Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life under Siege

The siege of Paris by Prussians in the fall and winter of 1870 and 1871 turned the city upside down, radically altering its appearance, social structure, and mood. As Hollis Clayson demonstrates in Paris in Despair, the siege took a heavy toll on the city's artists, forcing them out of the spaces and routines of their insular prewar lives, and literally thrusting onto the ramparts the many among them who became soldiers. But Clayson argues that the siege actually encouraged innovation, fostering changed attitudes and new approaches to representation among a wide variety of artists as they made art out of their individual experiences of adversity and change - art that has not previously been considered within the context of the siege. Using the visual arts as an interpretive lens, Clayson illuminates the wide range of issues at play during the siege and thereafter, including questions of political and cultural identity, artistic masculinity and femininity, public versus private space, everyday life and modernity, and gender and class roles in military and civilian society. (Jacket)