Original subtitles

The late 19th century was a time of incredible technological progress and social change.

As a result, it was also a time of political turmoil, both internationally and domestically,

with war, revolution, and unrest sweeping over Paris and throughout Europe.

The Post-Impressionists were hardly ignorant of politics.

Some sought to capture the tensions of the era in their art.

Others were outright activists and revolutionaries on the barricades.

The cafés of Paris would have been buzzing with political discussion and debates.

We can't truly understand the Post-Impressionists without having some sense of that political

atmosphere that formed the backdrop to their lives.

Three big events in particular that I think play the biggest part in shaping the lives

and the thoughts of those living in France at the end of the 19th century.

The Franco-Prussian War, the Paris Commune, and the Dreyfus Affair.

In this lecture, I want to explore these events from the perspective of the Post-Impressionist generation,

and how it shaped their work.

We'll need to back up a little, though, to find out how Paris found itself at the center

of all this drama.

Ever since revolutionaries stormed the Bastille and Guillotine-Louis XVI in the 1790s, France

was a tumultuous place.

Over the next 80 years, power vacillated from kings to conventions, committees, directories,

consuls, emperors, back to kings, presidents, and then to an emperor again.

The emperor was Napoleon III, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, who had been elected as

president in 1848 and then declared himself emperor in 1852.

Napoleon III was a complicated and fascinating guy.

Despite his autocratic tendencies, he brought much-needed stability to France and oversaw some

of the most important reforms in French history.

All those new banks, railroads, ports, and factories that were transforming France into

an industrial giant?

A lot of that was driven by Napoleon III.

He had a severe case of keeping up with the Joneses when it came to their old rival, Great

Britain.

Like his uncle, his ambition was limitless.

That massive reconstruction of Paris under Baron Haussmann?

That was his vision.

Want a faster way to get to the French colonies in Indochina?

Let's dig a mighty canal through Egypt and call it the Suez.

Need more wood for industry?

Let's plant the largest man-made forest in Europe at Landis.

He was also progressive by the standards of the day, expanding female access to education

and health care to the poor, and he tried somewhat to ease the growing social tensions

of industrial France by improving workers' rights and subsidizing low-cost housing.

When it came to art, however, suddenly he wasn't so progressive.

The emperor was very old-fashioned.

He liked his paintings academic.

Even the realist painters were too edgy for him.

This was super important because all the really fat commission checks came from either

the government or the church, which was extremely traditional in their tastes.

The Paris Salon was also subject to imperial patronage and pressure, so it would be very

rare to see any work exhibited that Napoleon didn't like.

Traditional academic painters you've never heard of, like Alexandre Cabanel, were some

of Napoleon's favorites.

They got all the best jobs painting murals for the palaces and those grand new public buildings

going up around the country.

And they were put on powerful committees like the Salon Jury, where they actively prevented

avant-garde artists from being exhibited.

So in many ways, Napoleon III set the tone for life in France in his time.

And just about every post-impressionist painter grew up in his new empire, enthusiastic about

the future, technology and industry, and yet deeply traditional in terms of art and culture.

The one thing Napoleon III didn't have the skills for is war and diplomacy.

In the 1860s, while he's banning all this scary new art, a much scarier prospect is on the horizon.

Prussia.

Political mastermind Otto von Bismarck is steering Prussia to dominate the future of Europe.

He wants to unify all the fragmented German states into a single German nation, and France

is high on his hit list.

Napoleon III sees them coming, but terribly misjudges the threat France faces.

And even though the French economy is roaring, the army is not.

Of course, Bismarck knows all this, and in 1870, he does what he does best.

He cooks up a complicated scheme to humiliate the French.

Once it's reported in the French press, public outrage and patriotic fervor encourages Napoleon III

to declare war on Prussia to settle their beef once and for all.

It was a terrible mistake.

They severely underestimated the strength of the Prussian army, which was the most highly trained and state-of-the-art military in Europe.

They had an enormous reserve of conscripted soldiers to call on.

Within just a few months, they had completely overrun the French army.

And Napoleon himself was defeated at the Battle of Sedan and taken prisoner.

No surprise, it's a total disaster for France.

Now, the Prussians start racing to conquer Paris and completely defeat the French.

Given how the war has gone so far, Bismarck is confident he can take the capital in days.

