You may think our modern world was born yesterday.
But it wasn't. Not even the day before yesterday.
Democracy in the streets and the rise of people power...
..the raw passion of national belonging...
..good and bad.
HITLER SPEAKS GERMAN
Our obsession with the self, with our own psychology
and the dark recesses of the human mind.
Even our love of nature and our concern
for the future of the planet.
All of this was the creation of the romantics...
..a generation of artists living and working 200 years ago,
around the time of the French Revolution.
Their art was created over nearly a century of upheaval and change.
And it speaks to us now with as much ferocious power as it did then.
I mean, they should have been our leaders, really, you know?
They should have been our political leaders.
Imagine that we lived in one of the richest countries on Earth,
but kids are being exploited just down the street.
The romantics lived hard, worked feverishly
and many of them died young.
But we still think with their mind,
we feel with their emotional heartbeats, we see with their eyes
and we listen with their ears.
As surely as if we saw them walking down the street,
they are still with us, right here, right now.
Anybody knows that the people have the power.
Well, we ARE the government.
All we have to do is awaken the power in the people.
If you've ever been on a march for whatever cause,
you've experienced one of the great inventions
the romantics brought into the modern world...
..the elixir-high of a crowd...
..the exhilaration of a common cause and, whether peaceful
or violent, the sense of the onrushing unstoppability
of a brother and sisterhood of the people.
What the romantics did was to convert the old religion
of pilgrimages, processions of veneration and obedience...
..into a new religion of insurrection and agitation,
in which everyone could take to the street to fight
for freedom, equality and justice.
And there was one great icon of that new religion
by the French artist Eugene Delacroix.
It was painted after the Revolution of 1830 in Paris,
which brought an end to the Bourbon monarchy
40 years after the original French Revolution...
..and it's been a focal point of intoxicated devotion ever since.
No picture, I think, is ever going to capture the pure physical
and moral onrush of a revolutionary crowd,
the sense of righteous indignation.
What it feels like to be at the heart
of a street insurrection like this painting,
Eugene Delacroix's Liberty Leading The People.
It's a scene from the uprising in Paris in 1830, when the crowd
of Paris took the city from the regime
of the reactionary king, Charles X,
and Delacroix's painting shows the sovereign of a new age,
the majesty of the people, above all, embodied in this glorious
figure of Liberty herself.
Now, there've been images of Liberty before,
in that first French Revolution,
wearing the Roman red Phrygian bonnet, which signified
the move from slavery to freedom.
But they've been static, taken from coins and medals.
There is nothing really allegorical about this woman.
She's a living, fleshy embodiment of an actual person
and around her are all the people
who make up this great communion of insurrection.
One of the figures is looking up in devoted veneration at Liberty
as though she is a Madonna.
But this is an altarpiece for the modern fighting age of the people.
Don't need God any more. We barely need a king.
There's only one sovereign here
and it's the sovereign that is the people.
Delacroix was born into an age of revolutions, in which
the monarchy and aristocracy was under siege from the ideals of
liberty, equality and the rights of man.
He was part of a new generation of romantic artists who believed
that paintings and poems and music could electrify the masses
and shake regimes.
It was the artist as activist, rebel and prophet who would create
the iconography for the modern democratic age.
"If I have not fought for my country, at least I will have
"painted for her", Delacroix wrote.
And the imagery he created didn't shy away from showing
the body count of liberty.
The martyrdom of those fallen in the name of unity
and people power.
Well, to achieve the kind of theatrical celebration
of this mythical unity, the people, you need a great cast of characters
and Delacroix knows what he's doing, all right, so he's given us
every possible kind of character in this composition.
We have a student from the Polytechnique
with his distinctive collegial hat,
we have a real man of the people brandishing
an almost cutlass-like sword.
We have a top-hatted bourgeois carrying a hunting gun,
and he could be a lawyer or journalist,
people who have been particularly offended by the reactionary
censorship of the royalist regime.
Then, we have a gamin, we have a street urchin.
Street urchin boys were famous for causing trouble in the streets
and he, of course, would appear famously as Gavroche
in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.
