200 years tomorrow

Tomorrow will mark a moment 200 years ago of the launching of a make-do raft constructed to carry up to 150 people to the safety of the African shore following the wreck of the French naval frigate Méduse that had run aground off the coast of today's Mauritania on 2 July 1816.

Today I e-mailed the Guardian with the following:

Dear Editor

Unusually perhaps, I would like to reference a story carried by the Guardian some years ago. The story was reported on the 29 March 2012 when your newspaper "revealed the findings of a damning official report into the fateful voyage, which saw the sub-Saharan refugees drifting in the sea for two weeks while dying of thirst and starvation, even though their boat had been located by European authorities and emergency distress calls had been issued to all other ships in the area.

The report blamed a collective set of "human, institutional and legal" failures for the inaction, labelling it a "dark day for Europe" and concluding that large loss of life could have been avoided if the various agencies in the area – Nato, its warships, the Italian coastguard and individual European states – had fulfilled their basic obligations." 29 March 2012.

In some ways, thankfully, things have changed as a result of this report. In another way things have not changed that much over the last two hundred years. We are obsessing about Brexit right now and understandably, but the challenge to the United Kingdom and Europe is to our core values as a society and the politics associated with migration.

Two hundred years ago on 5 July 1816, at least 147 people were set adrift on a hurriedly constructed raft; all but 15 died in the 13 days before their rescue, and those who survived endured despair, a violent confrontation, starvation, dehydration and a necessary resort to cannibalism. The event became an international scandal, in part because its cause was widely attributed to the incompetence of the French captain, a political appointee devoid of any capability to function as a leader and lacking any moral compass. This event became the subject of one of the great works of European Romanticism, The Raft of the Medusa (French: Le Radeau de la Méduse) 1818–1819 by the French Romantic painter and lithographer Théodore Géricault. Completed when the artist was 27, the work has become an icon of the representation of disaster.

The huge scale of the work, and the composition, allows for the meaning of the work to be experienced in an immersive way, and for an audience to empathise with people as subjects, not somehow reduced to something less than humanity. The moment in the tragedy the artist chooses helps us to understand an all too common human predicament, despair intertwined with hope. Géricault paints the profile of the companion ship to Méduse, the Argus as it would have appeared on the horizon, depicted as it would have been seen by the survivors, as so, so small in the far distance. Trying to gain visibility the survivors stretch out for rescue. The Argus sails out of sight. The survivors are only rescued later through the Argus’ chance encounter with the raft, as no particular search effort had been made to find the raft and the many souls that had been deliberately abandoned by those tasked with towing the raft to the shore.

Ai Wei Wei, and many other contemporary artists, struggle to re-connect us, their audiences, with the human values that make it possible to maintain our humanity. The small Greek island of Lesbos has become a place for Ai Wei Wei to make a studio. It is also a place where people do not need to be told, or cajoled into offering help. Migrants, refugees, all have been given their daily bread for months by some of the islanders in this extremity of Europe.

For this your correspondent, it will be a case of looking at what is happening in the world over the next thirteen days of the bi-centenary of this disaster and scandal, and thinking about the human situation now. I wish, like many of your readers, that I could change the world somehow, and maybe the artistic function in society is, at its core, about facing up to this kind of challenge. And, migration too, is at the heart of human experience, in our histories and our pre-histories. What is our problem?

Two of the survivors of the Raft of the Medusa published their story of what happened and got the blame, as victims often do, for telling it how it was and is. However, these two survivors, Corréard and Savigny, through their efforts created the focus for a political voice in opposition to muddle headed incompetence in the establishment, through publishing works that were known in the Palais Royal as coming from "under the sign of the raft'.