Jonsson Society Degree Zero

STEFAN JONSSON
Society Degree Zero:

Christ, Communism, and
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the Madness of Crowds
in the Art of James Ensor
A ro u n d th e t u rn of t h e c e nt u ry, the Swedish writer August

Strindberg encountered the face of madness in the works of the Belgian artist James
Ensor (1860–1949). In a 1903 novella called Ensam (Alone), Strindberg relates his
confrontation with the underclass in Stockholm, a layer of the population that he,
the son of a servant, both identi ed with and abhorred:
As I observed these creatures I noticed an overwhelming number of cripples; crutches and
canes mingled with crooked legs and broken backs; dwarfs with giant backs, and giants with
the foundations of dwarfs; faces without noses, and feet that had no toes and ended in lumps.
An assembly of all the misery that had been hiding during the winter and that now had
crawled out in the sunshine to move out to the country. I had encountered such human-
like creatures in Ensor’s occult mask-scenes and at the theater in Gluck’s Orpheus in the
Netherworld and had at that time believed that they were fantasies and exaggerations.1
Strindberg’s narrator is rst lled with compassion. He then realizes that he,
elevated as he is above the masses in his carriage, forms the focal point of their
hatred. If he wished to express his sympathy, he would have to step down and rub
his body against theirs. The mere thought terri es him so that he tells the driver to
rush back home. Once at his doorstep, he says, ‘‘I was liberated as from a terrible
dream.’’2
This is a modernist primal scene. The lone individual confronts a society of
threatening masses. To protect his fragile sense of self, Strindberg’s alter ego shuts
himself up in solitude. But this existential vacuum oVers him no recognition; there
is no external Other to help him establish the boundaries of his person. Psychic
forces tear his identity in contrary directions, dissolving his individuality. His con-
sciousness can master these forces, but only by projecting them onto the external
reality. The struggle the writer ghts against his own demons is transformed into
a war against society.
In a 1926 essay on Ensor, Wilhelm Fraenger argues that this is also the primal
Re p r e s e n tat i o n s 75 · Summer 2001 q t h e r e g e n t s o f t h e u n i ve r s i t y o f c a l i fo r n i a

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scene for the Belgian painter.3 According to Fraenger, Ensor proves his individuality
by depicting humanity as a mad mob, with himself, the only voice of truth, as its
victim and savior. Like Strindberg, Ensor interprets his interactions with the world
as events in a phantasmagoric theater of combat.
It is a psychic constitution that borders on insanity, to be sure. But the same
psychic constitution also motivates aesthetic creativity and social critique. Strind-

berg and Ensor use the con icts they perceive in the social world as material for the
construction of their own fantasy narratives. Restructuring society according to a
new logic at once phantasmic and political, their work frees social events, persons,
and collectives from the cognitive and ideological representations in which they are
normally embedded. In this essay, I want to analyze how Ensor’s major work The
Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889 (plate 1) is generated by a psychopolitical logic
of this kind. Executed in 1888, when the artist was twenty-eight, and seen by him-
self and others as the summa and symbol of his work, The Entry is regarded as a
modernist landmark, a monumental work that both encapsulates a cultural mo-
ment and launches a new way of viewing the world, comparable to Georges Seurat’s
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Paul Gauguin’s Where Do We Come
From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? and Pablo Picasso’s Les demoiselles d’Avignon.
Yet, while The Entry is one of modernism’s most important achievements, it is also
one of its least understood.
Strindberg probably encountered Ensor’s work in the special issues that the
French journal La plume devoted to the painter in 1898.4 On the initiative of Eugène
Demolder, a close friend of the artist, all the major gures of the Belgian avant-
garde paid tribute to Ensor’s genius. The contributors singled out three features of
Ensor’s work: his treatment of light; his depiction of crowds; and the mad nature
of his images, a visual outrage they explained by linking it to the wacky character
of the artist himself. All three features—light, crowds, and madness—were in-
grained in the European culture of the period. In the 1880s, art claimed autonomy
as a means to explore the nature and perception of light; the bourgeoisie was ob-
sessed with the presence of the so-called masses; medical science rede ned madness
as a pathological condition caused by the absence of reason.
Although the three issues may seem unrelated, Ensor’s images fuse them. In
Ensor scholarship, however, only the rst element—light—has been examined in
depth; the other two—masses and madness—have been treated as self-evident. To
disregard these two themes is to diminish Ensor’s art. In order to understand a
work like The Entry, we must explore its relation to the history of the masses and
the history of insanity. This is not to say that we should reduce Ensor’s masterpiece
to yet another entry in these histories. What I want to do in the following pages,
rather, is to examine how these histories enter the painting, on the assumption that
they are inseparable from the visual representation itself. This examination will
lead me to two conclusions. First, the notions of madness and the masses disclose
new sediments of meaning in the painting and shed a diVerent light on its aesthetic
2 Re p r e s e n tat i o n s
form. Second, the painting’s aesthetic form discloses a new and alternative idea
of the masses, one that in fact negates the notion of the masses that prevailed in
Ensor’s society.
This interpretation has the additional advantage of explaining the brief and
explosive nature of Ensor’s career. By the mid-1880s his art ourished in a wholly
new visual rhetoric of masses, madness, masks, and social excess. Only a few years

later, his work regressed into futile repetitions of earlier inventions; he did not pro-
duce any signi cant art after 1895. Why was Ensor’s achievement so short-lived?
Because his work depended, I submit, on the tropes of madness and ideas of the
masses that pervaded the political imagination in Belgium during a brief interval
of political crisis and revolutionary possibility between 1886 and 1893.
This argument takes issue with the received view of Ensor’s art. The Entry is
typically read as a statement about the sad fate of the individual, symbolized by
Christ, in a society dominated by mass movements blinded by ideologies. This
interpretation is often buttressed by biographical speculations, according to which
Ensor played the role of the suVering Messiah, in an act of rebellion against the
cultural establishment and the Belgian society that had excluded him. The problem
with such a reading is that it presupposes an opposition between the individual,
understood as a mind of truth, and the masses, understood as a collective body of
delusions. This dichotomy derives from nineteenth-century notions of ‘‘the
masses,’’ especially from French mass psychologists such as Gustave LeBon, Gabriel
Tarde, and Henry Fournial. Ensor’s work is contemporary with mass psychology,
to be sure, and it addresses similar issues. My point, however, is that Ensor used his
visual means of representation to articulate an idea of society diametrically opposed
to the one inherent in mass psychology. To see the painting as a celebration of the
tormented individual and a condemnation of the mad masses is at best fallacious
and at worst absurd; it is to misrecognize the painting’s historical signi cance and
aesthetic charge. As I shall argue in this essay, The Entry oVers a unique glimpse of
the social body as it exists prior to the emergence of either individuals or masses—
a glimpse of society degree zero, as I have chosen to call it—and as it actually ex-
isted, brie y, in Belgium of the late 1880s. Ultimately, I want to show that the Christ
who enters into Brussels is someone else in disguise, someone who reveals the very
meaning of the words that crown Ensor’s boulevard: ‘‘Vive la sociale.’’
How does the history of madness enter into The Entry? One door is opened by
Hieronymus Bosch. Ensor himself and many commentators have pointed out his
aYnity with the sixteenth-century master. But at least one detail remains to be
stressed: the red ag on the mast of Bosch’s The Ship of Fools ( g. 1) returns as an
immense red banner in The Entry. Whether this is an explicit quotation or not, the
ag and the banner can be construed as signs referring to a common story. The red
thread of this story is madness: the ship that in Bosch’s image departs on a hazard-
ous journey reaches its destination in Ensor’s Brussels, where its passengers, having
Society Degree Zero 3

figure 1. Hieronymus Bosch, The Ship of Fools, late 15th century. Musée du
Louvre, Paris.
multiplied during the journey, disembark to conquer a society that has mustered
all its forces to keep the fools outside the gates. When the ship sets out, the insane
are seen as explorers of the daemonic powers of creation. Three hundred years
later, when the ship arrives, the insane are seen as mentally ill and herded into
the asylum.
This is the story told by Michel Foucault in Madness and Civilization (1961),
which opens with an analysis of Bosch’s Ship of Fools.5 Foucault emphasizes two insti-
tutional transformations in the history of madness. The rst is the Great Intern-
ment of around 1650, a cleanup operation that sought to discipline idle or rebellious
segments of the population. Royal decrees authorized the oYcials of law and order
to imprison the unemployed, petty criminals, vagabonds, beggars, poor elderly, dis-
abled, work-shy, and insane and to construct houses of correction in which to
lodge them.6

The second transformation occurs with the French Revolution. The storming
of the Bastille spelled the end of the general politics of internment, which was now
seen as an oppressive legacy of the ancien régime. The only people who were kept
locked up were the insane. Numerous houses of correction were converted into asy-
lums. It was in these institutions that modern psychology emerged, and so did our
modern understanding of madness. Psychological theories were developed con-
cerning the balance of reason and instincts, the evolution of higher mental faculties,
and the relation of the free will to compulsion. Now that insanity was conceived of
as mere lack of reason, it could no longer be claimed that madness had a secret
meaning of its own, as Bosch’s fools do. There was one domain, however, where
madness was not discarded as empty babble: the domain of art. According to Fou-
cault, the foremost analyses of madness are not to be found in the medical reports
of doctors such as Philippe Pinel, Etienne Esquirol, and Jean-Martin Charcot, but
in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Vincent van Gogh, and Antonin Artaud.7 I
shall soon add Ensor’s name to this list, but rst I will discuss how the history of
the masses enters the picture. Strangely, this history terminates in the same place
as the history of madness, in the asylum.
Giorgio Agamben has shown how the people, as a term, encapsulates the basic
social division of modernity.8 It is a term that refers to the subject that constitutes
political power, as it is said in those famous founding words ‘‘We the people of the
United States.’’ But the same term also refers to the underclass that is excluded from
political power. When Abraham Lincoln invoked a ‘‘government of the people, by
the people, for the people,’’ he implicitly opposed the contradictory references of
the term. The people in the expression ‘‘by the people’’ are never the same people
as those referred to in ‘‘for the people.’’ Yet popular sovereignty is founded on the
belief that the people by whom government is conducted and the people for whom
it is conducted are somehow one and the same, a unitary political body.
The fractured signi cation of ‘‘the people’’ thus indicates both that the political
body is always divided and that it must always imagine itself as uni ed. It is divided
between those who are included in politics because they claim to represent the peo-
ple, and those who are excluded from politics because they are represented by oth-
ers; that is, they can be excluded because they are somehow already included
through intermediaries. It is in this context that the notion of the masses acquires
its meaning. In the spectrum of meanings associated with ‘‘the people,’’ ‘‘the
masses’’ come to signify the majority that is excluded from politics and that must

