The entry of the Crusaders in Constantinople: when History stumbles

Abstract

Worried about its future, the government of the July Monarchy (1830-48) invents a sort of national novel in painting, in Versailles in particular, expecting an indirect legitimation from it. In the episode of the Crusades (12th and 13th centuries), re-evaluated and sung by romanticism, Delacroix receives an order: the Entry of the Crusaders in Constantinople (1204), delivered in 1840. We analyze here how, from an inglorious episode (in fact a plunder), it develops, by its plastic and chromatic poetics, all the dark and glaring contradictions.