Norton
Review by David Starkey
I bought my copy of Sebastian Smee’s Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism after visiting an exhibition at the National Gallery entitled “Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment.” The exhibit begins with what Victor Hugo called “The Terrible Year” of 1870-1871, and Smee’s Paris in Ruins opens with a prologue set on October 7, 1870, during the midst of the Siege of Paris by the Germans, when prominent politician Léon Gambetta is about to ascend in a hot air balloon to get a good look at the trouble his city is in. We also meet Édouard Manet—at the time one of the most influential painters, though something of a rebel who had trouble getting his work shown in the city’s conservative annual Salon.
The next 80 pages are dedicated to the Salon of 1869, which focuses on Manet and his mentee Berthe Morisot, another talented painter who was largely ignored by the academy. Progressive artists were frustrated by the Salon’s insistence on only showing paintings about historical, mythological and biblical subjects with a positive moral message, but that was far from their most urgent worry. Political upheaval was in the air. Napoleon III was declining in both health and prestige, while Otto von Bismarck, the “Iron Chancellor,” was strengthening the Prussian forces into a unified German Empire.
In July of 1870, France declared war on Germany, and Germany returned the favor, routing the French army, with France surrendering in January 1871. Smee looks at the war primarily through the eyes of the painters who—no surprise—were better at making pictures than they were at fighting battles. It was a dispiriting time, entirely at odds with the bright colors and light touches of paint we associate with the Impressionists. Instead of gardens of plenty, “Hoarding became commonplace.” A rat market opened in front of City Hall, where the “bigger, fleshier rodents sold for 60 centimes, while standard-size denizens of the sewers sold for 30 or 40.”
Things only get grimmer after a treaty is signed and the Germans withdraw. From mid-March to May 28, 1871, working-class citizens formed the Paris Commune, an idealistic civic community that resisted the terms of the treaty and was immediately under attack from Adolphe Thiers and the Army of the French Third Republic. The painters were sympathetic to the Communards, but they mostly went into hiding or left Paris altogether. You can hardly blame them; the killings of “Bloody Week” were atrocious: “wounded soldiers were thrown into mass graves along with the dead.” One witness recounted seeing “laughing soldiers” taking turns throwing stones “at a small arm that seemed to be moving in a pile of bodies until it stopped.”
However, when the madness finally ended and a semblance of normality returned to Paris, almost to a person, “the Impressionists were disinclined to directly depict the realities of 1870-1871.” Smee wonders if this was “a collective act of psychological repression? Or was it an attempt, conscious or otherwise, at recuperation, an assertion of pacific values as an antidote to violence and trauma?” While he reckons both theories could be true, “the better explanation is simply that Impressionist artists were in revolt against state-sanctioned hierarchies of art.”
Whatever their rationale for turning from darkness to light, in April 1874, Manet, Monet, Morisot, Degas, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, Cézanne, and their kin sponsored a breakaway exhibition in direct conflict with the Salon. While their work was mocked by establishment critics, we all know who won this battle of the arts.
Overall, it’s a strange story, though one eminently worth telling. The lesson a reader is likely to take away from Paris in Ruins is both that art is inept in the face of political power and armed violence, while, with the passage of time, it is capable of rising above the fray and standing as a testament to the best of the human spirit. And yet, as Smee would no doubt remind us, the price of great paintings may be measured not just in currency, but in lives senselessly and brutally lost.
Paris in Ruins was published this year and was written well before the election of Donald Trump, but a looming sense that things can quickly go horribly wrong will surely be felt by many who read the book, as while as those museum-goers who, after looking at a collection of mostly very beautiful paintings, walk out into the chilly streets of Washington, DC.
