‘Painting out’ (and ‘reading in’) the Franco-Prussian War: Politics and art criticism in the 1870s

The Paris Salon of 1872 provides us with an exemplary moment in the long history of the fraught relationship between art and politics. As the first state-sponsored exhibition after the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, it offered contemporaries the opportunity both to reflect on the disasters of 1870–1 and to judge the extent to which the newly installed Third Republic would loosen the constraints on the freedom of expression imposed by the dictatorship it had replaced. Questions had already been raised in this respect when the regulations governing the organization of the forthcoming Salon had been published a few months earlier: restrictions on the voting rights of those eligible to elect the jury, reinforcing its conservatism, were met with the predictable accusation that such modifications amounted to a coup d’état, the term implicitly referring to Napoleon III’s seizure of power on 2 December 1851. The jury’s politically inspired decision to reject Courbet’s Femme couchée because of his involvement in the Commune was symptomatic. For it was inevitable that the pious hopes that the works on display would be assessed purely in terms of artistic merit would be left unfulfilled. Indeed, even immediately prior to the formal opening of the exhibition on 10 May, its politicization was intensified by the debate surrounding the privileged positioning of Nellie Jacquemart’s portrait of the President of the Republic, Adolphe Thiers. Moving this to the grand entrance-hall from its originally assigned place determined by the artist’s surname provoked predictable responses: fury on the part of radical opponents to Thiers’ record (negotiating the armistice and suppressing the Commune); extending to insidious remarks on his portrayal in a bourgeois frockcoat barely masking his regal bearing (‘Mlle Jacquemart a confondu un président avec un roi’); and much mockery at the expense of these ‘critiques ombrageux’ hysterically likening this ‘crime de lèse-alphabet’ to ‘une sorte de coup d’état’ instigated by ministerial diktat over the heads of the elected jury responsible for selecting which pictures should be hung in the so-called ‘Salon d’honneur’ and whose members had, according to an unsigned article in Le Figaro cited by Le Temps on 9 May, ¹ ‘protesté ce nouveau deux-décembre’. Which is not to forget that Thiers was equally reviled by right-wing commentators (for the declared democratic principles establishing the Republic) who related the moving of his portrait to nepotism, the artist being a personal friend of the politician’s wife: ‘voilà où nous sommes en fait de mœurs républicaines’ (C: 12/5).

More fundamentally, however, critics writing on what was dubbed ‘le Salon de la défaite’ focused on the representation, or the relative absence of such pictures, of the Franco-Prussian War itself. As early as the previous summer, but outside officially sanctioned platforms, images of France’s humiliating military reverses were in circulation, notably in a special two-volume compendium, with 300 illustrations, advertised in Le Monde illustré of 19 August 1871. The continued topicality of the conflict at the Salon of 1872 was assured by ‘ces charmantes héroïnes du Palais de l’Industrie’ stationed in its ‘jardin de la sculpture’ and thus ideally placed to raise funds for the victims of the war before visitors could access the galleries. Literally juxtaposed to reviews in the press were excerpts from the memoirs of combatants and reports of commissions of inquiry charged with investigating the surrender of over 20 fortress towns, headlining the indictment for treason of Marshal Bazaine’s capitulation at Metz. That context was occasionally exploited in descriptions of individual works: in one of his multiple articles devoted to the Salon, Jules Claretie (1874: 218) underlined the irony of Liéven Goethals’ La Défense de Strasbourg celebrating the ‘énergie’ of General Ulrich ‘juste au moment où le conseil d’enquête le blâme sévèrement sur sa conduite’; conversely, Albert Anker’s Soldats de l’armée du général Bourbaki soignés par des paysans suisses served as a pretext for Louis Enault’s further condemnation of ‘l’ineptie de cet avocat pleurard qui semblait s’être donné pour mission d’aggraver tous nos malheurs et rendre nos désastres irréparables’ (C: 10/6).

