Edouard Manet and "Civil War" Author(s): Jacquelynn Baas Source: Art Journal, Vol. 45, No.

1, Manet (Spring, 1985), pp. 36-42 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/776873 Accessed: 02/11/2008 13:38
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Edouard Manet

and

"Civil

War"

By Jacquelynn Baas considering any form of artistic expression, we must address the question of production: "Why does this work look the way it does?" A useful answer often requires an aggressive contextual inquiry. This is especially true of prints emerging from nineteenth-century publishing circles, where the intentions of art, journalism, and illustration were often interrelated. One reason for producing a work of art in the form of a print-an "exactly repeatable pictorial statement"'-was to make a calculated venture of public communication. (Calculated, for instance, because some print mediums are "more public" than others-a fact that refers us to existing conditions of printing technology and publishing practices.) Inquiring into the circumstances of such a work, we may discover parallel forms of communication that contain clues to lost meanings and intentions. Edouard Manet's 1871 lithograph Civil War (Fig. 1)2 is an unusually rich example because of the availability of contemporaryaccounts of the Paris Commune, which is its subject. Fig. I Manet, Civil War, 1871, lithograph, 151/2 x 20" (image). Hanover, N.H., Here I shall situate Civil War within a Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Purchase from the Julia L. Whittier cluster of visually interrelated works, Fund Pr.955.1 10. drawing on the available biographical and historical evidence to suggest a new with social and political subjects. It is the prints thus produced for a large interpretation of Manet's print. In the easy to understand the appeal lithogra- audience.3 In this realm, Daumier was process it should become evident that phy would have held for an artist like an obvious model. Manet's earliest lithocontextual perspectives can shed a use- Manet. Etching, with its painstaking graph (Harris 1), published in Diogene ful light on formal aspects of Manet's processes of biting and rebiting, was in April 1860, was a caricature very work. more suited to a caustic and restlessly much in the Daumier tradition. His next Most of Manet's prints were etchings experimental artistic temperament like works in this medium were executed in executed during the early 1860s. He that of Degas than to Manet's flaneur 1862. Two of them ornament sheet music (Harris 29, 32). Another-The ,employed this traditional print medium aesthetic. There is evidence, moreover, that Balloon, Manet's first important lithoprincipally to restate the compositions of his paintings. Towards the end of the Manet was attracted to lithography for graph-depicts a popular entertainment 1860s, however, Manet increasingly reasons beyond its ease of execution. As in a manner that resonates with social turned to lithography, a more direct Nils Sandblad has pointed out, Manet meaning.4 Besides the 1871 Civil War, medium that stimulated him to produce seems to have associated the medium other lithographs in which Manet independent graphic statements, often with popular art and to have intended invested potent political comment in36 Art Journal In

clude The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian'of 1868 (Fig. 2), The Barricade of 1871 (Fig. 3), and Polichinelle of 1874 (Harris 54, 71, 80 respectively). All three will help us interpret Civil War. Ironically, the factor that made lithography suitable for works with a social or political message-its capacity for large editions-resulted in small or nonexistent editions for most of Manet's lithographs during his lifetime. Unlike etching, for which Manet could rely on the assistance of friends like Felix Bracquemond and Henri Guerard in the preparation and printing of his plates, lithographic printing required the services of professional printers employed by publishers who not only liked to be paid in advance but were also bound by harsh government censorship laws. The tribulations attending Manet's attempted publication of The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian provide a case in point. Not only was the printing as well as the publication of this lithograph forbidden, but the publisher, Lemercier, initially refused to return the stone to Manet. Instead he tried to bully the artist into allowing the stone to be defaced. Manet succeeded in rescuing his work only by waging a public campaign in the art press.5 Although Manet probably executed The Barricade and Civil War soon after the "bloody week" of May 21-28 that ended the Paris Commune in 1871, the public trauma and government embarrassment associated with this event prevented publication of The Barricade during Manet's lifetime and delayed publication of Civil War until February 1874.6 Like the publication of Polichinelle in June of 1874, the publication of Civil War may have been linked to Manet's disgust at the election of Marshal MacMahon-who had led the ruthless suppression of the Commune-as President of the Republic in 1873. Polichinelle, which was suspected of being a caricature of the Marshal, was suppressed by the government.7That Civil War escaped censorship can only be attributed to the carefully contrived neutrality of its imagery. Manet's visual reminder of the Commune could not be overt if the print was to reach its audience. Surely, to ignore this constraint on Manet's artistic language does an injustice both to the artist and to our understanding of the work.8 The circumstances of censorship require a more active scrutiny, heightening our alertness to the subtleties of the visual clues Manet gives us.

