ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author argues that the level of the narrative order notions and emotions which middle-class intellectuals were reluctant to conceptualize, namely, the fears of working-class politics. She explores interrelate visual images, the language of nineteenth-century historians and that of art critics. The author shows that what have often been catagorized as questions of style or technique in art and literary criticism – she think in particular of narrative, realism, popular art – are means of codifying political language whenever the issue at stake is 'history'. The metaphorical language of the late eighteenth century construed the pair Marat–Corday as the duality between evil and good. The Realist scenario of nineteenth-century visual art disavows the existence of any symbolic order and attempts to neutralize its narrative categories within the specificity of its time-scale. Commentators proceeded to apply modes of reasoning to abstract categories, transposing notions of psychological identity into the concrete order pervading the realist scenario.
