I first read the letters Édouard Manet wrote to his family in the winter of 1870-1871 on a dead summer afternoon in an air-conditioned college library in Sydney. I was 19, studying art history. I was falling in love with Manet’s painting (none of which I’d actually seen in real life). I was now weirdly riveted by his letters, which were terse, self-mocking and — during that particular winter — quietly wretched.
I didn’t learn until later that these letters had been airlifted out of Paris by balloon. When Manet — by now on starvation rations and desperate for news — finally received replies, they were delivered by homing pigeons. The pigeons — those that made it — arrived in Paris with goose quills tied to their tail feathers. Photographic negatives, each one capturing hundreds of letters in miniature, were rolled up inside the quills.
Extreme measures like these were necessary because Paris — that great cosmopolitan city, which we’ve all enjoyed gazing at this Olympic summer — was besieged. The army besieging it was Prussian — although that January, just to inflame France’s humiliation, Prussia united with neighboring states to become the unified nation of Germany. The ceremony took place at Versailles, where this upstart enemy army was headquartered.
Anyway, for communication with the outside world, balloons and pigeons were all the residents of Paris had.
This tumultuous period, which included in the siege’s aftermath a left-wing insurrection known as the Commune, has its own dedicated gallery near the beginning of the National Gallery of Art’s fall blockbuster, “Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment.” It’s jarring — not what most people expect when entering an exhibition of impressionist pictures. But it’s an explicit acknowledgment that you can’t really think about the birth of that beloved art movement without understanding the violent upheaval French society had just undergone.
Manet is renowned today as the father of impressionism. (He used to get irritated when people confused him with Monet, as still sometimes happens.) Before the siege of Paris, he had been introduced to the painter Berthe Morisot by a mutual acquaintance in a gallery at the Louvre. The two — it’s obvious — were instantly smitten. With her dark, skittering eyes encased in shadow, she reminded him of a Spanish maja out of a painting by Goya. And since Manet was infatuated with all things Spanish, he asked her to pose for him.
After reading Manet’s correspondence, I went on to read the probing, skeptical, occasionally lovestruck letters about Manet written by Morisot, her sister Edma and their mother, Cornelie.
Berthe Morisot I had fallen in love with as soon as I saw reproductions of Manet’s gorgeous, intimate portraits of her. I hadn’t yet seen her work. And then, one day, my professor, Virginia Spate — a leading impressionist scholar — took our class to Sydney’s main art museum. She had us stand in front of a Morisot painting, on temporary loan to the museum. For 40 minutes, she barely spoke. Every now and then, she would toss out a simple question like, “What color do you think she put on first?”
It was during those 40 minutes that I became entranced by Morisot’s way of viewing the world. Like all the impressionists, she had a feeling for everyday beauty. But she had something else, too. Her brushwork was looser, more audaciously sketchy than the other impressionists, as if she had a sharpened sense of how fugitive and fragile the things we take for granted can be.
Reading her letters, I was captivated by her alloy of lively intelligence, dry humor and moody frustration. I became curious about her very close relationship with her painter sister, Edma. How was it, I wondered, that the different decisions each sister made (Edma married and had children; Berthe remained single into her 30s) had such a massive impact on their respective destinies? It was like reading something out of Tolstoy or Chekhov. Boredom and thwarted passion in the foreground; intense, life-altering drama just offstage.
I never doubted that Berthe and Édouard were in love. The problem for Berthe, who was intent on advancing her painting career, was that Manet was already married. But when war broke out and an attack on Paris seemed imminent, he sent his wife, Suzanne, and their teenage son, Leon, to safety in the south of France, near the Spanish border. He and Edgar Degas, who had also stayed in Paris, joined the National Guard, an ad hoc army of citizen-soldiers charged with defending their city.
Berthe had the opportunity to leave, but she, too, decided to remain in the city. “I have made up my mind to stay,” she explained. “I have the firm conviction that everything will come out better than expected.”
Dear reader: Never commit such thoughts to paper. Never say them aloud. Never tempt fate.
Morisot had no idea just how bad things would get. When I began to get a sense of what she and Manet endured during the siege and under the Commune, I was astounded. Anyone who has read Alistair Horne’s “The Fall of Paris,” Rupert Christiansen’s “Paris Babylon” or any number of other books about what Victor Hugo called “The Terrible Year” knows that the inhabitants of Paris went through hell in 1870-1871.
You might have thought that Manet and Morisot, both from affluent families, were spared the worst. It’s true: Many poorer Parisians suffered more than they did. And yet they, too, were lucky to survive. That winter was one of the coldest in living memory. Morisot, in particular, became very ill. Manet briefly saw action, lost friends in battle, fell ill. Toward the end of the siege, they were both on starvation rations. When Manet’s cat disappeared, it was understood that someone had eaten it.