Fig. 2 Manet, The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian, 1868, lithograph, 13'/8 x 17" (image). Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Rosenwald Collection, 1947. print. Texturally, he has confidently exploited the expressive, calligraphic possibilities provided by the sharpened end of a greasy lithographic crayon on smooth stone, as well as the gritty, tonal capabilities of its flat side. One can almost reconstruct the exact size and shape of the chunks of crayon with which Manet worked, so graphic are his strokes. Delicate lines and flicks have been scratched through the texture of the crayon in the darker areas, allowing the white of the paper to gleam through. All this is typical of Manet's manner of working. Here, however, in concert with the multiple directions created by the crayon strokes, the graphic texture of the crayon imparts a disturbing sense of agitation to an otherwise serene composition. Significantly, Theodore Duret recalled that "the scene was not 'composed.'" "Manet actually saw it," Duret states, "at the corner of the rue de l'Arcade and the boulevard Malesherbes. He made an on-the-spot sketch of it."9 Leon Rosenthal has pointed out that the location mentioned by Duret identifies the colonnade and iron fence depicted sketchily behind the barricade as the Church of the Madeleine. Rosenthal then interprets the presence of the Madeleine as a sacred rebuke to the violent scene for which it served as backdrop. How easy it would have been, he argues, for a less reticent artist to "oppose the serenity of the stones and the protest of religion with human barbarity." In contrast, Rosenthal suggests, Manet placed his entire emphasis on the blunt fact of the dead soldier, who bears an unmistakable resemblance to Manet's own Dead Toreador of 1864.10 (Manet had made an etching of this painting in 1868 (Fig. 4), three years before the date of Civil War, Harris 55.) These are useful perceptions. My purpose here is to place them in a denser field of visual and historical reference, from which some important qualifications will emerge. A key work in this context is The Barricade (see Fig. 3), which was executed at the same time as Civil War but not published until after Manet's death. Manet obviously based its composition on that of his own earlier lithograph The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian (see Fig. 2). Though reversed and slightly smaller in scale, the firing squad in The Barricade is identical to that of The Execution of Maximilian. In effect, this reinforces the import of Manet's allusion to the French government's responsibilityfor the execution of its puppet-emperor by paralleling it to the crime against its own citizens in The Barricade." The setting for The Barricade may well have been taken from life. There remains an on-the-spot drawing from the year 1870-71 that shows soldiers gathering in a street to return to their post (De Leiris 334). Like The Barricade, this sketch is an emphatically vertical composition in which soldiers with their backs to the viewer are framed by buildings. It has been well documented that Spring 1985 37

Civil

War is Manet's finest lithograph, and it may be his greatest

x 13 /8" (image). Fig. 3 Manet, The Barricade, 1871, lithograph, 181/4 Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Rosenwald Collection, 1946. Manet regularly relied on collateral visual sources to help formulate his final artistic statements.'2 For The Barricade, another probable source is a contemporary wood engraving by Pierre Verdeil that depicts an actual execution during the last week of the Commune. Entitled Execution sommaire d'insurges agents de la Commune, rue SaintGermain-l'Auxerrois, le 25 mai, a 6 heures 1/2, the print appeared in the journal L'Illustration on June 3, 1871 (Fig. 5). Although Verdeil's composition is horizontal and populated while Manet's is vertical and spare, both deploy a barrel as a repoussoir element in the bottom right corner and a lamppost as a vertical anchor. To the left of the lamppost, the repetitive punctuation 38 Art Journal of Verdeil's mounted soldiers has in the Manet been transformedinto three generalized but emphatic doorways. n even more convincing auxiliary source exists for Civil War, a source that would certainly have caught Manet's eye because of its striking resemblance to his own Dead Toreador. I refer to an anonymous wood engraving entitled The Last Perquisition, which appeared in the June 17, 1871, issue of the Illustrated London News (Fig. 6). (There were many English reporters in Paris during the Commune. The British were initially hostile to the insurgents but soon became outspoken in their condemnation of the government massacres, which were clearly aimed at total

