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Courbet and Popular Imagery: An Essay on Realism and Navet

Author(s): Meyer SchapiroReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 4, No. 3/4 (Apr., 1941 - Jul.,1942), pp. 164-191Published by: The Warburg InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/750414 .

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COURBET AND POPULAR IMAGERYAn Essay on Realism and Naivet6

By Meyer SchapiroI

The caricatures of Courbet's paintings reduce his work to the level ofpopular and unskilled art; they show his figures as stiff, schematic littlebonshommesPl. 38a).1 A child at a ginger-breadstall, in a caricatureof 1853,2cries to his mother: "Oh! maman, vois donc ces beaux courbets! Achetem'en! quatre pour un sou !" And the critics, from the forgotten reviewers toThdophile Gautier,3deride the primitive character of his art, the likeness totobacconists' signs and the imagesd'Epinal;it is a "peinture'Auvergnat."4These criticismsare not simply a pattern of abuse applied to all innovatingart. The Romantics before him and the Impressionists afterwardswere at-tacked in another way. Their works were considered mad or chaotic, likecertain paintings of our own time. They might also be criticized as childishlyincompetent and ugly, but it is hard to imagine Delacroix's "Sardanapale"or Monet's street scenes caricatured as rigid in form. In the nineteenthcentury the charge of childishness was sometimes brought against classicisticor too synthetically composed forms.5 Even Courbet, who had passed throughthe school of romantic art, spoke contemptuously of the figures of David as"bonhommes pour amuser les enfants au meme titre que l'imageried'Epinal;"6 and the same criticism is made in substance by Thackeray inhis Paris Sketch Book,7 when he draws the Horatiias rigid semaphores in a

1 They have been collected by CharlesL6ger, Courbetelon es caricaturest les images,Paris 1920. See especially pp. 13, 15, 19, 2o,34, 74, 79, 85. Two are also reproduced byJohn Grand-Carteret,LesMoeurs t la Carica-ture en France, Paris, n.d., pp. 550, 551.2 Lger, op.cit., p. 20, from the JournalpourRire.3The opinions are collected by Riat,GustaveCourbet, aris 1906, pp. 86, 87; LUger,op.cit., pp. 34, 37; Estignard, GustaveCourbet,1897, PP- 27-30. The critic of the Revue desDeuxMondes,Louis Geoffroy,wroteon MarchI, 1851: "Evidemment M. Courbet est unhomme qui se figure avoir tent6 une grander6novation, et ne s'apergoit point qu'ilrambne l'art tout simplement Ason point ded6part, 'a la grossi're industrie des maitresimagiers." On the criticism of realism in theRevuedesDeux Mondes, ee the dissertationofThaddeus E. Du Val, Jr., The SubjectofRealism in the Revue des Deux Mondes (1831-I865), Philadelphia 1936; and for criticismof realism in general in this period, thedissertation of Bernard Weinberg, FrenchRealism: The Critical Reaction, 1830-1870, The

University of Chicago Libraries, ModernLanguage Association of America, 1937.4L6ger, op. cit., p. 34. "Peinture d'Au-vergnat" is the phrase of Victor Fournel, whosome years later wrote sympathetically onpopular spectaclesand on the streetsongs andsingers of Paris: Ce qu'onvoitdans les ruesdeParis, Paris 1858; Lesspectaclesopulairest lesartistes des rues, Paris 1863. Cf. also deBanville'spoem (1852):"...Je suis un realiste,Et contre i'idal j'ai dress6ma baliste.J'ai cre6l'art bonhomme,enfantin et na'f."Cited by P. Martino,Le roman ialiste ous eSecond Empire, Paris, 1913, P. 76.5Especially Ingres; see L. Rosenthal, Lapeinture romantique,Paris I9oo, p. 82.6 This is recorded by Philibert Audebrand,Derniers oursde la Bohime,Paris, n.d., p. i lo,but more than fifty years after the occasion.

