From the notion of war to the concept of peace in François Lemoyne’s “Louis XV Giving Peace to Europe” (1729): Transformations of power and their reflection in eighteenth-century French paintings

We begin from the idea that all works of art are produced in a historic context that reveals part of their intentionality. In this paper, we consider the work Lemoyne painted for Versailles’s Hall of Peace in 1729 as a new representation of Louis XV as the King of Peace. Although the allegories belong to the traditional representation of the King of War establish a clear dialogue with the Great Gallery of Versailles, this painting portrays the changes that occurred from the late seventeenth to the early eighteenth century, especially regarding sovereign power and its representation. War and its opposite, peace, as it was understood by the supreme power, paved the way for a culture of peace founded on the notion of government, in other words, a government built on calculations, individual’s needs and interests, which questioned the idea of the previous sovereign’s power and brought a new economic conception of power. This new idea of power, defined by Foucault as governmentality, not only had an influence on political action, but also the artistic representations of the time. The painting studied here is a clear reflection of this exceptional political context after Louis XIV’s death, when France believed in Sully and Richelieu’s dream in which the country would lead European peace and bring economic prosperity for both the its monarchies and people.