elimination of the rebellious element of the population.) The Last Perquisition shows a dead national guardsman lying before an overrun barricade. He has been stripped of his boots and coat, and his pockets are being emptied by a soldier of the Versailles government. Although in Civil War the dead soldier is fully clothed and the looting soldier is not present, Civil War shares with The Last Perquisition not only the pose of the fallen soldier but also his short pointed beard, the placement of the barricade, and the overall compositional arrangement. Because the process of printing reverses a drawn composition, the fact that the pose of the fallen soldier is exactly the same suggests that Manet copied his soldier directly from the Dead Toreador (see Fig. 4). He could then have easily adapted the figure to the setting of The Last Perquisition, which is reversed as one would expect: the barricade tumbles to the left rather than to the right, and the marching soldiers to the right of The Last Perquisition have been replaced by the vertical pillars of the Madeleine in the upper left-hand corner of Civil War. The overall composition of Civil War is certainly closer to that of The Last Perquisition than to any other proposed visual source. And Manet's use of the Dead Toreador, reversed in pose and isolated in the setting, alerts us to his strategy of adapting preexisting images, which in this case has an even richer history than I have so far suggested. Two sources that have been mentioned-Daumier's Rue Transnonain'3 and an Alexander Gardner photograph of a fallen American Civil War soldier'4-are visually comparatively remote. A very convincing influence, however, has been proposed by Gerald Ackerman, who clarified the links between works by Manet and Jean-Leon Gerome that were first noted by Bates Lowry.s1 Ackerman's argument is too complex to summarize here, but one of his conclusions need only be restated: that Manet was strongly influenced in his Dead Toreador by a well-known painting by Ger6me entitled Dead Caesar, and that Gerome in turn was influenced by Manet's composition when he produced an etching of his Caesar for an 1869 publication entitled Sonnets et eaux-fortes (Fig. 7). Clearly Civil War belongs to this chain of visual reverberations. An examination of its relationshipto these other works yields a valuable perspective on the type of audience reaction Manet wished his print to elicit. Gerome produced two painted versions of his Caesar, the first of which was exhibited at the Salon of 1859, the second at the Exposition Universelle of

ing. Whatever the details, it is inconceivable that Manet would not have known of Gerome's etching. Nor is it likely that a visually literate viewer of the period would have missed the connection between Gerome's Dead Caesar, Manet's Dead Toreador, and, by extension, Civil War. It is significant, then, that Manet chose to present his fallen soldier with the same orientation as that of the Dead Caesar. Reversed, the figure would have too readily recalled Manet's own Dead Toreador and would perhaps have been engulfed by its connotative ambience. Along with The Last Perquisition, Gerome's Dead Caesar constitutes the most important visual referent for Fig. 4 Manet, The Dead Toreador, 1868, etching, 33/4 x 75/8" (image). Manet's lithograph, and the rhetorical Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchased: The Harrison Fund, 63-176-2. overtones of both images are part of their usefulness. Although The Last Perquisition was meant to be interpreted by the mass readership of The Illustrated London News as "eyewitness" journalism, it also contained a powerful message: the defeat and total humiliation of the Commune. In fact, The Last Perquisition may have inspired Manet to produce a dignified, even heroic depiction of the fallen Commune. Correlatively, Manet appears to have had a political reason for alluding to Gerome's Dead Caesar: to transfer the dignity of the fallen, betrayed leader to his own image of the dead soldier. This suggestion is based on the assumption that Manet specifically intended to depict a fallen national guardsman in Civil War. The soldier's generalized uniform and the title printed beneath the composition"Guerre civile"-have led Leon Rosenthal and, more recently, Marianne Ruggiero, to argue that Manet wished the identity of the fallen soldier to be ambiguous in order to portray civil warfare as Fig. 5 lPerre Verdell, Summary Execution oj communard insurgents at tne rue Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, 25 May at 6:30, wood engraving published in a universal tragedy.'9 However, "Guerre civile" was a standard caption for jourL'Illustration, June 3, 1871, 61/4x 93/4" (image). Dartmouth College Library. nalistic depictions of events connected 1867. In both instances, the works elic- Gerome was inviting a comparison with the Commune uprising in the popuited considerable critical comment.16 In between his work and that of Manet, lar press-Le Monde illustre provides Sonnets et eaux-fortes, Gerome's etch- who also contributedto Sonnets et eaux- numerous examples. It is far more likely that Manet intended his caption, ing accompanied a poem by Anatole fortes (Exotic Flower, Harris 57). Manet's etched version of the Dead "Guerre civile," not as a universal term France that had been inspired by the for what he was depicting, but as a second painting. (Most of the other Toreador was done in 1868-precisely etchings in Sonnets et eaux-fortes were when Gerome would have been strug- neutral term. The distinction is imporinspired by or related to the sonnets gling to produce his etching of the Dead tant. I suggest that whatever generalizarather than the other way around, a fact Caesar.'7 Gerome made only four etch- tion can be seen to characterize this that underscores the celebrity of ings during his entire career.18Philippe lithograph should be attributed more to Gerome's work.) The title of France's Burty, who was in charge of soliciting Manet's desire to see his print published poem, "Un Senateur romain," refers to etchings for Sonnets et eaux-fortes, was than to a desire to make a universal a figure appearing in the second, more closely associated with another contrib- statement regarding the nature of civil compositionally complex version of utor to the book, the master-etcher Felix war. The uniforms of the army-the VerGerome's painting. Ackerman's conten- Bracquemond,who assisted Manet with tion that Gerome's etching was in- many of his plates. Given this tightly sailles government troops-and those of fluenced by Manet is supported by the woven network of painters and print- the national guard-the soldiers of the fact that the senator does not appear in makers, it is very likely that Burty sent federation-were quite similar, difthe Caesar etching. It may even be that Gerome to Bracquemond to help him fering primarily in details of color.20In in the close cropping of his composition translate his composition into an etch- black-and-white prints like The Last Spring 1985 39

