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.
Themes
The Relationship Between Art and Politics
In Paris in Ruins, Smee emphasizes the relationship between art and politics in late 19th-century France. He outlines how during the Second Empire under Emperor Napoleon III, the artistic establishment was closely tied to the forms and subjects favored by the empire, including during the Salon exhibitions. He demonstrates how artists like Berthe Morisot and Édouard Manet pushed the boundaries of what was possible within that system in keeping with their left-wing republican politics. Following the fall of the Second Empire and the Paris Commune, Berthe and other Impressionists launched their own exhibitions outside of the Salon system. This was seen as an expression of their republican values.
Smee emphasizes how the Salon’s jury during the Second Empire and for a time during the Third Republic “skewed conservative.” They adhered to rigid hierarchies, viewing “history paintings” as the highest form of painting, followed by “portraiture, genre painting, landscape, and still life, in that order” (71). They preferred techniques that layered paint and varnish over preliminary sketches. These works could, of course, not criticize the empire and had to generally uphold the conventional order. When Édouard made a work that criticized the empire, The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, it was censored by the government.
This is just one example of how Édouard Manet and others in his circle rebelled artistically and therefore also politically against the imperial establishment. Smee argues that Berthe Morisot expressed her politics within her artwork more subtly. For instance, she eschewed the classical technique of layered painting to paint directly on the canvas, creating a flat perspective. Her commitment to the early Impressionist exhibitions despite their association with radical republicanism is another example of the relationship her art had with the political arena of the time. Smee also focuses on the work and influence of leading Realist artist Gustave Courbet. He documents Courbet’s contributions to the republican Paris Commune and how Courbet attempted to reshape the French art world to be more egalitarian.
Smee argues that the Impressionists ultimately strove to liberate artists from all of the artistic and political baggage described above. He states that “they wanted to free art not only from the rhetoric of the political sphere but from the aesthetic styles of Romanticism, Classicism, and even Courbet’s Realism (all of which had been tied to political ideology)” (302). This argument is somewhat complicated by Smee’s descriptions of their ongoing political engagement into the 1870s. For instance, he notes Manet’s explicitly political portrait of the radical republican Henri Rochefort.
Overall, he depicts the Impressionists as a group who expressed their politics in more subtle ways than the sweeping neoclassical imperial epics or gritty working-class Realism, preferring instead to emphasize the fleeting immediacy of modern life. Nevertheless, Paris in Ruins emphasizes how the political realm and the artistic sphere were frequently in dialogue with one another.
The Personal Experiences of Artists During Crises
Throughout Paris in Ruins, Smee weaves personal anecdotes about leading writers and authors of the time into the greater sweep of Parisian history during the War of 1870 and the Paris Commune. He highlights how artists like Édouard Manet and Frédéric Bazille enlisted during the war. He also describes the psychological and physical toll the events took on Berthe Morisot, who stayed in Paris throughout the siege. This perspective highlights the personal experiences of artists during crises.
In contrast with the popular perception of artists as pacifists, Smee describes in detail the various contributions that many painters made during the siege of Paris. For instance, he notes that Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas both enlisted in the National Guard because “both felt duty-bound to defend the freshly hatched republic” (114). This service took a toll on Manet; Smee describes his loneliness at being separated from his wife and his declining health due to a foot injury and boils. Some artists suffered even more. Smee notes that “Degas’s friend the sculptor Cuvelier had been killed” in the Battle of Buzenval (176). Smee quotes from Manet’s letters to his wife and notes his lack of productivity during this time to illustrate how the difficulties took a toll on the artist.
Although as a woman Berthe Morisot did not serve during the siege, it still deeply affected her. Smee details how the city as a whole began to run short of food and coal; he even describes how they resorted to butchering the zoo’s beloved elephants. This state of want and the constant bombardment near the 16th arrondissement eroded Berthe’s physical and mental health, as described in her mother’s writings. She became “isolate” and “was ill and losing weight” (139). Already “prone to depression […] a sense of futility had taken hold” (139). Smee also emphasizes that she was deprived of her studio, which was used to billet soldiers; had she wanted to create, she would not have had the space to do so. Despite these deprivations, the outcome was positive for Berthe: Smee argues that the experience of the war prompted her to dedicate her life to her artwork.
In addition to his focus on his principal actors, Berthe and Édouard, Smee also includes anecdotes about the experiences of other artists during the crises. For instance, he relates that the writer Théophile Gautier petitioned the legendary writer Victor Hugo to intervene to spare his beloved horse from being butchered for its meat. Smee describes this petition somewhat wryly as “heartbreaking.” It suggests that wealthy writers like Gautier were desperate to preserve their privilege despite the suffering around them. He also notes that Edgar Degas paid one of his models in meat during the siege and quotes someone—perhaps Degas himself—as stating that “so hungry was she, and devoured it raw” (172). These anecdotes illustrate how different personalities responded to the adversity of the time.
The Impact of Collective Trauma on Creativity
The central thesis of Paris in Ruins is that “we cannot see Impressionism clearly without grasping the impact of that tumultuous time on the movement’s leading artists” (vi), namely Berthe Morisot and Édouard Manet. Smee supports this argument by detailing how the traumas of that time period contributed to their work and artistic trajectories, drawing attention to the impact of collective trauma on creativity.
During and directly following the traumatic events of the siege of Paris and the Paris Commune, many artists did not create at all. The works that they did manage to create during this timeframe are few in number and relatively simple. For instance, Smee describes how Manet did very little creative work during the siege. However, inspired by Meissoniers’s sketches, he “made two small, sketchy and exceedingly bleak-looking paintings” (167) during the siege. Smee states that “the memory invoked by Effect of Snow at Petit-Montrouge was of desolation and gloom” (167), implying that the trauma and sadness of the war was reflected in the gloomy landscape Manet depicted. Smee also notes that Manet created two lithographs following the war of the Commune. These images are likewise bleak: One depicts a dead communard and the other is modeled off of his The Execution of Maximilian. These images reflect “his strong urge […] to expose the ugliness of the army’s actions during Bloody Week” (268). These depictions are one way Manet sought to process and express the crises.
Conservative artists like Ernest Meissonier capitalized on the traumatic events to push propagandistic narratives. He describes how the 1872 Salon favored either “portrayals of the heroism of individual soldiers and small bands of troops” (264) as a way to find victory in the defeat, or paintings of the Paris ruins as a moral warning against mob rule (i.e., the Commune). Their ability to continue working despite the traumas was not the norm. Smee notes that for many “their creativity seized up” (264) as they began to process the scale of what they had been through. They isolated themselves and, in some cases, left Paris altogether, as in the case of James Tissot.
Smee notes that overall, the works created by the Impressionists in the years following the trauma do not reference the events directly. He states that “they may have painted landscapes that had recently witnessed terrible violence” (301), but they did not directly address what had happened. Instead, he argues, they “recoiled from the delusional ravings of men, whether of the left or the right, who were willing to sacrifice sons and daughters, stability and security for absurd and hopeless causes” (301). They expressed this in their artwork through a focus on the world “as it met their eyes in the here-and-now” (301). In response to trauma, they turned away from the past to depict the present.
