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

“This book is about how the city of Paris endured two military and political disasters in one year and how those events formed the backdrop both for an affair of the heart between two great artists and for the early days of the Impressionist movement. The story focuses on the events of 1870-71 (famously dubbed ‘the Terrible Year’ by Victor Hugo). It’s premised on the conviction that we cannot see Impressionism clearly without grasping the impact of that tumultuous time on the movement’s leading artists.”

This quote from the Author’s Note lays out the thesis or central argument of Paris in Ruins. It describes how it aims to connect the “military and political disasters” of 1870-1871 with the Impressionist art movement that was in development during that time. It outlines the larger structure of the text and its use of both history and art.

“[M]any who lived through the Terrible Year succumbed to a new and suddenly deeper sense of existential fragility, and it is hard not to see Impressionism’s emphasis on fugitive light, shifting seasons, glimpsed street scenes, and transient domesticity as expressions of this heightened awareness of change and mortality.”

This quote summarizes some of author Sebastian Smee’s conclusions about how the events of 1870-1871 impacted the Impressionist artists, whose first exhibition was held in 1874. He argues that the experience of the war and the Commune, the death and destruction of that era, provoked the artists to focus on the transience of life, reflecting The Impact of Collective Trauma on Creativity.

“Édouard responded powerfully to this willingness to see what other art traditions shied away from. Old Women (Time), for instance, was as far from the French classical ideal as it was possible to get. Édouard also liked the way not only Goya but especially Ribera and Velázquez projected dignity onto individuals from all classes. It fed into his instinctive egalitarianism, his feeling for justice, his republicanism.”

This quote represents one of the first examples of The Relationship Between Art and Politics that Smee explores in Paris in Ruins. He connects Édouard Manet’s fondness for the works of the Spanish painter Francisco Goya and other Spanish painters like Jusepe de Ribera and Diego Velázquez to his “republicanism,” arguing that this political sentiment is represented in Édouard’s artwork and inspired by these painters. Smee uses some editorial language to drive this point home by characterizing Édouard’s egalitarianism as “instinctive,” presenting it as a fixed (and admirable) aspect of his personality.