nevertheless be evoked as its legitimation. ‘‘The masses’’ are that part of the popula-
tion whose exclusion founds the city of men.9
This division of society was justi ed in two ways. The rst one was based on
liberal ideas of a social contract: only those who contributed to the communal trea-
sury should have a say in communal aVairs. For instance, when Ensor made his
painting, Belgium had a population of six million but was represented by 117,000

property-owning men who paid more than 42.32 francs in taxes. The division be-
tween citizens and masses was further justi ed by humanist appeals to learning
and personal cultivation. Education was seen as a path toward Man’s emancipation
‘‘from his self-incurred tutelage,’’ as Immanuel Kant put it. Yet, not even Kant be-
lieved that the majority was able to take this step. The multitude was so bent on
immediate needs and desires that it must remain in tutelage.
Throughout the nineteenth century, these two discourses, the one about the
distribution of political power, the other about the distribution of culture, worked
to consolidate the liberal order. The meaning and content of ‘‘the masses’’ are thus
determined by the synchronized operation of two systems of representation. One
system is political, stating who has the right to represent ‘‘the people’’; the masses
are those who do not have that right. The other system is ideological, cultural, and
aesthetic, and here the masses are the uneducated ones, their passions untamed by
civilized norms. ‘‘The masses’’ are thus not only the excluded proletariat but also
the embodiment of the passions that bourgeois man must suppress in order to be-
come a free individual and citizen.10
The distinction between individuals and masses is coextensive with the eco-
nomically de ned con ict between bourgeoisie and proletariat, but it cuts deeper
into the social body, asserting itself on all its levels. In every nineteenth-century
work of art and literature seeking to render society truthfully, the division is either
explicitly recorded or tacitly implied, as is exempli ed by the genre of history paint-
ing, whose tableaux of great individuals and the anonymous troops under their
command confer legitimacy upon the sovereign, but also by the realist novel, with
its irresolvable con icts between the hero and the social matter in opposition to
which he establishes his individuality.11 As the working classes gradually emerge
from the shadows and constitute themselves as political subjects, the notion of ‘‘the
masses’’ becomes increasingly politicized. Eugène Delacroix’s painting Liberty
Guiding the People of 1831 is perhaps the last picture where worker and bourgeois
are on the same side of the barricade.12 In later images they are enemies, as in
Edouard Manet’s The Barricade, which renders the suppression of the Paris Com-
mune in 1871. From Delacroix to Manet, a cultural stereotype is set in place: the
masses, the crowd, la foule. We encounter it in Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Educa-
tion, in the chapter that relates the looting of Les Tuileries in February 1848; in
Hippolyte Taine’s conservative account of the French Revolution; and in Emile
Zola’s Ger minal, about striking mineworkers. The more the fourth estate ap-
proaches the institutions of power, the more phantasmic and monstrous this stereo-
type becomes. By the late 1880s, a handful of medical doctors and social scientists
make the connection between the lower classes and the passions explicit. They de-
liver an ultimate verdict on the people’s demand for empowerment: the masses
are mad.
In 1872, a year after the Commune, a book appeared called La vie: Physiologie

humaine appliqué à l’hygiène et à la médicine. Its author was Gustave LeBon, a medical
doctor and one of the most in uential intellectuals of the third republic. In this
book we nd the usual stereotype, but we also nd the rst attempt to explain crowd
behavior in psychological terms: ‘‘Hallucination is a phenomenon which, by imita-
tion or under the in uence of identical excitations acting simultaneously on a great
number of individuals in the same state of mind, is able to become collective. These
collective hallucinations are veritable mental epidemics very common in history.’’13
For LeBon and others, the Commune was an example of just such an epidemic.
In his subsequent writings, he added a host of examples: the democratization of
access to education, the institution of the lay jury, urban congestion, and workers’
strikes. In such collective situations, he claimed, the individual loses his reason,
regressing to the level of the collective. In order to explain this leveling of individual
consciousness, LeBon introduced the notion of a ‘‘crowd soul,’’ modeled on the
widespread idea of a ‘‘racial soul’’; and in order to explore how the crowd soul
functioned, he turned to his colleagues in psychology.
Late-eighteenth-century French psychology was entirely based on the study of
mental pathologies. LeBon and other mass psychologists built their theory of hu-
man collectives on these diagnoses of insanity. In La Psychologie des foules (1895),
LeBon describes how persons in a crowd are spellbound by hypnotic suggestion,
which deprives them of their individual identities and instills in them whatever idea
or emotion the leader wants. The idea or emotion then captures the entire group
through a process of mental contagion, to the eVect that everyone behaves in the
same way, forming one collective social animal. The man of the masses ‘‘is no longer
himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will,’’
LeBon asserts.14
‘‘The masses’’ was thus transformed from a social category into a psychopatho-
logical one. In the Great Internment of the 1650s discussed by Foucault, those who
were considered mad were grouped with the idlers, the poor, and the vagabonds,
and excluded from society on account of their moral and social inferiority. With the
emergence of mass psychology, the scenario is reversed. Now, those who were con-
sidered morally and socially inferior, and who organized collectively to redress their
lot, were grouped with the insane, and excluded on account of their mental
inferiority.
With the theory of mass psychology, all grounds for defending collective action
were cut away from mainstream cultural and political vocabulary. Meanwhile, it
also became possible to rewrite history. Lucien Nass, for example, described the

Paris Commune as a ‘‘revolutionary neurosis’’ manifesting a ‘‘morbid psychol-
ogy.’’15 LeBon applied his theory in La Psychologie du socialisme of 1898, in which he
argued that the struggle for social justice expressed a pathological delusion. ‘‘We
must not forget,’’ he wrote, ‘‘that the exact hour that de nite decadence began in
the Roman Empire was when Rome gave the rights of citizens to the barbarians.’’16

French mass psychology has taught us to perceive collectives as crowds or
masses; to analyze these masses as uni ed and ruled by emotions; and to interpret
these uni ed and emotional masses as disorderly and dangerous, and hence in need
of authoritative guidance. It is no exaggeration to say that these perspectives also
have dominated art-historical accounts of crowd paintings. Jonathan Crary falls
back on a long tradition when, in his recent book Suspensions of Perception, he applies
LeBon’s theory to Seurat’s painting Parade de cirque (1887–1888).17 Hanna Dein-
hard has pointed out that the analytical tools with which art historians approach
visual representations of crowds are crude and primitive. ‘‘An iconology of the
crowd is one of the great desiderata of our discipline.’’18 Views and prejudices de-
rived from mass psychology also pervade interpretations of Ensor’s The Entry.19
Describing the painting in 1947, Jean Stevo writes: ‘‘The mass, the brutal and bar-
barian mass pushes forward in closed ranks. The mass oppresses us through its
presence.’’20 Georg Heard Hamilton in 1967 writes: ‘‘In depicting the event as a
socialist holiday, Ensor expressed his disgust with what Mallarmé had called the
‘ordinary enemy,’ the people.’’21 And in 1970 Patrik Reuterswärd writes: ‘‘Judged
by the way this cheering mass has been depicted, there is no other way to see it
than as a thousand-headed hydra made up of all sorts of reckless indulgence and
promiscuity.’’22 In his 1985 analysis of The Entry, still the most comprehensive one,
Stephen McGough asserts that ‘‘Ensor’s message’’ in The Entry ‘‘was that society
was systematically excluding the person who was truly an individual. . . . For Ensor
the mass in The Entry is the metaphor for this willful alienation of the self so that
it may be lent to collective purposes.’’23 Joachim Heusinger von Waldegg’s 1991
view is that ‘‘Ensor’s pessimistic analysis is in many ways related to Gustave LeBon’s
Psychologie des foules. . . . Ensor’s painting . . . makes manifest the irrational moment
of the masses in their inability to communicate with anything else than gestures.
At the same time it shows their susceptibility to slogans and doctrines.’’24 Finally,
here’s Michel Draguet in 1999: ‘‘The crowd threatens to devour anyone who tries
to distinguish himself from it. The malleable crowd evolves through hypnotic con-
tagion and suggestion. Ensor’s vision renders such a collective hallucination.’’25
While it is true that Ensor was submerged in the same cultural atmosphere as
the French mass psychologists, and that he struggled to represent social situations
of a similar kind, a closer look at The Entry makes clear that the painting contests
their view of society. Indeed, even the elementary formal features of The Entry un-
dermine mass psychology’s assumption that society is constituted by individuals
and masses. As Waldemar George has emphasized, The Entry obeys no known laws
of perspective that aid the viewer to organize the visual plane.26 This is because the
painting is structured by three con icting perspectives, which, taken together, turn
the image into a play of oppositions, suggesting alternative ways of organizing the
same social space. The rst perspective is of course that which follows the boulevard
itself, its end dissolving into in nity under the great red banner. But the eye is at
the same time led along a vertical axis running straight up the middle of the canvas

