Early one morning in May 1871, the writer Edmond de Goncourt looked at the sky and thought he might be witnessing an eclipse. Venturing out from his friend’s apartment, he overheard people saying the Tuileries Palace was on fire. He decided to go see for himself. He got as far as the Place de la Madeleine when a shell exploded only a few yards away. Better, he thought, to head the other way.
Later, as evening came on, Goncourt watched large swathes of central Paris go up in flames. ‘Against the night sky’, he wrote, the city ‘looked like one of those Neapolitan gouaches of an eruption of Vesuvius on a sheet of black paper’.
All week, the French army had been advancing street by street into central Paris. Sharpshooters placed high up in buildings along the Rue Royale were firing at insurgents hunkered behind barricades. These insurgents were French citizens, like them. Sensing the game was finally up, they slowly withdrew toward the Hôtel de Ville, setting fire to buildings as they fell back. Thousands of rebels, meanwhile, were captured and summarily executed. The water by the banks of the Seine ran red with their blood. ‘The Louvre and the Tuileries are burning’, reported The New York Times, which put the appalling news from Paris on its front page every day that week.
The Louvre survived (though only just). The great museum, first opened to the public during the French Revolution, was where two of my favourite painters, Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot, had been introduced to one another three years earlier. Morisot’s dark colouring and dramatically shadowed eyes immediately reminded Manet of Francisco Goya. He was in love with all things Spanish at the time, especially the art of Diego Velázquez and Goya, so he asked Morisot if she would model for a painting. The Balcony, 1868–69, now in the Musée d’Orsay, was Manet’s homage to Majas on a Balcony, 1800–10, Goya’s painting of two prostitutes and their sinister-looking pimps.
When they met, Manet was already married and Morisot was still single at 29. She was from an affluent upper-middle class family, so in some ways it was risky for her to fraternise with an artist like Manet who, although he was from the same social class, was known for risqué and often bewildering paintings like Olympia, 1863, and The Luncheon on the Grass (Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe), 1862–63 (both in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay). But Morisot was headstrong and did as she pleased. Just as Manet had two brothers, Morisot had two sisters. The relationships among the two families and the artists, writers and composers in their circle were all thickening nicely when France suddenly descended into a predicament, a set of events, that would uncannily take on the worst aspects of that other side of Goya – the Goya of The Third of May 1808, 1814, and the Disasters of War series (1810–15).
In September 1870, after an ill-advised declaration of war, France was overwhelmed by a German army. Humiliated, Napoleon III – the authoritarian emperor despised by Manet and his circle – surrendered on the battlefield at Sedan. Back in Paris, a republic was quickly declared, even as an enemy army advanced on the city. Before long, Paris was cut off from the world, with Manet and Morisot still inside it. Manet had sent his wife and son to safety in south-west France but he stayed behind and joined the National Guard, along with his friend Edgar Degas, the composers Camille Saint-Saëns and Gabriel Fauré, and 400,000 of their fellow citizens.
Paris was converted into a giant military barracks. Theatres and cafe-concerts were transformed into hospitals. Farm animals were brought in from the surrounding countryside. Trees were cut down for fuel, and when gas ran low, the streetlights were switched off. What followed was one of the coldest winters in living memory, and the population gradually fell to starvation. Many resorted to eating pigeons and rats. Disease was rampant. The only way to communicate with the outside world was to send letters – and homing pigeons – out by balloon, hoping the pigeons would eventually bring back replies.
The whole ordeal ended in surrender in January 1871. But for Paris, incredibly, things were about to get worse. The economic hardships and the sense of shame brought on by the surrender were so acute that six weeks later, the city’s more radical – or desperate – residents improvised an insurrection. The outmatched government withdrew to Versailles, and an alternative administration was installed inside Paris.
The Commune, as it was called, lasted almost two-and-a-half months, during which time Paris was again besieged, this time by France’s own army. In May, after taking its time to regroup, the army poured in through the city’s defensive wall, and civil war broke out in the streets. Troops ruthlessly slaughtered their fellow citizens, who meanwhile murdered hostages and set fire to buildings. The scale of the devastation was so great and gruesome that it became known as Bloody Week.
