Love among the ruins: Paris in the 1870s

Sebastian Smee’s Paris in Ruins: Love, War and the Birth of Impressionism  (Norton, 2024) “attempts to knit together art history, biography, and military and social history.”  It successfully describes how Paris endured a military and a political disaster in one year—the Franco-Prussian War and the siege of Paris during the Commune of 1870-71—and how these events  formed the background for both an affair of the heart between Berthe Morisot and Edouard Manet and the start of the Impressionist movement in 1874.

The first 100 pages are very familiar, not only from the friendship of Manet and Degas that Smee wrote about in The Art of Rivalry (2016), but also from many other books on this subject.  But Paris in Ruins is well written and has precise descriptions of the paintings.  In Manet’s On the Beach, for example, “the wind is almost palpable, conveyed as much by Edouard’s brisk, dashing brushstrokes as by the taut, angled sails of the boat on the horizon.”  Smee perceptively describes the wars, especially when the Parisians were trapped in the city during the German bombardment, and deftly follows the lives of the leading Impressionists through war and peace.

On the Beach, 1873 by Édouard Manet

Manet and Degas served in the Parisian National Guard in the war against Prussia.  Morisot and her parents remained in Paris, and lived through a terrible nightmare of “artillery bombardment, brutal winter, serious illness and threat of starvation”.  Balloons, completely dependent on the direction of the wind, were used during the siege of Paris to observe enemy positions and carry the mail.  In a typically unfortunate incident, the balloon containing the politician Léon Gambetta “failed to gain the desired lift and in fact began to descend.  The timing was terrible.  Two defensive forts were just beneath him, but they were powerless to help the foundering balloon, which floated haplessly over the perimeter line and met with a fusillade of musket fire”. (Gambetta miraculously survived and escaped to Tours.)  As the city starved, the people began to devour the zoo animals they could no longer feed.  They began with the gamy antelope, wolf, bear and stag, and desperately finished with the “tough, coarse and oily” elephants.

After the French defeat at Sedan, the Empress Eugénie escaped to England and Victor Hugo returned from his long exile in the Channel Islands.  As worshippers lined up outside his door, he celebrated his return by sleeping with five women in one night.  Smee writes that “France had declared war on Germany even though it was unprepared, its performance on the battlefield had been inept, the humiliation of the army’s loss had fed into a fratricidal bloodbath in Paris”.  In the civil war that followed, both sides committed mass executions and atrocities as the Versailles government, led by Adolphe Thiers, fought the radical Paris Commune and the nation destroyed itself.  The worst butcher was Thiers, whom Flaubert called an “imbecile”, “postule” and “turd”.  Thiers, idle tears.  The German victory in the Franco-Prussian War won the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, unified Germany, strengthened its military power, and ultimately led to France’s ordeal in the First World War and defeat in the Second.

Though art followed war, there was no significant connection between the years of violence and the birth of Impressionism.  Smee concedes that “none of the painters depicted battles or other scenes of suffering associated with the war, the siege or the Commune”.  The Impressionists wanted to loosen the conservative death grip on the arts, which emphasised mythological, biblical and historical subjects, smoothly finished and varnished.  The well-attended and well-rewarded official Salons were judged by reactionaries hostile to the Impressionists, who created their own defiant Salon des Refusés.  Smee observes, “Impressionism emphasised fugitive light, shifting seasons, glimpsed street scenes, and transient domesticity as expressions of change and mortality.”  Morisot painted, with a poignant feeling of vulnerability and evanescence, “not only the flux and transience of light but also the profound fragility of life itself”.

The Third of May by Francisco Goya

Both Manet and Morisot imitated Goya.  Goya painted the French killing the Spanish during the Napoleonic war in The Third of May 1808 (1814); Manet painted Mexicans killing the French-supported Austrian archduke in The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian (1867-69).  Goya’s The Meadow of San Isidro (1788) influenced Morisot’s portrayal of a similar vista in View of Paris from the Trocadéro (1872).

The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (1868–69)

The main focus of Paris in Ruins is on Manet and Morisot.  But Smee does not consider the important question of Léon Leenhoff’s paternity and doubtfully assumes that he was Manet’s son by his wife Suzanne.  Yet there is strong evidence to suggest that Manet’s own father, Auguste, was in fact Léon’s real father.  Manet knew that his father had syphilis, and had reason to believe that he himself would inherit the disease.  Fearful of passing it onto his wife and children, he was unwilling to have a child of his own.  The estrangement, fear and rage in his portrait of his parents may have been provoked by the secret surrounding Léon and by Manet’s resentment of having to step into the shoes of his hypocritical father—an extremely self-righteous legal judge of paternity suits—in more ways than one.

Though Smee drops many hints, he does not discuss whether Manet and Morisot were lovers.  It’s strange that the handsome and elegant Manet would marry Suzanne—the older, unattractive, Dutch piano teacher of his family—unless his father forced him to marry her in order to hide Léon’s real paternity.  The beautiful Berthe—“tall and thin, with an extremely distinguished manner and mind”— was a striking contrast to Suzanne, whose face Manet had difficulty depicting in his portrait.  When Manet violently slashed Degas’ unflattering portrait of Suzanne he wanted to efface her face.

Morisot was jealous of Manet’s relationship with his artist-pupil Eva Gonzalès.  Smee notes that he and Morisot had “some mysterious alloy of intimacy and despair”; she was intoxicated with Manet; they were “connected by tendrils of affection that had mysteriously thickened”; “they were palpably in love.”  “She was in love with Edouard. . . but could do nothing about it,” though they were alone with “no others in his studio.”  But “she could not marry the man she truly loved.”  The only impossible alternative was a scandalous elopement, like Anna Karenina’s with Vronsky, that would have ruined her reputation and disgraced her family.

Édouard Manet – Le repose

Smee convincingly states “that they loved each other is evident to anyone looking at his portraits of her” and that Manet’s Repose (1871) was “fired by an erotic energy that borders on the inappropriate.”  In Manet’s Berthe Morisot with a Bunch of Violets (1872), his most beautiful and powerful portrait, she is gentle, tender and engaging while confronting the viewer directly and close to the frame of the picture.  Her face is half in shadow, half in light; her brown irises are unusually large; her nose delicate and lips inviting.  Violets symbolise the love of truth and the truth of love.

Edouard Manet – Berthe Morisot With a Bouquet of Violets

Berthe’s letters to her sister and Manet’s many portraits of her strongly suggest that they were lovers.  They clung to each other as the world collapsed around them.  Manet admired her work, relished her talk and fell in love with her.  Often together in his atelier, they had ample time for intimacy.  When she married his brother (an appealing substitute), they burned each other’s letters to hide their love affair.

The Balcony by Édouard Manet. His fellow artist, Berthe Morisot, is pictured on the left

Jeffrey Meyers has published Impressionist Quartet: The Intimate Genius of Manet and Morisot, Degas and Cassatt  (2005).

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