So, we have, in this extraordinary kind of ensemble of characters,
a really uplifting notion that whatever their differences
in rank and status and language and education,
everyone comes together for the common cause.
No other image of popular revolt has ever had as much staying power.
And his iconography is so powerful that it's been taken up by causes
with very different ideas of freedom.
Most recently, it was adopted by the Gilets Jaunes
in their demonstrations against Emmanuel Macron,
but it was considered so incendiary, the authorities had it painted over.
ARCHIVE: Openly insurrectional slogans are shouted
as France wonders if the government will simply disintegrate.
But Delacroix's image had its most famous resurrection during the
Paris uprisings of 1968, when students and workers came together
on the barricades to break apart the rigid conservatism
of French society under de Gaulle.
ARCHIVE: Many of the symbols of past revolutions appear, and for
a brief moment, the 19th and 20th centuries seem to overlap.
I happened to be in Paris during those heady months,
and even if this revolution was also driven by a modern Marxist agenda,
you could feel it was suffused with the same passions of liberty,
love and sexual liberation championed by the romantics.
In the spring of 1968, totally failing to understand
that I was about to live a bit of history,
I was actually doing work on the period of the revolution,
on my first book and I was staying in one of those garret rooms.
They don't look very garret-y now, they look rather posh
and the whole square was pretty much as you see now,
but much dirtier, much more broken down.
And the Odeon here was the epicentre of kind of everything.
Well, it was natural that a theatre would become the epicentre
of the student revolt because there was this extraordinary
faith that through art, through poetry, through drama, through power
to the imagination, France was going to live again and be shaped
by the passions of youth.
ARCHIVE: Every wall becomes a writing surface, covered with
slogans, questions, statements, humour.
Inspired by that deeply romantic idea that it's through art
that you can remake the world, the students took over
the most prestigious art school in France and covered Paris
in revolutionary slogans, poems and street art.
ARCHIVE: Posters created by the art students bedecked the streets
of Paris. It is the one industry that will flourish during the next few weeks.
The Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where Delacroix himself had been
a student, was transformed into an art factory
where the artists of '68 turned out posters in support of
the revolutionary cause.
ARCHIVE: If the symbols are echoes from former revolutions,
the style of expression is new and the content
of the expression is imaginative.
SHE SPEAKS FRENCH
One of the most potent slogans of the 1968 revolt was
L'imagination au pouvoir -
all power to the imagination.
But that romantic idea that it was actually possible to remake
the world through the powers of creativity and passionate emotion
began not with Delacroix and his generation, but with one
of the founding fathers of romanticism, the visionary poet
and artist, William Blake.
# Riders on the storm... #
Much-loved by the '60s counterculture, the beat poets
and rock bands like The Doors, who took their name from one
of his most famous phrases, "the doors of perception".
# Riders on the storm... #
Lines from Blake's poetry were graffitied all over the streets
of '60s London, the city in which he lived almost all his life.
# Riders on the storm... #
Born in the late 1750s into a tradesman's family in Soho,
Blake grew up in a city growing fat on the profits of Empire,
where every day, he could see the extremes of wealth and destitution.
But young William was no ordinary tradesman's son.
His head swam with visions.
As he walked through the streets of his city, he saw angels
in the trees and amongst the haymakers in the fields.
He's always reaching for that bit of heaven.
He sees everybody as potentially wonderful.
That's his adorable thing!
That's how he sees the world, even in the middle of, you know,
filthy, cruel, ferocious meat-grinder London.
And it's a wonderful thing to develop that kind of ecstatic possibility
that we need to live in a world of wonder, of the imagination,
in the middle of the most grasping metropolitan place
in the whole bloody world!
In his early thirties, when the French Revolution broke out
in 1789, Blake embraced it with unbridled joy,
seeing it as a chance for man and society to be reborn.
He believed that a new age needed a new kind of art, not paintings
for the rich, but hand-printed books that he hoped, with their mixture
of ecstatic imagery and prophetic text, would open ordinary people's
eyes to the injustices and to the wonder he saw all around him.
In them, Blake targeted what he felt was the true enemy of his age...
..the Enlightenment, whose faith in pure reason and science cut man off
from his sacred potential.