I wanted to write Paris in Ruins because I suspected there were sides to Impressionism that must be related to the trauma of 1870–71, which became known as L’Anee terrible (the Terrible Year). Registering the full horror of what had happened, which histories of the movement so often consign to a few paragraphs, was sure to bear, I felt, on our understanding of modern art’s first avant-garde movement.
But my motivation was more personal than that. I wanted to get deeper into the relationship between Morisot and Manet. I touched on this relationship in my earlier book, The Art of Rivalry (2016), which told the story of four artistic relationships that were simultaneously loving and competitive. One of the pairs I had focused on was Manet and Degas, but Morisot played an important role in that chapter. I knew from her letters that she was a complex personality with a rich interior life. She was a woman you could as easily imagine in a novel by Ivan Turgenev or Leo Tolstoy as in the annals of Impressionism.
Then, in 2018, I went to Quebec City to see a travelling Morisot retrospective. Reviewing that show, I realised that the Terrible Year had been more than just a stressful blip in Morisot’s life. She’d been lucky to survive. The experience changed everything for her. It was the catalyst for her decision not only to commit herself to a career as a professional artist but to join the Impressionists – against Manet’s advice. His career, too, took a major turn after the Terrible Year. Not only what he painted but the way he painted changed dramatically.
As a writer on art, I’m less drawn to aesthetic or sociological theories than to the human motivations behind art making. That means I’m interested in relationships, influence, competition, rivalry, distraction, ambition, love and loneliness. I felt that the strong connection between Manet and Morisot had a lot to do with the traumatic experiences they endured that year. So, I set out to come to a deeper understanding of those experiences and how they might have affected their art.
If Paris in Ruins is a love story, it’s also an attempt to show that Impressionism – the revolution Manet and Morisot helped inaugurate – is more contradictory, more charged with history, suffering and personality than people often realise. We associate Impressionism today with serene, light-filled paintings by Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne and Alfred Sisley, often showing the landscape around the snaking Seine to the west of Paris or the bustling streets of the city itself. The NGV has beautiful examples: Boulevard Montmarte, morning, cloudy weather, 1897, by Pissarro (supported by Felton Bequest); various depictions of haystacks and riverscapes by Sisley and Monet; The uphill road, 1881, by Cezanne (supported by Felton Bequest); The plain of Gennevilliers, yellow fields, 1884, by Gustave Caillebotte (supported by Felton Bequest). Boston, where I’ve lived since 2008, is especially rich in Impressionism, as the current exhibition allows Australians to see.
And the pictures are indeed serene. But it’s notable that they were painted by artists who were all followers of Manet, a trenchant critic of Napoleon III and a passionate republican, as they all were. Their paintings were praised by republican critics in republican journals. Critics in the more conservative press linked the breakaway artists who mounted the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 with the Communards, who had so recently plunged Paris into chaos.
Impressionism, that’s to say, was embedded in (very fraught) politics from the start. We tend to focus on the movement as a style – liberating light and colour through broken brushstrokes and de-emphasising drawing, structure and volumetric modelling. But just as important is the Impressionists’ preferred subject matter. These painters valued sincerity and truth and were deeply suspicious of ‘official’ culture. They wanted to show members of all the different classes and professions, and to paint familiar landscapes, stripped of moral rhetoric and artificial hierarchies. They were trying to depict a democratic society at a time of deep uncertainty about the long-term viability of a democratic republic in France.
So even if we are reluctant or slow to sense the Impressionists’ modest yet quietly radical motivations, preferring to submit to their paintings’ sheer beauty, they are nonetheless there, ‘baked in’, as it were, and surely an important part of why Impressionism still speaks so strongly to us today.
Sebastian Smee is an Australian art critic for the Washington Post and the author of Paris in Ruins: Love, War and the Birth of Impressionism. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2011 while at the Boston Globe and wrote The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art in 2016.
This article was first published in the Sep–Oct 2025 issue of NGV Magazine.