Preface `This is a book of misery, ruins and blood', is how Armand Dayot, Director of Fine Arts, described his publication in 1901 which recorded the events of 1870 and 1871 in France. The period is brief, barely 316 days of rapidly shifting political allegiances and events. But this was a period of radical imbalances of power in which the whole political spectrum in France was active and in contention: Royalists, Imperialists, Bonapartists, Republicans, Communists and Anarchists fought it out. In addition France went to war with Prussia providing crisis after crisis from Strasbourg in the east to Paris itself and to many other areas too. Much of the landscape near Strasbourg is a broad flat plain, the border with Prussia being formed by the river Rhine although there is much higher ground nearby. When travelling west towards Paris the immense tower of Strasbourg cathedral is visible on the horizon for at least ten miles across the wide landscape. For an army moving west progress could be fast through these fertile fields. Prussian forces came this way in 1870 and also by Metz further north. The high ridges and runnels near Lutzelbourg overlook a twisting interplay of road, rail, river and canal, but beyond this the Moselle flows through benign and fruitful meadows. For armies besieging a city this country was wide enough and rich enough to sustain them indefinitely. At Metz and at Strasbourg there remain many signs of the German presence here during the war of 1870-71. Both cities became part of Germany and in both the late nineteenth-century architecture proclaims Germanic traditions, taste and history. A whole section of the city of Metz, for example, situated near the railway station, is German in its architecture. The rest of the city is evidently French in its spacious plan and its many classical buildings. Warfare and culture were clearly linked. Further west the landscape assumes a soft, creamy and undulating aspect of rounded hills and river banks, the fields still ploughed rip and down the slopes as they are in Pissarro's paintings. These broad-bottomed valleys and rich fields continue, scarcely interrupted, all the way to Paris. But in this book landscape is more often a setting for violent action than a vista to charm the painter's eye. In a critical time of military and political struggle artists were often reporters of events, responding to danger and to opportunities to document both disaster and victory. As their social context changed fast and furiously around them they might be caught in the cross-fire of battle or in the shifting ideologies that sought supremacy through war and revolution. In this swift flow of extreme events history and art history both record what happened. As artists responded to circumstance they moved between roles in a similar way, sometimes recording what they saw in rapid drawings which they sent to periodicals for a wood-engraver to prepare for the press. These artists were acting like the reporters or news photographers of today. Others made more thorough studies in an attempt to understand the suffering and violence around them, eventually designing paintings or sculptural monuments to form a focus of public loyalty, recognition or remembrance. And some artists wished to change the world: they were committed to revolution and radical reform using the power of their art to help make or break the politics of their day. The converse of this suggests that, as many revolutionary activists were not artists, their significant activities might be missed here. A startling example of this is the invisibility of revolutionary women artists at this time. The images of women in this book are men's images of women as activists or as allegorical figures. Women at the barricades and as revolutionary fire-raisers both appear together with allegories of Liberty, France, the Republic or the Commune. In Impressionist painting, which began before the war and flourished after it, the events depicted are frequently the small events of daily life -- figures walking in a sunlit field, a scene in a bar or theatre, the bustle of the city street or railway station, rowers on the Seine. But in this book the events themselves are significant and often violent: they mark the collapse of Empire with the war, siege, a revolutionary uprising that followed together with its ferocious suppression. In this context art is also evidence and more or less reliable according to its purpose. It must have seemed that photography provided the most objective and documentary evidence. Photography was widespread and commonplace by 1870, but it was not possible to reproduce photographs in printed form for mass circulation in periodicals or newspapers until the American Daily Graphic published the image of a shanty town on 4 March 1880, ten years after the disastrous events central to this book. To solve this problem photographs were copied by craftsmen who cut through them into blocks of boxwood to make wood-engravings which in turn could be set into the type of the magazine or newspaper page for printing. In this way the older technique of wood-engraving made the photographic image universally accessible through publication. Once photographs could be reproduced by screening them to make a dotted image, thousands of skilled engravers became redundant at once. Wood-engraving has never recovered its status as a news medium and the engravings themselves are little studied, but in fact the engraver had to work fast from a drawing or photograph made at the scene of events: it was the quickest way to get the image onto the streets. From the initial record of an event occurring, including its dispatch to London from Paris, for example, and including the cutting of the block, the printing and the distribution of the magazine could often occur within two weeks. In addition when photographic compositions were made from several negatives pasted together, it was the engraver who added consistency to the engraved image. Finally wood-engraving could be simple invention. Clearly as an historical record and as art historical artefacts these engravings provide visual evidence which has to be appraised as carefully as any written record. Visual evidence of the horrifying events of 1870-71 is not scarce but it is little seen and studied in art history. Its imagery forms a kaleidoscopic impression, contradictory, antagonistic and impassioned, which no single standpoint can dominate, for no single view could encompass events. Sometimes painters acted like novelists bringing creative insights into the narrative of what they saw. Sometimes they were journalists rapidly recording and documenting what happened. Both