A Certain Slant of Light

troisoiseaux was reading Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism, which is about the effects of the 1871 Franco-Prussian War on the baby impressionist movement. Of course I had to read it, as I am tragically incapable of resisting anything about the impressionists, and in this case it worked in my favor, because this book is fantastic.

This book balances a lot of different strands. It situates the impressionists within the wider political and cultural milieu of France, while also touching on how France’s relationship with the rest of Europe shaped that milieu. Most dramatically in the form of the Franco-Prussian War, of course, but Smee’s description of Manet’s fascination with Spanish art, particularly Goya, is also illuminating. In the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war, Manet tried to make Goya-style lithographs of the horrors he’d seen, but the misery was still too raw.

In fact, Smee notes, most of the impressionists never engaged artistically with the war at all, partly in reaction against the Academy’s elevation of heroic history paintings in general and its insistence on heroic history paintings of the Franco-Prussian War. Instead, they focused on the ephemeral, the evanescent, the shifting light of daily life as an antidote to a demoralizing political reality and a deeply disillusioning experience of war in which pretty much all the political forces in France came out looking bad.

Napoleon III? The idiot who started the war. (People tend to forget this, possibly because the Prussians trounced France so thoroughly, but France did start the war.) The Communards? Completely out of touch with the political reality outside of Paris*, also had the unfortunate habit of lynching people who looked maybe kind of spy-like. The monarchists? Bad on principle, also lost their chance at monarchy when their numbskull candidate for king tried to insist on a return to the white Bourbon flag. The forces of the republic? Lost the war, massacred the Communards, but somehow they’re here to stay.

(*The Communards complete failure to grasp that much of rural France remained a bastion of Catholic royalists started me on a train of thought about how so-called “popular revolutions” are often revolutions that are popular only in the capital city, which then imposes its will on the truculent countryside which is, numerically, often 70% or more of the population of the country, and often wants nothing to do with the revolution supposedly enacted “for the people.” Popular revolution as urban imperialism?)

The book also describes the social milieu of the impressionists, where political divisions are ferocious sometimes to the point of firing squads, and yet Berthe Morisot (daughter of moderate constitutional monarchists) can be courted both by reactionary Puvis de Chavannes and republican Eugene Manet, brother to painter Edouard Manet (who probably would have been courting Berthe herself except awkwardly he was already married). They all meet peaceably at the Morisots’ salons and chat about painting.

Although various impressionists bob in and out of the book, Berthe and Edouard are the focal points. (Smee refers to them by their first names, which gives the book an novelistic flair.) These are not my top impressionists, but I came out of the book with a greater appreciation of their work, because as well as being a good social and military historian with a fine eye for the subtle shifts in relationships between individuals, Smee is also a perceptive art critic who can help you see new depths in paintings you have previously not fully appreciated. I’ve struggled with Morisot’s work in particular, but I’d love to return to her work to view it through this new lens.

This brings me to the one flaw in the book: not enough art reproductions! Presumably the publisher’s fault rather than Smee’s, but I do wonder who thought it would be a good idea to put in, for instance, a photograph of the balloonist Nadar rather than another example of Morisot’s work. Not that I wasn’t fascinated by the use of hot air balloons to get mail out of Paris, and carrier pigeons to bring back replies in the form of film negatives containing tiny, tiny pictures of thousands of letters that then had to be blown up and transcribed! I just didn’t think a portrait of Nadar was the best use of the limited picture space.

Overall, though, loved it. Highly recommended if you’re interested in either the impressionists or French history. I’m going to read Smee’s The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art next. I’m really most interested in Manet and Degas, but I love a good feud so perhaps that will carry me through the 20th century artists too.

It took me a while to get through Colin Jones’ The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris, partly because the book is long but also partly because I kept getting lost in the welter of names. I don’t have a lot of background in the French Revolution, and even if I did, Jones is drawing on testimony from a lot of smaller actors as well as the big guns, which I appreciate as a historian but sometimes found confusing as a reader.

However, eventually I sorted things out, more or less, and the story really picks up when we hit the early afternoon, when Robespierre’s ally Saint-Just rose to make a speech. One of the deputies interrupted this speech, using the occasion not only to launch an attack on Saint-Just but also Robespierre, who had recently been calling for yet another purge of the Convention, which meant another wave fo deputies sent to the guillotine.