groups of twenty persons, file by on unsteady planks that had been laid out before the corpses. We watched this mournful inspection, interrupted from time to time by heartrendingcries from those who recognized someone dear to them. This made a terrifying impression on us, so terrifying that at the studio, where the heedlessness of youth made everything a joke, this visit to Montmartre cemetery was never mentioned. Manet, however, made a drawing of it that he put into a portfolio without showing anyone. Manet's sympathies during the tragic final days of the Commune twenty years later are revealed in a letter of June 5, 1871, from Mme Morisot to her daughter Berthe: Fig. 6 The Last Perquisition, wood engraving published in the Illustrated London News, June 17, 1871, 83/8 x 131/8" (image). Dartmouth College Library. Tiburce [Berthe's brother] has met two Communards, at this moment when they are all being shot ... Manet and Degas! Even at this stage they are condemning the drastic measures used to repress them. I think they are insane, don't you?25 In a letter of June 29, Mme Morisot wrote Berthe's sister Edma of Manet's hatred of Adolphe Thiers, the head of the Versailles government: On Tuesday at last I saw our friend Manet.... We were unable to say anything to each other, even in a casual way. ... Manet irritates me with his railings against Monsieur Thiers, whom he calls a demented old man; he says that anyone else would be better, and that the only capable man we have is Gambetta. When you hear talk of that sort, you can scarcely have any hope for the future of this country.26 Once we understand how emphatically pro-Commune Manet's sympathies were, we are alerted to clues to the hidden message of this lithograph, which was Manet's only public statement about the events of 1871. One such clue is the sketchy presence of the Madeleine in the background of the print. The Commune was thoroughly anticlerical, and churches were often turned into meeting places for various libertarian groups. One of the instigating factors behind the Paris Commune had been the disappointing results of the February national elections, in which only 150 of 768 government seats went to Republicans, the majority having been won by conservative Catholics sympathetic to the provinces. And more than any other church

Fig. 7 Jean-Leon Gerome, Dead Caesar, 1868, etching, 43/8 x 71/2".The

Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1968 (68.673.37). Paris, defiled by the blood of her children."23 /1anet's populist politics went back ^M to early experiences during the June Days of 1848 and the attempted coup d'etat of 1851. Antonin Proust, Manet's biographer and lifelong friend, provides a moving account of the aftermath of the days of December 1851, when Manet was nineteen years old: Along with our comrades from the studio, we dashed off to Montmartre cemetery, where LouisNapoleon's victims had been laid out under a bed of straw with only their heads visible. The police made the visitors, supplied with numbered cards and divided into

