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Overview
In June 1816, the Medusa set sail. Commanded by an incompetent captain, the frigate ran aground off the desolate West African coast. During the chaotic evacuation a privileged few claimed the lifeboats, while 147 men and one woman were herded aboard a makeshift raft that was soon cut loose by the boats that had pledged to tow it to safety.
Those on the boats made it ashore and undertook a two-hundred-mile trek through the sweltering Sahara, but conditions were far worse on the drifting raft. Crazed, parched, and starving, the diminishing band fell into mayhem. When rescue arrived thirteen days later, only fifteen were alive.
Among the handful of survivors were two men whose bestselling account of the maritime disaster scandalized Europe and inspired promising artist Théodore Géricault, who threw himself into a study of the Medusa tragedy, turning it into a vast canvas in his painting, The Raft of the Medusa.
Drawing on contemporaneously published accounts and journals of survivors, The Wreck of the Medusa is “a captivating gem about art’s relation to history” (Booklist) and ultimately “a thrilling read” (The Guardian).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555848675 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
In July of 1816, the French frigate Medusa, bound for the Senegalese port colony of Saint Louis under the command of an incompetent royalist captain, hit a famously treacherous reef. In the chaos that ensued, the commander and a privileged few claimed the lifeboats. The rest were herded onto a makeshift raft and set adrift. Without a compass or many provisions, hit by a vicious storm the first night and exposed to sweltering heat during the following days, the group set upon each other: mayhem, mutiny, and murder ensued. When rescue arrived thirteen days later, only fifteen were alive.
Two survivors' written account of the tragedy became an international best seller that exposed far-reaching corruption in Restoration France. The scandal inspired a young artist, Theodore Gericault, whose iconic depiction of suffering and hope won first prize at the Salon of 1819 and captivated viewers in the Louvre for centuries to come.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A Severed Head
An agitated young man with a recently shaven skull and piercing eyes emerged through a monumental portico that fronted the hospital and turned into the chilly shadow of the street. Hitherto unfocused, in this bitter winter of 1819 he had a newfound sense of determination, a resolve formed not a moment too soon: although only twenty-seven, this striking figure would, within the space of five years, be dead.
The street into which he turned was not busy. He had chosen to install himself in a working-class, northwestern suburb of Paris, close to the Beaujon hospital and away from society's babble. The district was scarred, as was every part of that damaged capital, by the bloodshed of a revolution turned vicious and, more recently, by the debris of an empire overthrown. A visiting English artist noted that there was "scarcely a driver of a fiacre, a waiter at a café, or a man in middle life, who had not been in battle, served in a campaign, or been wounded by a shot." Mutilation was commonplace. Injured soldiers and amputees formed a macabre and lengthening procession that had dragged itself about the city since Napoleon's first conquests. Twenty years on, there were hoards of these invalids, retired on half pay after 1814, rejected victims of the restored monarchy's reduction of the once feared Grand Army. According to another English visitor, Paris was "a vast mourning family," where "three people out of five that one meets are habited in black." Its citizens after a quarter of a century had, once again, been made royal subjects and discord grumbled round the capital.
Although the muslin parcel that he hugged in his arms was proving cumbersome, the young man attempted to quicken his pace. From his razored appearance and from the dark red staining the gauze, it would seem that his trade was perhaps butcher or that his guilty secret was murder. The fabric was proving far from impermeable and he was obliged to reposition his load in order to prevent his coat from becoming bloodied.
If it seemed like madness to parade in broad daylight with a severed head clutched closely to one's breast — and, indeed, neatly bound in the muslin sack was a human head that had, until recently, been attached to a living, breathing body — it was nothing to the folly of the world into which Théodore Géricault had plunged. His new friend Alexandre Corréard had promised to call. He was an excitable person with strong convictions, a frankly litigious man with a recently acquired sense of self-importance. Corréard had been on board the Medusa. He had survived the infamous raft and had much privileged information to impart.