Now, Blake often said that life was imagination, and these images
really take fire through his own rebellious, impassioned imagination.
Against imagination was, he thought, the imprisonment
of a mechanical kind of obedience to reason.
His villains are people like Newton and Locke,
who everybody else in Enlightenment Britain worshipped.
For Blake, Newton and Locke had created a world about measurement,
about entrapment, about understanding the price of things
rather than the deep value of things.
These images, together with these extraordinary poems,
would be the instrument of liberation.
So these are where the revolution in romantic sensibility truly begins.
The sovereignty of passion, the dominion of the imagination,
attacking those prison chains of mechanical reason.
The figures in Blake's revolutionary cosmology are demonic and wild-eyed,
laying curses on convention and authority.
And their metaphysical dramas personify the convulsive forces
that were transforming Blake's world.
For Blake, revolution wasn't just humanity's first step
towards freedom...
..but part of a cosmic struggle that he represented in two figures.
Urizen, the incarnation of reason and repression...
..and Orc, the spirit of rebellion and the destroyer of tyranny.
The new age would come from the battle between
these two eternal forces.
And he was perfectly aware that that battle
might unleash demons.
What a feverish mind. If you want the first great, kind of,
comic book, heroic visionary, it's William Blake.
And it has an instinct of what we'd call, you know, video game
or sci-fi, that you need mythological superheroes.
You need superheroes and super villains.
And the superhero, Orc, who will come to save us all,
he is absolutely the first Superman.
And the super villain is Urizen, The Ancient Of Days.
I mean, one of the astonishing things about Blake is
you do feel that it's in the images that were negative for him
that his most prodigious creative powers were invested in.
So much so, actually, that people have misread some of them.
And this is thought of as a positive image, a heroic image.
I think partly because it does bring to mind Michelangelo's
God the Father on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
But, you know, this is the first time I've noticed this,
the eyes are blank, are actually dead.
They're not shut.
He's looking down at his measured creation, holding this pair
of compasses from hell.
And this, for Blake, is actually, sort of, his version of Darth Vader.
It's absolutely the kind of mad assumption that the universe
was created as an act of measurement rather than as an act of liberation.
If Blake's superheroes lived in the realm of fantasy
and the supernatural, then there was another side to Blake,
more deeply rooted in the gritty realities of everyday life
in the streets and alleyways of his native city.
In his Songs of Innocence and Experience, written at exactly
the same time, Blake addressed the same themes of oppression
and liberation, but in simple poems describing the social injustices
he saw all around him.
These poems, in particular the savagely tragic London,
have lost none of their power.
My name's Testament and I'm a hip-hop artist, rapper, beatboxer
and Blake means a lot to me.
You hear London and that's an angry young man poem.
Within 16 lines giving an autopsy of why London has fallen off and died.
"I wander through each charter'd street
"Near where the charter'd Thames does flow
"And mark in every face I meet
"Marks of weakness, marks of woe
"In every cry of every Man
"In every Infant's cry of fear
"In every voice, in every ban,
"The mind-forg'd manacles I hear
"How the Chimney-sweepers cry
"And every blackning church appalls
"And the hapless Soldiers sigh
"Runs in blood down Palace walls
"But most thro' midnight streets I hear
"How the youthful Harlots curse
"Blasts the newborn Infants tear
"And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse."
I first came across Blake at school in Year 9.
I thought, this is dead. This is rubbish.
But then later, as I grew up and I sort of came across him
again, I realised that what he was talking about was really relevant.
I mean, imagine that we lived in Blake's time.
Imagine we lived in a world of rapid technological advancement.
But it's being done at the cost of people being exploited far away.
Imagine that we lived in one of the richest countries on Earth.
But kids are being exploited just down the street.
Imagine that people were talking about the outrage
being done to nature.
Imagine that society is telling us that science is the only way
and imagination is being bred out of schools.
Imagine we lived in a world of discrimination,
of racism and sexism,
in a country that declares itself as the upholder of values
that it doesn't keep.
Imagine we lived in a world like that.
Blake rarely left London.
He could only hope that the fires of revolution would make their way
across the Channel from France.
