New Marianne

To all French public buildings, ministries, town halls, consulates, schools, etc., etc., word went out last week that they were about to receive new Mariannes. Officials prepared to sell or destroy their chipped and grimy plaster busts of the lady who for the past 44 years has represented La Republique.

The first bust of Marianne to attract public attention was that of Sculptor Jean-Baptiste Soitout, designed during the despotic provisional government of 1848. At that time France's ministry of the interior organized a competition for a figure to represent the Republic. Ten were submitted and Sculptor Soitout's winning bust was exhibited with much eclat in the Salon of 1850. There was some talk of ordering replicas for public buildings, but while the discussion was still going on pale Louis Napoleon abruptly ended the Second Republic with his famed whiff of grapeshot. Soitout's Marianne was hustled away to an attic. There she stayed for 28 years. With the Third Republic firmly established, Marianne was hauled out for the Exposition of 1878. At the close of the Exposition the State offered her to the City of Paris which placed the lady on a pedestal before the Institut de France where she remains today.

In 1889 the government decided to distribute Mariannes to all the communes of France, held another competition. This time Jean-Antoine Injalbert was the lucky man. Thousands of plaster copies of his Marianne, a broad-browed, sharp-featured young woman in a "liberty" cap, have been sent all over the world. To the government they seemed quite satisfactory until last year when one Jean Mistler was Under-Secretary of Fine Arts in the Paul-Boncour Cabinet.

M. Mistler took it upon himself to find a new Marianne for France. Last week, with a new Cabinet in France, M. Mistler was out of office. To his successors he bequeathed his new goddess, a large, placid pseudo-Roman lady, the work of his good friend Sculptor Pierre Poisson. To the new town hall of Arras belongs the original.

Quiet, well-dressed Sculptor Poisson, 45, is one of those conscientious, undistinguished artists who abound in every country and whom only politicians seem to know. Art dealers know him only as a man who has done many a job for the government and as a friend of the great French sculptor, Charles Despiau. Commenting last week on the new and old Mariannes, the French weekly Vu wrote:

"The new Marianne . . . is a good girl whose placidity does not seem likely to awaken failing energies. . . . The one that Injalbert carved long ago . . . did not lack charm. It was not so long before that they took the Bastille. Her energetic face showed that she still remembered it and that she considered that her task was far from finished."

Unlike Uncle Sam who represents the whole U. S., John Bull who is Britain, Marianne does not represent all France, but only the Republic. Every Frenchman knows this. Few of them know just why she bears her name. A learned French publication is the I. D. C., L'Intermediare des Chercheurs. On the why & wherefore of the name Marianne it has published the following notes:

1) Marianne was the name and password of a Republican secret society formed in 1852 immediately after Louis Napoleon's coup d'etat. Bonapartists referred to the Republican ideal as Marianne.

2) Further researches trace Marianne as a symbol of republican institutions as far back as the first revolution of 1789.

3) One Juan de Mariana (1532-1624) in a Latin treatise defined circumstances in which it is proper to assassinate a tyrannical prince. Following the assassination of spade-bearded Henri IV in 1610, Mariana's treatise was publicly burnt in Paris.

An independent theory looks to Pierre de Marivaux's interminable novel Marianne, published in instalments from 1731 to 1742. There was nothing notably republican about Marivaux's Marianne but the book was a best-seller in the years when the revolution was breeding. French critics indignantly accused England's Samuel Richardson of imitation when the first numbers of Clarissa Harlowe appeared in 1747.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.