These various issues were brought together in Le XIX^e Siècle of 9 May. In a column adjacent to the transcript of the latest phase of the Bazaine inquiry, Edmond About’s article, entitled ‘L’Art et la politique’, directly confronted the legitimacy of government control over which works of art were acceptable or not. It was occasioned by a ‘request’, announced on 5 May and signed by Charles Blanc in his capacity as Director of the Fine Arts (with the tacit approval of his minister, Jules Simon), that certain representations of the war be ‘voluntarily’ withdrawn from the Salon on the grounds that these might offend the sensitivities of the Prussians at the very moment when Thiers was engaged in a diplomatic initiative to persuade them to remove their forces from occupied territories. On the one hand, acceding to this ‘request’ was deemed a patriotic duty: ‘c’était un sacrifice: tous consentirent’ (Castagnary, 1892: II, 35; S: 1/6). On the other, there is reason to doubt that ‘tout semble s’être passé avec la plus parfaite courtoisie’ (Lobstein, 2000: 84). For, consistent with the furore provoked by the regulatory manipulation of the composition of the jury, this latest official intervention provoked accusations of censorship, the merely compliant being transformed into ‘les peintres et sculpteurs frappés d’interdiction’ (F: 6/5) and their works elevated, in the ironic terms of a newspaper supportive of church and state, to the status of ‘toiles persécutées’ (M: 8/6). In the May issue of L’Artiste (85, 220–1) About refers to them as ‘les Refusés’, blatantly evoking the imperial repression which had necessitated the mounting of the famous Salon des Refusés in 1863. For the opposition press, this was fertile ground, retrospectively explaining the postponement of the exhibition’s opening from its traditional date of 1 May as well as the reduction, from 5434 (in 1870) to 2067, in the number of submissions accepted by the jury. It was as speciously claimed that it also accounted for the very format and circumspection of the few pictures of the Franco-Prussian War allowed by the authorities. ‘J’ai remarqué, d’ailleurs’, Zola wrote, ‘que l’invasion de 1870 n’était représentée que par des petites toiles . . . Puis, ça et là, modestement, dans un coin, il y a une larme discrète. Le gouvernement en étouffant le cri de vengeance contre la Prusse, n’a laissé que les balbutiements de nos douleurs (Cl: 12/5). The day before, the most informed of art critics had mentioned paintings by Alexandre Protais, Henri Dupray and Charles Marchal as the exception: ‘rien ne rappelle nos deux dernières années et les angoisses qui nous ont assaillis et les horribles drames auxquels nous avons assisté’ (Castagnary, 1892: II, 6; S: 11/5). Other journalists went even further: ‘tout ce qui a été inspiré à nos artistes par les événements de la guerre a été écarté par la raison d’état’ (U: 18/6). Hardly less disingenuously, the reviewer for the ultra-conservative Revue des deux mondes, with an interest in not dwelling on uncomfortable truths at odds with its ideological stance, declared that only ten of the approximately 2000 works were devoted to such painful memories (cited in Lecaillon, 2016: 97).

The degree of such polemical distortion can be measured against the facts: the opening of the Salon had been delayed to allow for the reconfiguration of the sculpture garden after the closing of the ‘exposition hippique’ there only on 30 April; reducing the number of works displayed was primarily motivated by equally pragmatic considerations, the Ministry of Finance having taken over some of the original gallery space in the Palais de l’Industrie as a result of its own building having been badly damaged during the Commune; and the implication that virtually all images of the events of 1870–1 had been eliminated is belied by the statistics adduced from the Salon catalogue. Working from titles alone, scholars have identified between 30 and 86 such works (respectively, Tillier, 2012: 87; Lobstein, 2000: 89–91). But a contemporary journalist counted at least 100 (Cor: 25/4). All these figures are certainly an underestimate, failing to accommodate, as we shall see, the oblique strategies whereby artists represented the Franco-Prussian War without being seen to do so explicitly. Or, and no less significantly, the intentional fallacies superimposed on so many works by reviewers. And while the majority of pictures were indeed small-scale, the critics noting that history or epically conceived military painting had been downgraded, ‘sous la forme diminuée de l’anecdote’ (GBA, 1/6), to the proportions of a ‘tableau de genre’, this is not true of all of them. None can be compared to the largest painting in the exhibition, Jean-Louis Sorieul’s monumental and compensatory celebration of a French victory (back in 1855) commissioned by the state, La Bataille de Traktir (campagne de Crimée). But it is worth noting, by way of example, that Alphonse de Neuville’s Bivouac devant le Bourget, après le combat du 21 décembre 1871 measured 115 x 165.5 cm and that the size of Émile Betsellère’s L’Oublié (123 x 200 cm) did not prevent him from being awarded a first-class medal at the Salon by the ‘jury des récompenses’.