and connecting a series of key gures, from the conspicuously massive body of the
bishop in front, through the red-nosed drum major that heads the marching band,
to the geometrical center of the framed rectangle, where we make out the tiny gure
of Christ. This perspective is further marked by a slanting diagonal movement of
light and people that emerges from the side street just above Christ’s halo. On a
rst viewing, however, the observer is not invited to explore either of these axes,
both of which pull the gaze into the depth and background. A virtual mural or
tapestry of oil, The Entry—its width exceeding four meters—instead calls for a side-
ward movement, and the viewer will typically stroll in front of it as along a mural,
scanning the masks and faces that are compressed into the front plane. The third
perspective thus consists of a web of horizontal exchanges, gestures, and glances
within the collective closest to the viewer. For instance, the gaze of the man in the
lower right corner has his eyes xed on the clowns and blank banners to the left.
Their elevated position, in turn, is mirrored by the four gures on the green podium
to the right. The horizontal lines suggested by these glances and positions delimit
a rectangular area separating the crowd in the foreground, in front of the military
band, from the rest of the street.
Each perspective thus brings a diVerent crowd into focus. The one that follows
the boulevard looks like a workers’ demonstration with serried ranks and ying red
banners. The one gathering around Christ is a religious procession or a fools’ pa-
rade. The crowd that occupies the foreground suggests a spectacle of power, a circuit
of authoritative positions enclosing a horde of persons whose attention is suspended
between left and right. The semantic complexity is further enriched by the fact that
the subject matter of the painting is a superimposition of three distinct pictorial
conventions: the rst one derived from workers’ demonstrations, the second from
the carnival, the third based on representations of Christ’s Passion.
What we see, then, is not one crowd but an aggregation of many. They come
toward us from diVerent directions and for diVerent purposes. They move at cross-
currents and block each other’s way, until they reach the front and line up as a series
of faces detached from the collective body they once belonged to, constituting a
new kind of collective without identity or agenda, their swollen heads as self-assured
and evasive as the burghers in any seventeenth-century Dutch group portrait—a
genre, incidentally, that Ensor often caricatured, as in The Good Judges (1891) or in
his many group portraits with masks, such as The Intrigue (1890; g. 2) and Masks
Observing a Turtle (1894).
In everything, from the sheer dimensions of the canvas to the juxtaposition of

figure 2. James Ensor, The Intrigue, 1890. Oil on canvas, 90 3 150 cm.
Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp.
various crowds, to the stark contrasts of colors and the diVerent ways in which the
paint is applied—by brush, knife, ngertips, drippings, cloth, or tube opening—
Ensor maximizes the contrasts and oppositions of the visual plane, as though ex-
ploring how much heterogeneity a limited piece of two-dimensional space can toler-
ate before it disintegrates. This lack of organizing structure corresponds to the ab-
sence of any authority in the social drama itself. What the Lacanians would call the
big Other—the phallic signi er imposing unity and identity on the members of the
collective—is absent from the painting. The clowns have taken charge of the po-
dium but seem reluctant to issue any commands. Without any authoritative point
of identi cation, the gures are freed from the external power that enables them to
anchor their being in the constancy of a stable character.
In Ensor, identity appears as a transient crystallization of uid social interac-
tions. His work stresses this idea by foregrounding the mask. ‘‘In political struggles
men do not appear in their natural guises; each of them is dressed in a mask,’’
wrote Georges Sorel, the anarchist and theoretician of mass action, in his review
of LeBon’s La psychologie des foules.27 Sorel believed, like LeBon, that persons in-
volved in political struggles mime roles that corrupt their inborn identities. Ensor
was more radical. In his work, men and women fail to appear in their natural
guises, for they have none. One’s identity is in itself a mask, fabricated, wrinkled,
and scarred through countless encounters with others. It is not just in his visual
works that Ensor views humanity as a masquerade; in the odd speeches that consti-
tute the bulk of his writings, he typically greets his audience as ‘‘Dear friends, minis-
ters, consuls, mayors, and masks.’’28
True, the mask is a standard theme in late-nineteenth-century European cul-
ture. Deep uncertainty about the essence of the human being led many to the solu-
tion we call symbolism: human life hides another reality that can be accessed only
through symbols. The masks populating Ensor’s universe are in this sense the sym-

bolic appearances through which a hidden social reality—shapeless and dae-
monic—expresses itself. But Ensor resolved the symbolist problem in a unique way.
As André de Ridder states, he eVaced the diVerence between the face and the
mask.29 The results were masklike humans and humanlike masks, creatures that
are neither masks nor humans but a third species without de nite qualities. Human
faces are loaded with exaggerated detail, surcharged by the monstrous and the ri-
diculous. Related to caricature, Ensor’s vision eVects a doubling or dédoublement that
superimposes the anonymous mask of the type on the recognizable face of the indi-
vidual, or magni es human traits to animal proportions. The unity of the person
is split open, its unique personality impressed by the mark of the stereotype and
suspended midway between identity and anonymity, humanity and bestiality. Nei-
ther autonomous individuals nor faceless elements of the crowd, Ensor’s gures are
at once themselves and others.
In the late 1880s, these Ensorian creatures multiply and begin to engage in
theatrical exchanges. It is impossible to say whether these scenes are psychological
projections or mimetic descriptions; the humanlike appearances are so uid and
fragile as to dissolve the walls between inner and outer world, between the dead
skeleton and the pulsating body, and between individual and collective, to the eVect
that the interacting group of masks becomes an objective correlative of the deep
and undiVerentiated matter of social life as such. It is at this point that Ensor’s
symbolism turns expressionistic or even surrealistic, as it discloses a level of reality
anterior to those cultural and conceptual systems of representation that organize
the social eld into distinct entities, xed meanings, and stable identities.
Many scholars have discussed this feature in terms of the carnival.30 That En-
sor’s work owes much to the annual Ostende carnival and the wondrous masks
stocked up in his family’s souvenir store is well known.31 The more interesting ques-
tion, however, is how the logic of the carnival elucidates undertheorized aspects of
The Entry. Because the carnival operates with mechanisms of reversal that cancel
the distinction between imitation and original, the mask is placed on the same real-
ity level as the face. External appearances no longer manifest any underlying con-
tent or inner motivation, and the meaning of the face, mask, and gesture conse-
quently depend only on its similarity to and diVerence from surrounding faces,
masks, and gestures. The carnival is thus an endless process of semiosis, a parade
of signs without rm references. This process stalls the dialectic of expression and
repression, as there is no internal essence or identity to be expressed or repressed.
Hence, the carnival is an apsychological event.

On this level of generality, The Entry undoubtedly conforms to the carnivalistic
scenario. The heads in the painting seem disembodied, and some gures are liter-
ally decapitated. The obscure meanings of the faces or masks depend only on their
relations to the surrounding ones, not on the fact that they are connected to separate
organisms or psyches. Lacking any internal source of energy, their motions are de-
termined only by the collective circuit in which they are inserted, like beads strung

onto a tangled thread.
The Entry thus operates on the same level as mass psychology, staging a con ict
between reason and madness, order and revolt. In LeBon’s staging, this con ict is
resolved by organizing society in two homogeneous blocs; the mad masses are
tamed by the suggestive power of individual leaders. Ensor, by contrast, eradicates
this division altogether. His gures drift in some new social medium where the con-
ceptions of hypnosis, mental contagion, and suggestibility nd no anchorage. For
LeBon, the crowd is structured by one collective soul; for Ensor, it is structured
by countless lateral relations of diVerence and similarity. For LeBon, the crowd is
homogeneous; for Ensor, it is heterogeneous. Where LeBon turns all the faces in
the crowd toward the leader, Ensor has them fan out in a space without center.
Where LeBon sees the member of the crowd as an automaton, Ensor sees him or
her as an ensemble of social tensions. If we want a de nition of the visual grammar
of The Entry, we can say that the painting removes vertical relations of subordina-
tion and replaces them with horizontal relations of juxtaposition.
The formal organization of The Entry thus suggests a social worldview contrary
to that of mass psychology and aYliated with the radical and regenerative force of
the carnival and caricature. It subverts hierarchies, tears down authorities, dissolves
identities, violates order, breaks decorum, and laughs at dignitaries. Indeed, Ensor’s
depiction destroys the entire system of representation and power, not only the aes-
thetic system that determines how society should be represented but also the politi-
cal system that decides by whom it should be represented. Through this work of de-
struction, Ensor delivers his gures to the ambiguous freedom of a world without
xed positions of power and hence without distinct social identities.
Consider, for example, the man and the woman kissing each other in the left
foreground of The Entry. Who is the woman? The red Phrygian cap betrays her as
Marianne, symbol of the people and of the Republic.32 In Ensor scholarship, her
embrace of the baZed burgher has been interpreted in LeBon’s terms, that is, as a
denunciation of the contagious power of popular passions. Seduced by egalitarian
ideals, the mob corrupts morality and invites vice.33 If we remove LeBon’s glasses,
a diVerent interpretation becomes possible. The good bourgeois is kissed in public
by the heroine of the Commune herself. Is there a better way to rob him of authority
and show him up for what he is? Interestingly, Ensor inserted this motif into many
other works: The Baths at Ostende (1890), The Multiplication of the Fish (1891), Mas-
querade (1891), The Gendar mes (1892), and Red Cabbage and Masks (1925–1930). It
thereby emerges as an emblem of his ongoing critical investigation of social hierar-
chies. Judge, bishop, minister, mayor, chief of police, general, doctor, and intellec-
tual are resolutely forced into the howling crowd. As Ensor paints it, this crowd
tells the agents of law and order: ‘‘Yes, we are just like you say, dangerous and in-
sane—and we kiss you, because you’re one of us!’’ And as the representatives of
order are torn down, so are the very principles of reason and civilization on which
their authority is founded. Hence, there remains no position of reason in relation

