A current exhibition of the paintings of Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) at the Art Institute in Chicago is quite remarkable. It demonstrates the eye, the hand, and the sensibility of this great late-Impressionist painter. But the exhibition is remarkable in another way as well: there is almost no evidence in the paintings on exhibit, or the curatorial texts that support the exhibition, that conveys the intense and prolonged social, political, and military conflict of the period from the late 1840s through the defeat of the Paris Commune (1871).
Caillebotte himself served in the French military during the siege of Paris by the Prussian Army (1870-1871). In the text describing the exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris a curator writes briefly of his service: “But during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), [Caillebotte] was drafted into the 7th Battalion of the Garde Nationale Mobile de la Seine and assigned to the defense of Paris” (link). The detail about his service in the 7th Battalion of the Garde Nationale Mobile is especially telling. Michael Howard describes the Battle of Buzenval in these terms:
The battle of Buzenval, as it was to be called, settled the fate of Paris. More, it destroyed once for all the belief that a People in Arms could overwhelm a trained enemy by sheer numbers and burning zeal. It was the action for which the clubs had for so long yearned—the sortie en masse. Nearly 90,000 men were involved, of whom about half came from the Garde Nationale, and at dawn on 19th January they debouched from Mont Valérien, and advanced against the German defences between Bougival and St Cloud along a four-mile front. (Howard, The Franco-Prussian War, p. 373).
This battle was yet another disaster for the French military. It essentially sealed the fate of the besieged city and forced surrender of the last part of France still resisting German control. If Caillebotte was an active participant in this battle, he would have had traumatic and transformative experiences of war; and if he was held in reserve in the city during this final break-out attempt, he would have had personal knowledge of the significance and suffering created by the siege of Paris and the several unsuccessful efforts to break the siege through counter-attacks. Surely this is an important element in his development as an observant human being and a painter. And yet there is no evidence in his paintings of the impression the trauma of Paris may have had upon him. It would seem that this is an important contextual feature that should play a highlighted role in the curatorial presentation of the exhibition; but it does not.
Stéphane Guégan, a scientific advisor to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and author of Caillebotte: Peintre des extrêmes, considers the “military presences” in Caillebotte’s paintings. Referring to the first exhibition of the Impressionist group in 1874, he notes that “the [first Impressionist] exhibition did contain a few resounding echoes of the catastrophic situation from which the country was barely emerging: the crushing defeat of the Franco-Prussian War and the ensuing upheaval of the Paris Commune” (“The Shared War”, Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men, p. 42). But virtually no such references occur in the exhibition that has travelled from Paris to Los Angeles to Chicago. Guégan notes several exceptions: the painting of a soldier in uniform and an almost imperceptible representation of a uniformed soldier in Le Pont de l’Europe.
But neither image gives any sense of the true military catastrophe of the Franco-Prussian War or its aftermath. Instead, the curators have chosen to organize their ideas about Caillebotte’s paintings around the form of masculinity represented by his work.
Contrast Caillebotte’s silence in his painting with that of Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonier, a generation senior to Caillebotte. Here is Meissonier’s 1849 depiction of a massacre he apparently witnessed following the defeat of the workers’ uprising in June 1848.
And here is Meissonier’s 1884 painting representing a scene of death and destruction during the siege of Paris in 1870:
Finally, here is a daguerrotype of a poignant scene following the massacre of Communards following the fall of the Commune in 1871:
The traumas represented in these images were part of the experience and memory of the people of Paris during those decades, including both Meissonier (who was 33 at the time of the 1848 workers’ uprising) and Caillebotte (who was born in 1848 and was a serving member of the Garde Nationale Mobile in 1870-1871 during the final months of the siege of Paris and the suppression of the Commune itself (by French forces). How could either of these painters not have been deeply affected by these traumatic events of contemporary French history? Meissonier’s paintings take note of these fundamental facts, but Caillebotte’s do not. And yet the exhibition gives no historical context at all that would highlight these important and surely formative events.
