**The Significance of Intermediality in the Immortalization of the French Republican Nation (1789-1799)**

## Montserrat Martínez García *Complutense University of Madrid, Spain*

*De Barra, de Viala le sort nous fait envie Ils sont morts, mais ils ont vaincu. Le lâche accablé d'ans n'a point connu la vie: Qui meurt pour le peuple a vécu. Vous êtes vaillants, nous le sommes Guidez-nous contre les tyrans Les républicains sont des hommes, Les esclaves sont des enfants. Le Chant du Départ 1794* (Dauban 1869: 428)

### **1. Introduction**

Never before 1789 had the political education of a great nation like France been ruled by writers and artists (painters, sculptors, musicians, engravers and architects), the ones who probably gave the Revolution its peculiar attributes, besides infusing an unrivalled vigor into this event (B. de Huszar 1960: 1-18). The intellectual elite grew in Western Europe after the Reformation and countless generations of rational thinking culminated in France´s radical political ideas during the 18th century, marking nineteenth-century politics. This social category, a class apart, was devoted to mental activity, culture and the preservation of the current order (Seton-Watson 1960: 41-50), at the same time that legitimately held power and authority through six distinct strategies: backing of beliefs and specific principles, naturalization and universalisation of a selective credo, disapproval of opposed ideas, exclusion of alternative lines of thought, and finally, the masking of reality to adjust it to the dominant interests (Eagleton 1997: 24).

These minorities, or national prophets according to Hans Khon, were decisive in fixing inclusion and exclusion criteria within the community in order to restrict the access to power and decision making, subjugate the majority and interpret the national history with bias (Kohn 1946).

Consequently, intellectuals were the driving force capable of fostering the nation reconstruction and redefinition. This fact entailed two points: firstly, the nation State was

The Significance of Intermediality

fraught with mental and emotional manipulation.

**3. What is intermediality and how can we apply it to France?** 

in the Immortalization of the French Republican Nation (1789-1799) 63

superimposed on a standard, conveyed just one and very simple message, that of the making of the French Republican nation during the period ranging from 1789 to 1799, that is to say, the French revolutionary years. Throughout this paper, we will pay particular regard to this subject and to the way French artists resorted to the body, both male and female, as a core concept encapsulating the republican citizen by drawing upon political strategies

Now that the main concern of this paper has been stated, our business will be first to cast some light on what we mean by "Intermediality" and on what this term implies. The *Oxford Dictionary* informs us that the Latin prefix "inter" stands basically for two meanings: on the one hand, "between and among", while on the other "mutually and reciprocally". In turn, "Mediality" can be decoded "as designating the interaction of technology, society, and cultural factors through which institutionalized media of communication […] produce, transform and circulate symbols in everyday life" (Friesen and Hug 2009: 69). As a consequence, the merging of "inter" and "mediality", namely, the fact of being between or among shared media "stresses the idea of a message perpetually crossing the boundaries separating media; a message that *is, i. e. exists,* only *as* and *through* an incessant movement, never attaining an ultimate shape, and living as many lives as the number of the media crossed" (Punzi 2007: 10). When broaching the subject of intermediality, we are making a step forward in dealing with relational properties as well as a shift from separate media to partially or totally interconnected media systems. This suggests that intermediality highlights "textual relations as a dialogic process taking place between different expressive media, rather than as a set of static references to textual artifacts" (Langford 2009: 10).

Although there was a resurgence of interest in media and the mediatic questions thanks to Sanders Peirce´s (1839-1914) work on proto-semiotic theory and to Ernst Cassirer´s (1874- 1945) study on the mediality of culture and human knowledge in his *Philosophy of Symbolic Forms* (1953), it was Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) who gave prominence to the current relevance of media with his claiming that "the medium is the message" (Friesen and Hug 2009: 63). Yet, even if intermediality is quite a new term in the contemporary panorama of criticism, it is a linguistic tag whose semantic field has not yet been thoroughly ascertained, despite the work done on this issue since 1997 by, among others, the "Centre de Recherche sur l´Intermédialité" (Montréal University) and the "Center for Philosophy and Arts" (Rotterdam University) (Punzi 2007**:** 10). Within this trend, the term *information literacy* has been recently driven to the forefront to encompass all textual analysis and to process any

As one might expect with all new terminology, intermediality is not a sudden concept but one whose history goes back to the dawn of Western thought. As a matter of fact, if Aristotle (384 BC-382 BC) was one of the first philosophers to consider the expression of diverse media in his *Poetics* (335 BC)*,* his legacy was carried on afterwards by Horace (65 BC-8 BC) in his *Ars Poetica*  (20-14 BC)*,* in which he stated the close relationship between poetry and painting through his maxim *ut pictura poesis*, and by Augustine´s (354-430) *Confessions* (5th century) with his discussion of mediality of the biblical Word in Book 11. Examples spring up in abundance. Suffice it to mention that during the 15th and the 18th centuries, emblems became expressive of

sign system transmitting any kind of information (Semali and Pailliotet 1999: 5).

the blending between pictorial and verbal signs working conjointly in the same artifact.

always articulated, thought and imagined in consonance with discourse, and secondly, the rapport between politics and intellectuals uncovered one of the mainstays of nationalism, namely, the understanding of the nation as a cultural and political entity. If before the French Revolution, the State as a political unity had remained totally disconnected from the nation as a cultural wholeness, their fusion opened a singular stage in the history of nation States (Cobban 1994: 245-50).

The success of this intellectual middle class undertaking depended on the masses cooperation, which explains why people were invited to partake of this historical project and why this invitation was written in the intelligible language that typifyed the populist nature of nationalism (Nairn 1994: 70-76). For example, writers became the public opinion leaders and began to play the role usually reserved for politicians. During the French Revolution, the abundant circulation of pamphlets and documents attempted to anger people against the king. In this sense, *L´Ami du peuple*, edited by Marat, was one of the most important newspapers inciting to rebellion and to Louis XVI´s overthrow.

In sum, the artistic achievements of intellectuals were an unmistakable struggle to protect and systematize the cultural continuity of the nation as well as to legitimate all national discourses, whether literary, historical or critical. Thereby, the narrative of the nation began to be told and retold through national histories, literature, popular culture, that is to say, through a kind of art interested in providing stories, images, symbols and rituals that could portray identity as primordial, essential, unified and unchangeable (Valdés 2002: 71).

The relevance of this paper rests on its timelessness. Although at first sight, its scope might be quite restrictive, since its topic is limited to France and to a very concrete time range (between 1789 and 1799), in truth its reading will prove the contrary. Not only does the paper help to understand the foundations of nationalism and nation construction, given that France was a pioneer in this subject matter and a model for many other countries, but also to deepen into the current working of those nationalisms still functioning thanks to their drawing inspiration from the French prototype.
