Abstract

The Sèvres porcelain Service des Départements (begun 1824) was an ambitious attempt to depict the whole of France, including its colonies, on a set of dessert plates. It was conceived as both an encyclopedic account of France’s riches and a way of tangibly offering the nation to its monarch, Charles X. But in the 1820s, France remained a fragmented and disconnected entity. To picture it, the artisans at Sèvres relied on pre-existing landscape representation for the plates’ central views, while extensive ornamentation on the plates’ borders worked to generate a sense of unified identity across the set. It was through textual additions, however, that the Service most clearly wrestled with the complicated construction of France as a diverse but united nation. Painted words describe the landscape views, label portrait medallions, and detail regional attributes; a reference guide on the back of each plate reinforces this interdependence between word and image. The text, unusual in Sèvres porcelain of the time, betrays a particular anxiety about the ability of landscape representation to stand for the nation, especially at a moment when France was itself disunified. The tension within the Service between particularity and cohesion further invokes a relationship between part and whole best described by the Romantic trope of the “fragment.” Drawing on theories of the literary fragment, this essay describes both the ambition and the ultimate failure of the Service to represent France.

摘要

塞夫尔瓷器服务部（始建于1824年）是一次雄心勃勃的尝试，目的是在一组甜点盘子上描绘整个法国，包括其殖民地。它既被视为法国财富的百科全书，也是向其国君查理十世提供有形国家的一种方式。但是在1820年代，法国仍然是一个支离破碎且相互联系的实体。为了说明这一点，塞夫尔的工匠依靠预先存在的景观表现来获得车牌的中央景观，而车牌边界上的大量装饰则在整个场景中产生了统一的感觉。但是，通过文字添加，该服务最明显的是，法国是一个多元化但团结的国家，其复杂的结构使它陷入困境。涂有文字的文字描述了景观，标有肖像的徽章和详细的区域属性；每块板背面的参考指南加强了单词和图像之间的这种相互依赖性。这段文字在当时的塞夫尔瓷器中是不寻常的，特别显示出景观代表国家的能力，尤其是在法国自己统一的时刻。服务内在特殊性和内聚性之间的张力进一步唤起了部分与整体之间的联系，这种联系被“碎片”的浪漫主义描述完美地描述了。本文以文学作品的碎片理论为基础，描述了文学作品的野心和最终的失败。服务代表法国。