Most of these paintings were, from an official perspective, pretty innocuous in relation to what Zola called ‘la délicatesse peut-être exagérée’ (SM, 10/5) of diplomatic niceties: portraits of fallen commanders; the evocation of heroic encounters; instances of French bravery; the commemoration of particular skirmishes or battles, in some of which the artists concerned had been directly involved, either as participants or as ‘embedded’ witnesses. The critics emphasized the intended affective response of spectators brought up close to the vulnerability of infantry in the face of modern armaments, the dejection of prisoners, the convoys of the wounded, the burying of the dead, grieving widows and, more generally, the victims of the folly of war. The government’s priority was to ‘airbrush’ out of this pictorial history any allusion, whether verifiable or invented, to Prussian atrocities. What remains surprising is that only eight such works were withdrawn from the Salon. These can be positively identified by virtue of the fact that the livret had already been printed by the Imprimerie Nationale, to which it was returned for a revision so last-minute that the original numbering was sustained, thereby revealing the deleted items. Grounded in evidence of certain of them being purchased by the state, the hypothesis that these were subsequently readmitted to the Salon (Lobstein, 2000: 86) is less ‘plausible’ than specialists would have us believe (Tillier, 2012: 88). As Zola had noted on the day it opened, ‘M. Jules Simon a fait dire à ces artistes que, pour les dédommager, l’État achèterait leurs tableaux et les enverrait dans les musées de province’ (SM, 10/5). Assuring them of their eligibility to be considered for various honours and awards, effected as early as 10 June (F: 10/6), was similarly a forlorn attempt to pre-empt accusations of official censorship (Tillier, 2004: 252).

The ‘deux bannis politiques’ at Thiers’ behest, so it was imputed (T: 9/6), on which the press initially focused were Benjamin Ulmann’s Pillage d’une ferme par les Allemands and Xavier-Alphonse Monchablon’s La Force prime le Droit, the latter allegorizing a principle ascribed, notwithstanding his denials, to Bismarck. Like the Ulmann, Édouard Detaille’s Un déménagement aux environs de Paris par l’armée prussienne, known as Les Vainqueurs, provided so uncomfortable an image of the spoils of war that both works could only be shown in the private galleries of Durand-Ruel and Adolphe Goupil respectively (‘en attendant que nous puissions regarder chez nous la peinture qui nous plaît’ (U: 8/6) referencing Goupil being refused permission to distribute photographic reproductions of them, consistent with the legislation of 28 December 1871 prohibiting the retailing of images likely to be a risk to ‘l’ordre public’). Louis Souplet’s La Réquisition en Picardie was withdrawn for the same reason. Gustave Jundt’s L’Arbre de Noël, showing a fir-tree ‘decorated’ with French corpses, was too obviously provocative. So too was the one sculpture removed, René de Saint-Marceaux’s Gisant de l’Abbé Miroy, the parish priest of Cruchery executed by the Prussians on 12 February 1871. In the absence of descriptions of it, we can only surmise what was objectionable about Albert Adam’s watercolour, Épisode de la bataille de Woerth. But perhaps the most unacceptable composition of all was Émile Bayard’s triptych, with its unambiguous caption from the Aeneid: Excoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor. For, of these ‘trois dessins patriotiques’ (XIX^e: 10/6), the first two portraying the cowardly distance from which Prussian artillery massacred French troops at Wissembourg and Reichshoffen, the culminating frame was entitled La Vengeance, the crucial theme which the government wished to suppress, at least in the public domain (the Bayard, along with the Adam and the Souplet, was one of the three withdrawn works bought by the state (T: 21/6), doubtless relieved that the Detaille had already been purchased by a private buyer for 22,000 francs).