But other British romantics, many of whom Blake admired
and knew, packed their bags and headed into the flames, determined
to witness the birth of the new world first-hand.
They included William Wordsworth and Tom Paine, the radical author
of The Rights of Man.
But perhaps the most surprising, or at least the bravest,
was the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft.
In 1792, fired up by the revolution,
Mary had written A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,
the first feminist treatise in the English language, arguing
that women were as fully governed by reason as men.
And so she landed in Paris,
the capital of a nation reborn
as a country of equal citizens,
in the hope that women's rights
would be fully established alongside the rights of man.
Well, this is Rue Meslay.
It's the street to which Mary Wollstonecraft first came
when she came to Paris.
And a lot of the houses along here are quite grand
when you look at them, with stone carvings. This sort of house
would have been either full of
very nervous liberals...
HE LAUGHS
People with a lot of money who were trying as hard as they possibly
could to be friends of the revolution, unless they'd be arrested and in deep trouble.
Or it would have been empty.
They'd have emigrated and it would just be servants clattering
around. It's like, you know, early days of Bolshevik Russia,
where you had the architecture of a world that suddenly
collapsed and vanished.
The house she came to was number 22.
But as it turned out, Mary's timing couldn't have been worse.
For, three years in, the revolution had taken a very dark turn.
Her friends, a merchant and his schoolteacher wife, had fled,
leaving her alone in a vast house with only a few suspicious servants
for company, and to make matters worse, Rue Meslay had now become
the front line in a new revolutionary war.
She kind of drops into an absolute maelstrom of fearfulness
and violence.
The area she finds herself living in is the epicentre of sans-culottes
radical Jacobin hostility.
She finds the city filthy,
nerve-racking.
She won't go outside.
And there's something else, too.
She barely has a word of French.
She's in a very bad state.
She's close to meltdown.
Then one day something happens to her.
She's standing at a window like this,
looking down on the Boulevard Saint-Martin,
and she sees the king being brought from his prison to his trial.
She looks down on him and she says that she was very surprised
to see this fallen man,
not pathetic at all, but somehow dignified in the stoicism
of his fate.
Suddenly, the romantic Mary Wollstonecraft takes over
from the Mary Wollstonecraft of the brain,
and she feels a tear fall down her cheek.
"The inhabitants flocked to their windows, but the casements
"were all shut.
"Not a voice to be heard.
"Nor did I see anything like an insulting gesture.
"For the first time since I entered France, I bowed to the majesty
"of the people and respected the propriety of behaviour
"so perfectly in unison with my own feeling.
"Though my mind is calm,
"I cannot dismiss the lively images that have filled my imagination.
"Once or twice looking up from the paper, I've seen eyes glare
"through a glass door opposite my chair.
"Bloody hands shook me.
"I wish I even had the cat with me.
"I want to see something alive.
"Death in so many frightful shapes has taken hold of my fancy.
"I'm going to bed.
"And for the first time in my life,
"I cannot put out the candle."
Over the next two years, Mary witnessed the worst excesses
of the Jacobin government.
By late 1793, the myth of revolution, a spontaneous act
by the people for the common good, had turned
into its nightmare antithesis...
..the dictatorship of the Terror...
..in which over 10,000 people were rounded up and sent
to the guillotine, including a number of Mary's new-found friends.
Privately determined to write her own history of the revolution,
Mary relied on copies of the latest government reports to keep abreast
of the news, and in them you can see how the will of the people
and the language of liberty became increasingly debased
into the propaganda slogans of unlimited state power.
Here's a speech at the Jacobin Club and it says anybody thought
to be hostile to the revolutionary government should be put
under national anathema.
That means basically you're a non-citizen, you're a non-person.
The people will distinguish between the friends
of the revolution, those who sustain it at the expense of their
own life in order that it should triumph despite... "les ennemis du peuple."
Despite the enemies of the people.
You know, it has so many echoes in dictatorships of the people,
right-wing as well as left-wing, and it hadn't happened before.
So in that sense, it's a fatal inauguration.
With Britain now at war with France,
foreigners like Mary became suspected of being a fifth column,
acting on behalf of hostile foreign monarchies to bring down revolution.