What he didn't know, though, is that the French government had just spent over 120 million francs fortifying the defense of the city.

They built 30-foot-high walls and moats with thousands of massive guns and 400,000 National Guardsmen defending the city.

At this point, it was one of the most fortified cities Europe had ever seen.

The French were prepared for an attack, but they didn't expect a siege.

The Prussian army completely encircled the city, a 50-mile perimeter.

And they figured after a few weeks of no food or provisions, going in or out, they would give up.

The city had saved about 80 days of food storage.

After they used that all up, they started severely rationing food.

They started slaughtering farm animals, domestic animals, horses, maybe even rats.

Over the winter of 1870 and 71, there was a three-month-long nightmare of cold, sickness, and hunger.

Hundreds of people a week were dying from pneumonia.

Hundreds more from starvation, too.

Many of the post-Impressionists were children in Paris during the siege.

Some of the older artists, like Odilon Redon, served in the army,

while others, like Paul Cézanne, skipped town and would later be branded deserters.

Eventually, the government in Paris realized there was no hope of breaking the siege.

Nearly 80,000 soldiers and civilians had perished,

and now the Prussians had begun to shell the city with artillery as well.

They surrendered at the end of January 1871.

Prussia demanded 5 billion francs, the Alsace-Lorraine territory,

and, just to rub it in their face, a military victory parade down the streets of Paris.

The Parisian public were pissed.

They had suffered and sacrificed in the name of France only to be handed up in humiliating defeat.

Prussia had not actually breached the walls or taken the city.

Their leaders had basically handed over the keys.

The real trouble came from the National Guard that had defended the city,

which was a separate entity than the army.

They were not professional soldiers.

Most were hastily armed and recruited from the working-class neighborhoods of Paris.

And working-class tensions had been slowly bubbling up in the city for decades.

Dangerous work conditions, low wages, high prices, poor housing, and no democracy

had driven many to strike and riot in previous decades.

Well, now they were armed and pushed over the edge by the government's handling of the war.

After the Prussian army left, the National Guard began wrestling control of the city

away from their fellow countrymen, the French army.

Protests and riots break out everywhere in support of the National Guard.

Rebel units formed their own leadership and began to take the city's cannons

to the working-class neighborhoods in preparation to defend themselves.

The French government can't really stop them.

They're still reeling from the war, and many of the loyal regular army

are still Prussian prisoners of war.

On March 18th, the government realizes they cannot hold onto the capital

and retreat to Versailles.

The National Guard takes control of the gunpowder stores, the railways,

and government buildings and offices.

Then they gather outside the Hotel de Ville and raise a red flag in victory.

They declare their independence, the Third Republic, and the Paris Commune begins.

They created, amongst themselves, a radical governing council committed to overhauling the city,

composed of anarchists, socialists, communists, Republicans, and Neo-Jacobians.

The council passed a raft of new decisions.

There would be free daycare centers.

Education for all children was to be free and compulsory.

Child labor was abolished.

So was night work and bakeries.

Empty buildings were requisitioned for the homeless.

Wives, unmarried partners, and children of soldiers killed in the war were given pensions.

First aid stations were set up around the city for free care.

But that's not all.

All the tools and household items given up during the siege were returned.

They postponed commercial debt obligations and wiped the interest from those debts.

They prohibited fines by employees against their employees.

Access to the legal system was free for all.

The death penalty was abolished and the guillotines were all burned.

Separation of church and state was strictly enforced in the commune.

Many clergy were arrested and churches opened for public use.

The Church of St. Germain, Lausaroy, for example, was briefly turned into a socialist women's club.

It's an exciting, heady time for many of the working class who finally see real change happening.

But soon, the leaders are fighting amongst each other over what the perfect commune should look like

and how much to redistribute the city's wealth in order to pay for it.

As government forces start rebuilding and begin surrounding Paris to retake it,

major arguments break out about how they should prepare to defend the city.

Some are pacifists opposed to militarizing the commune.

While others are robe-spear wannabes who wanted a strong central dictatorship

to take total control of the commune and defend it at all costs.

The anarchists end up quitting the council and the National Guard begins to collapse.

By May, parts of the walls and gates are being left undefended.

But they don't just let the dog out, they let the French army back in

when they discovered one of these undefended sections.

