Abstract

After Napoleon's final defeat of 1815 and before the beginnings of the second great wave of French colonialism in the 1830s, during a period of great internal political crisis, French society produced an object called The Death of Sardanapalus. This painting represented what was then a somewhat familiar figure, the "Oriental," an outsider behaving badly and set to die for it.Based on the mimetic theory, this essay argues that in the relation it determines with its viewers, this painting's representation of violence is a form of ritualistic activity, one that allows for contained and predictable events of unifying violence against outsiders. Among the effects of the French political conflicts was a crisis in such...