This one is from the spring of 1793
and for the first time, the word
"etranger", foreigner, now becomes a synonym for suspicious person.
Foreigners were particularly responsible for spreading
"faux assignats" - false money.
And then, uh-oh,
"les fausses nouvelles" - fake news.
So from being kind of embraced as brotherly and sisterly heroes,
rallying to the cause of the revolution, you now basically
find yourself, if you're someone like Mary, as carrying a horrible
virus, the virus of fakery,
corruption, and probably sooner or later treason.
But arguably the bitterest blow for Mary was the ferocious resistance
of the Jacobin government to allow women any active role
in public life.
"Femmes," the speaker says, women, if you want to be good republicans,
be simple at home.
Laborieuses - work in your household.
Get back to your children.
And if you do that, "la patrie vous benira" -
you will be blessed by the republic.
Incredibly depressing.
So this great, glorious opening of possibility of freedom for women
to have a public life now just absolutely becomes kind
of a prison for women, really.
Unless they were good mums.
As with so many of her fellow romantics, the collapse
of revolutionary idealism into the Terror left
Mary bitterly disillusioned.
But when she returned to London after three years in France,
Britain had also become a very different place.
Terrified that the revolution would cross the Channel
to destabilise British society and upset the interests
of the landowning elite,
the Tory government waged its own war of terror on revolutionary
sympathisers that would last for the next 40 years.
The 1790s had seen a flowering of the radical press.
But now, in the midst of an all-out war, radicalism was branded
as sedition, if not outright treason.
Press freedom was shut down and radicals, including writers
and journalists, were arrested or transported to the colonies.
Even William Blake was arrested on a trumped-up charge
of defaming the king.
But the idea of a British revolution did not die
with his or Mary Wollstonecraft's generation.
In the early 1800s, during the economic hardships
of the Napoleonic Wars, radical discontent stirred again
and a new generation of romantic artists and poets looked back
to the old heroes for inspiration.
One of the most ardent was the alienated son of a baronet
and Whig MP, Percy Bysshe Shelley.
In 1811,
while he was a student at Oxford, Shelley wrote and published a series
of anonymous texts in defence
of atheism and the freedom of the press.
It would eventually see him expelled and put under surveillance
by government spies.
Poor Shelley was a really bad boy.
I mean, he's a rebel from the very beginning.
He comes to Oxford and he starts student politics, really.
He's in favour of free love.
He's very much a vegetarian.
He's massively anti-war,
but he's totally irresponsible as well.
I mean, he's the sort of cowboy in Oxford, really.
He actually has two pistols.
His clothes were very expensive, but he made them look tumbled
and rumpled.
He's into his hair and he's always fussing around with it in a kind of
Sid Vicious-y way.
You know, it is pure punk.
It's total aristo punk.
Then he gets thrown out of Oxford and elopes with a 16-year-old.
So just to complete the portrait, he has a teenage bride.
PUNK MUSIC PLAYS
After his expulsion, Shelley and his teenage wife,
Harriet, went on the run.
In Ireland, he joined the struggle for Catholic emancipation.
Then, in an attempt to hide from government spies, he retreated
to the small coastal town of Lynmouth, in Devon, where he landed
with another incendiary pamphlet that went even further in his hope
of rekindling the fires of a people's revolt.
The word that Shelley is spreading is absolute dynamite.
It's explosive. The government are right, really,
so follow him around with spies and suspicions.
He calls this document a Declaration of Rights.
Sounds immediately like the American Revolution, the French Revolution.
And here's how Shelley starts this document.
First four words - "Government has no rights.
"It is a delegation from several individuals for the purpose
"of securing their own rights.
"It is therefore just only so far as it exists
"by their consent and useful only so far as it operates
"to their well-being."
And it gets more and more radical as he goes along.
It's powerfully modern.
It's movingly modern in some ways.
"Article 24. A Christian, a deist, a Turk," in other words a Muslim,
"and a Jew have equal rights.
"They are men and brethren.
"If a person's religious ideas correspond not
"with your own, love him nevertheless."
Then there is an attack really on his dad,
on everybody's dad, the King.
On the notion itself of empty social status.
