In 1870, Paris, the illustrious heart of Western art, literature, and culture, was reduced to rubble. It was a disaster brought on by France’s ruler, Napoleon III, who started a losing war with Prussia in a vain attempt to improve his country’s standing as a major European power. Sadly, for the fortunes of peaceable Parisian life, he underestimated the Prussian army. The French implored England to come to its aid. The English refused. At the Battle of Sedan, France was crushed. The capital was surrounded and cut off.
In Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism, Washington Post art critic Sebastian Smee tells the story of the cultural fallout of this military misadventure. Smee focuses on the destruction occurring between September 1870 and May 1871, showing how the horrific events of that time affected the course of art history.
“The solid earth seems turned to smoke, and to be going away from under our feet … Such is the inner life of the siege,” Smee quotes Nathan Sheppard’s writing in Shut Up In Paris, an account of the city in wartime.
During this siege, Parisians ate horses, dogs, cats, rats, and even zoo animals. They drank water from the Seine and came down with typhoid. They became ill in the bitterly cold winter. Some died from starvation. Others waited in breadlines. They witnessed murder and destruction coming not only from the Prussians but also from French troops and the Versailles government.
One character Smee includes in his book is Felix Nadar, a photographer, journalist, and balloonist whom Parisians mocked and then later praised for his hot air balloons. With Paris blockaded by Prussians, Nadar’s balloons became the only way in and out. They carried the mail, as well as political and military officials, up and over the blockage. However, there was a cost. People used coal gas for heat, Smee explains, but now it was in short supply since it was needed for the balloons. The hardship of winter made life even worse. A lucky few obtained oil and wood.
During the Franco-Prussian War and the ensuing civil war, many artists fled to other French cities or to London. However, artists Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, and a few others stayed behind in Paris, where they saw and painted the people and places that were destroyed. France’s terrible year — the name coined by Victor Hugo – left these painters searching for a new way of painting to escape the turmoil of the past. They were repulsed by violence. They rebelled against classicism, romanticism, and realism.
They looked for “pure optical sensations,” says Smee. Light fascinated them. It was a “spiritual salve.” From this, a new movement and a new way of looking at the world was born: “impressionism.”
After the wars ended in May 1871, the impressionists were painting again. They portrayed places that had been embroiled in fighting and occupied by the Prussian army. They wanted to paint not sunlight on these areas but the way the location and the light made them feel — the impressions that these created on them.
Take Manet’s 1878 painting, The Rue Mosnier with Flags, which appears among the book’s illustrations: France’s tricolor flags hang helter-skelter on lampposts and nearby buildings. The flags’ blue and white colors seem to recede into the paint. However, what stands out are streaks of blood-red color, almost as if Manet had cut his finger accidentally, smearing blood on the canvas. Haunting, ghost-like figures pass each other on the sidewalk. Rubble is heaped up behind a fence. A gentleman peers into a carriage, perhaps saying hello or goodbye. A ladder lies on the street. A hunched, one-legged man hobbles with crutches.
The one-legged man is probably a war veteran and is reminiscent of Manet, who detested Napoleon and served as a staff lieutenant in the National Guard. The crippled man’s “forlorn presence fills the scene with futility.” Manet must have had similar feelings.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Yet the ladder, the newly paved street, and the summer sunlight seem, in their own way, a signal of hope. Was Manet trying to express feelings of relief as Parisians started on the road to recovery? Was he sending a message about the horrors he and other Parisians recently experienced? Or was he using art to bring the city he loved and nearly lost back to life? Probably all of the above.
Diane Scharper teaches the Memoir Seminar for the Johns Hopkins Osher Program. She is a regular contributor to the Washington Examiner.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
