Material Futures: Reproducing Revolution in P.-L. Debucourt's Almanach National

Abstract

Philibert-Louis Debucourt's 1790 Almanach national, intended to serve as a frame for a pasted calendar for the subsequent year, is a unique combination of allegory and everyday scene. Dominated by a bas-relief representing the National Assembly, the image presents responses to the French Revolution organized in terms of race, age, and social class and features a singular representation of a female newspaper vendor at work. Debucourt's image effectively mobilizes print to conceptualize the reproduction of Revolution across temporal and national boundaries, providing a means of thinking about the relation between Revolutionary time and the materiality of the image.

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Richard Taws

Richard Taws is lecturer in the History of Art Department at University College London, where he specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visual culture. He is completing a book titled The Politics of the Provisional: Visual Culture in Revolutionary France [History of Art Department, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, [email protected]].