7 In the essay "On the French School ofPainting," I840. In the same work, hecriticizes the primitivismof the new Catholicschool in France for its archaic forms andcompares them with English playing cards.164


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COURBET AND POPULAR IMAGERY 165row. Relative to Courbet's atmospheric, tonal painting, the classical school isarchaically stiff; but beside the mobility and pittoresque of romantic art,Courbet himself seems inert. In an essay on Courbet in 1856, Silvestreaddresses the same reproach of immobility and lack of lively gestures to bothIngres and Courbet.' Hence, if the abusive criticism may be applied in-discriminately, it has also sometimes a basis in the positive qualities of theworks attacked.2The charge of primitiveness was provoked also by the themes of Courbet.The "Wrestlers," which recalls in its elaborate study of the muscles theeffort of a Pollaiuolo, was ironically recommended as a background for thestrong man in the circus.3 Among the masculine nudes of contemporarypainting, with their heroic, mythical or tragic meanings, the wrestling figuresseemed a profane intrusion of the vulgar taste of the fairs.Yet in characterizing his work as naive, the unfriendly critics of Courbetagreed finally with his supporters. His chief defender, Champfleury, foundin this naivete one of the great qualities of Courbet's painting. He likenedthe Enterrementn its simplicity and force to the art of the folk imagier.4

De loin, en entrant, l'Enterrement apparait comme encadrd par uneporte; chacun est surpris par cette peinture simple, comme ? la vue deces naives images sur bois, taill6es par un couteau maladroit, en tate desassassinats imprim6s rue Git-le-Coeur. L'effet est le meme, parcequel'execution est aussi simple. L'art savant trouve le meme accentque l'artnaif.6What Champfleury had in mind here was that "synthetic and simplifyingvision" which Baudelaire was to attribute later to Corot and Guys, and whichhe found also in Egyptian, Ninivite and Mexican art.6 Courbet was ob-viously not trying to revive the conventions of popular imagery, as archaistic

I Th6ophile Silvestre, Histoire des ArtistesVivants,Etudesd'apris nature,Paris 1856, p.269: "Le geste lui manque, ses scenes sontinertes" (on Courbet), and "Ingres est mort.Cette immobilit6 fait la honte de l'art."2This was recognized by Baudelaire whenhe remarked in his study of Guys: "Manypeople have accused of barbarismall painterswhose vision is synthetic and simplifying, forexample Corot, who begins by tracing firstof all the main lines of a landscape, its frame-work and physiognomy." Lepeintrede la VieModerne,n Baudelaire, Oeuvres, aris, N.R.F.,1938, II, p. 338 (all citations from Baudelairewill be from this edition).3 LUger, op. cit., p. 2o. The painting isshown on a circus booth behind the strongman and the flutist. The legend reads:"Qui est-ce qui demandait donc i quoipouvait servir la peinture de M. Courbet?"In his Journal, on April 15, I853, Delacroix

criticizes the Wrestlersas "lacking in action."It is interesting that it was painted over aromantic picture of a Walpurgis Night thatCourbet had exhibited in the Salon of 1848.4 From an article in the Messagerde I'As-sembli, I851, reprinted in Champfleury'sGrandesFigures d'hier et d'aujourd'hui, arisI861, p. 244. At the same time 'naivet6' wasalso discovered in David. See Del6cluze,David,sonecole tsontemps,Paris, I855, p. I76,who speaks of the 'Tennis Court Oath,' the'Lepelletier,' the 'Marat' and the 'DeadBarra,' as a return to naivete. See also forthe same view, Jules Renouvier, HistoiredeI'artpendant a Rdvolution, aris, 1863, p. 77.For an example of a contemporary printof the rue Git-le-Coeur, see Duchartre andSaulnier, L'imagerie opulaire,Paris 1925, p.Io8-"L'horrible assassinat . . . par un marijaloux" (P1.38b).6See below,p. I8o; and note2 above.

