On 20 April 1792 France declared war on Austria, with Prussia joining the defense of Austria a few weeks later. It was this war in which the young Corsican Napoleone da Buonaparte, who later “francified” his name into Napoleon Bonaparte, would shine as a general, eventually taking over control of the French army and later declaring himself emperor.
Responding to the declaration of war, a joint Austrian and Prussian force invaded northeastern France in August 1792, capturing Verdun on 2 September. The rights of the French monarchy had been suspended a month earlier, and the monarchy was officially abolished on 21 September 1792. France was declared a republic.
The Republican army confronted Austrian and Prussian forces on 20 September at Valmy. The unusual battle involved much bluster and few deaths. It was recorded that 40,000 cannon rounds were fired, but the total number of deaths on both sides combined amounted to fewer than five hundred. It was a French victory nonetheless. The invading army withdrew to the far side of the Meuse River that flows east-west across Belgium. Seizing the opportunity, the French army followed the retreating coalition, and by early November Austria had abandoned most of the Austrian Netherlands. The French army continued to victory at Aachen, securing all of the territory once known as Flanders, later known as Belgium, including the city of Ghent.
This area was officially annexed by France in 1795. The territory of Flanders /Austrian Netherlands/Belgium, an area the size of Maryland, was
destined to remain the battlefield of major European powers for centuries to come, the taut and fraying rope at the center of the imperial tug-of-war.
The Austro-Hungarian and Prussian factions began to plot the reinstatement of the French monarchy, in what is known as the Brunswick Manifesto. Had they succeeded, the grateful French king would have made France subservient to them. Learning of this plan, the French Republican leaders quickly executed the royal family. The execution of Louis XVI by guillotine took place in Place de la Concorde in Paris on 17 January 1793. This sparked the Reign of Terror, spearheaded by the director of the Committee for Public Safety, Maximilien Robespierre, who led a hunt for perceived and actual enemies of the French Republic, executing all he could find. Archives record the deaths of 16,594 people, most by guillotine, though some historians place the total number of deaths in this two-year period at nearer 40,000.
During the Reign of Terror, the Austrians, Prussians, Spanish, and British attempted to gain control of France, but the Republican army resisted them all. Successful battles led the Republic to take offensive measures. The French army invaded the Austrian Netherlands in 1794, not just seeking a pitched battle with the Austrian and Prussian forces, as had been fought two years prior, but intent on territorial conquest and pillage, as a means to increase revenue to repair damages and fund further campaigns. In 1793 and 1794 they instituted the Vendôme Decrees, which permitted the confiscation of the belongings of exiles and opponents of the Republic, ostensibly for redistribution to the needy.
Just as Emperor Joseph II had disapproved of the “irrational” veneration of Catholic art, the revolutionaries hated the idea that art was the sheen and plumage of the elite aristocracy. Emperor Joseph II had divested churches of their artwork, their instruments of awe, in order to encourage rationality and the power of individual human beings. The revolutionaries’ goal was less to empower individuals than to empower the people as a collective.
In an effort to transfer power from the elite to the common people, as well as for the more practical motivation of gathering valuable artworks for sale, the revolutionaries confiscated the art of the executed and the
soon-to-be-headless. Without concern for ownership or historical context, the revolutionaries stripped France of those art treasures owned by the former oppressors, the church and the aristocracy, and brought the plunder back to Paris for display to the people.
Although the principle of revolutionary art theft was to overturn the concept of elitist personal property, much of the art was sold to the wealthy, flooding the market with freshly gathered aristocratic possessions. Many works considered of a secondary importance by nonconnoisseur citizens and officers were sold to finance the war effort. This was rationalized by the need to raise funds for the war and the fact that the buyers were not French aristocrats but foreigners. The most famous of these sales, that of the collection of the Duke of Orleans in 1792, resulted in the enrichment of British collections above all, as a consortium of English nobles purchased the majority of the works for sale. The core of the Orleans collection consisted of plunder: 123 paintings that had once belonged to Queen Christina of Sweden, having been stolen by Swedish troops during the Thirty Years’ War, from Munich in 1632 and from Prague in 1648.