The severed head was already putrid, but the stench that greeted the young man as he climbed the stairs to his lodgings was emetic. It was fortunate that he was living an almost reclusive existence, for the stink was overpowering as he opened his front door and beheld the carnage. Surely the domain of a homicidal maniac, the space was ornamented with portions of death. Arranged lovingly, like delicacies on a small table, were the amputated arms and legs of some unfortunate individual. If Géricault was no murderer, then surely he was a psychopath, a cannibal who had decided to feast upon the dead.
The sound of quick, purposeful steps could be heard on the stairs and the expected visitor, Corréard, burst into the room. He showed no sign of shock at the butchery, and neither did the reek of rotting flesh upset him. Corréard had, nigh on three years before, over a period of days while floating between life and death, eaten from the hacked-off limbs of dead companions. Since then, such sights had racked his dreams, but somehow, in the cold light of a winter's day, these scraps, arranged for purposes of research, seemed acceptable. Over the past few weeks his host Géricault had been living with putrefaction as fragments of bodies had decomposed all about him, helping the artist approach the horror precipitated by the wreck of the Medusa.
The flagship of a prestigious expedition to repossess the colony of Senegal, the Medusa had been driven onto a sandbank by its inept captain, a relic from the ancien régime, who had been appointed leader of the expedition not for any qualities of seamanship but in recompense for past political services. Corréard, as a member of that ill-fated expedition, had been the victim of an avoidable shipwreck and a selfishly misconceived rescue plan. Adding insult to injury, when Corréard had sought compensation, he had been spurned by an indifferent government. Outraged by its callousness, he had publicized his misfortune, writing The Shipwreck of the Frigate, the Medusa — a best seller — and was visiting this stinking room to elaborate certain visual details that were absent from his text. He was here to help create an image, to act as adviser to this disturbed young artist who was deep in a painting with which he sought to make his name.
So gripping was the indictment of the French leadership in Corréard's book that it had been translated into English, German, and Dutch, with an Italian translation forthcoming. The work in its second French edition had become more politicized in scope and Corréard visited Géricault not only to reconstruct specific details of his terrifying days on the raft, but also to elucidate the sinister state of affairs. His argument, to which his own misfortune bore witness, offered a scathing appraisal of the Bourbon restoration, which, he claimed, was intent on betraying the positive gains of nearly three decades of French political struggle.
Host and visitor began to talk, exploring the labyrinth of issues that led out from that supreme act of cowardice, the release and cutting of the ropes that were supposed to tow the raft of the Medusa to safety. One hundred forty-seven people had been herded onto this makeshift platform because of a shortage of lifeboats. Abandoned by the leaders of the expedition, who fled in order to save themselves, all but fifteen died on board.
Swept along by Corréard's intense and penetrating diatribe, Géricault listened attentively. Géricault had begun to look about, in the streets and in the press, for something to excite his desire for relevance. He had come back early to Paris from his Italian painting trip, not with the usual copies of Michelangelo but with scenes of carnival upheavals, executions, and a fistful of tortured erotic drawings. He had returned searching for the kind of story that smacked of the moment, for an incident that thrilled the readers of the popular press of the day, one of those lurid news items that reported wide-ranging infamies from criminal and sexual scandals to suicides, shipwrecks, and cannibalism.
Alexandre Corréard and Théodore Géricault, meeting in the midst of this butchery, had both suffered devastating setbacks, had scandals hounding them, had secrets to conceal and yet were determined to surmount misfortune. Corréard tireless in his struggles for retribution and justice; Géricault tackling his ambitious canvas with a fervor and single-mindedness that could be gauged from the hideous array of decomposing flesh with which he chose to populate his studio. It was a temporary space; he had rented it to paint the raft. Hence the strewn limbs, the sketches of the successive outrages in the drama, the small model of the platform, which had been assembled for him by the ship's carpenter, a man who had questioned aspects of Corréard's account of their thirteen days adrift.
Catching sight of a bundle of studies for which he himself had posed, Corréard pondered them for a moment and then turned to confront the large canvas on which Géricault had begun to work. He saw his own figure taking shape, center stage, in pride of place, the star of the nightmare.
