france flag

Pathology of an era: France's obsession with its supposed degeneracy lies at the heart of Richard Thomson's ambitious attempt to relate French visual culture of the 1890s to its political and social context

The Troubled Republic: Visual Culture and Social Debate in France 1889-1900

Richard Thomson Yale University Press, 40 [pounds sterling] /$60 ISBN 0 300 10465 0

The twelve years of French history that concern Richard Thomson here began in 1889 with a vast universal exposition celebrating the centenary of the French Revolution. The event brought millions of visitors to a rejuvenated Paris. The newly-erected Eiffel Tower rose above the city as the tallest structure and most audacious engineering feat in the world. In September, the universal metre, first mooted during the revolution, was finally adopted by an international committee and the template for it installed at an observatory near Paris, thus asserting France's claim to leadership in world decimalisation, a cornerstone of modernity. These were all manifestations of a renewed commitment on France's part to rationalism, internationalism and innovation. Despite the defeat it had endured at the hands of the Germans a generation earlier, in 1889 the republic knew the ambitious role it meant to play in the modern world. It would invoke the logical, progressive, egalitarian and universalising spirit of the revolution and with new vigour take up its old responsibilities as a guiding light to the international community.

State-mandated optimism of this kind does not necessarily match social reality. As Thomson shows, France was a traumatised nation during the 1890s, torn by doubts about its social, moral and political fabric. 1889 had begun with a highly divisive election. Anarchists' bombs regularly shattered public order. The Dreyfus affair and the virulent anti-Semitism it unleashed would reveal profound divisions in the nation. The legacy of the revolution, and its contemporary exploitation by a government anxious to consolidate power, seemed ill-equipped to heal such wounds.

Thomson offers a pathology report on the ills of the era, presenting four case studies of issues causing concern to the body politic. He explores the human body itself, its health and sexuality, and the growing suspicions that, as a declining birth rate attested, France had entered into a period of degeneracy. He examines a pervasive fear of the crowd on the part of the middle classes, and of the threat that was latent in the unruly urban masses. He looks at the renewed importance of religion, especially the Catholic revival, the threat it was seen to pose to rational republicanism, and the accommodations sought by Church and State, both knowing, cynically enough, that their interests were, in the end, compatible. (Leon Bonnat's 1888 portrait of a leader of the reconciliation, Cardinal Lavigerie, at Versailles' Musee National du Chateau, is an archetype of self-satisfied plutocracy.) Finally, he surveys the role played by nationalism and militarism, and the continuing impact of the idea of la revanche against the Germans for the defeat France had endured in 1871.

Thomson is not the first to point out that these issues were crucial to fin-de-siecle French society. The bibliography on each of them by social, political and cultural historians is extensive. But Thomson is an art historian with expert knowledge of the imagery of the era, and his contribution is to ask, and answer, two questions. The first is the conventional one raised by the social historian of art: how does our understanding of these issues influence our interpretation of the imagery produced in France in the 1890s, conceived in the broadest terms to include paintings, posters, political cartoons, sculpture and the decorative arts? Does it help us, for example, to know about the fear of the crowd when we look at the bustling Parisian street scenes that the anarchist Pissarro began to paint in 1893? Perhaps a decade ago, that line of investigation might have been enough. The second question--and here the novel ambition of Thomson's project is revealed--is to ask how visual imagery throws light on the issues themselves. In other words, what do art historians have to teach their fellow acolytes of the historical discipline about how to use the evidence of imagery competently? How does knowledge of visual imagery cause us to reinterpret and inflect other types of historical evidence?

Of Thomson's four case studies, arguably the most provocative is his reassessment of the continued role of la revanche in the imagination of Frenchmen of the 1890s. In recent years, most historians have argued that it was largely a dead issue by then--realpolitik had moved on by 1890--and that, however galling it might be to see Germany occupying Alsace and Lorraine, the primary interests of the republic now lay elsewhere. Thomson, however, points to works in the fine and decorative arts, and in popular imagery, that suggest otherwise. The popularity of paintings, widely disseminated through prints, such as Edouard Detaille's The Dream of 1888 (Musee d'Orsay, Paris), with its thrilling image of a ghostly Grande Armee marching through the sky, shows that the ideal of French military prowess remained alive. It is not surprising that Jean Veber's hideous Butcher's Shop of 1897 (Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, NJ), with a bloody Bismarck as the slaughterer of humankind, had to be removed from public display in Paris so as not to offend German sensibilities. Thomson finds numerous other examples as well expressing hopes for taking on the Germans, and urging youth to rise to the challenge, and concludes that la revanche was far from a dead issue. Scrupulous historians henceforth will need to take this compelling evidence into account.

