Un serment pour des temps troublés
An oath for troubled times
Born into a family of painters and art lovers, Jean-Sylvain Bailly was attracted to the sciences from childhood, and in particular to astronomy, a discipline in which he distinguished himself through his studies of the satellites of Jupiter and eclipses. Science without premonition is nothing but banality of the soul, one could say about him, because this activity led him to install an observatory on the roofs of the Louvre from where he had a panoramic view on the places where his epic and fatal destiny was going to be accomplished a few years later.
A man of intuitions indeed, but also of convictions and paradoxes, he militated in the years preceding the insurrection of July 1789 for the destruction of the Bastille but also for the preservation of the Parisian architectural heritage, proof that political ideas and aesthetics are not always easy to conjugate.
As a deputy of the Third Estate, he found himself, in the tumult and radical unpredictability of events, president of the National Assembly and first mayor of Paris. The example of the last provost of the merchants of Paris, whom he succeeded, led him to a certain prudence - the amiable Jacques de Flesselles had just been shot by an unidentified assassin before his head was paraded at the end of a pike by a furious crowd.
Bailly later tried to maneuver in the face of the outbursts of Desmoulins and Marat, leaders of the first Paris Commune. Feeling that the situation was beyond dire, he preferred to flee to the provinces, but the Montagnard vindictiveness pursued him and led him to the scaffold in November 1793 after he bravely refused to testify against queen Marie-Antoinette.
Our singular and extremely rare stone statuette represents him at the peak of his life: when he was the first, in the Jeu de Paume hall in Versailles, to swear that the representatives of the Third Estate, joined by a few prelates and aristocrats, would not leave until they had obtained a constitution.
It was this natural leadership and courage that enabled him to self-proclaim himself president of the National Assembly.
It is often said that one cannot be absolutely certain of anything. Bailly, for his own safety, should have meditated on this prudent warning. But he would not have had this astral destiny, an achievement for this scientist and lover of the infinite skies whose spectacle is the only true common heritage of humanity.
