1
1871
SPITTING ON BONAPARTE
In this opening chapter I attempt to set a scene of rapid social change during the Paris Commune of 1871 and to establish within it the role of cultural processes, including in this case the destruction of a public monument. Through discussion of Gustave Courbet’s art and his involvement in the destruction of the Vendôme Column, I sketch what I take to be a first avant-garde, which is epitomised by French Realism. This avant-garde, which is politicised through a link to French utopian socialism in the mid-nineteenth century, is not entirely extinguished by the fall of the Commune. It contrasts with the anti-art avant-garde of early twentieth-century art discussed in Chapter 2, yet has some relation to the utopianism of the Modernist project in architecture discussed in Chapter 3. The problem of what, apart from public monuments like the Vendôme Column, constitutes a public sphere is taken up in Chapter 9. Setting the pattern for the book, I begin with an anecdote:
the impulse to attack and destroy public works of art is part of the general attack on the continued presence of signs of the ancien régime. It is confirmation also that in moments of ‘madness’, publics will treat these monuments almost as if they were the actual leaders themselves … For instance in a report from 1871 on the destruction of the Vendôme column, the London Illustrated News gave this account of what happened after the column was felled: ‘[The crowd] treated the statue … as the emperor himself, spitting on his face, while members of the National Guard hit his nose with rifles.’
(Lewis, 1991: 3, quoted in Mulvey, 1999: 220)
I PLACE VENDÔME
Anecdotes are not documentation. Nonetheless, they provide useful insights into histories. There is another, too strange to be a trick of memory or invention, that the Communards went through Paris shooting the public clocks, acting not like rat-catchers but as executioners.
In the first story, Bonaparte’s effigy stands in for the person of Napoleon III, and is treated as the Communards would have wished to treat that person (by then elsewhere). Perhaps some of those present remembered the revolution of 1848 and the election of Napoleon as Emperor in 1851 by a conservative provincial vote, a vote against Paris, which sealed its failure. Napoleon III presided over a bourgeois state, an economic boom in the 1850s, the making of many fortunes, and the remodelling of Paris under Baron Haussmann which carved wide streets through the working-class quarters, redistributing the poor to the peripheries. On August 15th, 1870 the Emperor had planned to unveil a statue at Place de Clichy–Monument to the 1814 Defence of the Barrier at Clichy by Amédée Doublemard1–but instead he rode out to his armies to be defeated at Sedan on September 1st, with which his currency became worthless. In the second story, the face of a clock with its regularly spaced numerals stands, a more dispersed and abstract sign than a statue, for another regime, that of the routines of labour on which modern industrial production depends.2 In a more direct expression of hate for the toppled regime, the Communards shot two generals.3 In this context, the toppling of the Vendôme Column, bringing the bronze statue of Bonaparte down to street level where it could be spat on, is not an ephemeral act of destructiveness, or a prank, but a purposeful re-enactment of the abolition of a regime through the destruction of one of its monuments. The re-enactment replays the shift of power as public spectacle, affirms in the freedom to do it that a change of power has taken place, and reclaims public space from the previous regime.4 Similarly, when the Berlin Wall was opened in 1989 people hacked it to pieces, taking them home as material evidence of having been there at its destruction.
The Vendôme Column commemorated Napoleon Bonaparte’s victory at Austerlitz, the statue of Bonaparte in Roman dress being made from melteddown canons captured at the battle. The form is based on a Roman monument, Trajan’s column. It had been destroyed once before, in 1814, and was rebuilt after the revolution of 1830 by Louis-Philippe (the citizen-king, so-called) with a new statue. Napoleon III restored it a second time in 1862, substituting a replica of the old statue for the new one. In this restoration it took on three layers of representation: the universality of power conveyed by the monument’s Roman form, annexing two millennia of history; the glory of France under Bonaparte; and, trading on both, the power of the bourgeoisie under Napoleon III. Each layer was contestable, particularly the last two. Even for those who remembered, or had heard personal accounts, of Bonaparte’s victories, these might have been seen beside the end of the Revolution’s radical stage with the fall of the Jacobins. The monument became a central element in Napoleon III’s public spectacles, used for military parades, and symbol of a regime known for its increasing corruption. Its destruction abolished all its histories at a stroke, and followed attacks on buildings and monuments, and removal of street signs, associated with the Napoleonic past.5 The destruction of the column, then, is a key symbolic act alongside other equally symbolic but more everyday acts of erasure, changes in the visual face of Paris to show the shift of power from Empire to Republic.
