The grisly art of Revolutionary France

There was a basket of thick red wool and two pairs of large knitting needles at the start of University College London’s cleverly curated exhibition, Witnessing Terror: French Revolutionary Prints 1792–94. Visitors were invited to contribute their own lines of stitches before picking up a copy of A Tale of Two Cities, in which Dickens fictionalised the tricoteuses, the women who gathered around the guillotine knitting and waiting for heads to roll.

The first six prints are French portraits of ‘revolutionary martyrs’ ranging from Louis XVI, wearing the bonnet rouge, or red cap of liberty, that was placed on his head when the crowd broke into the Tuileries Palace in 1792, to Robespierre, whose death in 1794 marks the formal, if not actual, end of the Terror.

Beneath the portraits is an extract from the diary of the dowager duchesse d’Elbeuf, who lived in a mansion on the Place du Carrousel during the revolution. The guillotine was placed just outside her gates, so she had a ringside view. She was at the opposite end of the political spectrum from the tricoteuses, and would have been executed after her letters and diary were confiscated had she not died of natural causes in 1794. Professor Colin Jones, one of the curators of the exhibition, recently discovered the duchesse d’Elbeuf’s papers in a police archive. Her eyewitness account runs like a thread through the exhibition.

Another thread is the work of the 20th-century Scottish artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay. His neon light sculpture, ‘Translation of a Line from Chénier: A Line of Thin Pale Red’ (1989), is displayed alongside the 18th- and 19th-century prints. Chénier was guillotined despite having written poems in support of the revolution. Hamilton Finlay’s sculpture, made to coincide with the revolution’s bicentenary celebrations, refers to the red ribbon worn around the necks of those who lost relatives to the guillotine.