54 pages • 1 hour read
Sebastian SmeeParis in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “The Commune”
Part 3, Chapter 12 Summary: “Work Is the Sole Purpose of My Existence”
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of wartime violence.
After Thiers’s government regained control of Paris following the armistice with Germany, they passed draconian laws that worsened the struggling populace’s financial situation, such as ending payments to the National Guard and ending a rent moratorium.
On March 8th, the National Assembly voted to “annul” the election to the Assembly of Garibaldi, a popular Italian republican who had fought for France against Germany. On March 17th, Thiers had the revolutionary socialist leader Louis Blanqui arrested. Then, led by Generals Vinoy and Lecomte, the army made a disastrous attempt to retake the cannons the National Guardsmen had taken to Montmartre. Lecompte and another general, Clément-Thomas, were captured and publicly executed.
Following this victory, the Central Committee of the National Guard took central Paris and occupied the Hôtel de Ville on March 18th. They declared a new government that came to be known as “the Commune.” The Thiers government moved from Bordeaux to Versailles, a town about six miles to the west of Paris, and began attempts to retake the city.
Édouard Manet and other republicans had little respect for Thiers. However, Manet worried that the actions of the Communards would imperil the republican project because they would be seen as “bloodthirsty.” He stayed out of Paris. By contrast, socialist artist Gustave Courbet was thrilled at the success of the Communards, throwing himself into supporting their aims.
On March 23rd, Berthe Morisot wrote to her sister declaring her intent to pursue a career as a painter. Smee argues she was led to do so by a sense of clarity about her priorities following the war.
Part 3, Chapter 13 Summary: “Courbet in His Element”
The Communards hoped to make the lives of the common people of Paris better. They privileged municipal autonomy. However, they lacked a leader because Blanqui was still in prison and the anarchist Proudhon did not have enough support.
The painter Renoir, although he was sympathetic to the Commune, managed to escape Paris with the help of the chief of police for the Commune, Raoul Rigault. Other painters like Édouard and Berthe, both no longer in Paris, sympathized with the Commune but were skeptical regarding its future.
From Versailles, Thiers assembled an army to once again besiege Paris, while the Communards built barricades to defend the city. Conflict between the Versaillais army and the Communards began. Thiers’s army shelled the city and its suburbs. Rigault arrested the archbishop of Paris, Georges Darboy; the hope was that he could be traded for Blanqui in an exchange of hostages.
On April 19th, the Communards published a manifesto that was “fiercely republican but as much libertarian as socialist” (219). Gustave Courbet began to organize a Federation of the Artists of Paris that would be a counter to the government-run art system, including the Salon. Édouard was elected to it in absentia. As the conflict escalated, Berthe was sent from Saint-Germain-en-Laye to her sister’s house in Cherbourg in Normandy. Édouard settled in Tours.
Part 3, Chapter 14 Summary: “Music in the Tuileries”
Chapter 14 opens with a description of Édouard Manet’s 1862 painting Music in the Tuileries, which depicts a crowd gathered to listen to a concert in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris. The peaceful scene contrasted with the “full-scale tragedy” (231) that would take place there in 1871.
Despite the attacks, the Commune continued to hold Paris. On May 10th, Thiers’s art collection was ransacked and his house burned down. They tore down the Vendôme Column built by Napoleon I, which was seen as a symbol of the empire.
In May 1871, the Communards opened the Tuileries and its Palace to the public. They held a series of concerts there to boost morale. On May 18th, the Versaillais army began shelling the area and people were killed during one of these concerts. That evening, Thiers’s army, including Berthe’s brother Tiburce, entered the city from the Pont du Jour in the southwest and began taking back Parisian neighborhoods. Communards and their supposed supporters were executed en masse by the military.
Berthe Morisot’s mother Cornélie, a moderate, despaired at the retaliation. On May 23rd, the military retook Montmartre and the cannons. In their retreat, the Communards set parts of the city on fire, including the Tuileries Palace and the Hôtel de Ville.
