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From Charity to Bienfaisance: Picturing Good Deeds in Late Eighteenth-Century France

This article explores a hitherto little known aspect of French visual culture in the period before the French Revolution, demonstrating its cultural and political significance. It documents and analyses the imagery of good deeds which proliferated in this period and, in so doing, explores the meaning and functions of the vogue for benevolence. Many of the images discussed in the article are largely unknown to modern scholarship; in other cases, the context it provides allows images previously discussed in isolation to take on a broader significance, with regard to such issues such as class and gender.

The article makes a contribution to the burgeoning field of print studies and, as such, it enriches debates in cultural history; it explores the development of new secular ideas about benevolence and how they differ from older, Christian notions of charity. It is also engages with political history, since it demonstrates how many major figures of the period, including the king and queen, royal ministers and future revolutionaries, made use of images of themselves engaging in philanthropic activity for propaganda purposes.

The article draws on wide range of primary source material, including both major literary texts and some extremely obscure ones. It is also informed by secondary literature drawn from across the disciplines of art history, literature, history, history of ideas and history of medicine (citing references in four languages). Its claims are nuanced to take account of the shifting significance of benevolence over the decades between c. 1750 and the Revolution, as what had started out as an enlightened ideal was gradually appropriated for conservative or even reactionary ends.