This is the death mask of Maximilien Robespierre, speculatively taken by Madame Tussaud shortly after his execution by guillotine. A prominent figure of The French Revolution (1789) , Robespierre was a leading member of the Committee of Public Safety during The Reign of Terror, the period immediately after the revolution, during which the revolutionaries from different fractions started accusing each other for anti-revolutionary activities. Robespierre advocated terror to protect the revolution and led the efforts in mass executions, friends and foes alike, by guillotine. Madame Tussaud, on the other hand, was imprisoned in Paris during this time awaiting execution. She had already achieved some fame as a “celebrity” wax sculptor in court circles and was released after the intervention of an influential friend. According to historical accounts, Madame Tussaud exhibited a wax sculpture of Robespierre’s head based on this death mask, in London, along with the heads of other prominent victims on wooden sticks complete with all the gruesome bloody details, a few months after Robespierre’s execution. She claimed that she would made these masks by searching through corpses to find the severed heads of executed citizens. I am unable to let go off this image, rather the bizarre network of serendipities unleashed by all the layers of representation that comes with this image. It is a death mask of a revolutionary turned politician taken by an artist turned entertainer. It is not even likely that this account is true given the improbabilities of Madame Tussaud being allowed to take a death mask of a disgraced figure who had just been beheaded. It is therefore a speculative representation (the death mask) of a fragmented entity (a head without a body) of a revolutionary (Robespierre) that is a symbol of something bigger than himself in political history, which is then used by Madame Tussaud to create yet another representation (the wax head) as simulated sublime for entertainment. That is a lot. Furthermore, the topography of Robespierre’s face is currently a contested geography in France, in name of historical revisionism: Some historians argue that all the images of Robespierre, drawings, etchings, paintings, etc., created during French Revolution and on, depicts him as more handsome than he actually was as he was the glorified face of the revolution. These depictions contradict, they say, the research suggesting that he had a heavily punctured skin because of scars left from smallpox he had as a child. This is not simply contesting a descriptive inaccuracy. It is about turning the tables: Representing Robespierre as “ugly” as he was, also means pushing forward the idea that the revolution itself was “ugly”, bloody, violent, and ultimately unnecessary. Robespierre’s face therefore is the battleground for interpreting the past, which very much means shaping the present. His image is tied forever to the image (and meaning) of the revolution. That is a head lost twice.
Published in THE AIR SHEETS, issue 6, edited by Vanessa Thill and Claire Mirocha, 2017
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