Géricault's Raft of the Medusa as Political Critique

The Bourbon Restoration and the Wreck of the Méduse

The so-called Bourbon Restoration, which lasted from roughly 1814 to 1830, saw the end of Napoleon's reign as well as the beginning of the end for the empire he established. Although the true end of France's colonial aspirations would not come until the twentieth century, Napoleon's reign was the high-water mark for France as a global imperial power. The Bourbon Restoration, while representing the return of the monarchy, was therefore also a period of distinct imperial decline wherein French power — both military and cultural — evaporated. When looking at the first few years of the Bourbon Restoration, one can see the beginnings of this almost inevitable decline even as the restored monarchy attempted to portray itself with the same pomp and glory that had marked Napoleon's imperial reign and the old monarchy which had preceded him.

The Bourbon Restoration began with an inauspicious start, when, "after enduring but little over ten months the restored Monarchy had collapsed like a pack of cards," as Napoleon returned from exile and Louis XVIII was forced to flee (Hall 70). After Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, the monarchy regained power seemingly as a last resort — the only possible means by which France could retain some form of sovereignty in the face of dedicated and allied opposition. The government that emerged from this defeat was "an attempt to graft upon Absolute Monarchy, which had been revived by Napoleon, a Parliamentary and Constitutional form of government similar to that of England," and, much like an organism rejecting the grafting of an alien organ, this attempt resulted in the destruction of both the absolute monarchy and the newly established parliamentary organ via the revolution of 1830 (Ormathwaite 110).

The reign of Louis and his successors was so clearly disastrous for the country that by 1872, one author remarked that "the history of the first Bourbon Restoration and of the circumstances of its failure is so well-known, and so much within the personal recollection of men still existing, that it seems almost a tiresome repetition of what newspaper articles and contemporary reviews have already taught us, to recapitulate them" (Ormathwaite 110). The failure of the Bourbon regime was due to a combination of indifference and incompetence, combined with a dedication to old grudges born out of the Napoleonic Wars — grudges that would ultimately serve to undermine Louis XVIII's authority and destabilize the country.

However, well before the Bourbon monarchy was again "overthrown by a popular insurrection, and vanquished in a street fight," an event occurred which seemed to serve as an omen for the ruin to come and laid bare the impotency of the monarchy and its supporters just as it was seeking to reestablish its legitimacy. In the summer of 1816, just a year after Napoleon's decisive defeat at the Battle of Waterloo and the "second chance" for the recently reascended Bourbon monarchy, the "low moment in French history" that was the Bourbon Restoration was marred by the wreck of a French naval frigate, the Méduse, carrying the newly-appointed governor of Senegal (Athanassoglou-Kallmyer 811).

"France had only just reacquired its West African territories in the treaty that finally ended the Napoleonic Wars," and so the rapid installation of a new governor was paramount in demonstrating the new regime's control over its empire (Brandt 171). Thus, while the wreck itself would have been embarrassing enough, the decisions of the captain, the governor, and the officers of the ship catapulted the Méduse into the public eye and stained the monarchy forever by demonstrating in gory detail the incompetence and indifference of the Bourbon regime just as it was attempting to demonstrate its legitimacy by reclaiming its former colonies. More specifically, the grounding of the Méduse sixty miles off the coast of western Africa would not have proved such a public humiliation and repudiation of Bourbon rule had it not been captained by a Royalist appointee with limited skill, and had that captain not made the decision to abandon a raft carrying 147 people in order to ensure the safety of the new governor and himself.

Henry Savigny, Alexander Correard, and the Raft of the Méduse

Over the course of thirteen days, the passengers on the raft died by drowning, starvation, suicide, or murder, and the few remaining survivors brought with them stunning accounts of the event. Even the atrocities committed by and upon the passengers on the raft were not enough to rattle the monarchy, however. It would not be until two years later, when the published account of two survivors inspired a young painter to immortalize the events, that the full impact of the raft of the Méduse would be felt. The painter, Théodore Géricault, imbued his image with political imagery, and The Raft of the Medusa may be interpreted as a direct critique of the bungling, haphazard governance of the Bourbon regime — a critique that predicts the crumbling of imperial power over the course of the Bourbon Restoration and the "bloody class war" that would ultimately result in a second revolution (Ledbury 608). Thus, while Géricault's painting was ostensibly focused on recent atrocities, it also pointed towards France's future, and the critique it proposes serves as a kind of looking glass through which one can interpret the Bourbon Restoration as a whole.

