Art and the French commune : imagining Paris after war and revolution
In this bold exploration of the political forces that shaped Impressionism, Albert Boime proposes that at the heart of the modern is a "guilty secret"--The need of the dominant, mainly bourgeois, classes in Paris to expunge from historical memory the haunting nightmare of the Commune and its socialist ideology. The Commune of 1871 emerged after the Prussian war when the Paris militia chased the central government to Versailles, enabling the working class and its allies to seize control of the capital. Eventually violence engulfed the city as traditional liberals and moderates joined forces with reactionaries to restore Paris to "order"--the bourgeois order. Here Boime examines the rise of Impressionism in relation to the efforts of the reinstated conservative government to "rebuild" Paris, to return it to its Haussmannian appearance and erase all reminders of socialist threat
Print Book, English, ©1995
Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., ©1995
History
xiv, 234 pages : illustrations, maps ; 27 cm.
9780691029627, 0691029628
30816375
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS XI ACKNOWLEDGMENTS XV 1. INTRODUCTION 3 2. THE CRITICAL RECEPTION 27 3. THE DISLOCATING IMPACT OF THE COMMUNE ON THE IMPRESSIONISTS 46 4. THE IMPRESSIONIST AGENDA 77 5. MAPPING THE TERRAIN 114 EPILOGUE: GEORGES SEURAT'S Un Dimanche a la Grande fatte AND POST-COMMUNE UTOPIANISM 140 APPENDIX: ON OLIN LEVI WARNER'S DRAFT OF A SPEECH IN DEFENSE OF THE FRENCH COMMUNE 186 NOTES 209 POSTSCRIPT 223 INDEX 225