Institutionalizing Revolution: The Official Mural Art Campaign of the Third Republic, 1870-1900

Abstract

“Institutionalizing Revolution: The Official Mural Art Campaign of the Third Republic (1870-1900)” analyzes the little-studied public mural art campaign of the French Third Republic, carried out in Parisian arrondissement townhalls in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Largely ignored by scholars and the public, the murals were also marginalized by the modernist art historical narrative as “academic art” despite their stylistic diversity. I argue the contrary and reveal the overlooked symbolic significance of the murals in promoting republican rhetoric. Combining field work with cultural studies methodology, this dissertation casts light on the townhall decorative campaign as a hinge-moment for a genre previously confined to religious institutions and palaces and later associated with populism and revolution. I illustrate not only how these murals served as tools to forge a modern republican identity, but also how, as artworks, they went beyond the restricted visual vocabulary of Renaissance and Baroque décor to develop a democratizing decorative idiom. As such, the dissertation showcases Third Republic murals as a deliberately emblematic vehicle that helped promote a new relationship between citizen and state; state and national history; and art and the public.