The Painting and the Poem

The massacre of Chios arrived in Europe at precisely the moment when European opinion was working out what it thought about the Greek revolt, and it settled the question.

Several things made it different from the other atrocities of a war that was full of them on both sides. It was not a battle or a siege but the destruction of a peaceful, prosperous, educated, and conspicuously unwarlike Christian population. That population had specifically declined to revolt and had been dragged in against its will, which meant that the usual argument about rebels reaping what they sowed did not apply. It was extremely well documented, because European consuls, merchants, and naval officers were on the spot and wrote it all down. And the evidence was visible, because Chian refugees appeared in every port of the Mediterranean and in half the cities of western Europe, and ransomed Chian slaves were living exhibits with names and faces.

Eugène Delacroix exhibited Scènes des massacres de Scio at the Paris Salon of 1824. He was twenty-six.

The picture is enormous — over four metres wide — and what makes it extraordinary is what it refuses to do. It is not a battle painting. There is no heroic Greek resistance, no noble death, no dramatic centre. In the foreground is a group of captives, arranged in a loose frieze across the bottom of the canvas: wounded, exhausted, waiting. A dying woman with an infant crawling at her breast. An old woman staring out of the picture with an expression that is not grief but absence. A young couple clinging together. A wounded man. None of them is doing anything, because there is nothing to do. Behind and above them, a mounted Ottoman soldier wheels his horse, with a naked woman lashed behind it. And beyond that, in a cold silvery light, a landscape of smoke that recedes to the horizon and gives no sense of any edge to the disaster.

The critics did not know what to make of it. One of them called it "the massacre of painting." Gros, who had been Delacroix's supporter, was appalled by the drawing and the colour. And it made his reputation permanently, both because it was recognised almost at once as something new and because everybody in Paris was arguing about Greece.

Five years later, in 1829, Victor Hugo published Les Orientales, and its most famous poem is L'Enfant — "The Child." It opens on the island after the fire:

The Turks have passed this way. All is ruin and mourning. Chios, the island of wines, is nothing now but a dark reef. And on the reef sits a Greek child, alone, blue-eyed, with his head bowed. The poet asks him what he wants. Flowers? The bright fruit of the orchard? A bird from the woods? And the child answers, in the line every French schoolchild used to know:

I want gunpowder, and bullets.

Between them, Delacroix and Hugo put a small Aegean island into the permanent vocabulary of European politics. "Scio" became a word that did not need explaining. Philhellenic committees multiplied in London, Paris, Geneva, Munich, and Boston; money and volunteers went east; Byron sailed for Missolonghi and died there in 1824; and the diplomatic climate shifted, slowly and then decisively, in a direction that produced the intervention of the British, French, and Russian fleets at Navarino in 1827, and Greek independence after it.

The independence did not extend to Chios. The island remained Ottoman for another ninety years.