The unbolting (déboulonné) of the Column and removal of its parts to l’Hôtel de la Monnaie was first proposed by Gustave Courbet in a letter to the Government of National Defence in 1870, after the defeat at Sedan. The Column, he argued, was a symbol of war and conquest, antipathetic to the spirit of modern civilisation and the union of universal brotherhood.6 This was reported in the press, with a suggestion that the metal be turned back into guns to use against the advancing Prussian forces. The letter follows Courbet’s wider involvement in issues of art’s organisation and conservation. A pacifist at the beginning of the Franco-Prussian war, he was appointed to an arts commission the task of which was to oversee the conservation of works, and investigate previous corruption at the Louvre. Courbet wrote that he was pleased to accept: ‘I did not know how to serve my country in this emergency, having no inclination to bear arms’ (Chu, 1992: 385, quoted in Roos, 1996: 150). Meanwhile Degas and Manet, both republicans, joined the National Guard; Monet spent the period of the war and Commune in England.
During the Commune, Courbet presided over debates on art education–the abolition of the Academy was proposed as a mark of egalitarianism, along with removal of juries for the annual Salons7–and the reorganisation of museums. Following his work in the arts commission he became chair of the new Federation of Artists. On April 16th, 1871 he was elected by the sixth arrondissement to the Commune’s administrative council,8 and on April 27th again urged the removal of the Column, this time suggesting its replacement by a statue celebrating the Commune. The removal was agreed, and carried out by contractors in the name of the Federation of Artists (which Courbet chaired). There is some uncertainty as to Courbet’s immediate involvement in the event, though it seems clear he argued consistently for it.
The Column was destroyed on May 16th. The Commune’s decree states:
Considering that the imperial column at the Place Vendôme is a monument to barbarism, a symbol of brute force and glory, an affirmation of militarism, a negation of international law, a permanent insult to the vanquished by the victors, a perpetual assault on one of the three great principles of the French Republic, Fraternity, it is thereby decreed:
Article One: The column at the Place Vendôme will be abolished …
(Ross, 1988: 5, quoted in Cresswell, 1996: 173)
Here another anecdote can be introduced: that Bonaparte’s head broke off and rolled away like a pumpkin.9 The act was denounced by the Versailles government, Marshall MacMahon writing: ‘Soldiers! … Men who call themselves French have dared to destroy … this witness to the victories of your fathers against the coalition of Europe. Do they hope … to erase the memory of the military virtues of which this monument was the glorious symbol?’ (attributed to Marshall MacMahon, Commander-in-Chief of the national army, press clipping, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; Edwards, 1971: 201, quoted in Roos, 1996: 155).
Courbet’s political engagement during the Commune followed a return to images of social injustice in the late 1860s, as a reaction against the regime and its corruptions, and against the triumph of the bourgeoisie under it. Although he made few overtly political works after 1855, one of his entries to the Salon of 1868–The Beggar’s Charity at Ornans (Musée d’Orsay, Paris)–marks a return to social criticism and the settings around Ornans of earlier works such as The Stonebreakers (1849, destroyed) and The Burial at Ornans (1849–50, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), made as representations of the democratic sentiments of the 1848 revolution, when universal suffrage was briefly proclaimed (and later withdrawn by Napoleon III). The Beggar’s Charity at Ornans shows a beggar on crutches giving a coin to a child while a woman suckles a baby in the background. All are ragged. So, the poor are more generous (in spirit as well as material means) than, by implication, the rich. For the radical critic Jules Castagnary, like Courbet a reader of the utopian socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (see Proudhon, 1969), it represented the endurance of human generosity in adversity:
For twenty years the poor tramp travels the same land, holding out his hand to all … And for the first time in twenty years someone does him the honour of asking him for alms … It is the encounter of two miseries … the local beggar feels an old forgotten tear well up under his eyelid, takes a sou out of his pocket and gives it to the child who sends him a kiss.
(Castagnary, 1892, vol. I, 287–8, quoted in Roos, 1996: 108)
Zola saw it as representing Courbet’s ‘gently humanitarian philosophy’, again in the manner of Proudhon (Zola, 1991: 219, quoted in Roos, 1996: 106).10
Despite the work’s negative reception, Courbet was otherwise a widely accepted and popular artist. His work was placed in the room of honour at the 1867 and 1869 Salons; in 1869 he was awarded a gold medal by Leopold II of Belgium, and went to Munich to receive the Order of St Michael from Ludwig II of Bavaria. Yet he declined the Legion d’Honneur: ‘My opinions as a citizen are such that I cannot accept a distinction which belongs essentially to the monarchical order … the state has no competence in the field of art. When it takes on itself to confer rewards, it is encroaching on the sphere of public taste.’ (de Forges, 1978: 45, source unstated). Courbet was by now an established artist, selling work to the value of 52,000 francs at the time of the 1870 Salon.11 At the time of the Commune, then, Courbet was a major figure in French art both for the bourgeoisie who frequented the Salons, and for Parisian artists in their associations. It is not surprising that, given his return to politics and commitment to democracy, he played a key role in the Commune’s cultural organisation. The destruction of the Column, however reticent Courbet was about it at his trial, could be seen as the culmination of a development of radical cultural representation and, in the end, action.
