Jacques-Louis David’s Adieux : The Micropolitics of Sovereignty at the Bourbon Restoration

Abstract

In 1816, the restored Bourbon regime banished a group of French Revolutionary politicians from French soil. Although Louis XVIII created an exception for France’s premier painter Jacques-Louis David, David contested this exercise of sovereignty by refusing to be the beneficiary of a monarchic decision on the exception. In rewriting exile as exit, David alters the Revolutionary conception of national sovereignty he subscribed to decades earlier and enacts self-sovereignty instead. David’s painting Les Adieux de Télémaque et d’Eucharis (1818) confirms the artist’s self-sovereign affirmation of responsibility, potential undecidability, and autonomous error in defiance of Bourbon unaccountability, decisionism, and infallibility.