Funeral Book

In 1879 Étienne Arago, playwright, journalist, and militant republican, wrote a short article on the Le Nain brothers for the magazine L’art.¹ His purpose was to establish the dates of each of the three brothers—Antoine, Louis, and Mathieu—whose lives and works were, at that time, often confused in the historiography of art. More or less by chance, he had discovered a book of the funeral and burial notices of academicians since the beginnings of the Académie in 1648. The opening page of the “Billets d’enterrement & de service de Messrs de l’Académie Royale de Peinture & Sculpture qui sont morts, depuis l’etablissement d’icelle en 1648 jusqu’à l’année courante,” in the library of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, contains notices for Antoine’s and Louis’s funerals, held two days apart at the end of May 1648 at the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris.² Following Arago’s lead, the book has been mined for the evidence of the civil status of academicians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is an object of research also for scholars of Le Vieux Papier, a society founded in 1900 for the study of “old” paper ephemera such as wall almanacs, games, trade cards, and funeral notices.³ Art historians, however, have rarely noticed the book.⁴ For good reasons, perhaps: long lost among the former Académie’s “useless paperwork,” it is not a symbolic and ritual object like the Académie’s document box, in which the company’s articles of foundation were kept, nor is it an attribute of membership in group or individual Académie portraits, like, for instance, the Order of Saint Michel. When considered at all, it has been in the historical context of administration and bureaucracy. We claim it for this book because, as we demonstrate, it was an unauthorized product of the bureaucracy that historians argue played so vital a role in the formation of “modern” art institutions and it thereby affords a different perspective on academic culture.⁵

As a thing, the funeral book is a collage of printed and written texts and decorated papers gathered together between the covers of a register that opens with a cut-and-pasted ornamental title page (fig. 55). It is not a book in any conventional sense; it is not a text published in an edition of identical printed copies. Rather, it is what one might call a scrapbook, a uniquely fabricated collection of recycled things, many of them standard products retailed by the print and paper trades in the eighteenth century. The register is of the kind supplied by Paris stationers, but it was almost certainly secondhand, because, at points where the infrastructure of the book is visible, the pages shows signs of use: marks of writing, possibly even drawing. The register’s boards were bound in vellum; a surplus copy of the Académie’s 1655 statutes was purloined for the purpose. Meanwhile, out-of-date copies of the annual printed lists of members supplied the endpapers smoothing the transition between cover and contents. In the pages proper, the funeral notices are glued three, sometimes four to a page (fig. 56), laid out using black-and-white marbled paper to contain and level the surface. The resulting folios are stiff and substantial, like placards.

Inscribed under the title but within the cartouche (see fig. 55), we learn it was “gathered and arranged in order by Antoine Reynès, Concièrge of the Académie.” Reynès was only appointed to the post of concierge or porter in 1701, providing a terminus ante quem for the making of the book.⁶ He stepped into the shoes of Pierre Pérou, whom he had served first informally as an office boy and then in 1697 by appointment as second huissier (usher).⁷ The functions of the ushers and the porter were defined in the Académie’s statutes, and indeed, those relating to the former are, by coincidence, legible on the upper right corner of the book’s front cover. Those duties were elaborated and supplemented by decisions made at the institution’s assemblies and recorded in the minutes. The primary task of the ushers was to clean and provision. That of the porter was to maintain order in the school,⁸ and to safeguard the Académie’s collections, tasks facilitated by the distribution of the rooms that, from 1721, located the porter’s lodge at the top of the main stairs and on an axis with the life class.⁹

Nowhere in either the legal or the bureaucratic literatures relating to the Académie were scribal tasks assigned to either huissiers or concierges, although the supply of candles and heating fuel, equipment for the life class, and liveries for the models presupposes invoicing and record keeping. The point being that the existence of the recueil is not explained by the role of its “author.” On the contrary, his functions denied him access both to some of the stuffs of the book, notably the statutes—locked in the document box—and to the time to make it. The roughness of the finish—the marbled paper often inexpertly trimmed to fit around the notices, the notices themselves sometimes disfigured by sloppy cutting—and the occasional errors of sequence that required hinged additions to reinstate order suggest interrupted thought to add to the scattered materials. In terms of the comparison famously drawn by Claude Lévi-Strauss between the modus operandi of the engineer and the bricoleur (handyman), Reynès acted like the handyman he actually was, generating something new from materials and ideas not made for the purpose but to hand.¹⁰

Lévi-Strauss’s technological metaphor—bricolage—for the savage mind lacks context. It is not related as a cognitive and creative process to specific structures of power: economic, political, symbolic, bureaucratic. More apt in the current context is Michel de Certeau’s critique of modern practices of everyday life, in which he identifies “making do” as one of the tactics of resistance practiced by the weak in the face of that “legal-rational” form of domination that authority assumes under capitalism.¹¹ He argues that “making do” is an active form of poaching that generates a more or less conscious and subversive counterculture. Does this model of deviant production fit the precapitalist world of early eighteenth-century France and the culture of deference at the Académie? Can we make a historical case for Reynès as disaffected and observe him finding within its bureaucratic grip both the time out and the débris from which creatively to assemble something other?