Part 3, Chapter 15 Summary: “Paris Is on Fire”
In the final days of the conflict, Paris became a killing ground. The remaining Communard leadership decided to execute Archbishop Darboy, still in custody, as a show of force. His executioner later faced a government firing squad. Rigault was shot dead in the street. One of the few remaining Communard military leaders, journalist Delescluze, was shot at a barricade.
The working-class hilltop neighborhood of Belleville was one of the last holdouts, and its residents fought ferociously. The last “resisting” Communard was killed in Père-Lachaise Cemetery after bloody hand-to-hand combat. An estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Communards and their supposed supporters were killed.
Cornélie Morisot, on the outskirts of the city, could hear the gunshots of the firing squads as government forces retook the city block-by-block. She had contempt for Degas and Manet for having supported the Commune, but Berthe remained silent on the subject.
A week later, the Morisot family returned to their house in Paris to assess the damage. Soon after, Degas and Manet returned to Paris. After running into Tiburce Morisot on the street, Édouard wrote to Berthe encouraging her to return to Paris as well.
Part 3 Analysis
In Part 3, “The Commune,” Smee covers the events of the Paris Commune, which lasted from March 18th to May 28th, 1871. Smee uses the evidence available to make specific claims about The Personal Experiences of Artists During Crises and how it shaped their characters and careers.
One example of how Smee builds his argument regarding Berthe’s responses to events can be seen in his analysis of her letter to her sister on March 23rd, 1871, shortly after the beginning of the Commune. In this letter, Berthe reports that she can hear the Versaillais army’s cannons shooting at the city from the fort at Mont-Valérien. Following this report, Berthe asserts to her sister that “work is the sole purpose of [her] existence” (208). Smee uses Romantic, admiring language to editorialize this citation, writing:
For a woman painter in the late nineteenth century, just to write such a sentence took extraordinary courage. To write it while seriously ill, after a siege, and as a civil war that had forced her family to flee their home was breaking out, was nothing less than astounding (208).
With this editorializing language, Smee creates an image of Berthe that might not otherwise be gleaned through the rather cool, formal language typical of the correspondence of the 19th-century bourgeoisie. This is a subjective rather than objective assessment that highlights Smee’s admiration and affection for his subjects. It also firmly places Berthe’s declaration in the greater historical context he details throughout the rest of Paris in Ruins.
Smee uses the events of the Commune to highlight another faction in The Relationship Between Art and Politics in 19th-century France. Thus far, Smee has focused on the distinction between the neoclassical, traditional works favored by the conservatives and the impressionistic techniques favored by Manet’s circle of republicans. However, the tension between Manet and Gustave Courbet highlights another schism, one that continues to resonate to this day in France. Gustave Courbet was a radical republican and proponent of Realism. Realism is an artistic approach that favors the visible and real and rejects idealism. In keeping with his politics, Courbet often featured working-class subjects, such as The Wheat Sifters (1854), with his works often having explicit political messages.
In contrast, early Impressionists like Manet often (although not always) eschewed explicitly political content in their work. This is consistent with Manet’s more moderate republicanism. As Smee reports, Manet “feared” that the “radicals’ bloodthirsty actions […] had all but killed off” the idea of a republic (203) in France. Nevertheless, Smee discerns subtle political ties in Manet’s work, such as his submission of The Battle of the USS Kearsage and the CSS Alabama to the 1872 Salon, which Smee claims is an implicit reference to the civil war that the Commune recently fought in France.
The majority of Part 3 is dedicated to a play-by-play description of the events of the short-lived Paris Commune. Smee uses evocative language to create a heightened sense of drama and sympathy for the Communards. This method is particularly evident in his description of the final battle of the Commune in Père-Lachaise Cemetery, a large cemetery on the eastern edge of the city near the working-class neighborhood of Belleville. He writes, “the cemetery was immediately transformed from a decorous resting place for the honored dead into a chaotic killing field […] The last resisting Communard was killed near [Honoré de] Balzac’s tomb” (256). This description contrasts the setting (“decorous resting place”) with the “chaotic” horror of the death. It also plays on the contrast between the tragedy of France’s descent into violence with the greatness of its civilization, here represented by the great conservative writer Balzac, best known for his series La Comédie Humaine.