contributed equally to the culture of their time in a period familiar to historians but neglected by many art historians even though these events took place in the middle of one of the most popular periods of art in current art-historical writing. In this mayhem and slaughter, artists had their place. This book aims to examine them, caught, as they were, in the shifting spotlight of cataclysmic events. These days, well short of a year, reveal a cross section of artists working under extreme circumstances, a time in which patronage and opportunity collapsed, replaced by a fight for survival, a time in which art was politicised by circumstance, ideology and experience. The narrative of these events is so appalling and grimly fascinating that it has the power to horrify; shock and dismay its readers even now. A flow of events so thick and fast, shifting and changing day by day, has the immediacy of a journal drawn and written by many hands. In this context immediacy had its value both in newspapers and in private accounts. The fact that these were not long-considered and polished accounts appears to guarantee their authenticity as individual impressions of events. Many first-hand accounts were published in 1871, only months after the events that they described. One of them, published anonymously by `a citizen of Paris', explained that his account contained `neither stylistic pretension nor stage setting ... nor any attempt at a genre. This', he said, `is written as the pen moves under the impression of the moment.' It is, as the author points out, `the absense of all research' that ensures a fresh and unpremeditated account. That is precisely where its value lies. The narrative of events is important to an understanding of related art, but this will always be a selective composition from many fragments of experience, the reflections of those participants and observers who happen to be articulate in drawing, painting, photography or words. As these flashes of illumination within a dense concentration of conflict, fear, determination and action provide only glimpses of the whole event, every account is partisan as it is recorded by one viewer. Yet there were as many viewpoints as there were people caught up in this tumult of war, hunger and revolt. Patriotic enthusiasm was followed by defeat, yet the war did not cease as many had hoped until siege, hunger, bombardment and occupation had produced new and bitter crises for the Third Republic. Armed citizens, particularly in Paris, formed revolutionary Communes in defiance of the national government. Socialist dreams of non-hierarchical government found inspiration in the collapse of empire, throwing aside the pyramidal structure of control from above to form cells within Paris that had no single leader, seeking to defy the authority of those who had made peace with the Prussians who still occupied large areas of France. Their alternative government was inspired by socialist theory and by discontent, the fury of those Parisians who had suffered most in the siege when the price of the simplest food rose beyond their means. In the Paris Commune the disadvantaged rebelled and it cost them dearly, for the Commune was supressed by killing tens of thousands of citizens in ferocious fighting when the Versailles government reasserted its control. In such raw circumstances every participant had his or her perspective as loyalties were strained by defeat, occupation and bloody civil war in the boulevards and backstreets of the capital. The war, siege and Commune ended long ago. As Parisians stroll through the sunlit public gardens of their elegant city, no sign confronts them to recall the appalling violence perpetrated in the Luxembourg Gardens, in the Tuileries Gardens, in the Parc Monceau or at the Hôtel de Ville. The living have taken over completely as they must. People talk in the sunlight, take exercise, enjoy the air. The destruction wrought in 1871 has vanished utterly, as completely as the Tuileries Palace that once joined together the long arms of the Louvre museum. In those long gone days fear, hunger and cold haunted both the boulevards and the battlefields. Art in this context could be terrible in its message as well as beautiful in its form. But paintings, prints and sculptures, drawings in sketchbooks (Plate 1), wood-engravings (Plate 2) and photographs (Plate 3) outlive events. They may be rapid records of personal experi-ence scribbled down in times of crisis, in bombed streets or in swelling crowds. At the other extreme they may be monuments to public grief, commissioned, polished and refined by committees as much as artists to reflect a special purpose. These too still exist. Whether artists sought to record or to change the world, their works are full of meaning. Whether they depict fact or fiction is an issue in history. Even photographs are framed by the viewer's eye, a selective imperative, a focus and unique balance. Yet they still function as telescopes in time: they show us people of the past and how they lived. But like a painting or drawing, a photograph is part fabrication, part fact. Its depiction of death or battle or tenderness is both an image of shared events and a single interpretation. This links art with news, and composition with reportage. Realism, reportage, fact, fabrication and propaganda form a kind of spectrum. The intersection of news with art is reflected in the intersection of the disciplines of history and art history necessary to investigate a mass of artists reacting to the desperate events that surrounded, involved and sometimes overwhelmed them. Visual imagery was produced in many forms and in a curious sequence. At one extreme Salon painting appeared years after the event, a kind of monument evoking and interpreting former times. But rapid drawings were often made as events unfolded and photography offered documentary evidence. In all of these techniques and modes of reporting, recording and remembering there is a balance of fact and fiction. A continuous spectrum from reportage to fiction reaches from the observations of the journalist Jules Clarétie, via the journals of private individuals. including Edmond de Goncourt, to a novel by Zola. Clarétie's immediate reportage can be compared with the considered truths of Zola's fiction. In the visual arts the photograph and the monument are in a similar relation. Whether artists acted as reporters of what they saw or as propagandists for a cause, whether they worked for editors or for emperors, the ferocious events of 1870-71 forced them to reveal their positions as it forced them to seize the opportunities peculiar to a time of war and revolution.