Here, however, Thomson might have pushed his argument further. Whereas he posits a distinction between the republic's vaunted and high-minded internationalism and the peoples' continued obsession with revenge on the Germans on their doorstep, another recent analyst of la revanche, not cited here, sees them as part and parcel of the same national aspiration. Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Culture of Defeat (2003) argues that France's dogged commitment to internationalism at the time--of which the founding of the modern Olympic Games in 1896 by the Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin was a telling example--was in fact a strategy for dealing with the nagging German question itself. Ignore Germany; posit a larger mission for the republic; deflect attention from the still-gaping wound of 1871 in order to salve it.

Thomson's most successful chapter deals with the religious revival, perhaps because the extent and quality of the visual imagery is greatest. Tissot's startling What our Saviour Saw from the Cross of c. 1890-94 (Brooklyn Museum of Art) is one of the most gripping religious images of the late nineteenth century, and Thomson's subtle reading of it is exemplary. Here, the impact of faith, and the opportunity to work on a large scale, challenged artists to excel themselves, although, as the author shows, many of the results are deeply ambivalent. Thomson has searched out pictures few of us have seen, or passed over unthinkingly on our visits to provincial galleries, and one of the pleasures of his well-illustrated volume is to come across good colour reproductions of such arresting discoveries as Jacques-Emile Blanche's hieratic The Host of 1891-92 (Musee des Beaux-Arts, Rouen), a modern-day 'Supper at Emmaus' set before a bourgeois sideboard. Not all the works of art he marshals for his argument are of this quality.

The least successful chapter concerns fear of the crowd. Not that this was not an issue. Texts such as Gustave LeBon's famously paranoid La Psychologie des foules (1895) prove that it was. But it remains unclear what the visual imagery of the period tells us about the problem, and here Thomson is uncharacteristically ambiguous. After admitting that Pissarro's ravishing images of Paris streets show that 'the psychology of the crowd was, in the main, well balanced and harmonious', he turns to a seemingly benign, and far lesser, work of art, The Construction of the rue Reamur of 1896 (private collection) by Maximilien Luce. Here, we learn that a certain grande dame of the anti-dreyfusard persuasion had, in the late 1890s, hired thugs to beat up Dreyfus supporters on this very street. 'So what underlay the apparently genial surface of Luce's painted fiction ... was a more violent reality'. A check of the notes reveals that this information was disclosed in a biography of 1932. Does it mean that in 2005 we must take the violence into account as we look at Luce's painting? That conclusion is unobjectionable. Does it mean that Luce knew about the violence, and that it informs his rather banal image of urban bustle on a street superficially indistinguishable from other Parisian avenues where no thugs were lurking? Thomson is not saying, and we come away from the analysis confused as to the import of the information he discloses. Similarly, a clever cartoon showing an omnibus overcrowded with various social 'types' is scant evidence of fear of the crowd; newspaper cartoons today about the over-stretched London Underground employ the same exaggerations without implying a critique of that current and cognate British bug-bear, yob culture.

The period Thomson covers ends with another great universal exposition in 1900, a renewed manifestation of France's commitment to internationalism. The particular problems of French society that he outlines had not been resolved by then, and would not be for generations to come. Even today, the Parisian chattering classes are thrilled by accounts of their current degeneracy. The bookstores of the Boulevard St-Michel are filled with them. So too were they in the 1890s and, as Schivelbusch shows, in the 1830s and 40s too. That's the way it is in the most sophisticated and self-involved of capital cities. It is Thomson's accomplishment to put one such period of acute self-doubt in vivid perspective.

The Public Catalogue Foundation's heroic project of publishing catalogues of all paintings in public ownership in the UK has now reached East Sussex. With 2,800 colour photographs (representing 25 repositories), it is a great bargain: it is published by the PCF at 35 [pounds sterling] in hardback, 20 [pounds sterling] in paper. Almost unputdownably browsable, it is the equivalent in book form of being allowed into museum stores to search for treasures among bad copies of Old Masters and dim portraits of Edwardian mayors. Half the paintings in this volume are from Brighton and Hove: this detail is of Musical Quartet with an American Flag from Brighton and Hove Museums and Art Galleries, and is one of fourteeen anonymous Chinese paintings of about 1800 that they own.

Christopher Riopelle is the curator of nineteenth-century paintings at the National Gallery, London.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Apollo Magazine Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group