Continuing from this post…
For the French, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 was a disaster of the most total sort. The Prussian army strolled through France and laid siege to Paris. As a result, the French government fell, the country lost territory (Alsace-Lorraine) and the Prussian victory effectively enabled the creation of modern Germany.
France’s leading painters offered mostly nationalist responses. Ernest Meissonier tried to squeeze triumph out of the siege with his goofy Siege of Paris, a painting so absurd that it rivals ‘Mission Accomplished’ as a propaganda piece. His student Edouard Detaille painted a few bleak scenes, but not many. This painting at the Musee d’Orsay presents the siege as a relaxing afternoon’s entertainment. (And by the 1880s Detaille recovered his tendency toward romanticization.) Today both Meissonier and Detaille are remembered as academic jingoists, as artists who missed the story.
Manet did not. The painting here is 1878’s Rue Monsier with Flags from the collection of the Getty Museum. The context of the painting has been well-discussed by T.J. Clark and others (including the Getty’s web text): In 1878 France declared a national holiday in an effort to celebrate France’s glorious recovery from war. Manet didn’t have quite as rosy a view.
You can’t miss the one-legged man, likely a war vet, at the left of the painting. The scene is apparently set on that national holiday and Manet juxtaposes the man against one of Baron Haussmann’s famously straight Parisian streets. On the right — on the other side of the street — are Haussmann’s new streetlights and a prosperous family. They all ignore the one-legged man. Manet is reminding us of the cost of war and of France’s willful negligence of its warriors.
When I see the Manet I think of the Walter Reed scandal. Just as the wealthy Parisians on the sidewalk look away, our government has tried to ensure we do too.
Related: ‘Mission accomplished’ and the lessons of history. Goya.
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