The exact process whereby these works were singled out, and whether the government’s ‘request’ was specifically directed, remains unclear. But, faced with the sheer number of potentially inopportune submissions, it is certain that the outcome was unsystematic or inefficient. Adolphe Potément’s Village incendié pendant la guerre, no less a reference to civilian victims of Prussian brutality, escaped proscription. More astonishing is that Édouard de Beaumont’s Suite d’une armée did, with its prostitutes servicing enemy troops behind a Prussian flag. The meaning of some paintings was in the eye of the beholder: Paul de Katow’s Les Prisonniers du Mans passent devant la ferme des Dappes ‘finit par faire ressembler les vainqueurs à des bêtes féroces’ (Lafenestre, 1881: 283). Which was not so in respect of Alfred Méry’s La Force prime le Droit!, replicating the title of Monchablon’s painting (as did Camille Bapst’s) but known as Singes piqués par des abeilles, ‘petite toile pleine de malice’ (C: 16/5), in which Bismarck’s facial features were instantly recognizable in one of the harassed monkeys (R: 2/6). His notorious axiom is again cited in a description of Jeanne Saint-Aubin’s Où s’arrête la Victoire, female rejection of the ‘cajoleries amoureuses’ of a Prussian officer being likened to ‘des résistances dont les canons Krupp eux-mêmes ne viennent pas à bout’ (C: 17/6). Other works of ‘real political allegory’, that ‘distinctly equivocal hallmark of nineteenth-century idiom’ (Clayson, 2002: 364), signalled their true subject almost as transparently: the hero of Georges Clère’s sculpture, Hercule étouffant le lion de Nemée, bears the inscription Vir Gallus on his right arm-guard while the ‘monster’ (C: 6/7) has the Prussian eagle engraved on its flank (Castagnary, 1892: II, 42); and it was accordingly soon renamed by the Revue de France as Hercule gaulois écrasant le monstre du Nord. Anachronism was no bar to the ingenious insertion, or imagining, of Prussian insignia or helmets: ‘Qui ne connaît pas cet oiseau à griffe rose?’ insisted Barbey d’Aurevilly in scrutinizing the bird of prey in Ernest-Louis Barrias’ La Fortune et l’amour (G, 30/5). For contemporaries, even Isidore Patrois’ Jacques Cœur was to the point, in commemorating a legendary fifteenth-century munificence used to raise an army of liberation (Claretie, 1874: 330). What was manifestly beyond official reach was the interpretative licence with which reviewers commented on those devoid of tendentious labels, to the extent that it seems highly problematic to assert that it was only after 1875 that the notion of ‘La Revanche’ makes its appearance at the Salon (Lecaillon, 2016: 92).

Coinciding with negotiations about their future jurisdiction, the lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine were a suitable subject for contemplation. The acceptance of works by a very large number of native artists was as calculated as their depiction of the perennial ‘Frenchness’ of a collective identity now at risk, however culturally distinct the two provinces had always been since their incorporation into the nation (Varley, 2008: 171). Among the ‘plusieurs Alsaces en deuil’ (T: 9/6), Gustave Doré’s huge and much-derided L’Alsace! has the female figure clutching the tricolour. Sentimental crowds were drawn, to name but a few, to works inspired by what Paul Mantz called the ‘mœurs éternellement français de l’Alsace’ (GBA, 1/6), such as Gustave Brion’s picturesque Danse de coq en Alsace, Henriette Browne’s Alsace! and La Malédiction de l’Alsace by the Colmar sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi. Eliciting compassion, however, was not enough. For Victor Cherbuliez, the conclusion to be drawn from this ‘simple et puissante allégorie’ was incarnated in the figure of ‘l’enfant qui doit rendre sa mère à la grande famille française’ (T: 13/5). And Louis Schützenberger’s Une famille alsacienne émigrant en France was considered ‘un véritable cri de haine’ (PJ: 11/5), the spectator’s attention being directed to the marginal detail of its ‘soldat prussien [qui] regarde, indifférent et inepte, passer ce témoignage de sa victoire’ (M: 22/6).

