The Gamin de Paris in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture: Delacroix, Hugo, and the French Social Imaginary

The iconic image of the revolutionary boy at the barricades was created by Eugène Delacroix and Victor Hugo and became a symbol of the struggles over nationhood and masculine, bourgeois identity.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 192 pages
Publication date: 13 June 2022
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

The iconic image of the revolutionary boy at the barricades is captured in Eugène Delacroix's renowned painting "Liberty Leading the People" (1830) and further explored in Victor Hugo's novel "Les Misérables" (1862). Throughout the nineteenth century, representations of the Parisian street urchin permeated the collective social imagination as cultural and psychic sites of memory, manifesting in avant-garde and more conventional visual cultures. These mythical gamin de Paris emerged from recurring political revolutions (1830, 1832, 1848, 1871) and the construction of masculine, bourgeois identities in response to ongoing struggles over visions and fantasies of nationhood. As traditional patriarchal family models destabilized, the symbolic role of fathers diminished, and the psychosexual relationship between the urchin and the allegorical motherland intensified, the once socially marginalized figure gradually assumed a central symbolic position in classed and gendered inventions and re-inventions of fraternity, people, and nation. Within a fundamentally split conception of the people, the insurrectionary bohemian boy, symbolizing freedom, underwent a transformation through ongoing discourses of power, reform, victimization, and agency. He evolved into a capitalist entrepreneur, schoolboy, colonizer, and budding military defender of the fatherland, becoming a contradictory emblem of the city and the nation.

Dimension: 246 x 174 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781032339658