CHAPTER 2Voyages Out
For Love and Loathing
Three fraught years earlier, in the summer of 1816, a summer that would change their destinies, Alexandre Corréard and Théodore Géricault appeared very different from the agitated, injured beings who would meet in that grisly studio during the winter of 1819. Both seemed, uncannily, so much younger. Géricault, in contrast to his later self, was very much the young man about town, handsome, well dressed, with an attractive head of reddish, light brown hair. Corréard was lithe and sinewy, excitable and alert. These two men, who would become important figures in each other's lives, had urgent reasons to leave France. Love would drive Géricault away; loathing for what was happening to his country would send Corréard, as a pioneer, to Senegal.
Despite the costly failures during the final months of his reign, Napoleon had boosted the self-esteem of a great many Frenchmen. In 1814, the twenty- six-year-old Corréard was by no means alone in feeling dismay at his emperor's defeat. Although a conciliatory constitutional monarchy was swiftly created, Louis XVIII was obliged to reward survivors from the ancien régime, counterrevolutionaries, and those who had been supportive to the crown in exile. Though the king was to preserve many of the improvements made in French administration since his elder brother, Louis XVI, had been forced from the throne and guillotined, the year 1814 saw ennoblement on an unprecedented scale and witnessed the restoration of that emblem of an all-powerful monarchy, the palace of Versailles. Such conflicting signals were alarming to a country suffering from defeat and a formidable sense of collective loss.
During their childhood and youth, Alexandre Corréard and Théodore Géricault had known only the turmoils of revolution and the authoritarianism of the empire. Alexandre had been born into a class that had prospered since the French Revolution and grew up in one of the grandest houses in the precariously hill-hugging town of Serres in the mountainous region of southwestern France. On his father's side the family had been merchants since the Middle Ages and his mother's family were middle-class professionals. Elizabeth, the mother often children, of whom Alexandre was the sixth, was fervently religious. She kept to her faith throughout the revolution, which had, by turns, been unsympathetic or ambivalent toward the church. Just as Alexandre's flair for enterprise suggests some measure of paternal influence, so Elizabeth's tenacity was reflected in the ardor of her son's subsequent struggles against the injustices of the state. He attended a military school in the imperial city of Compiègne, coming to maturity when Napoleon was at the height of his power. In 1812, as the tide turned against the emperor, with food and anticonscription riots at home, defeat in Spain, and retreat from Russia, Corréard joined the Imperial Guard, in which he served until 1814.
During those two years, the military and domestic situation in France deteriorated rapidly. With so many men conscripted, wounded, or dead, the women and children were to be found hard at work in the fields. Abroad, the unenthusiastic remnants of the French army in Spain were defeated at Vitoria-Gasteiz in June 1813, allowing the victorious Wellington to enter southern France. Napoleon was likewise defeated at Leipzig in October 1813, allowing the Prussians to push on toward the French frontier. By the early months of 1814, peasants had inundated Paris with their carts and cattle, seeking refuge from the invading armies. The mentally disturbed were turned out of asylums in order to provide quarters for the retreating troops; hospital patients were driven from their beds to make way for the wounded. In March, famine and pillage threatened the capital, presaging complete social breakdown. Dead bodies were heaped up on the banks of the Seine and floated eerily in the river, a situation that the authorities duplicitously assured inhabitants would have no deleterious effect on drinking water. Mounds of the military dead were piled into mass graves and Paris took on the air of a sacrificial altar to a lost cause.
Then, at the end of March and the beginning of April 1814, it all changed. Throughout the city, Allied troops paraded. In the Tuileries, along the Champs-Elysées, and in the Palais Royal droves of curiously attired English tourists, along with a multitude of occupying troops, gave Paris the splendor of a fabulous extravaganza; a stroll through the capital would present the visitor with a
savage Cossack horseman, his belt stuck full of pistols, and watches and hatchets ... the Russian Imperial guardsman, pinched in at the waist like a wasp, striding along like a giant, with an air of victory that made every Frenchman curse within his teeth as he passed him ... the heavy Austrian, the natty Prussian, and now and then a Bashkir Tartar, in the ancient Phrygian cap, with bow and arrows and chain armour, gazing about from his horse.
The cosmopolitan mayhem of the occupation flashed visions of "hopeless confusion ... Russians, Poles, Germans, Italians, Jews, Turks and Christians, all hot, hurried and in a fidget."
