In the nineteenth century, Victor Hugo's conversion from monarchism to republicanism was aesthetic as well as political. He argued that ‘Language was the State’ until 1789, whereupon the French Revolution unleashed the expressive potential of art (Hugo 1834: 31). La Marseillaise was not just a national hymn but an artistic call to arms: ‘Aux armes, prose and verse! Formez vos bataillons!’ Acting as the Danton and Robespierre of language, Hugo claimed to have ‘stormed and demolished the Bastille of rhymes’; traditional expressive formulae were the kings and titled aristocrats of language, making the Revolutionary poet ‘the devastator of the old ABCD’ who ‘declares all words equal, free, adult’. Thus, it is through popular art that the Revolution remains ‘vibrant in the air, in voices, in books. / In living words, the reader feels her life. / She shouts, she sings, she instructs, she laughs’ (ibid.: 30-7). This project of liberation was continued by the Modernists of the twentieth century. Blaise Cendrars's essay ‘L’ABC du cinéma’ draws a breathless route from ancient civilizations to the birth of photography and the ‘Eternal Revolution’ of cinema. Thanks to filmmaking, the ‘floodgates of the new language are open’ and ‘everything becomes possible’ – modern art could construct ‘The Gospel of Tomorrow’ (1919-21: 165). Through this utopian ideology, Abel Gance traced a direct path from the French Revolution to his own work as a filmmaking artist.

In the 1920s, Gance's reanimation of the Napoleonic myth was a reaction to the realities of a divided modern Europe; his film sought to inject post-war society with an impetus for change.