ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the new spatialities and their impact on real and imagined, material and virtual landscapes as they take shape over the revolutionary decade, starting with what was for many the founding site and moment of the Revolution, the siege of the Bastille. It deals with a conservative retrenchment of landscape painting in the form of historical landscape painting, or paysage historique. The Journee des brouettes, the collective preparation of a site to celebrate the Revolution’s first anniversary on the western edge of the capital at the Champ de Mars, brought together all ranks, ages and stations: nobles, priests, commoners and even the king himself. The configuration of the Bastille as a site of revolutionary memory is important in the transformation of spatiality in revolutionary France. The moment of the Revolution saw the concentration of evil and oppression within a single locus and at a specific moment.