With stunning swiftness, it became clear that Robespierre had almost no support. His own leftist allies were sick of him; the rightists had always hated him; and the general public in the galleries, who were generally believed to adore him, made no move to support him when the deputies shouted down his attempts to speak. (Robespierre, of course, had not allowed Danton to speak in his own defense at his trial.) In a matter of a couple of hours, the most powerful man in France was under arrest, with his four closest allies.

The Convention had learned something from its constant evocation of Brutus: when you topple Caesar, you have to take out Marc Antony as well. So the Convention decided to remove Robespierre’s ally, the National Guard commander Hanriot. Hanriot, no fool, knew that this would ultimately mean his death. Rather than quietly leave his post, he charged the Convention with tyranny and tried to set up another revolution, centered on the Commune, the seat of the Paris municipal government.)

At first, all seemed to be going well for Hanriot. He summoned National Guard forces to the Commune, and they came. They even managed to rescue Robespierre and the other arrested deputies. However, as the afternoon wore into evening, word got out that Robespierre had been arrested and Hanriot sacked. The National Guardsmen realized that Hanriot was no longer legally their commanding officer, and that by siding with the Commune, they were siding with Robespierre. They began to defect to the Convention. By the time the Convention stormed the Commune, around midnight, it was almost unprotected.

Thus, the Convention and the people of Paris rose in something stunningly close to unanimity to overthrow Robespierre. People from all over the political and economic spectrum had come to see him as a bloodthirsty tyrant, and whatever else they disagreed on (pretty much everything) they wanted him gone.

However, even as he is proving thoroughly that Robespierre’s tyranny had made him one of the most hated men in Paris, Jones also appears to be attempting… a partial rehabilitation of Robespierre? By Jones’ own pen Robespierre stands convicted of spearheading purge after purge, sending hundreds of people each day to their death, and using it all to set himself up for some sort of one-man rule, “marking out with purges to road to some form of personal power, that [his colleagues] were happy to call tyranny.”

Yes? Yes, they were happy to call it “tyranny,” because that generally is what you call it when one man appears to be angling to set himself as sole ruler? We say this sort of thing about Trump all the time, and the man hasn’t managed to guillotine a single elected representative yet. What would you prefer to call it, Mr. Jones?

In the last paragraph of the book – the note he wants to leave in his readers’ memory – Jones says, “In crushing what they named the Terror, the Thermidorians also destroyed much of the democratic promise and the progressive social and economic policies that have also characterized the period of Revolutionary Government before 9 Thermidor. The ultimate irony was that the person who, in the early part of his career, expressed belief in those values most luminously – and in a way that can still speak to us all – was Maximilien Robespierre, the great loser of 9 Thermidor.”

I mean, okay, sure, history is written by the victors, and Jones has a point that no one during the Terror called it the Terror… because, as Jones himself points out, Robespierre and company had squelched freedom of the press, opposition to the government was punishable by death, and publicly admitting to being terrified was itself a punishable offence, because of course the innocent have nothing to fear. The Thermidorians didn’t destroy the democratic promise of the revolution. Robespierre had already destroyed it.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I liked Siobhan Dowd’s Bog Child so much that I must have put A Swift Pure Cry on my list without reading the summary, because about a third of the way through the book I was getting Vibes, finally looked it up, and glumly learned that yes, indeed! this is a book about an accidental teenage pregnancy.

Accidentally teenage pregnancy is about on the same level as cancer on the list of “items I wish to avoid in my leisure reading,” so as you can imagine I wailed and gnashed my teeth. However, if that’s something you DO like, I actually think Dowd’s writing here is both tighter and more poetic than in Bog Child... and, uh, I’ll definitely be reading the summaries before I venture any more of her books!

I also finished Janet Flanner’s Paris Was Yesterday: 1925-1939, a collection of her notes to the New Yorker about happenings in Paris. As pleasure reading it left something to be desired - I wanted the notes to be longer, or more detailed, or just more something than most of them were - but it would be a fantastic research resource about Paris life in those years, and also the western European experience of the run-up to World War II.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve read the first chapter of R. A. MacAvoy The Grey Horse, and so far the titular stallion has more or less run away with Anrai, the elderly hostler who found him standing atop a round hillock above the sea. It’s my belief that this horse may be one of the Good Folk, but we shall see.

What I Plan to Read Next

Racing to finish up some books before I head to New York City next Monday! My main goal is to finish Megan Whalen Turner’s Return of the Thief and wrap up my Queen’s Thief review sequence.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Jane Langton’s The Fragile Flag, and aaaaaaaah, I really liked this book, you guys. Young Georgie (also the heroine of Langton’s The Fledgling) finds an old American flag in the attic, which gives people visions if it wraps around them; she decides to march on Washington with it, in hopes of convincing the President not to launch the Peace Missile (for which read Reagan’s Star Wars; the book was published in 1984).

