2012
Andrew Eschelbacher
- Doctoral Candidate
- University of Maryland, College Park
Abstract
Eschelbacher, Andrew
Labor in the Cauldron of Progress: Jules Dalou, the Inconstant Worker, and Paris's Memorial Landscape
French populist identity and changing notions of masculinity converge in the monument projects of Jules Dalou, revealing the fissures in the Third Republic’s attempts to unify the nation. Treating the worker as France’s representative man, Dalou intervened in a memorial sphere where the laborer’s ambiguous position manifested the effects of profound cultural traumas. This dissertation investigates how Dalou consistently altered his representations of the worker as he explored French identity at the intersection of a culture of traditions and a new age of science and industry. As Dalou pursued the monumental idiom appropriate to communicate this Modernity, his projects illustrate the social angst of the fin-de-siècle and anticipate visual language of divisive twentieth-century ideologies.
Labor in the Cauldron of Progress: Jules Dalou, the Inconstant Worker, and Paris's Memorial Landscape
French populist identity and changing notions of masculinity converge in the monument projects of Jules Dalou, revealing the fissures in the Third Republic’s attempts to unify the nation. Treating the worker as France’s representative man, Dalou intervened in a memorial sphere where the laborer’s ambiguous position manifested the effects of profound cultural traumas. This dissertation investigates how Dalou consistently altered his representations of the worker as he explored French identity at the intersection of a culture of traditions and a new age of science and industry. As Dalou pursued the monumental idiom appropriate to communicate this Modernity, his projects illustrate the social angst of the fin-de-siècle and anticipate visual language of divisive twentieth-century ideologies.