4


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166 MEYER SCHAPIROpainters of the nineteenth century imitated those of antiquity or the middleages. Yet in his composition, he shows unmistakeable tendencies toward amore primitive form. With all their colourism and richness of pigment, withtheir advanced use of tones to build up the whole, his arrangements are oftensimplified, with a clarity of grouping determined by the interest in the singleobjects. This is most evident when we set his larger canvases beside thebaroque compositions of Delacroix, who was distressed by the mere juxta-position of parts in Courbet's paintings, their lack of gestures and psycho-logical interplay.' Delacroix's figuresare learnedly "organized" and resemblethe machines of the Salons;whereas Courbet's large paintings, according toChampfleury, "have the supreme quality of a horror of composition."2 Hisdrawing is often irregular in an earnest, empirical manner, unrefined by theponcifsand idealizations of a grand style, as if he were tracing a complicatedshape for the first time; the creases and broken outlines of the clothes of theCasseursePierres re examples of this mode of observationwhich was ridiculedas vulgar in I850.That Courbet was familiar with the traditional methods, we can judgefrom his early paintings; if he gave them up, it was because they were in-adequate for his vision and subject matter. He was conscious of the largerpattern and the single shapes as qualities of the objects represented; and inrendering scenes of popular life, he sometimes accentuated the rusticity of thefigures by his very mode of drawing and grouping them. The drawing of theAumdne u Mendiant3 P1. 38c) seems naive, even artless, and suggests certainfigures of Van Gogh. In the Enterrementhe stark contrast of red and blackon the grey background and the clarity of the aligned, recurrent faces withtheir strong red tones, were conscious departures; before, he had paintedsimilar heads in outdoor scenes with deep shadows and more subdued colours.That is why the portraits in the 'Burial' gave the impression of a primitive,rustic taste. The distant heads are almost as bright as the nearer ones. Theypleased the people in Ornans who had sat for them, but the Parisian critics,schooled in the contrasted, shadowy, atmospheric painting of the romantics,found the portraits not only ugly as human types, but plebeian in execution.The desire for shadowless, unatmospheric portraits was a typical petit-bourgeois taste, like the frontality, which had been ridiculed by Monnier in hisplay "Le Peintre et les Bourgeois."4 The naive spectator from the lowermiddle class responded to shadows on a portrait face no differently from theChinese empress,who assuredthe Italian painter that the two sides of her facewere of the same colour.In its content especially, the Enterrementesembles works of popular

I See his Journal, April I5, 1853, andAugust 3, I855-2 "Ils n'ont pas le charme voil6 des oeuvrespodtiques de Corot; mais ils ont la qualit6supreme de l'horreur de la composition,"Champfleury, Souvenirst PortraitsdeJeunesse,Paris 1872, p. 173, quoted from his reviewof Courbet's work at the Salon of 1849.

Champfleury attributes the same quality to

the Le Nains in his monograph of 1862.3 See Th. Duret, Courbet,Paris 1918, Pl.XXXII.4 The 'same idea in Victor Fournel, Cequ'onvoit dans es ruesdeParis,Paris I858, pp.384 ff., and especially p. 390 on the petitbourgeois fear of shadows as spots on the face(La portraituromanie,onsidirationsur leDaguer-reotype)


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38

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b-Popular Woodcut of an Assassination. c. 1850(p. I65)

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a-Courbet, Drawing for the "Enterrement a Ornans." Besancon,Museum (p. 167)c-Courbet, "L'Enterrement

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b-"Souvenir Mortuaire." Popular Woodcut. c. 1830. Paris, Bibl.Ste-Genevieve (p. 167) d-"Les Degres des AgEarly 19th


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COURBET AND POPULAR IMAGERY 167imagery. The first, or at least an early, stage, preserved in a sketch on paperin the museum of Besanton (Pl. 39a),' shows a procession to the cemeterymoving fromright to left. The grave-digger is at the extremeleft, the rectanglein the centre is a grave-stone, the landscape is less developed. This drawingis like a popular wood-cut of Courbet's youth, SouvenirMortuaire,producedabout 1830 in Montbdliard, a few miles from Ornans, which the countrypeople attached to the wall after a funeral and inscribed with the name ofthe deceased (Pl. 39b).2 It shows also the procession to the left, the grave-digger at one end, grave-stones in the foreground and the cross elevatedabove the horizon. In Courbet's final painting (Pl. 39c) the conception hasbeen very much changed and deepened in content; the whole procession isarrested, the scene is concentrated about the central grave, and the form ofthe landscape adjusted to this new centre. Around it are grouped themourners, from the children at the left to the oldest men, in costumes of theseventeen-nineties. Even this version is related to popular engravings. Forin the images of the 'Steps of Life' (LesDegrisdesAges), individuals graded inage form a clear semi-circle or arch around a scene of burial (P1. 39d).3 Beforethe French Revolution the central space was filled with a Last Judgment; itwas later sometimes secularized by a simple hearse and a symbolic growth, arose-bush, a sheaf of wheat, a vine-plants in various stages of development,from spring to autumn.4 That Courbet copied such images is difficult toprove, but the resemblance is evident.In 185o he collaborated in the production of a "popular image." It is alithograph rather than a wood-cut in the traditional manner, but even in itsmore modern technique it reproduces a type of popular art.5 His image ofthe apostle, Jean Journet (P1. 38d), is part of a broadside, including a poemin couplets, a "Complainte" to be sung to the "Air de Joseph."6 Journet wasan independent Fourierist missionary, a man of solemn and irrepressiblecandour in his radical evangelism; Champfleury has described him in hiscollection of "Excentriques."7 Courbet shows him setting out to convert the