to which the event can be judged: it is impossible to determine whether the social
happening is normal or pathological.
Evidently, Ensor’s madness asserts itself independently of the grids of reason.
Like the voyagers on The Ship of Fools, the spectacle of The Entry seems to tap its
energy from the collective memory of a social life not yet fully organized by cate-
gories of power and knowledge. It is in relation to such a remote cultural past that
the métissage of human and animal in Ensor’s gures attains its ultimate meaning.
The juridical systems of medieval Europe frequently designated someone who
stood outside the law—the bandit or the outlaw—as a wolf-man. When a person
was expelled from the community of citizens, he was said to carry a wolf ’s head
and had to dwell in a no-man’s-land between the human order and the animal
order, the city and the forest, civilization and wilderness.34 Popular imagination
gradually transformed these outlawed wolf-men into werewolves and other hybrids
of human and animal that came to populate European folktales and annual carni-
vals. Crowding the works of Pieter Brueghel the Elder and Bosch, these creatures
resurface in Ensor’s work: a human face on the body of a bear; a human body with
a monkey’s face; a gure that is half human, half rhinoceroid; others bearing heads
of wolves, horses, and hares; yet others with beaks of crows and parrots. The sym-
bolic origin of all these beings is the gure that is banned from the city and that
threatens to return from the forest to undo the constituted social order. An echo of
the same notion is preserved in Thomas Hobbes’s account of the original state of
society as a condition in which ‘‘man is a wolf to men.’’ The Entry reenacts this
prepolitical level. As the order of the city is dissolved, its population no longer con-
sists of distinct human individuals.
But if there are no autonomous individuals in this painting, there can be no
masses either in the strict sense, because, as suggested earlier, the masses is but the
excluded term in an equation that presupposes that certain individuals uphold a
position of power. What we see, then, is neither individuals nor masses. What we
see, rather, is ‘‘the people,’’ ‘‘the collectivity,’’ or ‘‘the social,’’ as these exist before
being interrupted by systems of representation that divide the social eld into indi-
viduals and masses. Society is here frozen in a state of becoming, constituted solely
by horizontal connections and antagonisms, suspended between the nothingness
of human desire and the always inadequate forms of being in which that desire
seeks satisfaction.
Ensor renders the same condition of social transformation even more graphi-
cally in another remarkable work, The Cathedral (1886; g. 3). In this etching, the

figure 3. James Ensor, The Cathedral, 1886. Etching on paper, 24.7 3 18.8 cm.
Stedelijk Prentenkabinet, Antwerp.
uid collectivity at the bottom passes through a series of transmutations, ascending

to ever higher forms of social organization, until it seamlessly passes over into the
complete petri cation of the cathedral, a symbol of the authority and power of past
generations, now weighing like a nightmare on the shoulders of the people. It is
only in relation to these symbols of authority that the people appear as a mass.
Remove these representatives, and the people will constitute itself in a diVerent
form. Remove the weight of the state, the church, and the rest of the ideological
apparatus, and society will look like The Entry.
In a little-known article on Ensor, Walter Benjamin remarks that the painter
dissolved the seemingly solid masses of bourgeois society. Like someone who rolls
away a stone to see what is concealed beneath it, Ensor turns over social institutions,
thus exposing ‘‘not the faces but the entrails of the ruling classes.’’35 Benjamin in-
vites a reading of the painting in sequential terms, as the depiction of an event that
interrupts the ow of history; a break between a past order torn to pieces and a
future not yet formed. Such an approach sheds light on some of the painting’s most
striking features. First, it elucidates why Ensor chose to antedate the event as taking
place in 1889, that is, on the centennial of the French Revolution and in the inaugu-
ral year of the Second International—facts that most scholars pass over in silence.
Second, it clari es the meaning of the peculiar monochromatic elds in the upper

margins of the canvas: the green and blue areas in the upper two corners, the broad
stroke of dark green along the top edge, the checkered pattern of black stripes along
the left edge. Critics have typically understood them as mere ll-ins of spaces that
were left over when Ensor composed the image. But if The Entry represents a histori-
cal break, as I believe it does, these areas attain a crucial function. Comparable to
the scaVolding on a construction site, these parts elicit the impression that the image
represents a society in the process of rebuilding itself.
Moreover, to interpret The Entry as a crystallization of a discontinuity is also
to grasp the meaning of the three contradictory perspectives that organize the vi-
sual plane. I have already suggested that each perspective brings a diVerent crowd
into focus. This idea is both quali ed and supported once we realize that each per-
spective, and the particular crowd it corresponds to, indicates a speci c moment in
the process that turns over the old order and institutes a new one. The main event
is of course ‘‘the entry’’ itself, evoked by the visual perspective centering on Christ.
But if The Entry inaugurates the coming of a new era, it also expels the old order.
The caricatured clergy and bourgeoisie lined up in the foreground appear to em-
body this oppressive past; they are about to drop outside the frame, their exit her-
alded by the pompous bishop, the rst to be dethroned by the Messiah’s arrival.
Indeed, The Entry could also be called The Exit.36
If the crowd in the foreground signi es the exit of the past, and if, furthermore,
the crowd around Christ in the middle represents the entry of the new, how are we
to approach the crowd evoked by the third perspective that follows the boulevard
to its vanishing point under the red banner? Legions of people, entire populations,
line up in the street. They are too far away to be distinguished, the messages on
their ying banners impossible to make out. They do not march but stand in wait
behind the Messiah, who appears to clear the way for them.
The in nitely extended perspective in this part of the painting is probably En-
sor’s way of paying tribute to the old Flemish master he admired most, Brueghel
the Elder. The Entry is composed according to the same perspectival principles as
Brueghel’s Children’s Games, in which the wide panorama of plays and games is spa-
tially balanced by the depth perspective of the village street, which, like the boule-
vard in The Entry, adds an almost transcendental thrust that immediately relativizes
the activities in the foreground. In Ensor, similarly, the recognizable gures up
front, Christ included, are temporalized, relativized, and eventually dissolved by
the long perspective—a visual equivalent of the historian’s longue durée—that is oc-
cupied and represented by the anonymous collective.

It is therefore inadequate to regard Christ as the main protagonist of The Entry;
his reduced size is enough to suggest the contrary. Ensor’s Messiah is apparently
assigned the more modest role of pathbreaker. In that sense, he is similar to most
other utopian gures: they are rarely authentic incarnations of the coming world
of freedom but facilitators who enable that world to come into being.37 Ensor’s
Christ is thus a mediatory gure that neutralizes the forces that block change. He

marks the entry to a new order but is not himself of that order. The Entry evokes
the new order only as a possibility, represented by the anonymous multitude that
covers the far section of the boulevard. The People: they are about to enter the stage
of history.
In her remarkable book on the Paris Commune and Arthur Rimbaud, Kristin
Ross de nes the mode of social organization that prevailed in the Commune as a
system based not on ideas of the class, the proletariat, or the masses, but on a collec-
tivity she calls ‘‘the swarm.’’ Whereas a class presupposes a well-de ned division of
labor and a social hierarchy, ‘‘the swarm,’’ Ross writes, is activated by an uncon-
scious desire that dissolves the unity of the person into collective processes. If we
renounce the evolutionary vision of the swarm as something formless, utopian,
primitive, or otherwise incompatible with the realities of a complex society, we can
begin to see it, Ross states, ‘‘as that which escapes from any and all forms of sover-
eignty.’’38 Karl Marx described the Commune in similar terms, ‘‘as a resumption
by the people for the people of its own social life.’’39
The social form of the swarm is horizontal and paratactic; it places every sub-
ject on the same level as every other, eradicating hierarchies and refusing to recog-
nize any form of representation set apart from the social fabric. The symbolic event
of the Commune—the destruction of the Vendôme Column—signi es the leveling
of those institutions that once represented society and its history from above. The
people instead represent themselves through a horizontal network of production
and consumption in which each subject satis es the needs of others through his or
her voluntary activity. The swarm is, in this view, the realization of radical
democracy.40
The poetry of Rimbaud is, for Ross, the congenial manifestation of the demo-
cratic spirit of the swarm. Less than twenty years old and ghting for the Commune,
Rimbaud reinvented the art of poetry; according to Ross, this was because he trans-
posed the leveling and allocentric form of the swarm into a lyric idiom that ex-
ploded meters and genres. Rimbaud’s verse and prose are invaded by popular
songs, citations, and slogans. As these idioms interrupt the poetic process, the poet
becomes less an autonomous creator and more a medium through which the multi-
ple voices of the collectivity speak. The central agency of literary representation, the
authoritative rst-person singular, is thus abolished. This helps explain Rimbaud’s
famous exclamation: ‘‘Je est un autre.’’ Assuming the subject-position of an ‘‘I’’ who
is always an other, Rimbaud speaks for a centrifugal social force that cancels the
poetic authority, undoes each position of centrality, and throws everybody toward
the barbarian margin. Thus, while Alphonse Daudet remarked that under the
Commune Paris was in the hands of niggers, Rimbaud con rmed slyly that, yes,
‘‘I am an animal, a nigger,’’ proceeding then to enumerate the dignitaries of France,
stating that they, too, are niggers: ‘‘maniacs, savages, misers, all of you. Business-
man, you’re a nigger; judge, you’re a nigger; general, you’re a nigger; emperor, old-

scratch-head, you’re a nigger.’’41 Celebrating a ‘‘race that sang on the scaVold,’’
Rimbaud’s paratactic prose stalks the heads of French society and throws them into
a mad procession. Authorities are dethroned, fools crowned, the distinction be-
tween human and beast eVaced. So it is that Ensor’s The Entry encounters its textual
equivalent in Rimbaud, and the French poet’s evocation of the Commune in ‘‘The
Parade’’ emerges as a superb description of the painting:
Chinamen, Hottentots, Gypsies, Morons, Hyenas, Molochs,
Ancient insanities, sinister demons,
They distort popular maternal scenes
With bestial positions and caresses.
They play new plays and they sing the songs
Of the spinsters and the knitters in the sun . . .
Marvelous jugglers, with magnetic acting
They trans gure places and people.
Eyes ame, blood sings, bones begin to swell,
Tears start, and networks of scarlet ripple and throb.
Their jibes and their terror endure for a moment
Or can last for months upon end.
ONLY I HAVE THE KEY TO THIS SAVAGE PARADE!42
In his 1908 monograph, still the best book on Ensor, Emile Verhaeren remarks
that Ensor was often accused of trying to inaugurate ‘‘a sort of Commune with his
art and to inscribe his aesthetic doctrine in the folds of a red banner.’’43 It is well
known that Ensor’s intellectual friends and acquaintances were socialists and anar-
chists, a few of them even veterans of the Commune, like the geographer Elisée
Reclus. What is interesting here, however, is not to sort out in uences but to estab-
lish the cultural logic that made a painting like The Entry possible. When Ensor
executed The Entry in 1888, the situation in Belgium resembled the one in France
of 1871. It was a time of severe economic depression, with large parts of the working
class unemployed and starving. In the spring of 1886, Belgium exploded in violent
confrontations. The unrest began on 18 March, when the anarchists in Liège
marched to commemorate the anniversary of the Commune and the military re-
sponded by killing several of the demonstrators. The event ignited a wave of rebel-
lions that were eventually struck down by the army, leaving many more dead and
the industrial centers under military command.44 Following the rebellion was a
legal maze of biased prosecutions of socialist leaders. The convicted included the