A horrific week of fighting breaks out in the city streets,

as committed communards and the remains of the National Guard try to hold on.

Realizing after a few days the cause was lost, the communards turn instead to getting even.

They pour oil, turpentine, and gunpowder on the Tuileries Palace to blow up the entire building.

Churches, police buildings, theaters, and fancy homes get destroyed.

They even tried to burn Notre Dame, but the flames were quickly extinguished.

Half of Paris was now on fire.

Both sides are merciless in their treatment of prisoners.

The government executes many of the soldiers it captures.

The communards respond in kind.

They execute the Archbishop of Paris and most of the senior clergy.

An act that sends shockwaves across deeply Catholic France.

Low estimates say at least 17,000 citizens and National Guard were killed during that week alone.

And after the dust settled, at least another 40,000 people were arrested, the ringleaders were executed,

while thousands were imprisoned for years or sent into exile to the Pacific colonies.

The communes' aftermath and influence loom large for decades.

Marx wrote about it extensively, and many communists saw it as the first true revolution of the people

that would be a harbinger of things to come.

The city took years to rebuild and recover after the fires and destruction.

No one in Paris would have been spared the trauma from such a terribly difficult and violent year.

Many French artists of the era tended to be on the political left and were sympathetic to the ideals of the commune.

Some, like Gustave Courbet, directly participated as a political leader and would actually spend time in prison for it.

Others, like post-impressionist Maximilian Luce, were deeply impacted by witnessing it in their youth,

and would return to the subject often in their art.

The commune walls fell, but the ideals were more persistent.

Indeed, many post-impressionist artists were compelled to engage on the big political questions raised in this era

in a way that most of their predecessors never had the chance.

Some, like Luce, illustrated the events themselves, but most artists took a more subtle approach,

using their art to depict scenes of the poor and the working classes,

offering a window to a world that the urban cultural elite tried to ignore.

New radical ideologies like socialism, communism, anarchism flourished during this period

and counted many of the post-impressionists as followers.

Some post-impressionist movements, like neo-impressionism, were also political movements.

But it's also important to remember that the artists of this era weren't exactly in touch with the average person.

Paris did not equal France, and while all cities were changing,

in 19th century France most people still lived in the countryside.

And those who did tended to be much poor and less educated, and deeply Catholic and conservative.

While the fall of Napoleon III and the Paris Commune might have been exciting for the working classes

and creative types of Paris, it was deeply shocking in the countryside.

It was fashionable for artists of this era to travel into the countryside and make beautiful depictions

of the landscapes and people found there.

And in some ways they were also depicting a different political world,

a world where tradition and God was still paramount.

Were they generally interested in their world, or were they just exploiting and romanticizing the poor?

Bucolic landscapes often hide the fact that these people spent excruciatingly long,

back-breaking days with hand tools to bring in the harvest.

While these artists tried to empathize, they could go home on the train to their modern, comfy apartments.

Many of their subjects were still living like the Middle Ages.

So as more people were able to enjoy the art, culture, and high life of Paris during the Belle Epoque,

there were very deep divisions throughout the country, beneath the surface,

and small incidents could quickly explode into full-blown political conflict.

And that's exactly what happened with the Dreyfus Affair.

In 1894, while France was developing new weaponry to attack Germany and retake Alsace-Lorraine,

and avenged the war, they discovered a leak in their intelligence.

Someone was spilling the beans to Germany about their new technology.

They found a handwritten letter from the leaker corroborating the accusations.

The War Department starts searching for the culprit, and they come across Alfred Dreyfus,

who was an army captain serving in the Artillery Corps.

He was from Alsace and spoke German fluently.

So they're lining up a few dots, and then they find out he's Jewish.

Well, that makes him highly suspicious to the French command.

Now they just need some kind of proof.

Enter Armand du Patti de Clam.

He's a major working for the French General Staff,

and he declares himself an expert on handwriting,

even though he has no training whatsoever.

He summons Dreyfus to a meeting, and get this,

he pretends his hand is injured to convince Dreyfus to take dictation for him.

He has him write out the same words they found on the letter of the leaker.

And with his expertise, he claims that the two letters match.

Later, forensic experts dispute this, but the damage is already done.

Dreyfus is put in solitary confinement so de Clam can force a confession out of him.

But Dreyfus never relents.

