Richard Taws’s The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France makes a compellingly original contribution to the study of the visual and material culture of the French Revolution. This book takes as its subject a body of objects that have traditionally failed to garner sustained interest within the discipline of art history, which has preferred to focus on exemplary practitioners such as Jacques-Louis David and works of art made in the durable medium of oil painting. The Politics of the Provisional asks what might be learned about the French Revolution if attention is turned from singular masterpieces and their illustrious makers to works of cultural production that were provisional, ephemeral, and fleeting, including paper currency or assignats, passports and other official documents, prints, sculptures made out of repurposed stones from the destroyed Bastille, and playing cards. Throughout the book, Taws offers close readings of works (beautifully reproduced in color) that may be unfamiliar even to scholars of the period. The first object is a richly sculptural, frayed, brown copy of a 1791 constitution that was ritually burned in a ceremony at the height of the Terror (it is currently conserved in the Archives nationales in Paris). Attending to such objects not only casts a critical eye on artifacts that have often played a supporting role in accounts of the period’s better-known artists or events; the approach also opens up new theoretical ground into understandings of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century media hierarchies, changing modes of spectatorship, the production of memory, and broader problems concerning the relationship between visual representation and political culture.

Taws poetically situates provisionality as a political problem during the Revolution, a defining characteristic of its visual production, and a filter for debates about political legitimacy. If the revolutionaries faced a political situation that was constantly undergoing transformation and contestation, provisional objects “took on a heightened significance as the substance of the Revolution” (7). These objects, Taws argues, are not just an effect of the challenging artistic climate of the revolutionary period that made it difficult to produce works of art in the more costly and enduring media of painting and sculpture. Objects that were not intended to last are, rather paradoxically, at the heart of the revolutionaries’ attempt to form “a better idea about where they stood in relation to the Revolution itself” (169). The works that are the focus of Taws’s analysis are “more than the outmoded wreckage of discontinued political systems” (4); they are rather the basis through which political subjects negotiated their relationship to the events of the Revolution. Taking the quality of ephemerality as a productive starting point, Taws makes several arguments about the nature of revolutionary temporality, which, as he notes following Lynn Hunt’s important scholarship, constituted one of the most significant transformations occasioned by the period (123).

Particularly important is Taws’s desire to examine not only the subjects depicted within the visual culture of the Revolution but “issues of how it represented and what that representation made possible (or impossible)” (9). Taws’s sophisticated analysis inverts traditional hierarchies of artistic production by taking a group of objects that have been traditionally considered “low” or marginal to most art-historical accounts of the period and credits them with tremendous agency. These provisional objects demonstrate “the precariousness of representation on an intermedial field of exchange between a range of different kinds of objects and images” (10). This is not to say that the book completely avoids canonical works of art and artists; rather, they are examined through the lens of provisionality. The introduction, for example, features an insightful reading of Jacques-Louis David’s Bara (1794) as a painting characterized by “feathery, irresolute brushwork that breaks down into hazy formlessness,” as well as the work’s context of public display, “intended to be paraded through the streets at a revolutionary festival that . . . never took place” (4).

The Politics of the Provisional is divided into six highly readable chapters covering different categories of visual production. The first chapter concerns one of the most prolific visual forms of the Revolution, the assignat—the short-lived paper currency valued against confiscated church lands, which, for Taws, exposed the Revolution’s “uneasy position with regard to its own permanence” (13). Sensitive to the shifting iconography transmitted by the assignat and its role as bearer of symbolic capital, Taws examines the currency as a highly functional mass cultural form and links it to the larger print culture of the period. This involves an illuminating analysis of caricatures that depicted assignats, a discussion of counterfeiting and concomitant debates about authenticity, and a rather technical yet fascinating discussion about stereotype printing techniques. The second chapter interrogates identity documents and certificates, successfully repositioning them as visual objects while still heeding their instrumental functions. Taws argues that these “ephemeral and mobile images” exposed the tension between the Revolution’s rhetoric of liberty and the surveillance requirements of a centralized state. The book’s commitment to theorizing relationships between media, materiality, and genre is particularly apparent in the discussion about passports and their relationship to portraiture, which features a reconsideration of Louis XVI and the royal family’s attempted flight to Varennes and a discussion of Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson’s Portrait of Citizen Belley (1797) in light of the provisional status of citizen subjects who were not easily accommodated into the universalizing ethos of the Revolution.