figure 4. James Ensor, The Entry of Christ into Brussels, 1898. Etching on paper,
24 3 35.5 cm. Cabinet des estampes, Bibliothèque royale, Brussels.
head of the Flemish communists, Edouard Anseele who, incidentally, is hailed in

the drawings with which Ensor prepared The Entry and also in the 1898 etching
based on it ( g. 4).
In his chronicle of that year, Louis Bertrand concluded, ‘‘1886 is our année terri-
ble, just like the year 1871 was in France.’’ Yet, it was also, Bertrand added, the rst
time that ‘‘the popular masses forced everyone to listen to their great voice.’’45 The
revolutionary ferment is now permanent, wrote Jules Brouez the same year: ‘‘a new
element is today appearing on the social stage: the People, or, better, the Proletar-
iat.’’46 In 1886, this people awakened to the political reality: in a population of six
million, ve million nine hundred thousand were excluded from the political sys-
tem. One contemporary commentator remarked that Belgian society was split in
two: ‘‘The people see in power nothing but an instrument of oppression, the bour-
geois in the entire mass of workers nothing but an army of disorder.’’47 In 1886,
this system began to crumble; in 1893, it was replaced by universal suVrage for men.
The year 1886 was also when Edmond Picard, proli c writer, radical lawyer,
socialist politician, and editor of the avant-garde journal L’art moderne, published
his epochal article ‘‘Art and Revolution.’’ The time had come, Picard said, for intel-
lectuals ‘‘to dip their pens in red ink.’’48 The artistic movement that Ensor spear-
headed in the mid-1880s, les XX, was identi ed with this political tendency. A critic
at L’étoile belge shivered at the sight of the exhibition catalog for the 1888 salon of
les XX: ‘‘The catalog is red, the red of blood, the red of combat and carnage.’’49 As
contemporary chroniclers of Belgian art such as Camille Lemonnier and Richard
Muther recognized, the political radicalism of the avant-garde allowed ‘‘the
masses’’ to assert their presence in the nation’s culture, thus changing the ways in
which society was depicted aesthetically and at the same time calling for a new

system of political representation.50 Ensor’s contribution to this tendency is most
evident in images like The Strike (1888; g. 5) and The Gendarmes (1892), as well as
in Doctrinal Nourishment (1889) and Belgium in the Nineteenth Century (1889; g. 6).51
The avant-garde had reasons to support socialism. Writers and artists did not
share the experiences of the working classes, to be sure, but they struggled against
a common enemy: an authoritarian constitutional monarchy, a liberal industrial
bourgeoisie notorious for its hostility to art and thinking, and a church that con-
trolled the system of education all the way up to the university. This front of workers,
intellectuals, and artists was found in many western European countries during
the 1880s. The Danish critic Georg Brandes coined the expression the ‘‘modern
breakthrough,’’ arguing that the emergence of modernist manifestoes, the ght for
secularism and freedom of expression, and the struggle for social justice were facets
of one and the same historical process.52 These movements shared a wish for new
forms of representing society: new political institutions to articulate the common
will and new cultural and artistic forms to capture social reality. Between 1886 and
1893, in sum, to depict Belgian society was to take a standpoint in a social and
cultural struggle that concerned what Cornelius Castoriadis has called ‘‘the imagi-
nary institution of society.’’53
That The Entry incorporates elements from these con icts has been shown by
Stephen McGough.54 For example, Ensor drew on magazine illustrations depicting
the huge socialist march in Brussels on 15 August 1886. What makes The Entry
such a remarkable painting is that it condenses virtually all the lines of con ict that
divided Belgian society and culture during this period. From the aesthetic ght
between the avant-garde and the academy to the cultural tension between Flem-
ishness and Francophonie, to the class struggle itself: all are collapsed into one event.
Collapsed, but not ordered. For what is even more remarkable, and what makes
The Entry unique among crowd representations, is that it refuses to distinguish be-
tween these lines of con ict. Unlike his colleagues Constantin Meunier, Léon Fréd-
éric, Eugène Laermans, and Francois Maréchal, Ensor does not raise the masses
to a level of dignity, so as to prove that the workers, too, are human beings. In Ensor,
the con icts are not aligned with class divisions, not argued according to the rules
of political debate, not settled in line with the principles of reason, not organized
according to aesthetic conventions. The con icts are instead staged according to
the principle of carnivalistic doubling and the visual grammar of juxtaposition I
described a moment ago. This strategy enabled Ensor to bypass inherited ways of
representing society and go straight to the heart of the social matter: collectivity

figure 5. James Ensor, The Strike, or The Massacre of the Ostende Fishermen, 1888.
Drawing on paper, 34 3 67.5 cm. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone
Kunsten, Antwerp.
figure 6. James Ensor, Belgium in the Nineteenth Century, 1889. Etching on paper,
16.3 3 21.4 cm. Cabinet des estampes, Bibliothèque royale, Brussels.
as such. The Entry captures the people in the act—in the act of tearing down old
authorities and of constituting themselves as the new sovereign subject of political
power. ‘‘All social securities are voided, all social relations dissolved,’’ said the politi-
cian and writer Jules Destrée about Belgium in 1886.55 Between 1886 and 1889 the
Belgian people made ‘‘a tabula rasa of the past,’’ states Marcel Liebman in his his-
tory of Belgium’s workers’ movement.56 Ensor seized this process in The Entry, con-

densing it into one event. If there ever were a visual counterpart to that enigmatic
phenomenon we call a revolution, this is it: society degree zero—a society as yet
without meaning and direction.
Since the parade lacks meaning and direction, critics have perceived whichever
ideology they prefer in the painting, inscribing on the empty banners a message of
their own choice—a choice that, as I have argued, has been determined by the
inherited stereotype of ‘‘the masses.’’ This stereotype has not only distorted the
historical subtext and the political insight of The Entry; it has also precluded an
understanding of the painting’s aesthetic speci city. For Ensor could not have pre-
sented this zero-level of society, which precedes all systems of representation and
thus is anterior to the division between masses and individuals, had he not also
circumvented existing conventions of aesthetic representation and invented a tech-
nique that enabled him to visualize society as though for the rst time.
Many interpreters have explained Ensor’s originality as the positive side eVect
of the artist’s neurotic constitution.57 ‘‘Ensor was looked upon as an idiot,’’ says
Mabille de Poncheville. 58 Yet, it should be remembered that in the 1880s, when
mass psychologists diagnosed the majority of the people as potentially insane, the
idiot was a politically charged category. During these years, madness was seen as
a force that rose from the lower depths of society. The Entry should therefore be
understood not only as an expression of Ensor’s psychological fantasy but also as
the result of a fusion of his personal fantasy narrative with the general narrative of
Belgian history. The subject of the fantasy narrative is an insecure artist in the mar-
gins of society, defending his integrity by attacking a cultural establishment that
saw him as a fool. The subject of the political narrative is the Belgian people, as-
serting their humanity by striking back against political, economic, and religious
institutions that construe them as subhuman.
This hypothesis, which I for lack of space can only suggest here, has the advan-
tage of resolving a classical problem in Ensor scholarship. Why was Ensor’s creative
period so brief and explosive? Why, asks Roger van Gindertael, did he fail to do
anything signi cant after 1893?59 We glimpse an answer once we realize that what
Diane Lesko calls Ensor’s creative period coincided exactly with the modern break-
through in Belgium and with the struggling years of the nation’s socialist move-
ment, from the founding of the workers’ party in 1885 to the institution of universal
suVrage in 1893.60 During these years, the labor movement removed an oppressive
system of political representation, and the intelligentsia undermined an authoritar-

ian system of cultural and aesthetic representation. In these struggles, the constitut-
ing agency of ‘‘the people’’ was suddenly disclosed in its contradictory character.
Ensor’s crowd paintings indicate that the zero-level of sociality that was exposed at
this historical moment corresponded perfectly to the desired object in the artist’s
own rebellious fantasy narrative: the moment when the columns of authority go
down and people dance in the debris.

Between 1885 and 1893, then, the political landscape provided Ensor with a
set of antagonisms that allowed him to structure his own fantasy narrative. When
he shouted at the bishop, the judge, or the art critic, ‘‘Yes, I am an animal, a beast—
but so are you,’’ his voice was also the people’s. And when the people shouted, Ensor
made their voice his own. The eld of political con icts became an allegory for his
own struggle, and vice versa.
After 1893, the two narratives diverged. The con icts that had seared Belgium
were settled. Society returned to business as usual. The masks and myths that had
animated Ensor’s art lost their social resonance. His once powerful gestures were
transformed into the compulsory ticks of the village fool and the tricks of the jester.
Senility had already struck him at the age of forty, laments Michel Draguet.61 In
the early twentieth century, we encounter Ensor as the acrimonious baron, living
oV past victories, organizing carnivals, addressing the local Rotary club, defending
animal rights, and crusading against the soullessness of the modern age. Draguet
compares him to Don Quixote: just as Cervantes’s hero followed through the moves
of combat and the virtuous protocol of the knight in an era where the institution
of chivalry had lost its raison d’être, so Ensor after 1893 repeated the moves of the
anarchist—in a sphere disconnected from both politics and the avant-garde. With
the same intensity that he once scolded royalty and bourgeoisie, he now lashed out
not against windmills but—as the title of one of his pitiful pieces makes clear—
‘‘against the swimming pool.’’62
An obvious objection lingers over the interpretation I have given so far. Jesus
Christ! the reader may think. Does not the explicitly Christian theme of The Entry
contest a social and political reading of the image? Postwar critics have interpreted
Christ’s powerful presence in Ensor’s work as a negation of worldly aVairs and as
an aYrmation of the transcendent power of religion and genuine individuality. I
argued earlier that analyses that build on an inherited assumption of the masses as
opposed to individuality fail to understand The Entry. I now want to suggest that
critics accustomed to seeing politics and religion as separate spheres commit a simi-
lar mistake.
In 1886, Alfred Defuisseaux published a booklet called Catechism of the People.
He used the format of the catechism to disseminate socialist ideas, and the pam-
phlet went out in 250,000 copies. Some historians see it as the spark that ignited
the protests that nearly brought Belgium to civil war.
Closer relatives to Ensor’s Gospel are the short stories that his friend Eugène
Demolder began writing in the late 1880s.63 In the collection Contes d’Yperdamme of
1891, Demolder transposed episodes of the Gospels to a Flemish setting. The son
of God is a miserable man, walking from hut to hut, performing his wonders for the
bene t of the poor. As one critic remarked: Demolder’s Jesus is a pagan character—
‘‘there is something barbarian and primitive in his religion.’’64
In the early 1890s Ensor made a portrait of Demolder, depicting the socialist