Naturally the march swells to enormous size as it continues on, and George manages to meet the president in the end, etc. etc. Of course it’s escapism, but it’s really nice escapism in the current political climate. And the book is beautifully constructed, too, all the pieces of the plot (it’s more complicated than I’ve made it sound here) all come together like clockwork, and strike like midnight at just the climactic moment.

I also finished Warren Lewis’s The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV, which I read because the Inklings book I read recently praised it (Warren Lewis is C. S. Lewis’s brother) and also because I’ve long meant to learn more about France, and indeed it is a pleasant and readable introductory work to seventeenth century France.

And, for the Unread Book Club: I reread William McCleery’s Wolf Story, which in our youth my brother and I liked so much that we importuned our father to read it multiple times. I think he got bored and started making up new twists in the story to amuse himself, although I can’t be sure because the father in the book (who is telling a story to his child in the book) also gets bored with the story he is telling and keeps trying to come up with twists to end it quickly. It’s very meta.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m slogging through Margaret Stohl’s Black Widow: Forever Red, which I am not liking nearly as much as I expected sadly. I think this is partly the fault of my own expectations - I thought this would be about Natasha’s childhood or at least give us large lumps of backstory, perhaps flashbacks!, but it really does not. But it’s also not very strongly written.

Really not feeling this one. Maybe I’ll just give it up.

I’m also working on Gary Paulsen’s The Island, which is an oddly poetic book - I mean, not odd really, or only because my main association with Paulsen is Hatchet which is more of a survival story. This one involves a lot of our hero sitting on the island, contemplating nature.

And I continue to chug along in Tolkien’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight!

What I Plan to Read Next

Norah of Billabong is winging its way through the mail to me as we speak! So definitely that.

I finished reading Mary McAuliffe's When Paris Sizzled, which is about life in the art world of Paris between the Armistice and the Wall Street Crash, and which I enjoyed very much; I would recommend it to anyone with a prior interest in the time and place.

But I might not recommend it to someone who is just dipping their toe into these waters for the first time, because McAuliffe throws so many different names and relationships at the reader that I think it would be very difficult to keep up if you don't already have a working knowledge of at least some of their stories. I already knew quite a bit about some of the cast of characters - the Hemingways, the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein, Jean Renoir (the famous painter's son and a famous film director in his own right, and also one of the main characters in the charming 2012 French film Renoir), which left a lot of space free to sort out all the others - but I still don't think I got a good grasp on who all the music composers were, for instance.

It's all interesting, mind, I'd be hard pressed to point to any particular strand and say "This. This could have been left out and nothing of value would be lost." The stuff about the rivalry between Citroen and Renault cars, say, seems in some ways out of place with the rest of the book -and yet cars are so central to modernity that they do fit, as well.

Or perhaps the sections about Marie Curie? But those are so small, and Marie Curie is one of the figures that a lot of readers will already have some familiarity with anyway...

So the breadth probably makes this book a bad introduction to the time period: there's simply too much to take in at once. But if you already know something about the era, enough to make your way through the sea of names, it's a fascinating and evocative look at an era.

The strict chronological ordering contributes to the confusion - each chapter consists of little snippets about what our many main characters were doing during that time - but it also gives the book a sense of atmosphere. Because it's all scrambled together like that, you can really feel what a frenetic and busy time this was, culturally speaking, with so many people making so much art and trying to stretch art in so many different directions.

There's not a lot of depth here, but if you have enough prior knowledge to orient yourself, the breadth is breath-taking.

Via sartorias: The Paris Time Capsule Apartment. (My friend Emma tells me that this whole website is full of secret Paris things and urban exploring in general. Clearly I should poke through its nooks and crannies.)

But this article in particular is so cool: an apartment in Paris, which the owner shut up when she fled at the beginning of World War II, was only recently reopened. Can you imagine how amazing it would be to walk into it? Like stepping into the past. I wonder why the owner never returned.

It’s like the beginning of a mystery novel, especially when you factor in the forgotten painting that they found! What kept her away? The owner paid the rent punctually till she died, so she hadn't forgotten about it... it haunted her, perhaps; it holds ghosts, literal or figurative.

If I had any gift for mystery plotting, I would try my hand at it.