At the Center of the Globe: Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's Fontaine des Quatre-Parties-du-Monde, 1867-74

Commissioned in 1867 and installed in 1874, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s (1827-1875) Les Quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphère céleste (The Four Parts of the World Supporting the Celestial Sphere), also referred to as the Fontaine des Quatre-Parties-du-Monde (Fountain of the Four Parts of the World), is a public sculpture that adorns a fountain at the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. The monument sits on the axis between the Luxembourg Palace and the Paris Observatory and depicts four nude female figures who support a celestial sphere, and who represent the four continents–Europe, America, Africa, and Asia–through their distinct physiognomic features. This thesis interrogates the work’s racial iconography and spatial relationship to sites that embodied French political and scientific authority during the Second French Empire. Reading the monument’s iconography in relation to its placement in the charged space of Haussmannized Paris, I suggest that Napoléon III intended Carpeaux’s work to affirm his right to govern and his need to unite a divided French nation. The Fontaine embodied the contradictions of Napoléon III’s political messaging, as his regime outwardly championed progressive ideals, while it built and sustained itself on imperial and racial conservatism and French racial and political superiority.