."

But the reference to Zidane, a son of Algerian immigrants born in
Marseilles, only highlights the still-murky fate of Algerian galleries
that were the heart of the museum in the 19^th^ century. Vernet's
pictures are in the process of being restored; they were actually in
quite bad condition when I saw them five years ago. The museum's
curators have said nothing about re-opening these galleries to the
public. And indeed one curator told me that the administration is afraid
that in doing so would make the chateau a target for North African
Islamic terrorists who have roots in the anticolonial movement of the
1960s. So the colonial questions that inspired the creation of the
Algerian galleries at Versailles have now morphed into postcolonial
ones. But they remain questions of essentially political nature. Whether
they're opened or not, and how they might be represented to future
museum visitors will be a telling statement about today's French
thinking about the colonial past and its relationship with the French
future.

\[applause\]

Female Speaker:\
We have a few minutes here for just a few questions.

Jennifer Sessions:

Okay.

Female Speaker:\
Jen, you mentioned a lot about the pedagogical function of the paintings
and that's normally associated with the republic and obviously there was
an opening of a room after the French Revolution and then later Napoleon
also has a collection \[inaudible\]. But those collections were in
Paris. How did these galleries function as a public space in Versailles,
which I would imagine in the late 1830s must have still been a little
bit difficult to drive out there? Do you have any information about the
audiences when the galleries were open?

Jennifer Sessions:\
This was definitely a primarily a middle-class audience, but by the time
the museum opened it was actually quite easy to get there. One of the
reasons that the idea of the whole museum was even possible was that in
1832 the railroad began serving Versailles from Paris. So it was a
direct and rather quick trip on the train out to Versailles. But those
20,000 were primarily, you know, the bourgeois that could afford the
fare on the railroad. But the pictures had a much wider circulation.
They were all very widely reproduced both in sort of expensive artistic
lithographs but also in popular imagery; there are images d'Epinal and
canards even that are clearly very directly inspired by the Vernet
pictures. So they did reach a wider audience even than the people who
could, already a substantial number of people who made it to the museum
in person.

Female Speaker:

Was Horace Vernet actually in Algeria at the battle of Constantine? Was
he, as we say now, embedded?

\[laughter\]

Jennifer Sessions:

He was sort of embedded. He actually traveled to Algeria four times. He
went on his own in 1832 and then for each of these three assignments for
Versailles he also traveled. He went after the fact, after the battle
was over, but he visited all of the battle sites. And in fact after the
"Battle of Isly" painting was shown there were rumors that he had not
actually seen the place himself and he wrote a very angry letter to the
editor of the newspaper saying, you know, "I absolutely have been
there." He interviewed participants and was under military protection
the whole time, because although the battle was over the wars were
ongoing. You couldn't really traipse about the countryside without
protection, so he was definitely there under official auspices speaking
with official people. And I think you know even though he didn't see the
battle himself you could call him embedded in some ways.

Female Speaker:\
Jennifer, I'm just struck in looking at these paintings that's on and
the way you presented. I don't know whether it's the painting or the way
you \[inaudible\]. But the fact that there's so little of Algerians in
them. And then the thing to me to be about French representation of the
French other or representation of the other and I was wondering whether
this was a conscious choice on the part of the painters or was it, can
we draw some conclusions about perhaps the French colonial project from
\[inaudible\] because if you look at some of the British paintings of
India they are far less about the conquest \[unintelligible\] and rather
about the project. \[inaudible\] You know again was it just these set of
paintings or was it something else going on?

I have another question as well which is that in this particular period
is there also a \[inaudible\] production of history? \[inaudible\].
Present this as a visual conquest and that also you do mention in
\[inaudible\], I found this very interesting, there are also sort of
capture the movement of sovereignty from the king to the people in other
words obviously history somehow had been written differently.

Jennifer Sessions:

The short answer to both of your questions is absolutely. And I think
one of the things that's very striking and that I discuss in more detail
in the chapter that this paper comes out of is the fact that this is
essentially a Versailles exercise in self-representation. There's a
certain amount of exoticism that goes into it, and this scene actually
from the capture of the Smalah, Abd el-Kader is probably the best
example of that, where you have these Algerian figures in the front.
Vernet himself was fascinated by Algerians. He though that he'd
rediscovered the Holy Land and the biblical people of the Bible in
Algeria. So he did sketch them; he was interested in them. But they
really don't show up very much in the pictures except for this one. And
I think that is because of the political stakes that I tried to
highlight here. That it really is about the French and the French
nation: the French self-conception. In popular imagery there was more
interest in Algeria, so this images d'Epinal, these popular prints, one
of the things that the same printers of these did was to print
essentially military paper dolls for boys. And so you could get all of
the different units of the French army and their respective uniforms,
but you could also get all of the different units of Abd el-Kader's army
in their uniforms so that you could recreate the battles at home.

In terms of your second question about history writing, absolutely
there's a profusion of history writing in the 1830s and 1840s, and it's
very politicized. And basically, you know, whether you are a proponent
of monarchy, a proponent of Napoleon or a proponent of the republic
determined who the heroes of your story were. Whether it was the people,
the kings or the army. Although the Bonapartists and the republican
versions of the story often ended up looking quite similar and
highlighting the Algerian conquest to a much greater extent than the
royalist ones, which were loyal to the Bourbon kings and the old regime.

Mary Lou Reker:

Maybe one more question.

Female Speaker:

After Louis-Philippe had to leave, was there still popular support for
this war? I keep thinking about then and right now. And all the treasure
being spent from France to support \[unintelligible\] and yet a lot of
agitation about the message already or was it support to keep that
conquest going?

Jennifer Sessions:

The conquest was always somewhat politically contentious. There were
always, for example, financial liberals with a, I guess, capital "L" who
thought it was a lot of money to be spending that was only going to cost
more money if it succeeded. And there were also a small number of what
we might consider moral objectors to the war. There were periodic
scandals about torture and the French army's use of torture and the
punishment of civilians and so forth. But the conquest did remain
popular in the kind of cultural realm that I've been talking about
today. So these popular images, you know, they continue to sell through
the 19^th^ century. They develop new forms when the illustrated press
becomes very popular in the second half of the 19^th^ century \--
colonial conquest in the successes of the Algerian war become major
topics. So it does continue despite the criticism that does happen.

Mary Lou Reker:

Thank you.

\[applause\]

\[end of transcript\]