Perquisition and Civil War, identification must be inferred from contextual detail and contemporary interpretation. The earliest writers on Manet, those who were closest in time to the event, clearly identified Manet's soldier with the Commune. In 1889 Henri Beraldi, who was close to both Bracquemondand Burty, described the print as depicting the "body of a dead federalist soldier before a barricade."21Duret, in 1902, referred to the "tragic image of a dead national guardsman, abandoned alongside a dismantled barricade."22 And in 1906 Moreau-Nelaton wrote that "the Barricade and the dead federalist soldier who personifies Civil War were produced under the vivid impression of deplorable sights gathered throughout 40 Art Journal

Manet could have chosen, that of Saint Mary Magdalene signified the union of Church and State that the Commune was determined to end. Originally intended by Napoleon I as a temple of glory to the Grande Armee, the Madeleine had strong associations with the Emperor Napoleon III by way of his illustrious ancestor. The Madeleine also stood for a terrible moment in the uprising. On Wednesday, May 23, much of central Paris fell to the Versailles governmenttroops, who moved inexorably eastward during the course of the week. A stand was made between the barricade of the Madeleine and the place de la Concorde. Here one of the first massacres of Communards by government troops took place. After the barricade fell, three hundred national guards who had taken refuge in the church were executed on the spot. Just the day before, Thiers had announced to the Assembly at Versailles regarding prisoners of war: "We are honorablemen: expiation will take place in the name of the law, according to the law, with the law."28To a Parisian, the signs of the Madeleine in the background of this print would not only place the scene but recall this atrocity. As Duret indicates in the quotation cited above, Manet may well have been a witness to it.29And given the status of the Madeleine in French civic life, its presence endows the scene with a deeper political message: the disregard of the church-state for her children. Other details reinforce this suggestion. As has often been pointed out, the pair of legs extending into the lower right-hand corner of the composition belong to a civilian, testifying to the indiscriminate nature of the slaughter. It has not been noticed, however, that Manet's soldier, like the Dead Toreador, grasps an object in his hand. In that work, it is the matador's muleta. In Civil War its outline is deliberately obscured by the crayon and by parallel strokes of diagonal scraping, quite different in quality from the flickering white scratches and flecks in other parts of the print. In fact, this obliquely ribbed marking, carefully centered within a white space, is a textural and compositional focal point of the work. The effect is similar to that of a cancellation mark, texturally alien, superimposed upon a graphic event. This conspicuous overmarking suggests the censorship that forced Manet to obscure his political message. If we examine the outlined object beneath, as we are pointedly invited to do by the forms surrounding it, we discover a crumpled piece of white cloth. In the context of Civil War, it could have only one meaning: a signal of surrenderthat has been disregarded.

This interpretation would be consistent with the eyewitness accounts, one of which is found in the journals of Manet's considerably more conservative contemporary, Edmond de Goncourt. Hardly sympathetic to the radicals, Goncourt was nevertheless moved by an incident that he witnessed from Philippe Burty's window on May 23, 1871-the same day as the fall of the barricade at the Madeleine. Note the sense of agitation imparted to the scene by Goncourt's repeated reference to the rain of little leaves and twigs brought about by the hail of bullets. This device may remind us of the similar effect produced by the arresting flicks of white in Civil War. The barricade is taken. ... The Versailles troops come out of the Rue Drouot, spread out in a line, and open a terrible fire in the direction of the Saint Denis gate. ... Kneeling down and protected as well as possible, this is what I see through the open curtain of the window. On the other side of the boulevard a man is stretched out on the ground; I see only the soles of his boots and a bit of gold braid. Two men, a National Guard and a lieutenant, stand near the corpse. Bullets make the leaves of a little tree spreading over their heads rain on them. One dramatic detail which I forgot. Behind them in a recess in front of a closed portecochere a woman is lying flat for her whole length on the sidewalk, holding a kepi in one of her hands. The National Guard, with angry violent gestures, shouting to someone off stage, indicates by signs that he wants to pick up the dead man. The bullets continue to make leaves fall on the two men. Then the National Guard, whose face I see red with anger, throws his rifle on his shoulder, butt in the air [a gesture of surrender], and walks toward the rifle shots, insults on his tongue. Suddenly I see him stop, put his hand to his forehead, for a second lean his hand and forehead against a little tree, then half turn around and fall on his back, arms outspread. The lieutenant had remained motionless by the side of the first dead man, calm as a man meditating in his garden. One bullet, which made a little branch fall on him close to his head, which he tossed off with a flick of the hand, did not rouse him from his immobility. He looked for a moment at his fallen comrade. Then, without rushing, he pushed his sword behind him with disdainful delib-