"Article 27. No man has a right to be respected for any other
"possessions, but those of virtue and talents.
"Titles are tinsel
"and excessive wealth a libel on its possessor."
Then Shelley, the poet, the political poet,
Shelley, the person who believes that art cannot possibly
be apolitical in the face of injustice and repression,
we have the trumpet blast of Shelley,
"Awake, arise or be for ever fallen."
When no-one dared to publish it,
Shelley, in what must be the ultimate romantic gesture,
distributed his call to arms using the wind and the waves.
Clambering over the rocks at dusk,
he launched wooden boats sealed
with wax into the open ocean.
And with Harriet by his side,
tucked them into silk balloons that they released into the sky.
"Bright ball of flame that through the gloom of even
"Silently takes thine ethereal way
"A ray of courage to the oppressed and poor
"Which through the tyrants gilded domes shall roar
"A beacon in the darkness of the Earth
"A sun which o'er the renovated scene shall dart like truth
"Where falsehood yet has been."
Dogged by scandal after another runaway romance with another
16-year-old, this time Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter, Shelley
moved to Italy, where he turned to less explicitly political work.
But one calamity so brutal
it became legendary in the long fight for a people's democracy
jolted him back to politics.
John Ashton, aged 41, sabred and trampled.
John Lees, aged 21, beaten by special constables.
He died three weeks later.
William Bradshaw, age 17, of Lily Hill...
On August 16th 1819,
an unarmed crowd of 60,000 people gathered
in St Peter's Field in the heart of Manchester,
demanding the end of unlawful imprisonment,
a free press and the right to vote.
..sabred and trampled by cavalry.
But in an attempt to arrest the speakers, mounted militia charged
through the crowd, killing 18 and injuring over 600.
..Joseph Whitworth, age 19, shot by infantry at New Cross.
Thomas Buckley, bayoneted and sabred.
Behind me is where the militia came in.
This is Mount Street.
And then the mounted yeomanry came in and started to sabre people.
And that's when things turned really nasty.
My ancestor, John Curran, he was my great-great-grandfather,
was shot in the leg.
His mate, Nathan Broadhurst,
he refused to take his liberty cap off.
So they sabred him in the head.
Josh Whitworth, who was also a mate,
he was tracked down and shot in the head and died four days later
in Manchester Infirmary.
Hearing the news in Italy,
Shelley was electrified with anger and horror.
The question was - how could poetry respond?
And so, asking his friends to send him reports of the massacre
that they had published,
he sat down in a torrent of indignation, as he put it,
to write what many think is one of the greatest political
poems ever penned.
What strikes me immediately is that in this beautiful romantic hand,
it begins with rather delicate penmanship.
And as you turn the pages, this is what's so wonderful,
the actual hand gets more forceful and blotty and he doesn't
really care about that.
And more dramatic, in a sort of sense of intensity, is actually
in the pressure he's putting on the pen on the paper.
The poem begins with Italian drowsiness, a sense of him
being awakened from an apolitical daze.
"As I lay asleep in Italy
"There came a voice from over the sea
"And with great power it forth led me
"To walk in the visions of poesy."
And after that the business starts.
"I met murder on the way
"He had a mask like Castlereagh."
One of the ministers in the reactionary government
that had brought about this terrible event.
"Very smooth he looked yet grim,
"Seven bloodhounds followed him.
"Last came anarchy, he rode
"On a white horse, splashed with blood
"He was pale even to the lips,
"Like Death in the Apocalypse,
"And he wore a kingly crown,
"And in his grasp a sceptre shone,
"On his brow this mark I saw -
"I AM GOD AND KING AND LAW!"
His poetry weaponised in the cause of anger and justice.
The heart of that is the character of anarchy itself.
And that is a piece of pure Shelley intellectual cleverness,
because anarchy is the kind of thing
the powers that be accuse the people of committing,
kind of mob politics, looting, plunder, craziness.
So by actually casting the powers that are God, king and law, people
who thought of themselves as conservatives, as criminally
responsible for anarchy,
he's already turning a knife in a brilliant way.
Then this wonderful turn, famous turn in, in the poem.
