Freemasonry, French Revolution and ideological appropriation of neoclassical art

Abstract

The French Revolution annihilated the Ancien Regime, giving way to a new order where the bourgeoisie achieved its rise to political power, but in this libertarian struggle against noble privileges, a series of actors and ideological principles intermingled, as a result of the intense agitation, typical of the Age of Enlightenment. The French revolutionaries appropriated the artistic and aesthetic ideals that neoclassical art proposed: heroicity, republican sobriety, simplicity, beauty, grandiosity and above all a new rebirth, the beginning of a more just and egalitarian social order for all, these last ideals they were already proclaimed by the Freemasonic Order that appears formally in 1717 and that within their organization proposed the same principles as the neoclassical current and both will sometimes find themselves in a contradictory way in the revolutionary struggle. The work focused on carrying out an analysis of the relationship and participation that freemasonry had and its link with neoclassicism, in the imaginary and ideals of the French Revolution, elucidating how diffuse or open connections between these elements led to consolidating the ideals that he proclaimed the revolutionary movement.