eration, then bent down and attempted to lift up the body. The dead man was tall and heavy, and like an inert thing evaded the lieutenant's efforts and slipped out of his arms to one side or the other. Finally the lieutenant lifted him up and, holding him tight against his chest, he was carrying him off when a bullet, breaking his thigh, made them turn together in a hideous pirouette, the dead man and the living man, and fall on top of each other. I doubt that many people have been privileged to witness so heroic and simple a disdain for death. They told me this evening that the woman lying on the groundwas the wife of one of those three men.30 If the reactionary Edmond de Goncourt could so readily sympathize with the heroism of the defenders of the short-lived federal government, we can hardly expect less of Manet, who was a supporter of the Commune. In fact, if we reconstructthe way Civil Warwould have been interpreted at the time, its import is analogous to that of Goncourt's narrative account, but subtly inflected towards a more politicized understanding. It displays Manet's eloquence not only within his chosen medium of lithography but also within the public realm of reportage. inally, we must acknowledge that the critical view of Civil War as a timeless statement of the tragedy of war is "correct,"in the sense that Manet was forced to promote a generalized effect if his image was to be publicly disseminated. If my interpretation is sound, however, the clues to his political intent-the Madeleine and the white handkerchief-have been carefully placed at diagonally connected focal points at the top left and lower right. Thus Manet's Civil War-no less emphatically than his verbal statements that so irritated the complacent Mme Morisot-stands as an indictment of the Thiers-MacMahon governments and as a portrayal of the tragic dignity of the Paris Commune. Notes
1 William M. Ivins, Jr., Prints and Visual Communication, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953, p. 2. 2 Etienne Moreau-N6elaton,Manet, graveur et lithographe, Paris, 1906, No. 81; Gu6rin 1969, No. 75; Jean C. Harris, Edouard Manet: Graphic Works, a Definitive Catalogue Raisonne, New York, 1970, No. 72; Anne Coffin Hanson, Edouard Manet, 1832-1883, exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art, No. 116; Joel Isaacson, Manet and Spain: Prints and

Spring 1985

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Drawings, exh. cat., Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Museum of Art, 1969, No. 33; Juliet Wilson, Edouard Manet: Das graphische Werk: Meisterwerke aus der Bibliotheque Nationale und weiterer Sammlungen, exh. cat., Ingelheim am Rhein, 1977, No. 73; Brown University 1981, No. 42; Reff 1982, No. 76. 3 Sandblad 1954, p. 153. 4 Harris (cited n. 2), No. 23. The complex social content of this print has recently been explored by Douglas Druick and Peter Zegers in "Manet's 'Balloon': French Diversion, The Fete de l'Empereur 1862," The Print Collector's Newsletter, 14, no. 2 (May-June 1983), pp. 37-46. 5 See: Antony Griffiths, "Execution of Maximilian," letter in The Burlington Magazine, 119, no. 896 (November 1977), p. 777; and Juliet Wilson Bareau, Manet 1832-1883, pp. 279, 531-34. 6 It was publishedin an edition of 100. See: Juliet Wilson (cited n. 2), pp. 110-11; and Juliet Wilson Bareau, Manet 1832-1883, pp. 279-80, 327-28. Amnesty with regard to the Commune was not declared until 1880-three years before Manet's death. See: Manet 1832-1883, p. 464, No. 205, for evidence of the artist's elation at this event. 7 Regarding Polichinelle, see: Marianne Ruggiero, Brown University 1981, pp. 36-37; Reff 1982, p. 124; and Nochlin 1983, p. 195. [See also Marilyn R. Brown, "Manet, Nodier, and Polichinelle," in this issue.-Ed.] 8 A disregard of the pressures of censorship on Manet's graphic work informs Marilyn R. Brown's recent attribution of the lithograph's "undeniable and lingering quality of ambiguity, uncertainty, or ambivalence" to Manet's own position as an "artistic declass." She finds Civil War expressive of the "quandaryof early modernism which, even when it directed itself toward politically avant-garde subjects, so juggled the issue of its own self-reflexiveness that it became detached from the immediacy of the chosen subject." Although Brown notes that the more overtly political Barricade was evidently intended for publication-"something that did not occur until 1884, after the amnesty and after the artist's death"-she sees no connection between the 1874 publication date of Civil War and its "ambiguity," preferring instead to insist upon Manet's bourgeois reluctance to assume a public political stance. (Brown 1983, pp. 101-7) 9 Theodore Duret, Histoire de Edouard Manet et de son oeuvre, nouvelle edition, Paris, 1919, p. 166 (1st ed. 1902). Manet had left Paris to join his family in the south of France in February 1871, after the surrenderof the city to the Prussians. The weight of available evidence indicates that he returned to Paris in time to witness the "semaine sanglante"-the defeat and massacre of the Communards by government troops during the week of May 21-28, 1871. In addition to the testimony of Duret, we have the claim by Antonin Proust that "II passa dans les Pyrenees la Commune, mais, avant la derniere bataille du mois de mai, il revint a

