14 July

July 14 is celebrated in France as Fête nationale and remembers the ‘Storming of the Bastille’ on this day in 1789. The taking of this medieval armoury, fortress and political prison by revolutionaries was the flashpoint for the French Revolution which resulted in the  end of the rule by the monarchy and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

The French Revolution had a profound and far-reaching impact on the world.  Apart from abolishing feudalism and changing government from a monarchy to a republic, it also established universal male suffrage, lessened the importance of religion, spread liberalism, and gave rise to modern nationalism – as part of liberté, égalité and fraternité.

These major accomplishments came at a substantial cost occurring as part of a Reign of Terror in which many were executed. So, it may seem an odd choice of theme for much of the art practice of a late 20^th century Scottish experimental concrete poet and artist. Yet Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006), who has 84 works in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, found enormous artistic inspiration in this period.

Although of Scottish descent, Finlay was born in the Bahamas in 1925 where his father bootlegged alcohol into the United States during prohibition. At the age of six, he was sent to Scotland to be educated, leading to eventually studying art at the Glasgow School of Art. After the Second World War, in which he was part of the Non-Combatant and Service Corps, Finlay lived in the Scottish countryside where he worked as a shepherd and explored writing, painting and gardening.

Finlay’s early stories have affinities with Russian writers like Turgenev and Chekhov and were descriptions of rural Scottish life. Over time, his writing became increasingly poetic and in the early 1960s he set up Wild Hawthorn Press to publish his own poetry and works of undervalued international poets. These publications were often illustrated with Finlay’s woodcut prints as his visual-literary sensibility developed. Another endeavour was the quirkily-named magazine ‘Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.’ or P.O.T.H.

In late 1962, Finlay’s creative career changed dramatically when he came into contact with the concrete poets of São Paulo’s Noigandres collective. This led to his first collection of ‘concrete poetry’ – poetry in which the layout and typography of the words contribute to the overall effect.  Ultimately, his concrete poems would become noted for their juxtaposition of apparently opposite ideas and for his use of the ‘monostitch form’ – a poem consisting of a single line.

Melding poetry, art and gardening resulted in Finlay and his wife creating a ‘poetic landscape’, Little Sparta, a five-acre garden in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh which was voted the most important work of Scottish art in 2004. Little Sparta has conventional sculptures and two garden temples but is also populated with landscape-based poems by Finlay which are inscribed into stone in the natural environment. As described in ‘The Gardeners’ Garden’ by Phaidon Publishing (2104): ‘Little Sparta is not a garden for simply enjoying … it is not just an attractive setting for an eclectic collection of sculptures; the garden is laden with meaning and allegory – symbols to encourage the visitor to read the garden’.

Finlay’s aesthetics and ethics responded to his experience of the society, culture and warfare of his time, filtered through the lens of his ongoing interest in classical literature (particularly Virgil), memento mori and the Latin phrase ‘Et in Arcadia ego’, and the French Revolution. These influences resulted in work that was described as austere, witty and even darkly whimsical.

One of the leading figures of the Revolution was Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just. Saint-Just is a polarising individual. The great French Republican historian, Jules Michelet, described him as ‘the archangel of death’ – and Saint-Just was responsible for sending many people, including King Louis XVI, to the guillotine. Others see him as a young, courageous and feverish idealist who was capable of sacrificing lives (including his own) to make the ideal a reality. Saint-Just was ultimately a victim of the Reign of Terror, being guillotined with his close friend and ally, Maximillien Robespierre, one month before his 27^th birthday.

Finlay is clearly fascinated by Saint-Just and much of his creative output recognizes Saint-Just’s rhetoric around creation through destruction – that is, social progress through bloodshed. One of his commonly repeated images is the guillotine which he termed ‘a model of order’. For Finlay this method of execution exemplified the ‘rational, efficient and humane’ control that formed the French Revolution’s ideology.

The guillotine was named after the French Enlightenment physician (and death penalty opponent) Joseph-Ignace Guillotine, who proposed its use in 1789 as a more humane and egalitarian method of execution than being broken on the wheel or hung, drawn and quartered. The death of beheading by axe, once the ‘privilege’ of the nobility, became a quick death by a machine and available to the nobles and the peasants alike.

As Stephen Scobie points out in his essay, ‘A Model of Order: Ian Hamilton Finlay and the French Revolution’ for the Yale Union: ‘Finlay in no way diminishes or ignores the violence, the destructive power of the Reign of Terror. Indeed, he faces it head on, in ways which (he believes) modern secular society does not. “Democracies”, he writes, “are not at ease with their weaponry, or with their art”, because both depend on ideas of the Absolute which, in Finlay’s view, secular society cannot accommodate and prefers to ignore’.

The Jacobin idealists of the French Revolution – including Saint-Just – longed for a Roman past from which they felt separated and hoped to re-create. In many ways, Finlay shared their view and his art reflects his thoughts about how contemporary society should address this. In 1989, Finlay proposed works for the official 200^th anniversary celebration of the French Revolution which included references to Saint-Just, Robespierre and the guillotine.  His evident admiration of the leaders and their ideals was misinterpreted as a simple-minded endorsement of the Reign of Terror and flatly rejected by the French authorities. But Finlay recognised the tension in the social and political movement that brought equality and democracy into our world as well as the violent forces that lay at its heart.

In many ways, these same ideas were considered by the American cultural historian, Robert Darnton in his fascinating and illuminating essay from 1989: ‘What Was Revolutionary about the French Revolution?’. Acknowledging ‘Bastille Day’, The New York Review of Books has re-published the essay which can be found at: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1989/01/19/what-was-revolutionary-about-the-french-revolution/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20French%20Revolution&utm_content=NYR%20French%20Revolution+CID_311a61897c5461d52dc55017426e9d6c&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=What%20Was%20Revolutionary%20about%20the%20French%20Revolution

Writing on the two hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, Darnton concluded that the revolutionaries were: ‘an assortment of unexceptional persons in exceptional circumstances. When things fell apart, they responded to an overwhelming need to make sense of things by ordering society according to new principles. Those principles still stand as an indictment of tyranny and injustice’.

Darnton wrote this thirty-one years ago and reflected on the energy of the time that ‘permeated everything … [and] transformed life, not only for the activists trying to channel it in directions of their own choosing but for ordinary persons going about their daily business’.

When comparing the urgent and cataclysmic forces that operated in France in the late 18^th century with the extraordinary upheavals in the world today, we can only wonder (and feel apprehensive) where the notions of liberté, égalité and fraternité might take us in the future.