Headless in Paris

Photograph by David Henry, © 2008, all rights reserved

As I mentioned in the last post, there was a helluva lot of statue smashing going on in the French Revolution. After all, there were a helluva lot of statues to smash, and the populace was totally riled and ready to crush the bad guys and their artifacts as they saw them. This was real "iconoclasm from the bottom", rather than the carefully planned politico-artistic statements made in Afghanistan, Greece, and Iraq. It was NYC on a large scale. And no photo-ops need apply for this killing spree. I needed, as I noted in the last post, a focus.

I had thought I'd hit paydirt when I found out about the Fontainbleu incident, but zut alors! It's been trumped by the headless "Kings of Judah" episode from Notre Dame. Seems as though (from prelim reports) the common folk thought these erstwhile rulers were actually their own Franco ancestors and guillotined them on the spot. You can see their remains (the K of J, not the revolutionaries) in the Cluny Museum today (which will be my first stop when we hit Paris in September) and, of course, that makes it all the more seductive. The picture above is by a French photog who obviously has just the right sensibilities for this kind of thing. He wasn't drawn to the story, he wrote, but the juxtaposition of the living and the headless. You can see more of his stuff at http://www.davidphenry.com/

I have a stack of "History of the French Revolution" books on the kitchen counter and have committed myself to a marathon research spree the next few days. Stay tuned as things develop....

PS- Less than an hour later, I've come across some conflicting info from the above posting. It appears that the bodies are in Notre Dame and th heads are in Cluny...