As Befits a Legend: Building a Tomb for Napoleon, 1840-1861. - book reviews

Overall, the book provides a thorough and intelligent history of the development of the tomb project and of the changes it underwent through the middle of the 19th century. It is much to Driskel's credit that while his book draws upon archival documents to lay out the chronological course of the monument, he then moves beyond the historical grounding to consider such questions as the ideological significance of the Napoleonic legacy, the indeterminate authorship of the project, and the atypical character of its design.

Nell McWilliam's Dreams of Happiness: Social Art and the French Left, 1830-1850 covers some of the same time period as Driskel's As Befits a Legend, but the differences between the two studies are immense. McWilliam's study is less concerned with artworks or French politics per se; rather, what attracts his analysis throughout is "the relationship between two apparently disparate forms of writing: political theory and art criticism" (p. 4).

Among the great strengths of this book are the complexity and open-endedness of McWilliam's textual analysis. There is no attempt to force the question of art social into a narrow, thesis-driven series of arguments; rather, he begins with the idea that there was little consistency in the concept of art social, and much of his study is devoted to analyzing the ways in which the theorists of the left formulated conflicting, and often conflicted, interpretations of the role of art in a progressive society. That his book contains relatively few illustrations (forty-nine spread across several hundred pages of text) gives eloquent corroboration to the question that seems to have guided his research: why the radical theorists' "dreams of happiness" could have produced such meager and lackluster results.

Organized more or less chronologically, McWilliam's study follows in succession the role of the visual arts as it was envisioned in the writings of radical theorists in the first half of the century. After an introductory discussion of the sense of skepticism and "the crisis of belief" that had been inherited from the Revolution, he turns to the visual arts and finds that their role, also, "seemed increasingly open to question" (p. 26). From a thorough survey of the various permutations through which Saint-Simon's ideas about the arts passed, McWilliam moves to analyze art social as it emerged in the theories of the Saint-Simonians, especially Enfantin. In brief, the essentially reason-based concept of the arts that had been formulated by Saint-Simon evolved into an antirational and mystical aesthetic in the theories of Enfantin and other disciples of Saint-Simon. Asking "Why Were There No Great Saint-Simonian Artists?" McWilliam concludes that a fundamental contradiction operated against any real productivity by the group: that their belief in anti-individualism contravened the aesthetic tendencies of the period and, thus, went against the contemporary grain (p. 231).

With the utopian Fourier, the central problem was quite different, and here the emphasis on "harmony, beauty, and happiness" led to widely divergent concepts of the role that the visual arts should assume. Though the Fourierists criticized the Salon's diversity as typical of the "disintegration of shared systems of belief" (p. 231), they themselves remained vague and contradictory about the role that the visual arts should serve and were unable to break free from the "language of art itself' (p. 242). As a result, "[d]octrinal imperatives snap beneath the pressure of a dominant mode of discourse . . . and the [Fourierist] critic almost involuntarily returns to a language apparently at odds with his theoretical commitments" (p. 243).