The French Impressionists: caught between revolution and counter-revolution

“The impressionists ... stand for revolution ... [The paintings] make us feel liberated just looking at them and they retain a sense of rebellion.” This eulogy to the French Impressionists—taken from the promotional material for the French Impressionists exhibition currently showing at the National Gallery of Victoria—follows in a long tradition of similar commentary. The reality however, is more complex.

Most of the Impressionist artists were from comfortable, if not wealthy, families. This relative privilege coloured their attitudes to contemporary events. The salon system that organised exhibitions and patronage by some wealthy individual or institution—the main ways to achieve success—imposed stifling limits to artists’ creativity. Chafing against conservative opinion while experimenting with new ideas about the representation of reality made some of the artists somewhat open to radical ideas. But this was limited by their expectation of a respectable, comfortable life.

As they began to identify as a new school of art, France was increasingly in turmoil, torn apart by war and revolution, to which they responded in different, even contradictory, ways. Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, dictator from 1852 until September 1870, went to war with Germany in July 1870, which ended with the siege of Paris from September by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.

The intolerable misery of war and Bismarck’s siege followed years of turmoil caused by Bonaparte’s “urban renewal” in Paris, designed by Georges-Eugène Haussmann. New, wide boulevards cut swathes through workers’ districts, displacing thousands from central Paris.

The poverty, squalor and overcrowding in working-class districts of Montmartre and Belleville bred intense bitterness. On the other hand, the wealthy enjoyed glitzy cafes and elegant stores within walking distance of their magnificent residences. As the social historian John Merriman writes, “the bourgeoisie’s day had truly arrived”.

To add insult to injury for the poor, the wealthy upper classes—able to escape to country estates—refused to support any defence of Paris during Bismarck’s siege while the mostly working-class National Guard remained in control of armaments in the capital. The head of the French government, Adolphe Thiers, also signed a pact with Bismarck to crush “Red Paris”. Edouard Manet joined the National Guard along with his two brothers and Edgar Degas to defend Paris.

On 18 March 1871, Thiers sent in soldiers to seize the National Guard’s cannon, the only defence available to Paris. Workers in Montmartre and Belleville rose in rebellion.

Rebellion became revolution, and they instituted the Paris Commune, which would organise life in Paris for three months. They established the most democratic governance ever seen before or since—officials elected by universal suffrage were recallable at any time and received an average worker’s wage.

The atmosphere in Paris was one of joy, experimentation and flourishing creativity. Incredible flowerings of organisation, debate and social experimentation were the defining aspects of dozens of radical clubs. They implemented far-sighted reforms: equal pay and rights for women, universal education for both boys and girls free of church control and much more.

The army was disarmed and replaced with the National Guard to defend the Commune from Bismarck’s bombardments and the impending government attack. The terrified wealthy classes saw that this demonstration of workers’ ability to organise an equal society threatened their privileges and power.

In the last week of May, the government unleashed an orgy of violence to finally crush the Commune. At least 30,000 people were slaughtered in the streets of Paris and 50,000 jailed. In the following weeks, the executions continued and 4,000 were deported to Caledonia. The aim of la semaine sanglante, “the bloody week”, was to crush not just the physical presence of the social revolution, but also its spirit.

Albert Boime, a Marxist art historian, studied the response of the Impressionists to the workers’ revolution. Most were not sympathetic to Communard rule. Their wealthy class background mitigated against it. If they had not escaped Bismarck’s siege, many now fled Paris for country estates or other countries.

Auguste Renoir dismissed the Communards as fanatical and stupid. Perhaps his demeanour when painting in the street conveyed this contemptuous attitude. Some Communards, mistaking him for a government spy, hauled him in front of a firing squad. Fortuitously, Raoul Rigault, a respected militant and the attorney general of the Commune, remembered Renoir, who years before had hidden him from police persecution.

Edgar Degas, unlike the Manet brothers—who showed considerable sympathy for the workers perhaps—remained totally aloof. He saw the Commune as an infringement on his class’s right to wealth and property. His much-admired painting At the Races in the Country expresses a smug celebration of this class privilege.

Sketched during the Commune at the country estate of a wealthy friend and completed later, the tranquil, picturesque countryside emphasises the absence of the turmoil in Paris. More pointedly, his friend (sporting a top hat) is, as Boime says: “Located at the apex of the composition, casting a protective glance at mother, child and wet-nurse as if to represent symbolically the traditional hierarchy as constitutive of the surrounding order and stability”.

Degas eventually went to New Orleans to escape the social upheavals. He shared the racist views of his family, who were involved in slavery and supported the Confederacy in the Civil War.

Alfred Sisley stayed in Paris, and many of his paintings were destroyed by pillaging Prussian troops. It is said that the absence of any work by him during this year until 1872 reflects the trauma he experienced.

Paul Cezanne despised Thiers and loathed the violence of la semaine sanglante. But he appears to have shared the contempt for the Communards expressed by his close friend, the famous writer Emile Zola.

Nevertheless, the freedom-loving orientation of Commune leaders attracted many artists, writers and other intelligentsia who remained in Paris. The founder and president of the Artists Federation in the Commune was Gustave Courbet, the realist painter, precursor and friend of many of the Impressionists.

Eugène Pottier, famous for his authorship of “The Internationale”—a song imbued with the internationalism and irreverence of the Commune—wrote the founding manifesto of the federation. The federation held debates about the role of art and the artist in society. They aimed to overcome the counter-position between beauty and utility and to integrate art into the everyday life of workers.

