IN WRITING THIS BOOK, WHICH IS AN ATTEMPT TO KNIT together art history, biography, and military and social history, I’ve placed myself in the debt of many historians, curators, biographers, and translators. Although I have relied on specialists in the field of art throughout my career as an art critic, I’m less well schooled in the social and political history of nineteenth-century France. And yet one nonart book I read, on my father’s recommendation, in my early twenties—Alistair Horne’s The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870–71—played a crucial role in stimulating, two decades later, my desire to write this book. I tried not to pick up Horne’s book and its companion The Terrible Year: The Paris Commune 1871, until I was well into researching Paris in Ruins, but when I did, my pleasure and admiration were undiminished. Perhaps inevitably, these two books became an essential resource as I described many of the same events through a different lens.
Among the histories of the Terrible Year I relied on were Rupert Christiansen’s Paris Babylon: The Story of the Paris Commune, Michael Howard’s The Franco-Prussian War, John Merriman’s Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871, Bertrand Taithe’s Defeated Flesh: Medicine, Welfare, and Warfare in the Making of Modern France, Robert Tombs’s The War Against Paris 1871, and J. P. T. Bury’s France 1814–1940. I also drew on Edmond de Goncourt’s journals (written after the 1870 death of his brother and co-author Jules) and—for an understanding of the origins of Bastille Day—Christopher Prendergast’s The Fourteenth of July and the Taking of the Bastille. Important books about specific actors in the events described include Graham Robb’s biography of Victor Hugo; J. P. T. Bury and Robert Tombs’s Thiers 1797–1877; Adam Begley’s The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera; and the catalog for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1994–95 Nadar exhibition. My account of the balloon voyages out of Paris during the siege drew on many sources, but I am especially indebted to the tenth chapter in Richard Holmes’s marvelous Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air.
My understanding of Berthe Morisot’s experience before, during, and after the Terrible Year came primarily from Berthe Morisot: The Correspondence with Her Family and Friends, compiled and edited by Denis Rouart and translated by Betty W. Hubbard. The lively, frank, funny, and anxious exchanges between the various members of the Morisot family and a few of their friends are novelistic in their psychological complexity. Reading them motivated me to write this book the way I have. I would also like to acknowledge, with gratitude, Perspectives on Morisot, a book of essays edited and with an introduction by T. J. Edelstein; Anne Higonnet’s Berthe Morisot biography; and the expansive edition of Juliet Wilson-Bareau’s Manet by Himself, a beautiful and scholarly illustrated selection of letters and other writings by Édouard Manet.
Two books (recommended by Adam Gopnik) that transformed my understanding of the link between the Impressionists and republicanism were Philip Nord’s Impressionists and Politics: Art and Democracy in the Nineteenth Century and its companion The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France. One of the best and most thoughtful overviews of the responses of artists to the siege is Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life Under the Siege (1870–71) by Hollis Clayson. Tremendously helpful, too, was John Milner’s compilation of art from the Terrible Year, Art, War and Revolution in France 1870–1871: Myth, Reportage and Reality. My account of two artists who lost their lives during the Franco-Prussian War depended greatly on Marc Gottlieb’s exciting and original The Deaths of Henri Regnault and the exemplary catalog for Frédéric Bazille and the Birth of Impressionism, an exhibition at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
I relied on dozens of other exhibition catalogs. Probably the most important were the catalog from the 1983 Manet exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Grand Palais in Paris, and the catalog accompanying Berthe Morisot: Woman Impressionist, an exhibition I saw in 2018 at the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec before it traveled to the Dallas Museum of Art and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Three other books I relied on for insight into the Manet and Morisot circles were Julie Manet: An Impressionist Heritage, a catalog accompanying an exhibition at the Musée Marmottan Monet; the catalog of the great 1988–89 Degas exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Grand Palais in Paris, and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa; and (although my book was mostly written by the time it came out) the catalog accompanying Manet/Degas, the great 2023 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Musée d’Orsay.
My understanding of Claude Monet’s intersection with the events I describe was enriched by Claude Monet: The Colour of Time by my old professor Virginia Spate. My descriptions of Courbet made use of The Letters of Gustave Courbet, edited and translated by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu (who is also the author of the indispensable The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture) and the catalog accompanying the 2008 Gustave Courbet exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Of the thousands of books about Impressionism, the ones I found most useful in helping me understand the movement’s beginnings were John Rewald’s The History of Impressionism; Robert Herbert’s Impressionism: Art, Leisure and Parisian Society; Gary Tinterow and Henri Loyrette’s The Origins of Impressionism (accompanying an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art); and The New Painting: Impressionism 1874–1886 (accompanying an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and the De Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco). I would like to note here that the translation of Marius Chaumelin’s review of the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876 is by Stephen F. Eisenman and the translation of Ernest Chesneau’s response to Claude Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines is by Paul Tucker. I relied, too, on the catalog of Impressionists in London: French Artists in Exile 1870–1904 and Women Artists in Paris, 1850–1900, a traveling exhibition organized by the American Federation of Artists (which I saw at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts). My grasp of the importance of Manet’s infatuation with all things Spanish (and especially the art of Velázquez and Goya) was deepened immeasurably by the catalog accompanying Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting, a 2002–3 exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (where I saw it). Details of these and the many other books that I relied on can be found in the Bibliography.