The People’s Politics: Jean Béraud at the Salle Graffard

Abstract Jean Béraud’s À la Salle Graffard was widely considered to be a highlight of the 1884 Paris Salon, singled out by critics for its witty take on leftist demagoguery. Béraud’s spectacle of a rowdy assembly was praised for its true-to-life vision, skewering those types of contemporary socialism familiar to a bourgeois audience from the mainstream press. This essay investigates the kind of political tourism that Béraud’s scene performs, including as it was critiqued by radical commentators such as Jules Vallès. It reconstructs the particularity of the meeting’s setting, and the new, troubling form of political deliberation such meetings represented in the wake of the Republic’s 1881 law on the freedom of assembly. More than a simple document of proletarian politics, Béraud’s barely-studied painting offers, I argue, a self-ironising vision of the people’s politics, which playfully reconfigures the ur-scene of Republican popular sovereignty: the Tennis Court Oath of 1789.