1 In charcoal on bluish paper. It is repro-duced and describedby L6ger,Gustave ourbet,Paris 1929, p. 47, and Riat, op.cit., p. 79.2 1 reproduce it after the example in theBibliotheque Ste.-Genevi~ve in Paris. It isdescribed by Duchartre and Saulnier, op.cit.,p. 141, who say it is a unique example of avery special genre. On the importance ofMontbeliard in the production of images inthe early nineteenth century, see the samebook, pp. 138 ff.3On this theme, ibid., p. 1I, 7o, 103; itwas introduced in wood-cuts between I8ooand I814. For the older tradition, see R. vanMarle, L'iconographiede l'art profane, II,Alle'gorieset Symboles, 1932, pp. 156 ff., and A.Englert, Zeitschriftdes Vereinsfir Volkskunde,XV, XVII.4 My illustration is taken from an article

by Dr. Hoppen, "The Decades of HumanLife," in Clinical Excerpts, New York, X,1936, no. 7, p. 5.5 It was printed by Vion, 27 Rue St.Jacques, Paris. The Rue St. Jacques hadbeen since the seventeenth century one of thechief centres of production of popular imageryin France; the copper engravings of the RueSt. Jacques were the source of many of thepopular wood-cuts, and a special class of"imagerie de la rue St. Jacques" is distin-guished by Duchartre and Saulnier (op. cit.,pp. 29, 33, 87 ff.). In the second third of thenineteenth century, it was the centre of a"semi-popular" lithographic imagery.6 On this combination of image and "com-plainte," see Duchartre and Saulnier, op.cit., p. 58, and illustrations,passim.SLes Excentriques,aris 1856.


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i68 MEYER SCHAPIROworld, advancing with staff in hand, like the JuifErrant of the popular prints.The form of the lithograph framed by the field of verses belongs to the broad-sides of the early nineteenth century; there is in this secularapostle dominatingthe horizon something of the saints, and especially of the pilgrim SaintJacques, of the religious broadsides.'Courbet, moreover, made drawings for books addressed to a popular,sometimes uncultured and philistine, audience, unlike Delacroix who illus-trated Goethe and Shakespeare. Courbet's illustrations are of cheap anti-clerical tracts, the 'Death of Johnny the Rat-Catcher'2 and the 'Merry Talesof the Cures';3 or of a book on petit-bourgeoisypes, Le CampdesBourgeois,orwhich he provided drawings after photographs;4 or images of workmendigging and sawing, to accompany the work-songsin a book of popular songsof the provinces, collected by Champfleury.5His paintings of work repeat a common theme of popular art, the Mdtiers.6Courbet does not represent the advanced forms of modern industry--theyhad already appeared in paintings of the late thirties7-but the hand-workof the villages, the traditional occupations which had previously been repre-sented on a small scale.8 He monumentalizes the Knife-Grinders,the Tinker,the Stone-Breakers,the Winnowers; and besides these, he paints the Hunter,the Poacher, the Vintner, the Harvesters and the Faggot-Gatherer. In thelate forties and fifties, the mere representation of labour on the scale of the