Before addressing the visual and metaphorical content of Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa in detail, it will be useful to briefly discuss the actual raft and the conditions on it, as reported by Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard, two of the fifteen survivors who eventually published an account of their experience. As reported by Savigny and Correard, responsibility for the grounding of the Méduse lies with her captain, Hugues Deroys de Chaumareys, and to a lesser extent, the newly-appointed governor of Senegal, Colonel Julien Schmaltz, who was determined to arrive at his destination as soon as possible. As will be seen, these two men represented on a micro-scale the indifference, incompetence, and cronyism that would come to characterize the Bourbon regime and ultimately lead to the final downfall of the monarchy in 1830.

For all intents and purposes, Chaumareys should not have been captaining the Méduse at all. "Determined to exclude naval officers who had served under Napoleon, [French Minister of the Marine] Dubouchage made his selection on the basis of de Chaumareys' aristocratic pedigree and pro-Bourbon sympathies, and not on his merits as a sea captain," which were likely negligible considering that "at the time the Méduse set sail in June 1816, de Chaumareys had not served on board a French ship for twenty years" (Riding 38). De Chaumareys proceeded to prove "so incompetent that instead of following the advice of the officers under him, many of them republicans who had fought for France during the wars, he relied on that of a passenger who claimed to know the treacherous, badly mapped West African coastline well," but who proceeded to lead "the ship straight onto the Arguin Bank, a sandbar that extends far into the Atlantic" (Brandt 132). After failing to free the ship from the bank, a decision was made to fashion a raft out of spare parts and tow it to shore behind the Méduse's five smaller boats, but the latter half of the plan was not to be.

Later, Governor Schmaltz would attempt to explain the abandonment of the raft by saying that:

"Some men were on the front of the raft, at the place where the towrope was fixed, which they pulled so as to draw the boat nearer to them; they had already pulled several fathoms of it to them, but a wave coming, gave a violent shock; these men were obliged to let go: the boats proceeded more rapidly, till the rope was stretched; at the moment when the boats effected this tension the effort was such, that the rope broke." (Savigny & Correard 175–176)

In reality, however, accounts from others in the boats revealed "that all the boats were coming to resume their post, when a cry of 'we forsake them' was heard," and the towrope was let go as each individual boat fell into disarray (Savigny & Correard 176). The raft upon which the 147 people were abandoned was made up of "the top-masts of the frigate, yards, fishes, boom, etc. […] joined together by very strong ropes," and measured "at least twenty metres in length, and above seven in breadth" (Savigny & Correard 173). The passengers were for the most part submerged in "at least a metre" of water, and they had barely any supplies, as the majority of provisions had been thrown overboard in order to keep the raft afloat, so that they "saved only the wine and the water" (Savigny & Correard 174).

By the end of the first night, the raft had lost twenty people, as "ten or twelve unhappy wretches, having their lower extremities entangled in the openings between the pieces of the raft, had not been able to disengage themselves, and had lost their lives," along with some who had been carried overboard or else been murdered (Savigny & Correard 181–182). By the second night, a group of men had mutinied and attempted to kill the officers and destroy the raft, and by the third day, "those whom death had spared in the disastrous night […] fell upon the dead bodies with which the raft was covered, and cut off pieces, which some instantly devoured" (Savigny & Correard 192). Ultimately, the survivors were reduced to throwing the wounded overboard, and only after they had been reduced to fifteen men, "almost naked; their bodies and faces disfigured by the scorching beams of the sun," were they finally rescued by the Argus, which had set sail six days earlier to search for the raft and the wreck of the Méduse (Savigny & Correard 203).