The Commune fell on May 28th, 1871. Soldiers of the Versailles government combed the streets rounding up Communards, or anyone suspected, and shot them. Up to 30,000 citizens may have been killed by summary execution.12 Among them was Eugène Varlin, a 32-year-old bookbinder and socialist, arrested, paraded and humiliated, then shot at Montmartre on May 28th. Harvey records: ‘They had to shoot twice to kill him. In between fusillades he cried, evidently unrepentant, “Vive la Commune!”. His biographer called it “the Calvary of Eugène Varlin” ’ (Harvey, 1989: 215). The Basilica of SacréCoeur–as penitence for the ills of the preceding years (as seen by the religious right)–was erected on Montmartre, its foundation stone laid in 1875. It was a deliberate erasure of the site of the Commune’s first and last days–monumental architecture in service of the suppression of public memories.
Courbet was arrested on June 7th for his part in the destruction of the Vendôme Column, and tried in August. He maintained in questioning that he had simply wanted the column removed on aesthetic grounds, not destroyed.13 Several critics and established artists testified for him. Only a minor charge was upheld, and he was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment and a fine of 500 francs, rashly saying he would pay for the Column to be re-erected if his guilt for its destruction were ever proved. Of the 16 Communards tried with Courbet one was deported, two sentenced to hard labour for life, seven sent to penal colonies, and two executed. In prison he painted a bowl of apples, which was rejected at the 1872 Salon, though he sold several works at an exhibition at the Durand-Ruel gallery that year. Several of his paintings also went missing from his lodgings in Passage de Saumon before his release.
Then disaster struck–in 1873, with a swing to the political right, MacMahon was elected President. Courbet, who fled to Switzerland, was charged in June 1874 with the cost of the Column’s re-erection, initially estimated at 250,000 francs but finally assessed at 323,091 francs, 68 centimes, to be paid at the rate of 10,000 francs a year. Works and property were now confiscated, and his hopes of being rehabilitated, and accepted again at the Salon, dissolved when, in 1876 MacMahon dismissed the progressive premier Jules Simon. Courbet’s last work was a view of the Alps between Vevey and Montreux. He died of dropsy in 1877, impoverished and with no hope of a return to France.
Two questions arise. Why did the Commune place such emphasis on cultural organisation? And what was left of the avant-garde after its defeat? To approach the first: given the Commune’s short life (73 days), most of its projects remained aspirations. There is no major artwork produced in the Commune, no equivalent of the competition for an image of the Republic of 1848,14 though Courbet had proposed such a monument to replace the Vendôme Column. Manet produced two lithographs in 1871, The barricade and Civil War, but not until ex-Communard’s Jules Dalou’s monument to the Republic (1889–99) is there a return, and here in muted form, to radicalism in the arts.15 The Commune’s impact was more in removal of signs of the old regime than in new art, but it devoted much effort to the organisation of journalism, festivals and the theatre, to conservation and to education in the arts. But why all this, when there were barricades to build and defend? The Commune’s engagement with culture can be understood in two ways: as extending from a philosophical tradition from Proudhon and Rousseau, in which art is a means of public education, previously employed by David for the Jacobins; and as reflection of the high profile of cultural activities in Parisian life before the Commune, with high attendances at the Salons and a widespread coverage of the arts in the press.
Perhaps to dedicate time to art in the Commune did not seem extraordinary after all, though the example is mirrored 46 years later in the extensive monuments, parades, banners and street decoration of the October Revolution.16 Just as in Paris in 1871, it seemed necessary in Moscow and Petrograd in 1917 to give material and publicly visible expression to the moment of transformation. A. V. Lunacharski, speaking at the opening of the Free Art Educational Studios in Petrograd in October, 1918, asserted: ‘The need has arisen to change the external appearances of our towns as rapidly as possible, in order to express our new experiences in an artistic form as well as to get rid of all that is offensive to the feelings of the people’ (Tolstoy, Bibikova and Cooke, 1990: 15). Similarly, in the years leading up to 1968, members of the Situationist International called for the removal of monuments which were, as they put it, irretrievably ugly.17
But if the Commune’s attention to public spectacle makes it part of the pre-history of 1917, its place in political history is ambivalent. Marx was initially enthusiastic, seeing it as an enactment of radical democracy, not merely a regime elected by the working class but the working class as the regime: ‘The communal constitution would have rendered up to the body social all the powers which have hitherto been devoured by the parasitic excrescence of the “State”, which battens on society and inhibits its free movement … it would have brought about the regeneration of France’ (Marx, ‘Address to the General Council of the International on the Civil War in Fran...
