The Sèvres Service des Départements and the anxiety of the fragment

Abstract

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.