1The lithograph was made after a paintingby Courbet which belonged to Jean-PaulMazaroz, a compatriot from Lons-le-Saulnierin the Juras. It is interesting that Mazaroz,a collector and friend of Courbet, knownespecially for his meubles 'art and his radicalideas, was the son of a bookbinder who madepopular images at Lons-le-Saulnier, earlyin the nineteenth century. On the father,see Duchartre and Saulnier, op. cit., pp. I42,I43.2La Mort deJeannot-Les frais du culte,avecquatredessinsde GustaveCourbet,ExpositiondeGandde1868, Bruxelles I868.3Les Curdsen Goguetteavec six dessinsdeGustaveCourbet.Expositionde Gandde z868.Bruxelles I868. The "Return from the Con-ference" is reproduced as the frontispiece.4Etienne Baudry, Le Campdes Bourgeois,Paris 1868. For a description of the book andthe history of Courbet's collaboration, seeTh6odore Duret, GustaveCourbet, aris 1918,pp. 140, 141.5Leschansonsopulaires esprovinceseFrance,notice par Champfleury, accompagn6es depiano par J.-B. Wekerlin,Paris i86o. Courbetalso illustrated Alfred Delvaus, Histoiresanec-dotiques escafds tcabarets eParis,Paris 1862.The three last books were all published byDentu, who brought out in the eighteen-

sixties a large series of works on popularthemes, including Champfleury's histories ofcaricature and popular imagery. The illus-trations of Courbet have been catalogued byDuret, op. cit., pp. 138-141.6For an example see Duchartre andSaulnier, op.cit.,p. 68, a print from the regionof Lille. The Semeurs almost identical withMillet's conception.7By Bonhomm6in the Salonsof 1838, 1840o.Chasstriau had already represented theLe Creusot mill in I836. See L. Rosenthal,Du romantismeu rialisme,Paris 1914, p. 389,and B6n6dite, Chassiriau, I931, p. 4I.8 Cf. for example Le Rimouleur y Decampsin the Louvre. In the forties, during thebeginnings of realism in painting, work sub-jects are very common. The Leleux brothersespecially represent the road workers andwoodcutters (Rosenthal, op. cit., pp. 383,384). Perhaps significant for the tenden-tiousnessof such realistchoice of themes is thefrequency of the poacher (Le Braconnier)and the smuggler (Le Contrebandier) in thepainting of the forties; the poacher is an anti-authoritarian figure. Cf. the anecdote toldby Jules Janin in L'Et1d Paris, I843, p. 29: apoacher stopped by a guard in the royalforests replies,-"Le roi, c'est le peuple; or,je suis du peuple, done je suis le roi."


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COURBET AND POPULAR IMAGERY 169Stone-Breakers and Knife-Grinders was politically suggestive. The lowerclasses, and especially the workers, had emerged as a factor in politics; andthe slogan of the Droit au Travailwas the chief one for the workers in theFebruary revolution and in the disorders which followed.' Already in thefortiesthere had appeared a book by De La B'dollikre, LesMdtiers,2llustratedwith engravings (after Monnier) of the different popular occupations;3 itwas designed, as the author said, to awaken interest in the people, but notfrom a radical viewpoint so much as to effect a philanthropic reconciliationof the opposed classes.4Courbet's popular themes are therefore sometimes considered merelytendentious and doctrinaire, the result of his friendship with Proudhon. Butthis view disregardshis identification with the people and the precise contentof his pictures. Even his notorious anti-clerical painting of the drunkencurds5 as a popular rather than partisan origin. The representation of thepeasants under an image of the Virgin on the roadside, amused by thedrunkenness of the clergy, says nothing of the doctrines and sacramentsof the church, but corresponds to the cynical proverbs and tales of thereligious peasantry, whose folklore, even in a Catholic country like France,reveals without exception an underlying malice and hostility to the clergyas a class." If one compares Courbet's attitude with the erudite construc-tions of his admirer, the philosopher-painter, Chenavard,7 who must locatethe church in a vast cycle of world history in order to show its historicallimitations, it becomes obvious how rustic and popular in feeling is Courbet'ssatirical image. Even Proudhon in his commentary on the picture had toadmit that the criticism of the Church here was only implicit."

