revolution_fr | Some people build model ships...

But this man.... http://boisdejustice.com/Home/Home.html
Hmm...!
If you can lightly skip over his take on the Revolution (he knows a lot about guillotines, but evidently not much about the 1790's!) the history page has a pre-1925 fire photo of the Paris guillotine blade and lunette. There was a fire in 1925 that destroyed Madame Tussauds in London, including, sadly, most of the Revolution and Napoleon artefacts, but the blade survived, though damaged - I don't know what became of the lunette (I last went when I was 5 or 6!). I suppose you have to take their word for it that it's the one: it's now billed as 'the blade that killed Marie-Antoinette' (and I bet they were tempted to add 'like in the movie'?), but if that's the case parts, if not all of it, must also have been used to kill - well, pretty well everyone that everyone here is interested in...which is a weird and horrible thought...
http://boisdejustice.com/History/History.html
(btw in case you didn't know, Tussaud also allegedly took Robespierre's 'death mask' -the Parisian place that makes copies believes it was actually taken in life, which is plausible - Washington had his cast in life, as did many politicians, poets etc. - but billing it as taken at the foot of the guillotine sounds more dramatic! http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/dec/01/france.art )
Gosh, I'm morbid today!

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I would suggest that the chance of a death mask or a life mask ever having been made is almost nil. The market for artifacts has always been lucrative. So much so, that it's actually a wonder that there aren't more alleged masks, bloodied garments, locks of hair, etc. The people who are in such trade (including those who made death and life masks for a living) are in the business of believing that such items exist and passing on that belief to a paying public. Whether they are scam artists, merely duped by others, or a little of both, I don't know. But since the only claims for such things comes from people connected to making money off of them, I can't buy into any of the masks, coats, etc. One more reason: remember how urgent the need to obliterate the Robespierrists was. It would have been serious business to assert that it would be a good idea to make a mask. That would not have amused any of the Thermidoreans. As for a life mask, I can't picture Robespierre undergoing such an indignity without every one of his enemies screaming about it as soon as it was done. Yet only postmortem tales of masks exist. The only reason for believing such tales is resorting to "it's not impossible." That's just not convincig enough for me.

And yet, I've been told at the Carnavalet Museum that the lock of hair has very good evidence supporting its authentcity. I also asked why it was white and was told that it was the powder used to render hair fashionably white. My comment was something to the effect that they must have stuck that powder on with something nasty because it sure looks completely and totally white. I was told that's how it was. My natural inclination is to be very skeptical and I'm still not convinced that that hair is Robespierre's. The Carnavalet did not produce the convincing evidence they have, so I can't judge for myself. I should probably just trust their expertise on it--as I trust their expertise on believing the other artifacts in other places are hooey.

Whilst it's no proof of authenticity, the 19thc newspaper account on the acquisition of the hair says it was brown when it first went on display. Generally, fabrics and paper are now displayed in rooms with no natural light. Rather stupidly, when I was a student, I had a pair of 1860's stuffed ginger kitttens on my desk by a window (goth alert!) and they turned white in just a year! I presume the staff member was just ignorant of textile conservation issues.

As far as I can gather, Fleishmann's argument that the death mask is fake (pamphlet 'Masque Mortuaire de Robespierre') is that there wasn't the opportunity to make it after death, assuming the govt order was carried out to the letter: but (according to Bindman) the story that it was cast at the foot of the guillotine first appeared in 1838, in Tussaud's probably ghostwritten memoirs, and the story that they were taken after execution is first recorded as being mentioned in 1822, when they were moved to a seperate early version of the Chamber of Horrors - before that, I'm not clear if they were exhibited as life or death masks, but they were just exhibited (London 1802) with biographical details, and no lurid stories. Tussaud's uncle had run the Palais Royal waxworks all through the revolution, and seems to have been politically 'left'. Another thing to it pointing to it's not being a death mask is that it has no wound, and as I've mentioned in an earlier post, if you were going to make a fake death mask, why miss out the one feature that everyone wants to see, the broken jaw and the wound? Why make the 'monster' look so serene? So, maybe it's a life mask?

This was a great era for death and life masks and souvenirs (the Victorians replaced them with deathbed photographs!), and in Britain death masks were also frequently taken of murderers - presumably for phrenology or just souvenirs (also skin, in one case in Edinburgh!). There's a mention of a life mask of Robespierre taken by Houdon - as Houdon did Washington alive and Mirabeau and Rousseau dead, Robespierre would be joining an illustrious list of clients, and the terracotta bust by Deseine was sculpted, rather than cast, from life, actually made in the Jacobin club, according to Cockburn (I'd need to get French art books for more info, though - they're not well known names here). There were certainly dozens of sketches, paintings, busts, plates medals etc. made of him in life, so it's not implausible he'd have been asked for and sat for a mask. and the cast itself looks incredibly like him - assuming the Carnavalet portrait and the glasses on forehead sketch are lifelike - and doesn't look sculpted (why make a sculpture with the eyes shut?). It's impossible to be 100% sure of anything from this era, though, and I haven't read Fleischmann's case against - before the pamphlet, in 1911, they were assumed to be kosher - now when the mask's pictured , it's often with the words 'supposed' or 'alleged'.

(I once did a thesis on waxworks, taxidermy and photography - and my tutor told a BBC producer friend of his about it and he nicked one of my stories and went off and made a documentary on one of my subjects (a dead outlaw whose embalmed body turned up in an arcade) for the history slot! Seriously!)

Hair turning white when exposed to sun. Hmmm. I had no idea.
You're on top of art in a way I'm not. It just seems that the best argument for the mask being authentic is still "it's not impossible" and that leaves me very cold. If there were any contemporary (i.e., 1794) account of a mask being made, that would be intriguing. Without it, it sounds like someone selling tickets to her waxworks. I don't blame them, I just don't trust them.

It's an interesting subject (it's where a lot of my interests in art, history, politics and the macabre meet!) - but Tussaud was in showbiz and they're notorious for embellishing their stories to make them as grisly as possible! She says, for example, she took the cast of Marat's face while he was still warm! But, then again, she was local, and it's not impossible - she also says Robespierre actually gave her his clothes for their figure of him, which doesn't tally with the Robespierre-had-very-few-clothes story, but then, the 'he only had two coats' may be a myth, too! That's actually one of the things I love about this whole period, and has kept me interested for years: the inexhaustible supply of alternative and often contradictory accounts that you have to sift through - other periods are interesting, too, but people didn't write memoirs in earier centuries and little survives except archaology - and of course that the politics of the period are still a live issue in a way the politics of the 15thc are not!

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