Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism

In the Author’s Note, Sebastian Smee gives the core thesis of Paris in Ruins. He argues that the work of Impressionist painters Berthe Morisot and Édouard Manet was shaped both by the turbulent events in Paris from 1870-1871 and their “affair of the heart” (vi). He notes that Berthe, Édouard, and Edgar Degas were the only Impressionist painters to be in Paris during the siege of Paris during the war of 1870 against Prussia and the Paris Commune of 1871. 

Smee states that those who supported the Impressionists against classical painting tended to be republicans like Édouard. He also claims that Berthe’s decision to paint domestic scenes was a decision to turn away from the heroic inspired by “the upheavals of that period” (vii). Berthe and Manet inspired one another’s work. 

Smee connects their radical new vision of artistic creation with their republican political leanings and desire to break away from the authoritarian artistic and political regime of Emperor Napoleon III. Specifically, Smee argues that Impressionism’s “emphasis on fugitive light, shifting seasons, glimpsed street scenes, and transient domesticity” (viii) is a reaction to the political instability the painters lived through.