And what about Meissonier? His depiction of the massacre of workers in 1848 might suggest that he was offering sympathy and homage to the working class men and women who rose up in June, 1848. Alexis de Tocqueville and Alexander Herzen, both observers of the fighting in Paris in June 1848, offered sympathy and sorrow for the violence that overwhelmed the workers’ uprising. Here are comments offered by Herzen:
I listened to the thunder and the tocsin and gazed avidly at this panorama of Paris; it was as though I was taking my leave of it. At that moment I loved Paris passionately. It was my last tribute to the great town; after the June days it grew hateful to me. On the other side of the river barricades were being raised in all the streets and alleys. I can still see the gloomy faces of the men dragging stones; women and children were helping them. A young student from the Polytechnic climbed up on to an apparently completed barricade, planted the banner and started singing the Marseillaise in a soft, sad, solemn voice; all the workers joined in and the chorus of this great song, resounding from behind the stones of the barricades, gripped one’s soul. . . . The tocsin was still tolling. Meanwhile, the artillery clattered across the bridge and General Bedeau standing there raised his field-glasses to inspect the enemy positions. . . . (From the Other Shore, After the Storm, 46)
But this is not the current interpretation of Meissonier’s work. Rather, critics have suggested that the 1849 painting of the massacre at the barricade conveys a middle-class view of the insurrection, and serves as a caution for the future: “insurrection leads to massacre and death”, while the 1888 painting conveys a sense of patriotism and heroism.
An element of historical change that is entirely evident in Caillebotte’s paintings is the transformation of Paris by Baron Haussmann at the direction of Napoleon III. The “Paris Street: Rainy Day” painting above reflects the Haussmannization of Paris — the broad avenues, the “modernization” of life in the city, and the destruction of working class residential areas. This is a central theme in T.J. Clark’s interpretation of mid-century depictions of Paris in The Painting of Modern Life:
It seems that only when the city has been systematically occupied by the bourgeoisie, and made quite ruthlessly to represent that class’s rule, can it be taken by painters to be an appropriate and purely visual subject for their art….. For the House knew well that Haussmann’s modernity had been built by evicting the working class of Paris from the centre of the city, and putting it down on the hill of Belleville or the plains of La Villette, where the moon was still most often the only street light available. And what did painters do except join in the cynical laughter and propagate the myth of modernity? (The Painting of Modern Life, p. 51)
According to Clark, there was an overriding theme of class conflict and a fear of insurrection that drove both Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann in this urban project. They were concerned to “modernize” Paris in a way that would make working class rebellion (and the barricades through which previous uprisings had proceeded) impossible; troops and cannon would be able easily to clear the avenues of insurrection.
There was no disputing that part of Haussmann’s modernity was his wish to put an end to insurrection. He stated as much himself: it was a good argument to lean on when pleading for funds from the Conseil Municipal. Years after the event, he was still musing in his Mémoires over the hidden benefits of the Boulevard Sébastopol: “It meant the disembowelling of the old Paris, the quartier of uprisings and barricades, by a wide central street piercing through and through this almost impossible maze, and provided with communicating side streets, whose continuation would be bound to complete the work thus begun. The subsequent completion of the Rue de Turbigo made the Rue Transnonain [symbolic capital of the barricades] disappear from the map of Paris!” Nor was this merely a matter of hindsight on Haussmann’s part. The details of counterrevolution weighed heavily on the planners’ minds at the time: Napoleon intervened directly in 1857 to prevent the encirclement of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine from being spoiled by a mere architect’s whim: “the construction of arcades on the Boulevard Mazas,” he wrote, “would seriously damage the strategic system of Paris.” The arcades were quietly dropped from the designs. (75-76)
Here again the current exhibition’s curators have seemingly ignored the social and political context of the Haussmannization of Paris. They emphasize the “new modernity”, the dress of the mostly bourgeois men and women passing across the boulevards, and the relaxed scenes of conversation and amusement among Caillebotte’s male friends. But there is no curatorial mention at all of the political fears and imperatives that appear to have driven Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann in this wholesale restructuring of the urban environment of Paris. And there is no suggestion in the paintings on display in the current Caillebotte exhibition of a sensibility on the part of the painter to the underlying conflicts between working class Parisians and the bourgeoisie. There are notes of awareness and sympathy for working men and women in his corpus — for example, in the painting “The Floor Scrapers”. But there is no suggestion of his own awareness of the concrete circumstances of injustice, exploitation, or unnecessary misery in his paintings.
So the social conditions of class and war seem to be almost entirely absent in Caillebotte’s work. There is no sense of “social critique” or self-awareness of upper-middle-class position in these paintings. Caillebotte is silent about the most momentous events that transformed France and Paris during his adulthood, and this is surprising. But it is also surprising that the curators have not taken more notice of this absence.