Géricault's Painting: Visual Analysis and Political Symbolism

Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa captures the moment on 17 July when the Argus first became visible to the survivors, and his choice to reflect upon this particular moment reveals something about his intentions (Alhadeff 70). The Raft of the Medusa was his first major work and was exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1819 as part of a massive installation sponsored by Louis XVIII. "His choice was careful and methodical: this was a subject matter he considered suitable for an ambitious painting with which he could win the Prix de Rome" (Deligiorgi 613). Géricault's desire was undoubtedly to sell the painting either to a private buyer or the government, but "the size of the painting made it impossible to sell to private buyers and its subject matter had no appeal to a conservative royalist government," so it went into storage in his studio (Isham 168). This did not mean, however, that his hope that the painting would be "a catalyst for political reform" failed to come true; rather, he simply died before seeing the true fruits of his work, when, just over a decade later, the Bourbon monarchy was once again overthrown (Galenson 103). This is not to suggest that Géricault's painting was the most important factor in the overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy, but rather that it served to cement in the public eye the devastating effects of "the rampant cronyism displayed in organizing this ill-fated expedition" (Isham 168).

While the image itself is clearly stylized — and in fact helped encourage the development of Romanticism in Europe — Géricault put an enormous amount of research into his work, as he "talked to survivors, studied sick people and corpses in hospitals, and even had a model of the raft made and took it to the coast to study its behavior in the waves" (Isham 168). This research supplemented the written account offered by Savigny and Correard, as well as direct conversations between Géricault and Correard. The intersection of Romanticized stylization and realistic detail is one reason The Raft of the Medusa is so striking, and a close visual analysis of the painting reveals how Géricault used this intersection of styles and themes to criticize the indifference of the Bourbon regime while celebrating the potential for redemption.

Upon first glance, the eye is immediately drawn to the lower-left corner of the image, where two dead figures lie sprawled. One of the dead men is only visible from the waist up, representing one of those "unhappy wretches, having their lower extremities entangled in the openings between the pieces of the raft," while the other's body is almost entirely visible, naked and splayed (Savigny & Correard 181). The more visible of the two seems to be cradled by an older man, and various critics have "taken [this] to be a father grieving the death of his son" (Harris 602).

Along with a few other dead bodies flung about the raft, these figures demonstrate the "kind of hell" the survivors endured (Jefferson 84). Visually, the dead young man cradled by the older figure is a kind of despondent, hopeless pietà, where the body of Christ is replaced with a sickly youth and the holy cross with a ramshackle raft. Recognizing the visual connection between the young corpse and the common trope of a dead Jesus also inevitably focuses the viewer's mind on the theme of cannibalism, as the flesh of the dead offered a kind of saving communion for the survivors. While cannibalism is not directly represented in the image, the limbs of the various dead bodies appear splayed and disjointed, so that the bodies break down into their constituent parts and become nothing more than meat and bone piled upon the still-living bodies of the survivors. The survivors, then, are almost suffocated by abundance; at the same time that the bodies of the dead transform into food that might save the living, the living are overwhelmed by the sheer mass of corpses.

As the eye travels along the bodies from left to right, the figures gradually become more active and vital. A few men struggle to reach forwards while dead bodies weigh them down, while the rightmost figures stand or sit on barrels, waving scraps of cloth to signal the distant Argus, which can be seen as a dot on the horizon. The highest figure signaling to the Argus is that of Jean Charles, the only surviving black passenger of the Méduse. The line of bodies is entirely in the foreground, and although it moves away from the viewer such that Charles' body is almost half the size of the corpses, this line is clearly lit and distinct, pointing towards the distant background. The sweep of the eye from left to right follows this line of bodies from the dead corpses in the lower left to the triumphantly waving Charles in the upper right, but there is another group of figures which the viewer does not notice until the eye has passed Charles and moves towards the background. These figures stand next to the mast, shrouded in the shadow cast by the sail, and one points to the distant Argus while looking back at one of his fellows. This pointing figure has variously been interpreted as either Correard or Savigny, but regardless of who it is, the figure is remarkable for being the only one not looking towards the horizon, but rather back towards his fellow survivors.