Building on the pioneering work of Mona Ozouf, chapter 3 offers an insightful reconsideration of revolutionary festivals by focusing on the 1790 Fête de la Fédération and its afterlife as a series of images. Because revolutionary festivals were constructed out of impermanent materials and only lasted for a brief moment in time, they are a fitting cultural form for investigating revolutionary provisionality. Taws is interested in the uneasy relationship between the fleeting event and its static representation in a proliferation of visual media; he finds that both the festival and its associated images were “subject to and equally productive of anxieties about provisional materiality” (72). Chapter 4 focuses on Pierre-François Palloy, the “architect-entrepreneur” who transformed the Bastille from a solid structure into thousands of mobile objects that took the form of miniature models of the prison made from its pulverized dust, metal tokens, and an extraordinary set of dominoes made from the governor’s windowsill that were presented to the Dauphin in 1791. Despite the crucial role Palloy played as a producer of revolutionary material culture, he was denounced during the Terror, excluded from histories of the Revolution, and died a forgotten figure in poverty. Taws positions Palloy’s practice as productive reconstitution and reads it as a form of political art that performed the Revolution’s idea of its own contingent status, “always in the process of making itself anew” (102).

The fifth chapter shifts methodological gears by focusing on a single print, Philibert-Louis Debucourt’s 1790 design for an Almanach national, dédié aux amis de la Constitution, which Taws locates as a “self-conscious reflection on the relationships between different media and on the potential of images to mediate the Revolution itself” (119). In addition to its thorough examination of how Debucourt’s Almanach speaks to larger transformations within the period’s print culture, Taws’s formal analysis of the print yields a series of important insights about the relationship between allegory and the everyday, revolutionary temporality, and the ways that spectators asserted agency through reproductive, ephemeral media. A particularly riveting passage deals with a representation of blank, exposed marble within the print, which Taws reads as a “site for graphic exuberance” that vacillates between absence and presence (138). While the materiality of the print itself and of the objects it depicts are richly analyzed in this chapter, a discussion of the image’s scale would have also been interesting to consider. (Dimensions are not listed in the captions, nor in the image list at the beginning of the book, so the reader is left to ponder how scale would have impacted the experience of viewing this print as well as the other objects in the book.)

While the majority of items that Taws examines were produced during the earliest years of the Revolution, the sixth and final chapter deals with a body of imagery that has traditionally been seen as a mere curiosity: card games and trompe l’oeil depictions of defunct assignats produced during the “uneasy period of consensus” of the Directory (143). The study of these representations provides an opportunity to “think the Revolution’s relationships to history—its successes, failures and inheritance” (145). Intaglio print, as Taws argues, is the appropriate medium for this process of historical reflection, for it “exists as an aftereffect of an effaced, but enduring metal ‘original’” (145). Prints of assignats began to appear soon after a gigantic pile of them were ritually burned in Paris; Taws argues that this constituted an attempt to deal with the enduring aftereffects of the Terror and provided a site for dealing with the traumas of revolution across space and time.

The Politics of the Provisional is full of rich material that promises to challenge received ideas about the visual production of the French Revolution. While one of its chief virtues is its tight focus on the years between 1789 and the early Directory, the concept of provisionality is so interesting that one wonders how it carried into the Consulate, the First Empire, and beyond. As prolific a monument builder as Napoleon Bonaparte was, it might be argued that his reign extended the Revolution’s culture of provisionality with unfinished monuments such as the Arc de Triomphe and the plaster and wood maquette of the elephant monument that stood on the site of the Bastille from 1810 through 1847. Outside of times of revolution, how do the politics of provisionality change? Is provisionality a revolutionary strategy or is it a feature of modernity more generally? While such questions are beyond the purview of the book, The Politics of the Provisional succeeds in opening up new avenues of inquiry for scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries interested in the ways that provisionality was both an effect of the Revolution’s upheaval as much as it was a mode of confronting its contingencies.