Superficial Unanimity? Totality against Individuality

Description

In 1913, Ferdinand Hodler presented a monumental fresco to the municipality of Hanover depicting about a hundred bourgeois raising their arms in unison: The Unanimity. Commissioned to commemorate the city's accession to the Reformation in 1533, the painting crystallizes a fundamental tension: the one that opposes, at the very heart of the Protestant heritage, the need to express allegiance through a collective surge that must nevertheless be reconciled with individual conscience freedom — with its potential divergences of opinion.
The context of creating this fresco revives competing heritages between liberal democracy, authoritarianism, and Jacobin democracy. Unveiled in the presence of Wilhelm II, the painting was removed in 1914 after Hodler's protest against the bombing of Reims Cathedral: the episode reveals how much the work crystallizes these contradictory genealogies. Did Hodler want to depict the Reformation as a possible source of deliberative and pluralistic democracy, or was he rather criticizing these new forms of constrained unanimity, which the 20th century would witness with authoritarianisms and totalitarianisms?
By exploring various ways of linking Protestantism(s), Republicanism(s), and Democracy(s), this conference will show that the Reformation has less given birth to democracy than it has, over the long term, been a powerful ferment for political controversies and reflections on the meaning of majority voting. Like Hodler's Unanimity, the adoption of the Reformation still today retains a double-edged image.

Highlights

• Conference on Ferdinand Hodler's work
• Analysis of tensions between unanimity and individuality
• Venue: International Museum of the Reformation, Geneva

General Information

This conference explores Ferdinand Hodler's fresco 'L’Unanimité', commissioned in 1913. It addresses issues of collective allegiance and freedom of conscience within the context of the Reformation and 20th-century political developments.

Location

rue du Cloître 4, 1204 Genf, Switzerland

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