Along with the rolling heads of the Revolution came an art-looting spree the scale and breadth of which had never before been seen and would not be seen again until the Second World War. The finest pieces taken from deposed aristocrats were not sold but brought to Paris. The art seized by revolutionaries from French aristocrats was greatly augmented by the later military looting under the French Republican and imperial armies. By the time Napoleon achieved control over the army, Paris’s galleries had become a citywide display case for the trophies of war. Public museums were established to respond to this new state of affairs, displaying art to anyone who cared to see it. The new National Museum was established on 26 May 1791 and housed in the recently converted Louvre, once the royal palace. The Louvre opened on August 10, 1793, during the Reign of Terror, and was popular from its inception.
The motivations for art looting followed closely those of the French Revolution: to transfer power from the elite to the common people. Seized art symbolized the impotence of those from whom it had been
taken. In addition to the severed, guillotined heads on display on the Bastille walls, the art collections, severed now from their decapitated owners, were proudly displayed. What had once been the realm of the wealthy elite only, a private delectation, was now shown in the recently converted Louvre, formerly the royal palace and now a public museum. Paintings were hung along with the names of the aristocratic families to which they once belonged. In theory, through the revolutionaries, art received a new audience. Art collections were no longer for the select few who could afford and “understand” them.
In practice, however, art remained remote from the masses. Seven days out of ten, the Louvre was open only to artists and scholars. The other three days it was open to the general public. There was a contradiction in the theories and practice of revolutionary France. Governmental control was billed as popular, a democracy for the people, but while rights by birth were no longer the criterion to hold office, the state was in actuality controlled by an intellectual elite. The “masses,” once abominably oppressed, were to be liberated and helped, but they were considered in no way fit to run a country. This new Republican politics was mirrored in the availability of the Louvre’s collection to the public: three-tenths for everyone, with seven-tenths reserved for the educated elite.
Whether the looted art was appreciated by the masses on those three days out of ten is another question. During the throes of the Revolution, visiting a gallery to see the possessions of those deposed would have brought a satisfaction altogether distinct from enjoying the art itself. The galleries of Paris could easily have displayed the rich clothing of the fallen aristocracy, their furniture, or even, as was arrayed on the city battlements, their lifeless bloody heads. Art served as a trophy of success. What was once the prized possession of the fallen, of inconceivable monetary value to the common people, was now captured in the glass cage of the gallery, to be enjoyed for what it symbolized as a looted object, not for its intrinsic beauty.
Looting within France lasted from the Revolution until around 1794, at which point the French armies spread their conquests north into the
Austrian Netherlands and south into Italy, the rest of Europe receiving the brunt of the pillage. Behind the victorious armies followed a new breed of military unit, one with the sole purpose of seeking out, stealing, and shipping back to France works of art from the defeated nations.
In June 1794 the French established the Committee for the Education of the People and proposed sending “knowledgeable civilians with our armies, with confidential instructions to seek out and obtain the works of art in the countries invaded by us.” It is not clear whether this directive came from the government in Paris or the army itself, but on 18 July 1794 the following order was issued to the army:
The People’s commissioners with the Armies of the North and Sambre-et-Meuse have learned that in the territories invaded by the victorious armies of the French Republic in order to expel the hirelings of the tyrants there are works of painting and sculpture and other products of genius. They are of the opinion that the proper place for them, in the interests and for the honor of art, is in the home of free men.
The declaration, which referred specifically to the newly conquered territory of the Austrian Netherlands, went on to order the confiscation of these “works of painting and sculpture and other products of genius.” Two officers in particular, Citizen Barbier and Citizen Leger, were told to search out artworks. The army was to give them every assistance.
