LIBERTÉ, ÉGALITÉ, CABLE TV

Napoleon Blinded

On Avenue de Flandre, Banksy transformed one of the foundational images of French political mythology: Jacques-Louis David’s Bonaparte Crossing the Grand Saint-Bernard of 1801. David's Napoleon confidently commands a rearing horse, his red cloak billowing behind him as he leads his army across the Alps. In Banksy's version, the same cloak has blown forward and completely enveloped the rider's head and upper body. The heroic leader is still advancing, but he can no longer see where he is going.

The intervention is remarkably economical. Banksy leaves the familiar structure of David's composition intact and changes essentially one element—the direction of the cloak. Yet that small reversal turns an image of command into one of blindness. Power remains mounted on its horse, but control has become an illusion.

Liberté, Égalité… Cable TV

Banksy subsequently published the work under the title ^LIBERTÉ, ÉGALITÉ, CABLE TV*, corrupting the French republican motto Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. The substitution is characteristically Banksy: the grand political promise of fraternity is replaced by a consumer service, reducing revolutionary ideals to the comforts and distractions of contemporary life.

The image appeared as Paris and Europe were again confronting the politics of migration. The enveloping red fabric also inevitably recalled contemporary debates surrounding Islamic dress and France's prohibition of full-face coverings in public. Contemporary observers immediately made that connection, although the image remains deliberately open: the cloth can be read simultaneously as a veil, a blindfold and the very symbol of authority turning against the person who wears it.

Rewriting a National Icon

The choice of David was particularly pointed. Banksy was not simply borrowing a famous painting; he was intervening in an image constructed to manufacture political authority. David's Napoleon is an idealized leader overcoming the impossible. Banksy's rider inherits all of that visual power but has lost the ability to see.

Unlike several of Banksy's other Paris interventions, the mural was quickly protected and remains visible on Avenue de Flandre today.

Banksy needed only to turn Napoleon's cape around. The conquering hero became a leader riding blindly forward.