1840–1848

Abstract

In Strasbourg’s Place Gutenburg stands a statue of the printer by David d’Angers. D’Angers believed that art should improve humankind by displaying immortal examples, but the four panels affixed to Gutenburg’s pedestal – each celebrating the written word’s beneficial effects – inadvertently anchor this work to a specific place – France – and time – the late 1830s. One panel shows the great authors of history – philosophers, poets, scientists; another has great reforming Turkish and Asian monarchs, darlings of nineteenth-century liberals; a third immortalizes the signatories of America’s Declaration of Independence, with Lafayette and Simon Bolivar given honorary inclusion, along with some suitably supplicant and enraptured native people. Ranking equal to the others is a panel dedicated to the liberation of slaves. Unchaining exceedingly grateful blacks are the Marquis de Condorcet, Grégoire, Wilberforce and Clarkson. Such a presentation of the two pre-eminent figures of British anti-slavery in a piece of French public art implies that they and the British movement had achieved permanent recognition for an unimpeachable, philanthropic crusade. The incorrect spelling of Clarkson’s name, as ‘Clarrion’, however, suggests a superficial knowledge of Britain’s contribution to this work and a much more precarious place for it in the liberal pantheon should public opinion wander.