Although the book was assembled from old ends (the printed billets), which became in Reynès’s hands the means to a new purpose (the Recueil), Reynès’s découpage was not extempore, like Lévi-Strauss’s bricolage. On the contrary, the book was conceived and planned in advance, closer to engineering, bricolage’s opposite. It was “engineered,” moreover, with tools specific to the purpose: scissors and glue. The notices were trimmed of excess paper (that excess originally required to post them on walls and doors about the parish before the funeral) in order to adjust them to the pages of the register in a densely spaced chronological list (see fig. 56). In place of the dispersed spatial order created by the town criers responsible for distributing the billets in multiple copies to sites and mourners across the city, Reynès substituted a rigid timeline of events represented by single copies of the notices of individual deaths.¹²

His objective to gather a complete series from the Académie’s foundation to “the present day” drove him to create substitute billets when burial notices were unavailable, rather than make do with the fragments at hand.¹³ The portrait of the Académie he constructed was an ideal one, not just in material terms and consequent to filling gaps, but also in terms of formal composition: Reynès included in the collection notices of the Académie’s first, elite protectors and directors, for example cardinal Mazarin and Martin de Charmois, even though the Académie received no invitation to their obsequies.¹⁴ Likewise, he excluded notices of models, concierges, and concierges’ wives; their billets were set aside because they were not of academicians, not agents in its grand narrative.¹⁵ Finally, Reynès’s choice of a marbled paper that simulated the particular variety of breccia often used for tombs (fig. 57) proposed the book as a monument upon which the names of the exalted were in the process of being inscribed.

Reynès was not a bricoleur in the strict sense. Lévi-Strauss’s theorization of bricolage and engineering as typological modes of thinking and making precludes, in fact, the practice of either one in a pure form. To make sense of Reynès’s particular blend of the two we need to compare his recycling of funeral notices with other notices, and to consider the funeral book in light of the range of jobs he performed. Lawyers and notaries used surplus funeral notices as covers or folders for paperwork, but their reuse was confined to the paper; it does not extend to recycling the text.¹⁶ A comparable dossier of notices announcing the funerals of the capital’s publishers and printers was, however, assembled later in the century by the police inspector Joseph d’Hémery.¹⁷ D’Hémery’s files on men of letters are well known. Robert Darnton argues that the inspector’s systematic collection of printed and other data and his filing of it alphabetically by name represents “an early phase in the evolution of the modern bureaucrat,” a phase of state rationality he sees as beginning with Colbert and Vauban in the 1670s and stretching to Turgot and Necker a century later.¹⁸ D’Hémery’s perspective on his subject—the book trade—was that of an outsider, and the scope of his information gathering was more comprehensive that Reynès’s, but comparison of the two projects is suggestive. It encourages connecting the funeral book to a second register in the Académie’s archives, identical in size to the Recueil, also bound in vellum, and also with a title page by Reynès.¹⁹ It contains the annual lists of members of the Académie (fig. 58), each one trimmed and pasted onto a page and each one annotated over the course of the year with the names of new or departed members. Comparison underscores the largely secular nature of the annotations in the funeral book: Reynès supplemented the notices with dates of death where they were not the same as the dates of burial, noting age at time of death, changes of name, and the name of his informant when his source was not a funeral notice.²⁰ The collector and amateur Pierre-Jean Mariette regarded Reynès as the embodiment of accuracy and precision.²¹

However, Reynès’s position within the Académie inflected his administrative work in ways quite different from d’Hémery. His writing was not about mapping networks of patronage, locating sources of slander, and identifying dangerous subjects in need of police surveillance; it was an unsolicited, unacknowledged, perhaps even unwanted attempt by the concierge to participate in writing the Académie’s history, the task that had officially fallen to Nicolas Guérin, appointed the Académie’s secretary in 1705.²² He highlighted by annotation the status of some of the twelve anciens (founder members), and he recorded the genealogies of descendants of academicians, occasionally noting works executed by the deceased.²³ Instead of drawing attention to religious dissent, he included without comment burial notices of Huguenots expelled after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685).²⁴ By the simple act of reclaiming by notice of death those who had left France rather than abjure their religion, he disguised the rent in the Académie’s fabric caused by Colbert’s instruction to expel Protestant members in October 1681.²⁵ Though methodical, systematic, and concerned with the reliability of evidence, Reynès’s collection of data was neither impersonal nor unprejudiced. It exhibits loyalty, reverence even, for the Académie, and it bears the marks of Reynès’s artistic sensibility in its layout and decoration.

