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The Guillotine of History
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Head of King David, ca. 1145. Paris, Notre-Dame Cathedral, south portal of west façade (Saint Anne portal). Limestone, H. 11 1/4 in. (28.58 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1938 (38.180)
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During the French Revolution, just as the king was subjected to the guillotine, the sculptures on the façade of Notre-Dame—seen as symbols of authority—were destroyed by government edict in a parallel act of vengeance.
On January 17, 1793, during the vote on the fate of Louis XVI, a citizen approached Parisian Commune officials to report that there were kings represented on the portals of the cathedral. Most of the statues in public squares that could be identified as specific rulers had already been destroyed, many on August 10, 1792, when Louis XVI was deposed and imprisoned. This new "discovery" was referred to the Commission des Arts, which ordered the statues removed, and over an extended period Paris and other cities and towns hired contractors to behead statues not only of kings and queens but also, during the dechristianization campaigns of late 1793 and 1794, of religious figures as well, including apostles, saints, Old Testament monarchs, and angels.
The "cleansing" of religious imagery at Notre-Dame necessitated two campaigns. First the fleurons on crowns and scepters were knocked off, and later the figures were cut up and thrown down from all of the portals and from the gallery of kings high above the west façade, until the cathedral doors were obscured behind piles of stone. In a speech before the National Convention, the painter Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) proposed that the fragments be piled together as the base for an enormous monument to the French people to be erected on the Pont-Neuf.
Much of the removed stonework was sold by the cubic yard as building material. Many heads from the façade of Notre-Dame were discovered during renovation construction in the courtyard of the Hôtel Moreau in Paris in 1977. Some fragments found their way into the hands of pious individuals who, considering them part of a consecrated building, rescued the pieces and gave them Christian burial. Figures of apostles from Saint-Jacques-aux-Pélerins in Paris and from Saint-Pierre in Jumièges were discovered laid out with care when they were unearthed about a century after the Revolution. Thus, some art was reburied at the time of its displacement, but many pieces were dispersed and continue to reappear today. In all these ways fragments from destroyed monuments turn up in private collections and museums, orphaned sculptures whose identities have been lost.
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