writer as a religious founder. The two also made a trip to the Netherlands together.65
Ensor made a drawing of them that later became the etching Fridolin and Gragapança
of Yperdamme, thus inserting himself and his comrade into the legendary landscape
of Demolder’s tales, which in fact contain a character modeled on Ensor, the ute-
playing prophet Saint Fridolin. In 1892 Demolder published the rst longer study
of Ensor’s art, and now it was his turn to insert Ensor’s art into the atmosphere of
his own egalitarian Christianity. According to Demolder, Ensor’s Christ wants to
‘‘step down into the crowd and slap the ridiculous bishop with his wounded
hands.’’66 Ensor’s drawings of Christ are veritable illustrations of Demolder’s tales,
and these tales read like ekphrases on Ensor’s art. In both, we encounter a Christ
who is part holy sage, part village idiot, and part union organizer.
As early as 1892 Picard lectured on ‘‘The Life of Jesus and the Contes d’Yper-
damme’’ in La maison du peuple, the cultural center of the worker’s party.67 Picard
embodied the modern breakthrough in Belgium. In Le sermon sur la montagne et le
socialisme contemporain (The sermon on the mount and contemporary socialism;
1896), he argued that socialism had inherited the ideals of Christ. Writing about
the events of 1886, he extolled the dead workers as Christian martyrs.68
These examples from Ensor’s closest circle form a pattern.69 Socialism masks
itself as Christianity, and is itself transformed in the process. It is a case of what
Oswald Spengler called pseudomorphosis: new content is slipped into old forms so as
to gain acceptance and elude censorship. French socialists had used the same
method in 1848.70 In Belgium of the late 1880s, where the conservative Catholic
party was in power, the strategy was particularly germane. The most intensely de-
bated issue in the socialist journal La société nouvelle during the centennial year of
the French Revolution was thus not, as one might expect, the relation of Marx to
Mikhail Bakunin, the class struggle, or even the proletarian revolution, but the
history of the church. What enabled the socialist appropriation of the New Testa-
ment was a series of materialist interpretations of the Christian myth inaugurated
by David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu (1835–36). In France and Belgium,
Strauss’s work was translated and promoted by the philosopher and political re-
formist Emile Littré. Demolder was the rst to identify the portrait of Littré in
Ensor’s 1885 drawing The Entry into Jerusalem ( g. 7), one of the models for The
Entry.
The messianic thrust of Belgium’s socialism was so strong that Jules Destrée,
another friend of Ensor, found it necessary to warn against it. The confusion of
‘‘La grande Revolution Sociale’’ with ‘‘La sainte revolution d’un messie nouveau’’

figure 7. James Ensor,
The Alive and Radiant. The Entry
into Jerusalem, 1885. Drawing on
paper, 206 3 150 cm. Museum of
Fine Arts, Ghent, Belgium. The
portrait of Emile Littré is inserted
as the big face slightly right of
center at the bottom.
invites everybody, he wrote, to just sit down and await the second coming.71 This
did not stop Destrée himself from using the Gospels in his polemics against church
and capitalism, comparing the plight of the elderly poor to Jesus on Calvary, liken-
ing the workers’ party to a church, or arguing that Belgium’s legal system would
detain and condemn Jesus again, should he appear among the vagabonds that were
unjustly punished in the nation’s courts.72
A socialist representative of Belgium’s parliament exclaimed in 1899 that if
Christ would return, he would seat himself on the far left.73 Georges Rodenbach,
a major poet of the era, prepared in 1888 an epic poem on industrial society, the
working classes, and social justice. Its name? Le livre de Jesus, ‘‘The Book of Jesus.’’74
The fusion of Christ and the People even became institutionalized in the public
space of Belgium’s emerging socialist counterculture. In the new Maison du peuple
designed by Victor Horta and inaugurated in 1899, there was a great conference
hall called ‘‘la salle blanche.’’ As Paul Aron has shown, the workers’ party commis-
sioned Paul Signac to decorate this inner sanctuary of the socialist movement. Sig-
nac suggested his painting Au temps d’harmonie, which evokes the communist life of
creativity and leisure ( g. 8). The Belgian socialists rejected it, however, opting in-
stead for a painting by Antoine Wiertz that depicted a great head of Christ ( g. 9).
Rebaptized The Just, Christ was evidently thought to be a more appropriate symbol
for the movement.75
Symbol is the appropriate word here, for it lets us distinguish the often overtly
figure 8. Paul Signac, Au temps d’harmonie: L’âge d’or n’est pas dans le passé, il est
dans l’avenir, 1895. Oil on canvas, 300 3 400 cm. City Hall,
Montreux.
dogmatic messianism of Belgium’s socialists from Ensor’s own peculiar Christology.

Ensor’s Christ is no symbol, no metaphysical concept or idea that unites suVering
humanity under one and the same sign. If this were the case, Ensor would just
repeat the system where the sovereign individual speaks for the silent masses. As I
have stated, such a division of individual from mass is precisely what we do not nd
in Ensor. His Christ is central, to be sure, but he is also tiny, hidden, out of focus.
He enters the drama not so much as a sovereign individual but as part of the multi-
tude, acting as a mediatory representative of a social system as yet without any
mechanisms of political representation and hence also aesthetically unrepresent-
able. This feature also resonates with Brueghel, where Christ’s deeds are indistin-
guishable from the labors and festivities of the people, and where Christ is thus not
a worldly incarnation of the divine but rather, and in accord with chiliastic notions
contemporary with Brueghel, an allegory for the ethical substance of the popular
collectivity itself.
The most congenial literary parallel to Ensor’s images is therefore the literary
work of his friend and interpreter Emile Verhaeren, especially the trilogy consisting
of the epic poems Les campagnes hallucinées (The hallucinated landscapes; 1893) and
Les villes tentaculaires (The tentacular cities; 1895), and the play Les aubes (The dawn;
1898), which premiered in Brussels’ Maison du peuple.76 This majestic trilogy al-
ludes both to the Paris Commune and to the rebellions of 1886, and its main protag-
onist is not an individual but the masses themselves. ‘‘La foule’’ is in fact the rst

figure 9. Antoine Wiertz, The Just. Late nineteenth century. Current
owner and location unknown. Reproduced from Paul Aron,
Les écrivains belges et le socialisme, 1880–1913 (Brussels, 1997).
entry in the list of characters of Les aubes, which states, moreover, that the groups
of the drama act as one collective person with multiple faces.77 Like Ensor’s works,
Verhaeren’s trilogy provides an inventory of the modes of action and forms of ap-
pearance of the crowd: ‘‘O these masses, these masses / and the misery and distress
that move them.’’78 In Verhaeren’s trilogy, two agents metonymically represent the
masses. The rst is the fool. A suite of poems called ‘‘The Song of the Idiot’’ returns
at intervals to expose society as seen from the subaltern margin: ‘‘I am the madman
of the wide plains, / in nite, which the wind, like the eternal plagues, / strikes with
the great beat of its wings; / the madman who wants to remain standing / with his
head stretched toward the end / of coming times, when Jesus Christ / will come
to judge the soul and the spirit. / Thus let it be.’’79
A madman, speaking with the voice of the people about the coming of the
Messiah—such is the formula of Verhaeren’s mystic socialism. For the second agent
that here represents the masses is Christ himself. ‘‘What do the evils and the de-
mented hours matter,’’ Verhaeren’s poem asks—‘‘If some day . . . a new Christ
would come, in sculpted light, / to raise humankind toward himself, / and baptize
it in the re from new stars.’’80 In another poem the messianic power is transubstan-
tiated into the people, who forge ‘‘the new universe of an insatiable utopia.’’ An era
of blood and darkness gives way to ‘‘an order gentle, generous, and mighty,’’ reveal-
ing, at the break of dawn, ‘‘the pure essence of life.’’81
Consisting of the crowd, the madman, and Jesus, Verhaeren’s trinity is the same
as the one that animates Ensor’s art. In both, the history of the masses merges with
the history of madness, jointly sustaining the hope for a just society. The trinity

speaks with one voice and embodies the same social energy. The power it represents
is the people’s will to unify itself and institute a new universe, an insatiable utopia,
or, as Ensor and his friends used to call it—Communism.
I have dwelt on the role of Christ in Belgium’s socialist culture for two reasons.
First, Ensor scholars have neglected it.82 Second, it suggests that the Christian im-
agery is the least original element in Ensor’s work. Yet, the fact that the gure of
Christ is the least original element does not mean that it is the least interesting one.
It places Ensor’s work in the midst of a historical situation that enacted the originary
drama of politics and power: How and by whom should society be represented. As
Ensor visualized this drama, it is one of potentiality and collectivity. Society consists
neither of individuals nor of masses, is guided by neither reason nor unreason. The
light that radiates through this world is therefore akin to the lunatic power that has
been ascribed to the Belgian painter himself. What is exposed in this moment of
clarity is the very meaning of those enigmatic words that crown The Entry, ‘‘la soci-
ale,’’ which in Ensor’s culture was shorthand for ‘‘la revolution sociale.’’ Having
provided a visual interpretation of the meaning of these words, Ensor’s canvas then
turns that meaning into its own message: Vive la sociale.
No t e s
Work on this essay was made possible by a fellowship from the Getty Research Institute
in Los Angeles, which also generously supported color reproduction of plate 1. For inci-
sive comments and suggestions, I am indebted to Francesco de Angelis, Paul Barolsky,
T. J. Clark, Sara Danius, Heinrich Dilly, Catherine SoussloV, and Griselda Pollock. I
also want to thank Jennifer Helvey for giving me access to the material on Ensor in the
curatorial archives of the J. Paul Getty Museum.
1. August Strindberg, Ensam, in Samlade verk, ed. Ola Östin (Stockholm, 1994), 52: 55.
2. Ibid., 56.
3. Wilhelm Fraenger, ‘‘James Ensor: Die Kathedrale,’’ Die graphischen Kunste 49 (1926): 92.
4. La plume: Littéraire, artistique et sociale, no. 228–32 (1898). These ve special issues were
published as a book in 1899.
5. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans.
Richard Howard (New York, 1973), 3–37.
6. Ibid., 38–64.
7. Ibid., 285–89.

8. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford, 1998), 176–80.
9. For more on the de nition of ‘‘the masses,’’ see my ‘‘Masses Mind Matter: Political
Passions and Collective Violence in Post-Imperial Austria,’’ in Representing the Passions:
Histories, Bodies, Visions, ed. Richard Meyer (forthcoming).
10. See Helmut König, Zivilisation und Leidenschaften: Die Masse im bürgerlichen Zeitalter
(Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1992), 56.

11. For an account of visual representations of ‘‘the people,’’ see Susanne von Falken-
hausen, ‘‘Vom ‘Ballhausschwur’ zum ‘Duce’: Visuelle Repräsentation von Volkssouver-
änität zwischen Demokratie und Autokratie,’’ in Das Volk: Abbild, Konstruktion, Phan-
tasma, ed. Annette Graczyk (Berlin, 1996), 3–17; for an account of its counterparts in
literature, see Naomi Schor, Zola’s Crowds (Baltimore, 1978).
12. See T. J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848–1851, 2d ed.
(Berkeley, 1999), 18–30.
13. Gustave LeBon, La vie: Physiologie humaine appliqué à l’hygiène et à la médicine (Paris, 1872);
quoted in Robert Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave LeBon and the Crisis of
Mass Democracy in the T hird Republic (London, 1975), 28.
14. Gustave LeBon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, reprint of 2d ed. (Marietta, Ga.,
1982), 12; originally published as La psychologie des foules (Paris, 1895).
15. Lucien Nass, Le siège de Paris et la commune (Paris, 1914), 352 f. Another ambitious appli-
cation of mass psychology was made by Alexandre Calerre, who classi ed all the major
revolutions and rebellions in France’s history with the aid of the vocabulary of conta-
gion and suggestibility; ‘‘Les psychoses dans l’histoire,’’ Archives internationales de neurolo-
gie 34, no. 1 (1912): 229–49, 299–311, 359–70; no. 2 (1912): 23–36, 89–110, 162–77,
211–24.
16. Quoted in Nye, Origins of Crowd Psychology, 51.
17. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1999), 240–47.
18. Hanna Deinhard, ‘‘Daumier et sa représentation de la foule moderne,’’ Histoire et cri-
tique des arts, no. 13–14 (1980): 98.
19. The following examples illustrate the dominant view of art-historical scholarship. The
more journalistic the descriptions of The Entry become, the more explicit is the century-
old idea of mass psychology. A survey by Edward Lucie-Smith asserts that ‘‘the implica-
tion of the picture is, of course, that if Christ returned to earth, the Belgians would
undoubtedly treat him in the same way as did the Jews of Jerusalem’’; Symbolist Art
(New York, 1972), 178. John Walsh, former director of the J. Paul Getty Museum,
repeats the view in an interview: ‘‘It’s a mob; it’s a city mob, and it’s being led by rabble-
rousers under banners with slogans. [The painting] is obviously intended as a kind of
bitter warning of the dangers of giving over your individuality, your identity’’; Daryl
H. Miller, ‘‘Getty Museum plans with reverence its unveiling of James Ensor’s
‘Christ,’ ’’ Los Angeles Daily News, 16 October 1987. In the in- ight magazine of Thai
Airlines, nally, we are frontally exposed to the fear of the masses that resonates in this
interpretative tradition: ‘‘The uneasy surge of the crowd and its implicit instinct for
violence lls Ensor’s masterpiece’’; Susan E. James, ‘‘Among the Ghosts and Skeletons,’’
Sawasdee, April 1995, 41.
20. Jean Stevo, James Ensor (Brussels, 1947), 20.
21. Georg Heard Hamilton, Painting and Sculpture in Europe, 1880–1940 (Harmondsworth,
1967), 71.
22. Patrik Reuterswärd, ‘‘Barnet, faÊ geln och havet,’’ in En liten bok om Ensor (Stockholm,
1970), 40 f.
23. Stephen C. McGough, James Ensor’s ‘‘The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889’’ (New
York, 1985), 204.
24. Joachim Heusinger von Waldegg, James Ensor: Legende vom Ich (Cologne, 1991), 141 f.
25. Michel Draguet, James Ensor; ou, la fantasmagorie (Paris, 1999), 180.
26. Waldemar George, ‘‘James Ensor,’’ in Exposition James Ensor (Paris, 1926), 11. See also

Walther Vanbeslaere, L’entrée du Christ à Bruxelles (Brussels, 1957), 29 V.
27. Georges Sorel, review of La psycholgie des foules, by Gustave LeBon, Le devenir sociale,
November 1895, 769–70; quoted in Nye, Origins of Crowd Psychology, 105.
28. James Ensor, ‘‘Discours prononcé au banquet oVert à Ensor par ‘La Flandre littéraire,’ ’’
Mes écrits, 5th ed. (Liège, 1974), 76.
29. André de Ridder, James Ensor (Paris, 1930), 51.
30. For discussions of the relation of Ensor’s art to the carnival, see Draguet, James Ensor,
137–82; and Timothy Hyman, ‘‘James Ensor: A Carnival Sense of the World,’’ in James
Ensor, 1860–1949: T heater of Masks, ed. Carol Brown (London, 1997), 76–86.
31. For an account of these in uences, see Emile Verhaeren, James Ensor (Brussels, 1908),
10 f.; and Robert Croquez, Ensor en son temps (Ostende, 1970), 43–57.
32. On the history and meaning of Marianne, see Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into Battle:
Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1790–1880, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cam-
bridge, 1981).
33. See McGough, James Ensor’s ‘‘The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889,’’ 154; for a similar
but less pejorative reading, see Diane Lesko, James Ensor: The Creative Years (Princeton,
1985), 142 f.
34. See Agamben, Homo Sacer, 104–11.
35. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘James Ensor wird 70 Jahre’’ (1930), in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf
Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, vol. 4, bk. 1, ed. Tillman Rexroth
(Frankfurt am Main, 1981), 567.
36. I am indebted to Heinrich Dilly for this observation.
37. According to Fredric Jameson, what characterizes authentic utopian narratives is not
that they give a picture of what the perfect society really is like, for this picture would
necessarily be tainted by the ideological constraints of the author’s own society and
hence deviate from the desired perfection. Most writers have therefore restricted their
textual production to a diVerent kind of operation, ‘‘namely the construction of mate-
rial mechanisms that would alone enable freedom to come into existence all around
them. The mechanism itself has nothing to do with freedom, except to release it; it
exists to neutralize what blocks freedom, such as matter, labor, and the requirements
of their accompanying social machinery (such as power, training and discipline, en-
forcement, habits of obedience, respect, and so forth)’’; Fredric Jameson, T he Seeds of
Time (New York, 1994), 56 f.
38. Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (Minneapolis,
1988), 123.
39. Quoted in Ross, Emergence of Social Space, 22.
40. True democracy, Karl Marx wrote in response to G. W. F. Hegel’s philosophy of law,
does not recognize a separation between the state, as the representative of the people,
and civil society. In a truly democratic system every task and function would instead
be representative of the social body as a whole—‘‘in the sense in which the shoemaker,
insofar as he satis es a social need, is my representative, in which every particular social

activity as a species-activity merely represents the species, i.e. my own nature, and in
which every person is the representative of every other. He is here representative not
because of something else which he represents but because of what he is and does’’; Karl
Marx, ‘‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,’’ in Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, Collected Works trans. Richard Dixon et al. (New York, 1975), 3: 119.
41. Arthur Rimbaud, ‘‘Bad Blood,’’ in Complete Works, trans. Paul Schmidt, 2d ed. (New
York, 2000), 223; in French: ‘‘Mauvais Sang,’’ in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Rolland de Re-

