Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life under Siege (1870–1871) (review)

As Hollis Clayson reminds us, the siege of Paris that went on from September 1870 to January 1871 and was one of the signposts of France's war with Prussia has been a remarkably little-studied subject in the scholarly treatment of that debacle. The infamous aspects of the siege, such as the consumption of domestic animals by the starving populace and the malfunctioning new technology of hot-air balloon lifts, highlight the whole affair's unfortunate character yet leave unanswered questions about the social networks and individual struggles of the people who lived through it. Clayson's Paris in Despair thus fills an important niche in the exploration of France's "terrible year," becoming a landmark study of the siege and its record-keepers by an art historian who cites a primary interest in the cultural life of late nineteenth-century Paris. Her goal is "examining the impact of the siege on individual identity as well as artistic output" (10), and she turns to some of the best-known artists of the time, such as Rosa Bonheur, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Gustave Courbet and Jean-Alexandre-Joseph Falguière. What unifies these disparate figures some of whom enlisted in the National Guard, like Manet, and others who responded to the hardships of men and beasts in a more private way, like Rosa Bonheur who became an animalier? While the events of 1870–71 clearly disrupted the artists' formerly insular lives, Clayson argues that their creative production was not halted. Unlike previous studies of Manet and Bonheur that have claimed they produced nothing at the time, she introduces new evidence in the form of dozens of remarkable, never-before-seen paintings, maintaining not only that many artists' careers were galvanized by the siege, but that it brought new and unusual facets to their work. Hollis emphasizes that the Government of National Defense had no art policy and commissioned no paintings. This de-institutionalized aspect of the wartime production is crucial for her exposé of artists struggling with their new roles and identities vis-à-vis the infrastructure of besieged Paris, even as they were fighting to protect the city.

One of the strengths of Hollis' presentation of her subjects' siege-time careers is her carefully researched, biographical approach; the powerful chapter on Henri Regnault, who was killed on duty, incorporates paintings, diaries and letters to and from his fiancée to argue in favor of his preoccupation with "militarized masculinity." Even given this plethora of sources, Hollis can only speculate on the purpose behind his Orientalist paintings of passive soldiers and indolent tyrants: "Regnault might have been projecting his own feelings of frustration with the passive regimes of his military service onto his invention of the beautiful Oriental man" (256). While this explanation appears plausible, it has to rely on pictorial representation and suggestive statements in the letters – the same challenge as with interpreting the message in Bonheur's painting of an injured bird or Degas' double portrait of his wartime friends. The use of these often equivocal images, some of which have already been studied by a number of art historians, makes this a bold piece of scholarship, unafraid to suggest new readings of siege-time as well as post-siege works that connect them back to the artists' experience of the conflict.

Emerging from this discussion of trendsetters in the arts grappling with their new wartime identities is a history of the broader issues being faced by all Parisians during the siege. Hollis convincingly cites evidence of ongoing polemics on gender roles and women in the public sphere, the disappearance of class boundaries on city streets, as well as on the emergence of public spaces in the form of patriotic neighborhood associations. As she states in her introduction, "the conventional (the expected) symbiotic link between the spaces and practices of metropolitan modernity, leisure and consumption was ruptured" (10). This was a rupture not only in...