The whole ordeal ended in a humiliating surrender. But in Paris, incredibly, things were about to get worse. The sense of shame, frustration and economic anxiety was so acute that within six weeks of the surrender, left-wing radicals staged a full-blown insurrection. The army withdrew to Versailles, and an alternative government was established inside Paris.
The Commune, as this government was called, lasted almost 2½ months. During that time, Paris was again besieged, this time by France’s own army. The Commune collapsed only when the army, after bombarding Communard strongholds, poured in through an unguarded portal in the city’s fortifications. Civil war broke out in the streets of Paris. Government troops ruthlessly slaughtered their fellow citizens, who built barricades and set fire to much of central Paris.
Retreating to the city’s east, some of the last Communards were captured and killed in the Père Lachaise cemetery — but not before many of the great city’s grandest buildings — including the Hôtel de Ville (or city hall) and the Tuileries Palace — were reduced to smoking rubble. The Louvre itself — where Manet and Morisot had flirted and gossiped and sought inspiration — barely escaped destruction. The scale of the killing — notably, thousands of summary executions carried out by army forces deranged by vengefulness — was such that the episode became known as the “semaine sanglante,” or Bloody Week.
The first impressionist exhibition opened in the aftermath of these events, in a context still charged by the period’s polarized politics. Long accustomed to impressionists’ ways of perceiving the world, we put paintings by Monet and Renoir on tea towels and fridge magnets and hang Manet and Degas posters on dentists’ walls because they are supposed to be soothing. But lovers of impressionism tend not to register how dark things got before the light of impressionism emerged and eventually triumphed.
Impressionist paintings are, in the majority of cases, soothing. They’re reparative. They were intended as such. That’s partly because, in the wake of the Terrible Year, France needed repairing. Both left and right had been pushed to such extremes that they could no longer talk to one another.
Politically, the immediate aftermath of the Terrible Year was a reactionary moment. France was nominally a republic. But the republic’s fate was far from settled. The left had overplayed its hand and now confronted a backlash. Catholic royalists had considerable support. There was every likelihood that France would revert to a monarchy. It was even possible that Napoleon III or his son might return from exile in England and reestablish the empire.
The impressionist painters wanted to avoid those outcomes. They were, for the most part, sympathetic to the Communards and appalled by the government’s ruthless treatment of them. They were all antiauthoritarian. They wanted to secure the republic. Their exhibitions were written up in republican newspapers, supported by republican journalists.
But they were also recoiling from political extremity. The movement (to the extent we can call it that in these emergent years) constituted a deliberate retreat from ideological rhetoric.
The impressionists’ paintings advanced a radical new way of picturing the world. In spirit, it was secular, democratic, anti-hierarchical. Instead of heroic pictures allegorizing old-fashioned virtues or proselytizing on behalf of a glorious past, they painted everyday subjects in a secular, peaceable present.
They were interested in places where different classes mixed. They conspicuously avoided the burned-out, rubble-strewn streets of central Paris. Instead, they painted beautiful flowers and parks and riverbanks, as well as smokestacks and ports and bridges under construction (bridges that had been blown up during the Terrible Year). Their pictures started to look “normal” — less radical, less oppositional — largely because the republic survived and their vision of a secular, democratic society itself became normal.
Berthe Morisot was in mourning, and she and Manet were both, I think, in shock in the aftermath of Bloody Week, when he convinced her to sit for him. He hoped to paint her portrait. But mainly, he wanted to be in her company.
Together, they had experienced a trauma most of their friends and fellow painters had evaded (Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Cézanne and Sisley were all out of Paris during the siege). Morisot’s father had recently died. Morisot, who would soon marry Manet’s brother (if she couldn’t marry him, his brother was the next best thing), had decided, once and for all, to pursue painting as a career. She was wracked by doubt but, at the same time, quietly determined. With support from Manet and their painter friends, she was making great strides.
When Degas invited her to show in the first impressionist exhibition, which would open in the spring of 1874, Morisot accepted. She discussed the invitation with Manet during their many portrait sittings. Manet, despite being hailed as the head of the emerging new school (they had not yet been labeled “impressionists”), refused to participate. And he tried hard to talk Morisot out of it.
Manet thought that the show would make them look amateurish and naive. He worried, too, that they would be dismissed by the reactionary establishment and taken for Communard sympathizers (they were). But perhaps above all, he believed that, to make a mark as a painter, you still had to show at the Paris Salon, the annual, government-sponsored showcase for new art. In other words, Manet still thought he could transform the art establishment from within.
Morisot ignored his advice. This, it turned out, was the right decision. Eight impressionist exhibitions were mounted over the next decade and a half. Morisot displayed her work in all but one of them. The Salon, meanwhile, slowly withered. A new cultural dynamic of reaction and counterreaction was established. Color was liberated. The avant-garde was born, and with it, a new idea of beauty.