What, then, was the purpose of the book? To whom was it addressed? The answer lies not so much in the book itself as in its contribution to the corpus of Reynès’s writings. In addition to the two bound recueils of funeral notices and lists, Reynès made a fair copy of the Académie’s minutes (procès-verbaux) from its foundation to 1722, and he wrote what he called a collection of “historical descriptions” of the morceaux de réception (reception pieces) of which he was the keeper.²⁶ This is an extraordinary body of writing for a porter. The last of these includes an open letter to the “Messrs of the Académie,” seeking their permission to publish his text and to dedicate it to them.²⁷ The letter suggests that all Reynès’s works were at some level addressed to the officers of the Académie. Written after his promotion to concierge, they were intended perhaps to demonstrate his potential for further advancement: his secretary’s hand, his accuracy in virtual minute-taking, and his intellectual promise in two of the genres of conférence writing that the secretary Guillet de Saint-Georges had inaugurated in the 1680s—the “explanations” of the morceaux de réception and the obituary notice.²⁸ Reynès was attempting to engineer his own advancement not so much by poaching the Académie’s property as by trespassing on the territory of its secretary and historiographer. Although the Académie had established a fairly complex administration for its smooth running, one in which power was exercised through formally defined, quasi-legal offices, it seems that personnel like Reynès lived that domination by identifying with its elders and seeking to participate in its symbolic body.

Why did it not work? Reynès was not considered when a new secretary and historiographer was appointed after Nicolas Guérin’s death in 1715. In the case of the funeral book, the answer may have been, at a formal level, because sophisticated marbled frame notwithstanding, Reynès’s re-presentation of the funeral notices failed to repress the noisy popular tradition of the danse macabre manifest in the decorated initial “V[ous]” (You) (fig. 59), by which mourners were simultaneously interpolated, and also forewarned, of death.²⁹ At an institutional level, it was perhaps because death is more than the departure of the physical body, it is also a dissolution of the social being and as such constitutes a blow to the social order. Both the social status of individuals and the social order of the community must adjust in order to survive the loss. If registration of the death of ordinary members was sometimes neglected in the Académie’s minutes, that of an officer was not. The void was immediately filled.³⁰ Funeral notices were privately commissioned. They registered the rite by which the person passed over, but not the rite of representation by which the social body was repaired through the affirmation of its offices and statutes. The collection of notices, however complete, accurate, and appropriately presented, could not represent the Académie as an institution nor develop its ideology. However, if by making the book Reynès was not contributing to the “governmentality” of the Académie, neither was his bricolage a crafty manipulation of academic resources for his own purposes. It was rather the product of mishap and misjudgment, partly because the billets’ overdetermined symbolic and semantic value distorted Reynès’s intentions and partly because the opportunities for advancement that he thought he saw and that prompted his secretarial work were not really there. §

1. Étienne Arago, “Les frères Le Nain: À propos d’un recueil mortuaire,” L’art (1879): 301–9. ↩︎

2. “Billets d’enterrement & de service de Messrs de l’Académie Royale de Peinture & Sculpture qui sont morts, depuis l’etablissement d’icelle en 1648 jusqu’à l’année courante,” ENSBA. ↩︎

3. See Octave Fidière, État civil des peintres et sculpteurs de l’Académie royale: Billets d’enterrement de 1648 à 1713 publiés d’après le registre conservé à l’École des Beaux-Arts (Paris: Charavay, 1883); and Lucien Raulet, “Billets d’enterrement et pièces funéraires,” Le vieux papier 40 (1907): 19–35. ↩︎

4. Notable exceptions are Maxime Préaud, “On ne meurt qu’une fois: Note sur l’initiale V des billets d’enterrement aux XVII^e et XVIII^e siècles,” Revue de la Bibliothèque nationale de France 10 (2002): 73–76; and Christian Michel, The Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture: The Birth of the French School 1648–1793, trans. Chris Miller (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2018), 2–3. ↩︎