More generally, and much earlier than proposed to the contrary (McWilliam, 1996; Robichon, 2005), allegory and analogy reinforced an incipient revanchard discourse; not least in reviews of the sculpture on display: Henri Chapu’s Jeanne d’Arc à Domrémy has affixed to it, but only by a commentator, the same citation from Virgil ‘annonçant Annibal à venir et la revanche de Didon’ (C: 19/5) underscoring Bayard’s triptych; confronting Goliath, David vainqueur (by Antoine Mercié), ‘d’une main encore frémissante’, wrote Théodore de Banville, ‘tient l’épée vengeresse’ (N: 7/6); Barrias’ Serment de Spartacus, repeatedly traduced, given that it had been created the year before the Franco-Prussian War, represented ‘l’heure sacrée de la vengeance’ (T: 9/5 and 26/6; G: 30/5; C: 6/7). Variations on its ‘poignard de la vengeance’ (RF, II (avril–mai–juin): 638; but eliminated in Lafenestre’s 1881 publication of his Salon reviews in volume form) could be detected elsewhere, as in Jules Jacquet’s painting, Jeune fille tenant une épée (C: 14/6). For Barbey d’Aurevilly, Emmanuel Frémiet’s sculpted L’Homme de l’âge de pierre, depicting a shepherd beheading a wolf responsible for killing his sheep, ‘c’est toute une revanche’ (G: 30/5). Whereas Henri-Léopold Lévy’s Hérodiade figured a ‘femme exercée aux lentes vengeances’ (Lafenestre, 1881: 236), Barbey was not impressed: ‘Hérodiade devrait rayonner de vengeance. Elle ne rayonne pas’ (G: 13/6). He was as scathing about René Princeteau’s Patrouille de ulhans surprise par une embuscade de francs-tireurs: ‘Ah! Si c’est là notre commencement de revanche, que diront les Prussiens?’ (G: 17/6). Conscripted elephants, warriors and weapons of yesteryear notwithstanding, Évariste Luminais’ L’Invasion, with its ‘chef barbare’ (PJ: 12/5) indifferent to the suffering of women and children, was hardly subtle. Even Thomas Couture’s return to the Salon, after an absence of 16 years, could be made to fit the topical context: his Damoclès begged the question whether he had intended ‘sous couleur antique, [de] faire allusion aux douloureuses années que nous venons de traverser, et par le spectacle de notre récent esclavage, réveiller en nous l’esprit de la liberté’ (Castagnary, 1892: II, 16-17; S: 18/5). More ambiguous was Puvis de Chavanne’s L’Espérance: considered the finest allegorical work on display, its olive branch transformed into a sprig of oak as a symbol of France but undercut by its puny girl (‘Pour une Espérance, elle est bien défaillante’ (Castagnary, 1892: II, 19; S: 18/5) in the midst of a sterile landscape, a ‘champ de carnage’ (R: 20/5) recalling the battle of Champigny of its original title (Claretie, 1874: 191).

Such a contradiction between despair and intimations of France’s rebirth informs the critical ‘reading’ of the 1872 Salon as a whole. For right-wing commentators, the indirections and excesses of French art were inseparable from the wider national decadence which the Franco-Prussian War had revealed. For Georges Lafenestre (1881: 198), the exhibition represented ‘assez exactement l’anarchie intellectuelle dont souffre l’École française’. But it is Barbey d’Aurevilly who most forcefully exemplifies the exploitation of the analogy between the mediocrity of contemporary artists, ‘périssant sous la tempête de la couleur’ (G: 21/6) and that of the country subject to democratic enthusiasms: ‘cette génération est bien la même que nous avons vue devant la Prusse’ (G: 15/6). Opposed to such acerbity are those asking, in the context of the corresponding Berlin exhibition later that year, whether, in spite of military defeat, ‘les Allemands nous battraient en peinture?’ (T: 11/11), dismissing the events of 1870–1 as a ‘crise salutaire d’où peut sortir une renaissance’ (RF, II (avril–mai–juin): 632) and reasserting the superiority of French creativity to which the Salon of 1872 bore witness. Even a decade later, ‘au lendemain de nos désastres’, Zola would assert that ‘l’école française reste la première du monde’ (F: 23/5/81).

The Salon of 1872 may have seen the most intense conjunction of politics and art in relation to the Franco-Prussian War. But it was not the last, as contemporaries were reminded by Georges Dufour’s 1875 volume, Des beaux-arts dans la politique, and as Pierre Vaisse (1995) has exhaustively explored. On at least two other occasions, there is evidence of censorship stemming from government fears that diplomatic relations between France and Germany might be jeopardized. At the Salon of 1877, Ulmann’s immense Thiers salué du titre de ‘Libérateur du territoire’, le 16 juin 1877 à l’Assemblée nationale was belatedly withdrawn, and Detaille’s smaller Le Salut des blessés (86 x 130 cm) was reworked on the advice of Charles Blanc to make it less offensive. And the Universal Exhibition of 1878 saw some 40 military paintings excluded on the grounds that the occasion was intended to mark France’s re-entry into the European family of nations. Albert Wolff complained that ‘Neuville et Detaille brillent par leur absence (dont on connaît la cause navrante’ (F: 15/5/78), the latter’s Le Bourget, 30 octobre 1870 being ‘mis aux arrêts forcés dans les salons de Goupil’, precisely as had been the fate of his Les Vainqueurs at the Salon of 1872. This followed what the press called ‘une assez vive altercation’ (G: 5/5/78) between the painter and the Minister of Fine Arts, but a decision confirmed by Blanc on the grounds that ‘par délicatesse réciproque’, the Germans had had ‘le bon goût’ not to send to the exhibition their own pictures of the Franco-Prussian War. Yet again, ‘inopportune’ was the principle invoked. As it continues to be when Franco-German relations sidestep awkward chapters in the historical narrative rehearsed by the collective memory.