Eventually, the public gets wind of the story,

with jarring headlines like,

the treason of the Jew Dreyfus soon appearing,

and anti-Semitic tensions are unleashed.

A hasty military trial convenes.

Dreyfus is sentenced to life in prison on Devil's Island in French Guiana.

This actually made the anti-Semitic crowds even angrier,

who were demanding Dreyfus be hanged.

But the news stories were starting to turn,

thanks to the help of Alfred's brother, Matthew,

who led a campaign for his innocence.

And the truth began to take hold with some moderates.

Eventually, new evidence and testimony come to light,

proving the real culprit to be a bitter officer named Ferdinand Walson Esterhazy.

In light of the evidence, the government had no choice but to put Esterhazy on trial in 1898.

But since they already had Dreyfus, and they didn't want to look stupid convicting someone else,

the new trial was all staged.

Esterhazy was coached by the military on how to defend himself,

and they lined up forensic experts to say his handwriting didn't actually match

and discredit the new evidence.

Incredibly, Esterhazy is acquitted and immediately flees to England,

where he confesses to the London papers that he was indeed the spy

and proceeds to live a comfortable life enjoying his freedom.

Many of France's writers, artists, and thinkers were highly engaged with the case.

The author Emile Zola was a particularly bold voice for justice,

using his fame to declare Dreyfus an innocent man and the victim of anti-Semitic hysteria.

A huge petition of leading names, including Claude Monet, calls for a retrial of Dreyfus.

Many artists, including Paul Signac, Edouard Vuillard, and Camille Pissarro, were very pro-Dreyfus.

Several artists at the time even supported Dreyfus in their art by doing a series of allegorical paintings,

depicting the naked truth emerging from a well,

an homage to a famous saying by the Greek philosopher Democritus about how the truth eventually comes.

Many depicted truth holding a mirror, itself a symbol for truth-telling.

But it was hardly a unanimous position even among the artistic community.

Edgar Degas, for instance, was a huge anti-Semite.

He was the most vocal about his vitriol for Dreyfus and Jewish people generally.

It's said that he would get worked up into literal tears of rage over his bigotry.

Auguste Renoir, too, staked a pretty strong anti-Dreyfus position, despite having Jewish friends.

Paul Cézanne is a more nuanced case as he was growing closer to the Catholic Church in his later years.

He sympathized with the anti-Dreyfus camp, though he was a lot more quiet about his opinions than Degas.

By now he also had a strained relationship with Zola, and I wonder if that had anything to do with his position as well.

Degas, Renoir, and Cézanne were hardly alone, though.

Most of the country, particularly rural France, was deeply Catholic and if not vehemently prejudiced against Jews,

at the very least unsupportive of them.

Anti-Semitic violent outbreaks were now happening all over France.

Effigies of Dreyfus were burned in bonfires.

Zola became public enemy number one.

In an effort to silence him, he was prosecuted for libel and sentenced to one year in prison.

Zola fled to exile in England for a year.

He was eventually exonerated, but most of Europe, especially England and Germany,

were mocking France's justice system as a bit of a circus.

The whole thing drags on for years.

In fact, in France, it simply becomes known as l'affaire.

Under enormous public pressure, Dreyfus is finally brought back to France to be retried in 1899.

He looked terrible, emaciated, and close to death.

Even with most of the evidence against him now discredited, he's found guilty yet again.

But in the aftermath, the French president, weary of the never-ending crisis,

pardons and releases Dreyfus in exchange for a confession of guilt.

If Dreyfus reluctantly agrees to do so, they can put it all behind them.

Eventually, the Supreme Court clears his name and exonerates him at last in 1906,

and Dreyfus was reinstated in the army serving in World War I and ending his career as a lieutenant colonel.

But the Dreyfus affair had a very long tail.

The wave of anti-Semitism it unleashed revealed the deep-seated divisions over Judaism in European society.

Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, had been a newspaper correspondent in Paris during the Dreyfus case,

and would later state it was what convinced him that the Jews needed a homeland of their own to be safe.

And philosopher and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt famously observed that the Dreyfus affair

could be seen as a dress rehearsal for the Holocaust in Germany.

Religion obviously ran at the heart of the Dreyfus affair.

France was still a Catholic nation, more than 98% in the 1870s.

Jews, atheists, even Protestants were only a tiny percentage.