Out of this catastrophic slaughter Shelley envisions against anarchy
a mass of people standing in defiance against the onslaught.
"And if then the tyrants dare
"Let them ride among you there,
"Slash, and stab, and maim, and hew
"What they like, let them do."
Shelley gives us, really for the first time, a vision
of nonviolent resistance.
That's what actually is the message that goes forth into our own times.
The lines are extremely beautiful.
"Stand ye calm and resolute
"Like a forest close and mute
"With folded arms and looks which are weapons
"Of an unvanquished war."
The sort of thing you think can't possibly be weapons,
the termination of nonviolent resistance,
are exactly the weapons
which are unvanquishable, unconquerable.
That message does indeed echo into all the great popular
demonstrations which attempt to defy brutal reactionary
force with pacifism.
Then comes the great climax, written in the rhyming quatrains
of the ballads and dances of the working man.
"Rise like lions after slumber
"In unvanquishable number
"Shake your chains to earth like dew
"Which in sleep had fallen on you
"Ye are many - they are few."
In its direct attack on the government and call for class war,
Shelley's poem was so explosive
it couldn't be published in his own lifetime.
But he wasn't the only artist of his generation willing to risk
everything to keep alive the causes of liberty and justice at a time
when even France seemed to be turning its back on the ideals
of the French Revolution.
In August, 1819,
the very same month as the massacre at Peterloo, the French painter
Theodore Gericault put the final touches to one of the greatest
achievements of romantic art.
Unveiled at the Paris Salon,
the official art exhibition of the French state,
in this vast painting,
Gericault took another controversial story ripped
from the front pages -
this time, the shocking tale of France's most sensational
shipwreck - and turned it into a piece of pure political dynamite.
In the summer of 1816, the ship called the Medusa was carrying 400
settlers back to what had once been the French colony of Senegal
on the west coast of Africa.
Now, the 400 included the cream of society -
merchants, financiers, bureaucrats.
There was a governor, and they were going to reconstitute
this very important colony, important because it had grown rich
and fat and bloated, not least on the profits of the slave trade.
But there are a lot of regular folk too - tailors, weavers, carpenters,
everybody you needed to rebuild a French establishment
in West Africa.
But just off the coast of Senegal,
the Medusa ran aground.
153 passengers were put aboard an improvised raft
with very little provisions, almost no water and almost no food.
Immediately, horror unfolded.
On the second night, a violent fight broke out.
60 people at least were slaughtered in this act of horrifying mayhem
and chucked overboard.
A lot of people proceeded to die from malnutrition.
It took 13 days before a rescue was finally made
and just 15 had survived.
And when the rescuers came aboard the raft, what they found
was these are people who had clearly been eating human flesh.
They found dried pieces of human meat nailed to the mast
to dry in the sunshine.
It's a horrifying and dramatic story, but that doesn't explain why
the painting was so controversial or why Gericault was so drawn to it.
For the real story, which had been leaked to the press
by two of the survivors,
cut to the heart of a deep political battle over the future of France.
After the defeat of Napoleon, the monarchy had been restored.
And now a group of hard-right royalists were trying to return
France to the days before the revolution.
In this climate, the command of the Medusa was given
not to an experienced sailor, but to an inexperienced aristocrat
and friend of the king.
When the Medusa began to sink,
he commandeered the six lifeboats for his fellow toffs,
while abandoning the rest,
the lower orders and the liberals, to the makeshift raft.
The idea was that the lifeboats would sail in the direction
of the African coast and it would tow the raft behind it and together
they would somehow make landing.
But what really happened,
what divided these into the powerful and those who were helpless,
was when the captain made
a terrible decision.
The lifeboat pulling this enormous number of people behind it could not
make any progress.
So he cut the rope and left the 153 helpless to their own fate
and all the horrors, starvation,
cannibalism, mutiny,
murder, madness, to all those terrible things
were as the result of the cutting of the thread in effect
between life and death.
And that for Gericault were the two Frances,
the France of the powerful
and the merciless,
and the France of those who are on the sharp end
of all that cruelty and horror.
The raft of the Medusa -
that is France itself.
