History:French artist Théodore Géricault's powerful masterpiece, The Raft of the Medusa, is a potent image of shipwrecked people abandoned on a raft, but how many of us ever registered the fact that the painting records a real and terrible event?
The raft in question was a makeshift wooden raft hastily constructed to help evacuate passengers from the French government ship, the Medusa, headed for Senegal, after it failed to avoid a treacherous sandbank off the west African coast in 1816. Although the raft was initially towed by the ship's lifeboats, the ropes were then shamefully cut and its occupants left to drift towards inevitable starvation and death. Of the 146 men and one woman on board, only 15 men survived the 14 days of horror. After experiencing riots, suicides, murder, thirst, hallucination, cannibalism and despair, the survivors told tales that would send shockwaves through contemporary 19th-century Europe and beyond. They still have the power to shock today.
The plight of those packed into lifeboats was slightly less extreme, but no less dramatic. While the captain and privileged cronies sailed off to Senegal in well-stocked lifeboats, a number of smaller boats drifted ashore alongside the Sahara. This bedraggled group of about 80 survivors was forced to hike 200 miles through the desert, scrabbling to find whitish, stinking water deep in the sand, or plants on which to chew.
As they traipsed across interminable sand dunes, one of their number, Charlotte Picard, records waking up, only to fall faint in terror at the sight of large, bearded Moors towering above them on camels. The persistent fear was that Moors would capture the castaways and sell them into slavery. However, one of the Moors began to speak in French, introducing himself as none other than "an Irishman come here to help you". Indeed, the Irishman, Kearney, explained that as he lived among the peoples of the region and knew the desert well, the English commanders in Senegal had dispatched him to locate survivors. Kearney became something of a hero for Charlotte and her companions, acting as guide and providing drink and sustenance. At one point the dashing Irishman plunged into the swell to return with biscuits and bottles of brandy from a rescue ship, anchored offshore but too big to land and too far away for the survivors to reach. Along with a certain exoticism, Kearney also brought security, donkeys, camels, and safe passage back to the incongruous comfort of cakes and afternoon tea in Saint Louis, Senegal.
In an incredibly gripping book, social historian Jonathan Miles plunges the reader into the post-Napoleonic world of a very divided Restoration France. His meticulously researched narrative draws on a vast number of original and secondary sources - although none is (yet) explicitly devoted to Kearney. The author depicts a society where skewed political appointments under the newly restored Bourbon administration would lead to a horrendous, and potentially avoidable, disaster. As he weaves his tale of man-made error and incompetence, Miles traces acts of great heroism, loyalty and generosity. However, he also exposes cowardice, selfishness and a complete failure in leadership. His book is poignantly dedicated to "all those who were misled by their leaders".
ALONGSIDE THE SHOCKING survival accounts from the raft and from the desert, Miles composes a rich narrative whose primary axis shifts between two key protagonists: Géricault, the artist, and his acquaintance, Corréard, a survivor from that awful raft. Géricault's despair at the end of an illicit love affair with his aunt inspires the artist to devote himself to the passionate Raft of the Medusa, his studio littered with amputated limbs and putrefying flesh sourced from a nearby hospital. The artist's total immersion in his subject leads to a positioning of the Raft as a painting that strongly criticises the current regime: it furthermore overtly campaigns against continuing the slave trade in the French colonies, deliberately placing the sole black survivor at the top of the raft's mast.
Buoyed up by Géricault's striking canvas, Corréard would later reinvent himself as agitator and celebrity, publicising his shocking survivor's tale in a bestselling book, co-authored with Savigny, The Shipwreck of the Frigate.
Miles's masterful work is a stark commentary on the leadership failures inherent in a defensive regime. It engages with art, slavery, and an outmoded aristocratic superiority complex, while also addressing the problematics of survivors' guilt. Without ever descending into sensationalism, it invites the modern reader to question political regimes that attempt to protect themselves by fudging the truth behind their mistakes. It also commemorates the heroism of the traumatised survivors of that ill-fated Medusa. A powerful read.
Síofra Pierse is a lecturer in French and francophone studies in the school of languages, literatures and film, UCD. She is editor of The City in French Literature, published by UCD Press
Medusa: The Shipwreck, The Scandal, The Masterpiece By Jonathan Miles Jonathan Cape, £17.99