A Stone Cold Legend of the Mechanical Horse

It’s rather magical to me that I still have not made it five minutes into Robert Hughes’s The Shock of the New and yet I cannot stop writing about it, and learning from it.

I had become fascinated by his discussion of the Eiffel Tower as a symbol of 19th century technology.

It has been a fascinating and important inroad into understanding a cultural milieu for Paris of the early 20th century, which is so relevant to my current study of Picasso and his contemporaries.

Barely a minute after his glorious introduction treating of the Eiffel Tower, Hughes, in passing, mentions the Monument Levassor which is also located in Paris.

The monument, unveiled in 1907, and pictured above, represents a race that took place in 1895, from Paris to Bordeaux and back again (1,178km or 732 miles).

The man who is the central figure of this sculpture is Emile Levassor, the engineer who co-designed the car and drove it to first place. Despite passing the finish line first, Levassor didn’t actually even win the race. The rules had stated that the car must have four seats and he only had two, so he was disqualified from victory.

Despite being denied victory, Levassor and his machine captured the imagination of the broader public and the race secured his place in automotive history.

In his documentary, Hughes describes the car as having moved barely faster than a jumping frog, which is a slight exaggeration that lands charmingly.

In fact, Levassor's car had an average speed of approximately 24km/h (or 15mph). He covered the 1,178km course in 48 hours and 48 minutes.

In so doing, Levassor and his team showed the potential of the internal combustion engine, and caused something of a media frenzy in the process. 

Levassor was able to demonstrate the durability of the car. It was the first time that anyone had really proved the endurance of the automobile to travel any considerable distance.

By virtue of his automobile's achievements across such a distance, it became viable to think of cars as a worthwhile and viable transportation technology, perhaps for the first time, and the race spurred further investment into developing the automotive industry as a legitimate technology for the future.

Yet even by the time this statue was unveiled in 1907, more than 20 years after the race, it was still unclear whether the automobile would be here to stay, or whether electricity or even the steam engine would power the future of road transportation after the horse.

Monumentalising something in stone has been something humans have only tended to do when we want something or someone to be commemorated as historically important, with an importance that we believe will endure through the ages.

There is a kind of weighty significance that is immediately imbued upon anything or anyone who is represented in statue form.

Yet the car was being written about by historians and industry experts, even at the time of its unveiling, as something extremely unreliable, and it was still thought by many to be a fad.

Creating a stone statue of a car to be unveiled in the centre of Paris was very much a statement to the contrary of much of contemporary discourse.

The very existence of the monument seems to suggest, through stone and marble, that Levassor’s contributions, and the technological advancements that his vehicle represents, are all timeless and enduring.

Here, the figure of the engineer is a heroic one. He is quite literally driving progress and innovation towards the viewer atop his high tech machine.

In this way, the monument also cements the prestige of the technocratic industrialist in a very specific way. There is a market logic at work, a clear ideology that prioritises innovation and individual greatness over other values, like social good, or a more equitable society.

Profitability and economic impact are the markers of innovation in this narrative, and human progress comes through technology alone. Technological progress here is unidirectional and inevitable and it's coming towards the viewer at the speed of a leaping frog.

This narrative of development, and of the historical significance of Levassor, reflects how French industrialists saw themselves, as exemplifying market oriented rationality, progress, scientific expertise, institutional power, and velocity.

The monument inscribes a specific historical memory into the public space, creating a temporal link between past achievements and present identity. 

And it is interesting through modern eyes, with the hindsight that knows that the car would indeed later become a symbol of global modernity, of status and power, and then become fetishised in a system of objects that reflected and reinforced social hierarchies and consumerist ideologies.

Today the car also symbolises the absolute environmental devastation, the acceleration of everyday life, and the reshaping of our urban landscapes such that, these days, cities contain relatively few human-friendly spaces.

In a nice twist of fate this statue of Levassor was moved in 1933 after the automobile industry had truly taken off.

It had been placed at Porte Maillot, which had been a key point in the city's transportation network, seeming to make it a fitting spot for an ode to an automotive pioneer in 1907.

However, in the decades that followed its unveiling, this area of Paris had become increasingly overtaken by traffic, and polluted by the exhaust fumes of combustion engines.

To preserve this tribute to the combustion engine, the statue had to moved as the fumes were eroding the stone.

The statue of a man lauded as a hero of the car industry, had to be moved due to the destruction caused by the modern car industry.

And moved it was, far from the uncouth hullabaloo of modern traffic, to a place in which the great achievements of the automative age could be admired and contemplated in appropriately civilised tranquility. A park.