Born into a prosperous family with nothing to lose,
Gericault didn't hold back in taking on the repressive forces
of the state in paint.
In fact, he'd never shied away from controversy.
Earlier in his career, during the Napoleonic Wars, he didn't paint
glorious celebrations of victory, but images of defeat that revealed
the toll Napoleon's imperial ego trip had left on ordinary soldiers.
But the raft was going to be his biggest and most
politically explicit painting to date,
one he didn't want it to be just a piece of political propaganda,
but a romantic icon of universal inhumanity and suffering.
The preparatory drawings are now kept in the local museum
in Gericault's hometown of Rouen in Normandy.
And it's only by seeing them up close,
you can see how he transformed a news story
into an extraordinary masterpiece.
So he is ready to go for it.
He is going to make this stupendous picture and it's a kind
of devotional moment, I think for Gericault.
He's a bit of a dandy, a bit of a looker.
And he cuts all his hair off - like a monk taking an oath.
But then he knows he has a set
of incredibly challenging decisions.
One set of complexities are storytelling, narrative,
which bit of this horrible story is he going to tell?
And the other is compositional.
So the storytelling problem is
are you going to go for full-on atrocity?
Might you actually paint cannibalism?
Is he going to do the second night on the raft where a huge murderous
battle breaks out, populated with hundreds of figures,
some of whom are already dead.
They've been slashed to bits, thrown overboard.
And this experiment is super populated.
So it has great drama.
But it's also a little incoherent by Gericault's own standards.
So he, at some point, settles on the moment of ecstatic release
when the rescue ship, the Argus, is sighted.
And we have another drawing, which is much more resolved
in this glorious kind of ink wash,
where we have this classical pyramid
of figures that are coherently gathered together
in dramatic lighting.
And all the energy of everybody is desperately waving
towards the rescue ship.
So he gets the drama, he knows what to do.
And then he does something compositionally, which looks
like a little technical afterthought, but it's not,
it's the key to why everybody
who comes before this picture really gets a gut punch.
He draws a horizontal line at the bottom of the sheet here.
And what that does was simply abolish any space
between the subject and us.
We have no breathing room.
We have nowhere to go.
We ourself are on this raft of death and doom.
But that wasn't the only change Gericault made to plunge us
into the drama of his viscerally overwhelming painting.
As he stood face to face with his giant canvas, he made two
significant alterations that aren't in his preparatory drawings.
The first was to reduce the size of the rescue ship to just a tiny
speck on the horizon.
A detail that increased the tension even further between exhilaration
and hope at one end of the canvas
and utter despair on the other.
The second alteration was even more profound because it went
beyond aesthetics and composition to the moral heart of the painting.
At some very late stage indeed, Gericault changes
the figure who is at the summit of the human pyramid
from a white body to a black body.
In fact, there are four men of colour in this painting.
And that's a profoundly moral decision.
There is a debate going on about the slave trade in France,
but he's not making a kind of wordy manifesto
in this extraordinary painting.
He is simply making black and white bodies roil together with a heroic
figure looking, not just for rescue, but, of course, for freedom.
I think that Gericault had in his mind the great motto
of the slave trade abolition movement.
Am I not a man and a brother?
That's what this painting says,
"Nous some tous semblables."
In catastrophe, utter catastrophe,
under the skin, we are all the same.
It was a powerful, romantic, deep principle -
we share a common humanity.
Now, more than ever, the painting has lost none of its power,
as the shipwrecked and the castaway, the drowned and the doomed
have become so much part of our lives.
With the raft of the Medusa,
Gericault became the epic visual poet of rage
and horror, those twin engines of romantic sensibility.
And now, inspired by his example,
a new generation of artists are using the power of romantic
iconography to turn a lens on the inequalities and injustices
of our own times.
IN FRENCH:
In joining the cause of liberty and equality,
the romantics created works of art that spoke truth to power
and which went on to become the secular icons
of a modern, democratic world.
But now, as our own times are engulfed by crisis, widening
the gap between the powerful and the powerless,
new questions are being asked about where we're heading next.
And, crucially, how artists should respond.
Next time, how the romantics delved
into our subconscious and the dark recesses of the human mind.