Paris, passant par Versailles" (Proust 1913, p. 64). Moreover, the letter of June 5, 1871, to Berthe Morisot from her mother quoted below (cited n. 25) tends to confirm that Manet was indeed in Paris at this time (see also the evidence given by Marianne Ruggiero, Brown University 1981, pp. 28-32). Juliet Wilson Bareau is, in my judgment, mistaken in using a letter to Berthe Morisot from Edouard Manet as evidence that Manet returned to Paris only after the end of the Commune. On June 10 Manet wrote to Morisot, "we have been back in Paris for several days now," leading Bareau to conclude that by "several days" Manet could hardly have meant more than two weeks (Manet 1832-1883, p. 323). However, as anyone who has neglected to contact a close friend upon returning from a long absence would confirm, it is likely that Manet was being evasive. One suspects that Berthe had pressed her mother for informationon this point, for on June 10 Mme Morisot wrote her: "Guillemet told me yesterday that the Manets [i.e., the family] have finally managed to return; it was Edouard whom Tiburce met, not his brother." (The Correspondence of Berthe Morisot, comp. and ed. Denis Rouart, trans. Betty W. Hubbard, New York, 1957, p. 63.) 10 Rosenthal 1925, pp. 88-89. 11 Manet traced an impression of the Execution of Maximilian, turning the composition into an intermediate watercolor (De Leiris 1969, Nos. 342 and 243, figs. 285 and 287; Reff 1982, Nos. 72-73; Manet 1832-1883, Nos. 124-25). 12 See: Fried 1969. 13 Ibid., p. 76, n. 167. 14 Harris (cited n. 2), p. 192. 15 Gerald M. Ackerman, "G6r6me and Manet," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 70 (September 1967), pp. 163-76. 16 In addition, G6r6me's work was widely reproduced in photogravure by the art dealer and publisher Goupil, who was his father-in-law. 17 Manet exhibited his etching of the Dead Toreador with Exotic Flower-his contribution to Sonnets et eaux-fortes-at the Salon of 1869; see Harris (cited n. 2), p. 157, for a discussion of the dating of this etching. Although the publication date of Sonnets et eaux-fortes is 1869 (Paris, Lemerre), its colophon states that "ce livre .. . a ete termin6 le 20 decembre 1868." 18 Henri Beraldi, Les Graveurs du XIX' siecle, Vol. 7, Paris, 1888, p. 103. 19 Rosenthal 1925, p. 88; Ruggiero, Brown University 1981, pp. 33-34. 20 Herbert Kn6tel, Jr., and Herbert Sieg, Uniforms of the World, New York, 1980, pp. 77-114. I should like to thank Gregory Schwarz for this reference. 21 Beraldi (cited n. 18), Vol. 9, 1889, p. 210. 22 Duret (cited n. 9), p. 166. 23 Moreau-N6elaton (cited n. 1), unpaginated [essay, p. 10].

24 Proust 1913, p. 26 (see also pp. 11-12, 25). 25 CorrespondenceBerthe Morisot (cited n. 9), p. 63. 26 Ibid., p. 68. 27 Ruggiero, Brown University 1981, p. 30. I should like to thank Stephen Nichols for his most helpful suggestions in this regard. 28 Georges Soria, Grande Histoire de la Commune: Edition du centenaire 1871-1971, Vol. 4, Paris, 1971, pp. 201, 281. Edwards 1971 (1977), p. 330. 29 See n. 9. 30 Edmond de Goncourt, Paris under Siege, 1870-1871: From the Goncourt Journal, ed. and trans. George J. Becker, historical intro. Paul H. Beik, Ithaca and London, 1969, pp. 299-300.

Jacquelynn Baas is Director of the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College.

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Art Journal