ABSTRACT
If one thinks about art and propaganda in Europe during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, it is the French state, not its British adversary, that is commonly associated with the emergence of the modern propaganda state and state-sponsored art. The plethora of suggestions for paintings, sculptures and buildings devoted to the Revolution throughout the 1790s, the Convention’s art competitions, the Directory’s proposals for republican museums, civic temples and triumphal arches, and Napoleon’s development of the Louvre by Europe-wide art looting contrast with far fewer and less ambitious projects of civic and politicized art on the other side of the Channel. A long-standing reticence about state promotion of the arts that stemmed from Britain’s parliamentary government and Protestant reservations about art appears to provide a ready explanation for this polarity. Yet the actual achievement of propaganda art during the French Revolution was rather more limited – largely because of political instability, financial constraints and conflicting attitudes over artistic freedom and government regulation.1