However, the power and authority of the Roman Catholic Church in France had been in decline for decades.

The French Revolution itself, a hundred years prior, was a referendum on religious power in France,

and the Church lost much of its property in the aftermath.

Much of that status would be restored when Napoleon Bonaparte and the Pope made a compromise, known as the Concordate of 1801.

But the prestige of the Church was never quite restored, and the clergy shrank significantly in the aftermath.

And as technology, progress, and the Industrial Revolution rolled on, the anti-clerical leftists, the socialists, anarchists, and communists gained much more power and recognition.

There was a bit of a church comeback under Napoleon III, but it was much slower in urban areas where the factories were.

No matter how religious you were, it was easier to sympathize with leftist politics and harder to believe in a divine plan when you were being worked to death by your dangerous 80-hour-a-week factory job.

As more left-wing politicians were elected into office, new laws were beginning to weaken the Church's power again.

Priests were excluded from administrative committees.

Nuns were being replaced in hospitals by laywomen.

School curriculums were secularized.

Divorce became legal.

And weddings were to be performed by the state to be official.

Church weddings are just for show now.

It became legal to work on Sundays.

No more religious exemptions for the draft for priests going to seminary.

And religious language and symbols are removed from all government buildings.

It's easy to see how the wrenching apart of church and state after centuries of deep entanglement had a big impact on the psyche of all the Post-Impressionists.

This was happening right across Europe.

Some artists were emboldened to make increasingly controversial or blasphemous work.

One of the most notorious was not by a Frenchman, but just over the border in Belgium by James Ensor,

who is a fellow traveler of the Post-Impressionists.

Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1888 depicts a carnival parody of Jesus Christ's arrival into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday,

where Jesus himself is barely visible in the back of the scene.

Marching with grotesque skeletons, clowns, and characters of contemporary figures,

this painting was too shocking even to be publicly exhibited until the 1920s,

though it was proudly on display in Ensor's studio.

Classic themes were remade in new and shocking ways,

and some artists of the generation were really looking to get a rise out of the religious right.

Just as artists seem to do in all generations, they revel in challenging the establishment.

Many artists were depicting Jesus in ways no one had ever seen before.

Often there's a more human and complex side exposed, showing him not as a superhero or a white god,

but a strange and troubled fellow or just an ordinary person like us.

It wasn't just depictions of Jesus either.

His nemesis, the devil, became a more popular subject, with depictions of Satan not just as a token bad guy,

but as a more complex character.

This piece from Radon is succinctly titled,

Glory and praise to you, Satan, in the heights of heaven, where you reigned,

and in the depths of hell, where, vanquished, you dream in silence.

But it's important to remember again how controversial these issues were

to a society still strongly divided between rural and city people.

And even as the growing urban areas are rejecting religion and pushing it out of public life,

in other parts of the country, there's actually a spiritual revival going on.

After the Franco-Prussian War, a cult to St. Martin of Tours became widely popular in the countryside

and within the army and saw thousands making a pilgrimage to see his tomb.

And rural folks were not just sitting idly by while the urban elites transformed their France.

Throughout the late 19th century and up until World War I, there were several major conservative backlashes.

They came quite close in the late 1880s when George Ernest Bollinger, a former general,

made a name for himself by promising sweet revenge on Germany and to make France great again,

by restoring the church and monarchy to its rightful place.

The Bollingist movement became so popular that by 1889 the government feared a revolution was imminent.

So he was hastily charged with treason and forced into exile, along with his key supporters.

Even with his name off the ballot though, Bollinger received nearly 40% of the vote in the national election that year.

And it's important to emphasize that though less numerous, some artists of the period did identify as patriots

and sometimes even used their art to sweep up nationalist fervor and defend traditional values.

The post-impressionist Henry Rousseau, for example, frequently incorporated flags and French national celebrations into his work.

Because in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War and the political upheavals of the 1880s and 1890s,

some desired nothing more than for France to return to her former greatness and wreak vengeance upon our enemies.

A whole generation of school children was taught to remember the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany and the goal to take it back.

And this sentiment was shared by plenty of patriotic French.

So the 19th century was a tumultuous one.

It's no wonder from this momentous fracturing of the political, social, and religious order in France,

artists emerged like a dandelion in the crack of the pavement, reflecting to the world what the people being tossed around

in this chaotic time were thinking and feeling.