The federation’s members refused to exhibit any artistic works that were not signed by their creator. This was a response to the practice of artists having to sell their works unsigned so that a dealer could pocket the profits. They set up art galleries where workers could visit for free, and they improved art education.

Honoré Daumier, a skilled lithographer famous for his comical caricatures of political figures, was active in the federation. He is sometimes referred to as the first of the Impressionists, though he was not really part of their movement. The Metropolitan Museum of Art says of his lithograph See, Mr. Réac, it is quite enough! printed two days after the proclamation of the Commune: “It shows Daumier’s concern for the lives already lost in recent conflict and the bloodshed to come. An allegory of Paris points to a hillside filled with graves to tell the cowering reactionary that there are more than enough dead”.

His works are remarkable for their close identification with key aspects of life in the Commune. The lithograph Decree of the commune: General liquidation, from ‘Rent issues’ is typical.

Edouard Manet signed the federation’s manifesto but was not an active participant. His inspirational The Barricade also references the struggle in a positive light.

Boime says that in spite of little sympathy for the Commune, many of the Impressionists were sickened by the horror of the bloodshed that followed. Manet witnessed the carnage and “experienced creative paralysis and nervous exhaustion in the aftermath, leading to deep depression for several months”, according to Boime.

His dark, confronting lithograph Guerre Civile and the realist Courbet’s sketch of children in a jail cell and his Féderés are exceptional in their explicit renderings of the suffering.

You won’t see the art works that honestly depict the struggle or the ruling class’s violent vengeance on display very often. Guerre Civile was not exhibited until after Manet’s death.

Manet was sickened by the violence used to suppress the Commune, but he stood aloof from everyone in the socialist left, even though he would have known some of them from the Commune. Cultural historian Philip Nord says he “painted canvasses with charged and explicit political content and lent critical support to politically motivated efforts to democratise the salon system”, which he boycotted. This puts him to the left of the Impressionists as a whole, but he was not a revolutionary.

Manet’s brother Gustave, a Republican lawyer, participated in the Commune as a moderate. He and Edouard later campaigned for an amnesty for exiled Communards. Edouard’s beautiful L’Evasion de Rochefort depicts in oil exiles escaping from Caledonia. The tiny boat afloat the vast ocean evokes the dangers threatening those brave souls who suffered so much.

Claude Monet, the creator of the much-loved paintings of water lilies and gardens, escaped to England. But he later wrote to Pisarro: “What shameful conduct, that of Versailles [meaning the government], it is frightful and makes me ill. I don’t have a heart for anything. It’s all heartbreaking”.

The last quarter of the nineteenth century has been referred to as “a golden age of monument building” as part of the effort at “self-definition” following the trauma of 1870-71. One of the most explicit was the Sacré-Coeur, built on Montmartre, where the revolution began.

When laying the foundation stone, its architect Charles Rohault de Fleury declared that Sacré-Coeur reclaimed for the nation “the place chosen by Satan and where was accomplished the first act of that horrible Saturnalia”.

But it was not just stone and mortar monuments that contributed to the campaign to erase the memory of the Commune and ruling class savagery. Revolutionary in technique the Impressionists might be. But most of their exquisite work contributed to this campaign, whether consciously or simply as a reflection of their class prejudice. With their radical techniques and new ways of depicting the world around them, they are some of the most well-known, striking contributors. But interpretation is not straightforward.

Andrew Eschelbacher, in an article “Paris and Post-Commune Angst”, writes: “Vestiges of the Commune manifested themselves acutely in the city’s memorial spaces, and filled the urban sphere with competing understandings of the revolt. Accordingly, no universal memory developed”.

Camille Pisarro is typical. He painted beautiful portrayals of middle-class domesticity, their windows overlooking the now peaceful streets so recently barricaded. It was art to reassert bourgeois ascendancy. But the memories elicited by the city street scenes and middle-class comfort carry conflicting meanings. Renoir’s Pont Neuf or Pisarro’s middle-class elegance can be read as searing reminders of the savagery their class used to crush the joyous experience of those in the Commune.

They compete with a tradition in the working class of taking pride in the Commune and the courageous defiance of the children, women and men who made it. Burning the city to the ground and dying on the barricades rather than surrender was their last revolutionary act.

Why does it matter whether we just admire the beauty or take note of their role in the class struggle? James Plested explained why in a recent Red Flag article titled “Why does history matter for socialists?”. If we do not study history, he argues, “the radical movements and traditions we draw our inspiration from would be buried under the ideas about the past promoted by the ruling class and its institutions”.

This is particularly the case for 1871 and the following years. Even as we might enjoy the Impressionists’ work, we should remember the part they played in the campaign to bury the precious memory of the Commune.

Importantly, you will rarely see the works that celebrate the Commune, or indeed those which condemn the ruling-class barbarity. They are a reminder that the wars, the genocide, the suffering of refugees we are witnessing today are not an aberration. The rich, powerful and respectable may flinch at the horror, but in the end they will look away. They won’t join us in the fight to end this society that breeds it.

The Impressionists, even those who were traumatised by la semaine sanglante, helped create a tradition that glorifies their luxury, beauty and comfort as the epitome of culture—a culture denied to the vast mass of humanity as long as capitalism survives.