5. Classically, by Nikolaus Pevsner, who describes the regime at the Académie as an “ingeniously adapted civil-servantdom” in Academies of Art Past and Present (London: Cambridge University Press, 1940), 101. This approach is challenged by Michel in Académie Royale. ↩︎

6. “Fait en 1703” in Reynès’s hand on the billet for Denis Parmentier appears to confirm this. On Reynès’s appointment to the post of concierge, see PV, 3:212. On the duties of the concierge, see article XII of the 1655 statutes and article XVII of the 1664 statutes. ↩︎

7. On the usher’s role, see article XVI of the 1655 statutes and article XX of the 1664 statutes; PV, 1:255. According to the Procès-verbaux, the ushers derived part of their income from payment of a fee of 6 livres for summons to funerals. PV, 2:81. ↩︎

8. See PV, 4:41, 134. ↩︎

9. See the ground plan of the first floor of the Louvre, in Jacques-François Blondel, Architecture Françoise, 4 vols. (Paris: Jombert, 1752–56), 4:38–39 (P6). ↩︎

10. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 8–13, 16–22. ↩︎

11. Michel de Certeau, The Practices of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 29–42. ↩︎

12. The notices were printed in three sizes of poster (small, medium, and large). The jurés-crieurs were organized in a guild. They enjoyed a monopoly on the publication and distribution of burial notices. Small posters were priced by the Tarif des droits, salaires et vacations attribuez aux jurés-crieurs de Paris (1671) at 40 sous; medium were priced at 50 sous, and large at 3 livres. The distributor was paid 30 sous per day. For an example of funeral costs later in the century, see “Mémoire des fournitures de deuil” for the sculptor Edme Bouchardon, 28/07/1762 (AN, AB/XIX/4220) 400 billets were printed and posted at a cost of 32 livres. ↩︎

13. Thirty-two of the 184 notices were written, not printed. ↩︎

14. See Fidière, État civil, nos. 15 and 17. Other such manuscript notices concern academicians who died outside Paris. ↩︎

15. Those of Pérou, his predecessor; Germain Gobin, a model; and of Angélique Gaudet, his wife, were folded in at the back. ↩︎

16. Those used by notaries are now at the Archives Nationales de France: ADXX^c/78–89. A further collection from the files of the Châtelet are at the Archives de Paris. ↩︎

17. BnF, Ms. f.f. 22155. ↩︎

18. Robert Darnton, “Policing Writers in Paris c. 1750,” Representations 5 (1984): 1–31. ↩︎

19. ENSBA, Ms. 22. ↩︎

20. Fidière, État civil, nos. 4, 5, 11, 23, 26, 42, 58, 127. ↩︎

21. See Georges Duplessis, “Académie de peinture et de sculpture: Liste des members par Reynès,” Revue universelle des arts, 4 (1856): 313–26 at 314. ↩︎

22. On the role of the secretary, see Christian Michel, Charles-Nicolas Cochin et l’art des lumières (Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 1993), 81. ↩︎

23. See Fidière, État civil, nos. 1, 2, 11, 48 (founder members); nos. 82, 107, 168, 171 (son/daughter of an academician); no. 58 (painted the altarpiece in the church where he was buried). ↩︎

24. See Fidière, État civil, nos. 5, 7, 12, 16, 37, 38, 47, 53, 72, 87, 97, 112, 177. The last four (Samuel Bernard, Louis Elle Ferdinand, Jacques Rousseau, and Jean Forest) converted to Catholicism and were reintegrated into the Académie. See also Lucien Raulet, “Les billets d’enterrement d’artistes huguenots de l’ancienne Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture (1653–1712),” Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire du protestantisme, 1907, 53–69. ↩︎

25. PV, 3:197–98 (10 October 1681). ↩︎

26. ENSBA, Ms. 475. ↩︎

27. ENSBA, Ms. 475, 39–40. ↩︎

28. See Jacqueline Lichtenstein and Christian Michel, Conférences de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture (Paris: ENSBA, 2008), 2, pt. 1:31–387. ↩︎

29. See Préaud, “On ne meurt qu’une fois.” ↩︎

30. See, for example, during the first decade of the eighteenth century: PV, 3:319 (death of Antoine Paillet, recteur); 4:30 (death of Thomas Regnaudin, adjoint recteur, and Nicolas de Plattemontagne, professeur); 4:54 (death of Noël Coypel, recteur); 4:129 (death of Étienne Baudet, conseiller). ↩︎