Mord im Parlament: Ein vergessenes Gemalde von Joseph Nicolas Robert-Fleury, oder: Wie Geschichtsbilder entstehen

In Prince Alexander zu Sayn-Wittgenstein’s collection of paintings, there is an astonishingly bloodthirsty work among all the courtly portraits. The picture shows a crowd of angry French revolutionaries storming a parliament in order to hold out their gruesome trophy at the shocked chairman of the session: a severed head on a pike, depicting the dramatic climax of the sans-culottes revolt on May 20, 1795 - that day Jean Bertrand Feraud is brutally murdered in the middle of the French parliament. The uprising was just as brutally suppressed a few days later. The painting by Cologne-born Joseph Nicolas Robert-Fleury was created 35 years later as a contribution to a competition. A total of 117 artists are competing to design the Paris National Assembly. The bourgeois kings try to use history painting for political purposes. In vain: none of the paintings ever find their way into the plenary hall … The episode described stands at the beginning of the formation of European parliaments. Behind the story about the forgotten painting of the revolution, told in an exciting way by Mario Kramp, are fundamental questions of political iconography and the understanding of democracy in the plenary halls of the people’s representatives.