To secure peace and stability in Europe the Senate, at the behest of the provisional government and acting on the wishes of the Allied victors, summoned the Bourbon Louis Stanislas Xavier, king of France, to return home after his interminable exile and accept his rightful place on the throne. The event was heralded in a fast-selling pamphlet in which the royalist author vicomte de Chateaubriand celebrated the Allies as liberators, denounced Napoleon as having had "the sword of Atilla and the maxims of Nero," and hailed the royal family as healers.
Returning to France in 1814, the Bourbons may have been thoroughbred French, with their line stretching back to the Middle Ages, but they were also an unprepossessing group who were coming to restore regal authority and order to a country that had run wild with blood-thirsty political experiment. Louis XVIII claimed that he had been de facto king since the death of his young nephew Louis XVII, in 1795. By 1814 he was aging, childless, and deteriorating with gout, yet his uncompromisingly absolute attitude, a reaction to the execution of his brother Louis XVI, had mellowed during his long exile. Not so, however, that of his younger brother, the dangerous and provocative duc d'Artois, who would succeed Louis as Charles X. Artois surrounded himself with extremists, "ultra-royalists" who had no intention of letting renegade republicans and Bonapartists have their say in restoration France. These ultras were to prove the most problematic of all the political factions, launching intimidating affronts to Louis's rule.
The Senate called Louis XVIII to the throne as a constitutional monarch on April 7, 1814. The king arrived with a strong desire to heal his kingdom's wounds and to effect, as he put it, a "fusion of two peoples." France was a nation in a state of shock and, as Louis's remark suggests, divided against itself. If a good number of people in many parts of the country welcomed the return of a king, the army remained loyal to Napoleon. Paris was split along political lines. Dangerously, factions were testy and likely to clash.
Remembering Napoleon's rule as a period of opportunity, Alexandre Corréard noted that, at the time of his fall, "I wanted to distance myself as far as possible from France and so I engaged as an engineer in the military expedition that was going to retake possession of the French establishments on the African coast." As a geographical engineer, Corréard was appointed to identify a suitable location on Cap Vert, or its environs, for the establishment of a colony. An expedition was set up in the late autumn of 1814 and participants began to assemble at Brest for a departure planned for the spring of 1815. The scheme for which Corréard enlisted was directed by the Philanthropic Society of Cap Vert and attracted a large number of republican, or Napoleonic, sympathizers who were seeking to start afresh in a French colony. In order to gain official support, the Philanthropic Society presented itself as an organization that had been created to prevent disaffected people from taking their capabilities and capital off to other countries. With a schedule for reimbursing the crown for its initial support, the society was a properly structured commercial venture with shareholders, annual general meetings, a committee of directors, and projected profits.
As Corréard prepared to ship out, something unforeseen happened. On March 1, 1815, Bonaparte, who had been smoldering away on the island of Elba, landed in Golfe Juan on the south coast of France with the four hundred soldiers that he had illegally kept with him in exile. His reckless gamble seemed to be paying off when he entered Grenoble six days later, escorted by the very troops sent to check his advance. On March 10 in Lyon, Napoleon was greeted by crowds yelling, "To the scaffold with the Bourbons! Death to the royalists." Events followed swiftly. On March 14, the Crown Jewels were sent to England for safekeeping. Louis addressed the chamber of deputies, claiming that he stood for peace and liberty, whereas Napoleon brought war. However, on March 19 the king prepared to travel north into exile.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Wreck Of The Medusa"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Jonathan Miles.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
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Table of Contents
Illustrations,
Note,
Acknowledgments,
Map,
1 A Severed Head,
2 Voyages Out,
3 The Wreck,
4 On a Scorching Shore,
5 The Raft,
6 Tea and Pastries in Senegal,
7 Sex and the Street,
8 Breaking News and Stifling Scandal,
9 The Fualdès Affair and the Love Affair,
10 Trips to the Morgue,
11 The Raft of the Medusa,
12 The Medusa Sails On,
13 A Larger Struggle,
14 The Shipwreck and the Shipwrecked,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,