Citizen Barbier had some training in forced art redistribution—barely distinguishable from art theft. Antoine Alexandre Barbier began his career as a priest but was officially dismissed by the pope in 1801 for his antipapal activity, helping Napoleon to loot the Vatican of nearly everything that wasn’t nailed into place (and much that was). Barbier was a bibliographer and librarian, an accountant of objects, whose first official role was to redistribute to the libraries of Paris books and manuscripts that had been seized during the French Revolution, ostensibly from enemies of the state, but in practice from anyone whose collection looked promising. Barbier
was the official librarian to the French Directory and, from 1807, worked as a special agent for Napoleon. He was a key figure in the establishment of the libraries of the Louvre, Fontainebleau, Compiegne, and Saint Cloud, whose collections were in large part acquired through forced seizure, first from revolutionaries in France and then from Napoleon’s victims abroad. Fascinated with words and their origins, Barbier produced two books during his career: the massive, four-volume
Dictionnaire des ouvrages anonymes et pseudonymes
(Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous Works, 1806-1809) and the
Examen critique des dictionnaires historiques
(Critical Examination of Historical Dictionaries, 1820).
Though Barbier knew books, the revolutionary art hunters under the direction of Barbier and Leger were not particularly knowledgeable about fine art, and their looting lacked follow-through. Much of the looted art was moved to a collection point but never carried on to Paris. For example, although the forty-six columns looted from Aix-en-Provence that formerly stood in front of Charlemagne’s palace were seized in October 1794, they were still sitting in the courtyard of a palace in Liège, awaiting transport to Paris, in January 1800. It was not until the better-organized looting spree under Napoleon’s imperial army that the museums filled in earnest with the plunder of fallen nations.
The French revolutionary army had first arrived in the Austrian Netherlands in 1792 to liberate the area from the Austrian and Prussian forces. The second coming of the army, in 1794, brought the Revolution along with it—and resulted in the mass displacement of the region’s art treasures. Religious institutions were abolished, and their possessions were confiscated, including those of Saint Bavo Cathedral.
In the city of Ghent, the central panels of
The Lamb
fell into the hands of the French Republican army. The panels were removed from the cathedral by the army under General Charles Pichegru on 20 August 1794. The officer in charge of art confiscation in Holland and the Austrian Netherlands was Citizen Barbier. It is not known why the French took only the central panels of the altarpiece, and not the wings. The original Adam and Eve and the wing panels, stored in the chapter house of the
cathedral, were all left behind. Though it is not recorded in extant documents, they might have been
hidden
in the chapter house, or perhaps the simple fact that they were in storage while the central panels remained in the Vijd Chapel on display meant that they were overlooked by the French soldiers. The central panels were taken directly to Paris, where they went on display immediately as one of the museum’s top attractions.
Citizen Barbier addressed the National Convention in Paris mere weeks after capturing the central panels of
The Mystic Lamb
, only days after the first shipment of looted art arrived from Holland: “Too long have these masterpieces been sullied by the gaze of serfs. . . . These immortal works are no longer in a foreign land. . . . They rest today in the home of the arts and of genius, in the motherland of liberty and sacred equality, in the French Republic.” This was no doubt a crowd-pleasing speech, but it lays bare some of the hypocrisies inherent in the Republican expansion. Was it not the “serfs” who rose up to become the French revolutionaries? Why then have “these masterpieces been sullied by the gaze of serfs”? According to the revolutionary dogma, the commoners should now gaze upon the art that was once sullied by the aristocracy. And the art had just been taken from a country now liberated and indoctrinated by the Revolution—in effect stealing from the recently converted.
Confused dogma aside, the point was clear. Paris, the home of the free, was to be the depository of the art of the world. The revolutionary publication
La Decade Philosophique
became the prime annunciator of the new trophies of the Republic. In October 1794 it announced the arrival in Paris of the first shipments of looted art, with more than one hundred of the world’s finest pictures still en route. Paris would become the home of world art and the cradle of future artistry.