The Tennis Court Oath

 I read a chapter of Carlyle's French Revolution before going to bed. It's a slow process but I'm savouring it sentence by sentence. Carlyle was one hell of a writer!

I've just reached the turning point of the "tennis court oath" (le serment do jeu de paume). The king, arm-wrestling the Commons, has shut down their venue- on the lame pretext of getting carpenters in to make him a plattorm from which he can address them- so their President- the astronomer Bailly- finds them another- a roofed tennis court- and there they assemble to swear an oath to be united in a common purpose. The king's stratagem has blown up in his face- and his power has evaporated. Just like that. From now on he will no longer be a player but a thing that's batted back and forth and bounced off walls.

Carlyle makes you feel the drama, the exhilaration. I'm lying propped up in bed making nary a sound but inwardly I'm cheering.

In this time of overturn of all the fixities and certainties of our civilisation it feels appropriate to be reading about this earlier bouleversement.

The painter David, who produced indelible images of the Revolution and the Napoleonic period, has one of the tennis court oath. The painting was never completed because it was a long term project- involving the making of a great number of individual portraits- and the political weather changed-  but we have his preliminary sketches. I love how the curtains are billowing inwards as the wind of revolution sweeps through France.

The Stiff-Armed Salute

 These days the stiff armed salute, as recently performed by Elon Musk, is almost exclusively associated with the Nazis- and doing it in public can get you into serious trouble,  but it has a much longer history, though not as long as you might think. 

Hitler got it from Mussolini and received some stick from super-patriots for copying the Italians- to which he replied, brazen-facedly, that it was actually of German origin and Luther had done it.

But Mussolini wasn't the first. Among those who had used it before him was an American patriot called Francis Bellamy who thought it the appropriate gesture for saluting the flag- and got schoolchildren to do it while making the pledge of alliegance.

Mussolini probably thought he was reviving an ancient Roman practice- but there is no evidence in Roman art or writing that the stiff armed salute was ever in their repertoire. 

So where does it begin?

It begins here, in J-L David's iconic Oath of the Horatii- the first work of art from any culture which shows it being done-



And gets repeated in his Serment du Jeu de Palme (see previous post)

In both paintings it is a gesture of self-sacrificing Republican virtue.

So far as we know he invented it.

And it caught on. Such is the power of Art.

Little did he know what he had started....