néville and Jules Mouquet (Paris, 1946), 209.
42. Arthur Rimbaud, ‘‘Parade,’’ in Complete Works, 178. The cited translation is Paul
Schmidt’s interpretation of the following French original: ‘‘Chinois, Hottentots, bo-
hémiens, niais, hyènes, Molochs, vieilles démences, démons sinistres, ils mêlent les tours
populaires, maternels, avec les poses et les tendresses bestiales. Ils interpréteraient des
pièces nouvelles et des chansons ‘bonnes lles.’ Maõˆtres jongleurs, ils transforment le
lieu et les personnes et usent de la comédie magnétique. Les yeux ambent, le sang
chante, les os s’élargissent, les larmes et des lets rouges ruisselent. Leur raillerie ou leur
terreur dure une minute, ou des mois entiers. J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage’’;
‘‘Parade,’’ in Oeuvres complètes, 172.
43. Verhaeren, James Ensor, 100.
44. Marcel Liebman, Les socialistes belges, 1885–1914: La révolte et l’organisation, vol. 3 of
Histoire du mouvement ouvrier en Belgique (Brussels, 1979), 53–74; Jules Destrée and Emile
Vandervelde, Le socialisme en Belgique (Paris, 1898), 58–75; Léon Delsinne, Le Parti Ou-
vrier Belge, dès origines à 1894 (Brussels, 1955), 69–83.
45. Louis Bertrand, La Belgique en 1886 (Brussels, 1887), 1:5–7.
46. Jules Brouez, ‘‘Du problème social,’’ La société nouvelle 2 (1886), 1:30.
47. V. Arnould, ‘‘La dérive,’’ La société nouvelle 2 (1886), 2:111.
48. Edmond Picard, ‘‘L’art et la révolution,’’ La société nouvelle 2 (1886), 2:208.
49. ‘‘Chronique de la ville,’’ L’étoile belge, 5 February 1888; quoted in Jane Block, Les XX
and Belgian Avant-Gardism, 1868–1894 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1984), 37.
50. Camille Lemonnier, L’ecole belge de peinture, 1830–1905 (Brussels, 1906), 160–89; Rich-
ard Muther, Die belgische Malerei im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1904), 86 V.
51. Despite the explicit political content of these images, Susan M. Canning is the only
scholar who has discussed it in detail. Canning’s analyses are an invaluable corrective
to the antihistorical doxa of the postwar reception of Ensor. Often, however, Canning
makes Ensor’s politics too simple and explicit, attributing to Ensor’s images an activist
intention that renders any closer visual analysis super uous; see Susan M. Canning,
‘‘The Ordure of Anarchy: Scatological Signs of Self and Society in the Art of James
Ensor,’’ Art Journal 52, no. 3 (Fall 1993): 47–53; ‘‘Visionary Politics: The Social Subtext
of James Ensor’s Religious Imagery,’’ in James Ensor 1860–1949: Theater of Masks, 58–
69; ‘‘La foule et le boulevard: James Ensor and the Street Politic of Everyday Life,’’ in
Belgium: The Golden Decades, 1880–1914, ed. Jane Block (New York, 1997), 41–64; and
‘‘In the Realm of the Social,’’ Art in America 88, no. 2 (February 2000): 74–83, 141.
52. Georg Brandes, Det moderne g jennembruds mænd, en række portræter (Copenhagen, 1883).
53. Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Lon-
don, 1987), esp. 353–73.
54. McGough, James Ensor’s ‘‘The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889,’’ 160 V. and 229.
55. Jules Destrée, ‘‘Les troubles de Charleroi,’’ La société nouvelle 2 (1886), 1:427. See also
Destrée’s chronicle of the events of 1886 in Pages d’un journal, ed. Richard Dupierreux
(Brussels, 1937).
56. Liebman, Les socialistes belges, 1885–1914, 53.
57. See Fraenger, ‘‘James Ensor: Die Kathedrale’’; G. F. Hartlaub, ‘‘Zur Wertung der Kunst
James Ensors,’’ in James Ensor: Ausstellung (Mannheim, 1928), 3–8; Heusinger von Wal-
degg, James Ensor; and Draguet, James Ensor, passim.
58. A. Mabille de Poncheville, Vie de Verhaeren (Paris, 1953), 105.
59. Roger van Gindertael, Ensor, trans. Vivienne Menkes (London, 1975), 125.
60. Lesko, James Ensor, 3. Although Lesko extends Ensor’s period of creativity to 1877–
1899, there is no disagreement among scholars that he produces his most important

work in the late 1880s and the early 1890s.
61. Draguet, James Ensor, 9–12.
62. Ensor, ‘‘Contre le swimming-pool,’’ Mes écrits, 137 f.
63. Apart from Contes d’Yperdamme (Brussels, 1891), Eugène Demolder also published and
republished his stories in other books: Impressions d’art: Etudes, critiques, transpositions
(Brussels, 1889); Les récits de Nazareth (Brussels, 1893); Quatuor (Paris, 1897); La légende
d’Yperdamme (Paris, 1897); Le royaume authentique du grand saint Nicolas (Paris, 1896).
64. Hubert Krains, ‘‘Chronique littéraire,’’ La société nouvelle 7 (1891): 227 f.
65. James Ensor, Lettres, ed. Xavier Tricot (Brussels, 1999), 114.
66. Eugène Demolder, ‘‘James Ensor,’’ La société nouvelle 7 (1891): 588. Demolder also re-
marks that Ensor’s trinity is not the celestial group of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
but the earthbound trio of St. Francis, the Virgin, and Jesus. When describing Ensor’s
drawing The Entry of Christ into Jerusalem, Demolder argues that we see ‘‘a God of the
humble ones’’ making an impression of sadness and purity ‘‘in the midst of a crowd
where all is confusion and delirium’’; ibid. Demolder further asserts that Ensor’s para-
doxical spirit is marked by an in nite love for all expressions of life, human and animal,
combined with a revolutionary call to arms against society as a whole; ibid., 591.
67. Destrée and Vandervelde, Le socialisme en Belgique, 237.
68. Picard inserted Ensor as a sympathetic painter in his novel Psuké (1903). Ensor recipro-
cated by inserting Picard in several of his images. Ensor did not paint Picard sympathet-
ically, but ranged him with critics that he viewed as torturers. Yet he always recognized
Picard as a supporter, calling on him for help several times. In a letter of 16 February
1924, written just days before Picard’s death, Ensor acknowledges his lasting devotion;
Lettres, 609 f.
69. It is remarkable that no Ensor scholar has observed the resonances between Ensor’s
Christian myths and those of Belgian writers contemporary with him, many of whom
were his close friends. Xavier Tricot has described the intricate web of collaborations
and in uences between Ensor, Demolder, Picard, and others, but without asking how
this may have aVected Ensor’s work. Tricot repeats the idea, by now a commonplace,
that Ensor was in uenced by Edgar Allan Poe, François Rabelais, and Honoré de Bal-
zac’s 1831 tale Jésus-Chr ist en Flandre; Ensoriana, Cahier 1 (Antwerp, 1995), 5–35.
Though Diane Lesko devotes a full chapter to ‘‘Literature as Inspiration for Ensor’s
Art,’’ she fails to note that the works of Ensor’s friends contain a Messianic-socialist
symbolism similar to his; James Ensor, 83–114.
70. See Paul Aron, Les écrivains belges et le socialisme, 1880–1913: L’expérience de l’art social
d’Edmond Picard à Emile Verhaeren, 2d ed. (Brussels, 1997), 230; and Clark, Absolute Bour-
geois, 54 V.
71. Jules Destrée, Semailles (Brussels, 1913), 4.
72. Destrée, Semailles, 139–61; and Destrée, ‘‘Le secret de Frédéric Marcinel,’’ in Jules
Destrée (Brussels, 1906), 55. Destrée also stipulated a direct relation between the dimin-
ishing religious faith and the increasing faith in socialism; Art et socialisme (Brussels,
1896), 32.

73. Quoted in Aron, Les écrivains belges et le socialisme, 230.
74. Georges Rodenbach, Le livre de Jésus, in Oeuvres (Geneva, 1978), 151–73.
75. Aron, Les écrivains belges et le socialisme, 76.
76. For a discussion of Verhaeren’s trilogy, see Eva-Karin Josefson, La vision citadine et sociale
dans l’oeuvre d’Emile Verhaeren (Lund, 1982), 37–114; Aron, Les écrivains belges et le socia-
lisme, 173–213; and Hans Joachim Lope, ‘‘Emile Verhaeren, poète de la ville,’’ in Emile
Verhaeren: Poète, dramaturge, critique, ed. Peter-Eckhard Knabe and Raymond Trousson

(Brussels, 1984), 19–40.
77. Emile Verhaeren, Les aubes, in Hélène de Sparte / Les aubes (Paris, 1920), 108.
78. O ces foules, ces foules / Et la misère et la détresse qui les foulent; Emile Verhaeren, ‘‘Les
cathédrales,’’ in Les villes tentaculaires (1895), in Oeuvres, 9 vols. (Geneva, 1977), 1:118.
79. Je suis le fou des longues plaines, / In niment, que bat le vent / A grands coups d’ailes, /
Comme les peines éternelles; / Le fou qui veut rester debout, / Avec sa tête jusqu’au
bout / Des temps futurs, où Jésus-Christ / Viendra juger l’âme et l’esprit, / Comme il
est dit. / Ainsi soit-il; Emile Verhaeren, ‘‘Chanson de fou,’’ in Les Campagnes hallucinées
(1893), in Oeuvres, 1:49.
80. Et qu’importent les maux et les heures démentes, / . . . / Si quelque jour, . . . / Surgit
un nouveau Christ, en lumière sculpté, / Qui soulève vers lui l’humanité / Et la baptise
au feu de nouvelles étoiles; Emile Verhaeren, ‘‘L’ame de la ville,’’ in Les villes tentacu-
laires, in Oeuvres, 1:111 f.
81. La foule et sa fureur . . . / Fera surgir, avec ses bras impitoyables, / L’Univers neuf de
l’utopie insatiable; / Les minutes s’envoleront d’ombre et de sang / Et l’ordre éclora
doux, généreux et puissant, / puisqu’il sera, au jour, la pure essence de la vie; Emile
Verhaeren, ‘‘Le forgeron,’’ in Les villages illusoires (1894), in Oeuvres, 2:289.
82. In recent scholarship, Susan Canning, again, is the only one who has discussed the
broader dimensions of Ensor’s religious imagery. Yet, she does not note the striking
similarities between Ensor’s gure of Christ and identical themes in Demolder, Ver-
haeren, Picard, and Destrée; ‘‘Visionary Politics,’’ 58–69.

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Society Degree Zero 9

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Society Degree Zero 11

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Society Degree Zero 13

 uid collectivity at the bottom passes through a series of transmutations, ascending

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Society Degree Zero 15

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Society Degree Zero 17

head of the Flemish communists, Edouard Anseele who, incidentally, is hailed in

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Society Degree Zero 23

dogmatic messianism of Belgium’s socialists from Ensor’s own peculiar Christology.

Society Degree Zero 25

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uid collectivity at the bottom passes through a series of transmutations, ascending