The Revolutionary Colossus

The revolutionary Colossi stood on the edge between miraculousness and monstrousness. After the fall of the Jacobins in July 1794, monstrous depictions of revolution abounded, ushering in the conservative backlash of Thermidor, named for the month in the revolutionary calendar in which Maximilien Robespierre was guillotined. In one example, British caricaturist James Gillray, best known for his satirizing of Napoleon, depicted a French Colossus astride the Mediterranean, hands and feet dripping blood. The skull-like head, crawling with snakes, stands in stark contrast to the decapitated but quite human head of Louis Capet (as the revolutionaries referred to Louis XVI), strung around the Colossus-monster's neck. From the clouds, a British lightning bolt decapitates this aberration of a body politic. The giant body disintegrates at the same blow, arms and legs falling to pieces as the arms and legs of an enormous clay figurine might. An embodiment of the nation no more, Gillray’s French Colossus comes apart bloodlessly as no real body would. As Louis Sebastien Mercier wrote of a destroyed statue of Louis XV in the early years of the revolution, “Yes, it was all hollow, power and statue!”

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