2Courbet's political radicalism, his relations with Proudhon and his partin the Communeeem to be secondary to his goal as an artist; but they are1The leading theoretician of the "droit autravail," Victor Consid6rant, author of theThiorie du droit au travail et thioriedu droitdepropriit, 1839, was a compatriot of Courbet,having been born in Salins.2Emile de la B6dolli&re, Les industrielsmitiers tprofessionsnFrance,avec cent dessinspar Henri Monnier, Paris, 1842.s The "R6mouleur" on p. 206 recalls thepaintings of Decamps and Courbet.4 "Cet ouvrage a pour objet de peindre lesmoeurs populaires, de mettre la classe ais&een rapport avec la classe pauvre, d'initier lepublic a l'existence d'artisans trop m6pris6set trop inconnus."r The destroyed original is reproduced byC. Lemonnier, Courbett sonoeuvre, aris 1878,and by LUger, GustaveCourbet,Paris 1929,P. 97.6 Cf. P. S6billot, Le Folk-lorede France,IV,

19go07,p. 231-"The 'good cur6' seems un-

known in French paremiology. Both in thegeneral collections of proverbsand in those ofwhich the materials come from the regionsmost renowned for their religiosity, I havesearched in vain for proverbs praising thechurchmen, whereas those which criticizethem are found by the dozens. A specialquestionnaire confirms this conclusion; noneof my correspondents could remember asingle proverb which wasn't satirical. Al-though the same holds for the nobility (whichwas never popular), it is less surprising thanin the case of the secular clergy; the countrypriests who are loved by their parishionersand who merit it, are not rare."7 On Chenavard, see T. Gautier, L'artmoderne, aris 1856, and Silvestre, op.cit., pp.105-145.8 P. J. Proudhon, Du principedel'artet desadestination ociale, Paris 1875, chaps. XVII,XVIII, and p. 280.


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170 MEYER SCHAPIROcharacteristicof his personalitywith its provincial and plebeian self-conscious-ness in the Paris of an age of great social struggles. His feeling of superiorityas an artist was justified for him by his indigenous relation to the masses.In letters and public statements, he affirmed that he alone of the artistsof his time expressed the sentiments of the people and that his art wasin essence democratic.' He took a hearty delight in painting the land-scape, the individuals and the life of his native village of Ornans on amonumental scale, and thereby imposed on the Salonspectator his judgmentof the social importance of this world. Daumier, in a caricature of 1853,represented the stupefaction of countrymen before the paintings of Courbetat the Salon2 but the artist himself wrote from Ornans to Champfleuryof theCasseursde Pierres: "Les vignerons, les cultivateurs, que ce tableau seduitbeaucoup, pretendent que j'en ferais un cent que je n'en ferais pas un plusvrai."3 While painting the Enterrement,e corresponded with his friends inParis about the progressof the work, describing how he got his models, andhow they posed for him; everyone, he said, wanted to be in the picture.4With the curehe argued about religion; and the grave-digger regretted thatthe cholera which had struck the nearby village had passed by Ornans andcheated him of a good harvest. He ends one of these letters with an accountof the carnival at Ornans in which he took part.5 In his large allegoricalpainting, the Atelier,he presents around him in the studio his two worlds,at the right, the world of art, including his patron Bruyas, his literary andmusical friends, Baudelaire, Buchon, Champfleury and Promayet; on theother side, the people, in their homeliness, poverty and simple interests.6 TheGerman brasserie in Paris, where realism as a movement was hatched, isdescribed by Champfleury as a Protestant village, in its rustic manners andconviviality.7 The leader, Courbet, was a "compagnon,"handshaker, a greattalkerand eater, strong and tenacious like a peasant, the precise opposite of thedandy of the thirties and forties. His behaviour in Paris was consciouslypopular; he spoke in an evident patois,smoked, sang and jested like a man ofthe people. Even his technique of painting impressed academic observersasplebeian and domestic in its freedom; for he used knife and thumb, workedfrom jars, rubbed and scraped, improvising directly from memory, withoutapplying the learned devices of the school. Du Camp wrote that he paintedpictures, "comme on cire des bottes."8 In Ornans he framed the Enterrementwith plain boards of local fir; and it was shown in this village and the pro-

SCf. the letter to Bruyas, I854, reportinghis conversation with the Director of FineArts, to whom he said that "moi seul, de tousles artistesfranCaismes contemporains, avaisla puissance de rendre et ma personnalit6 etma Soci6te"--P. Borel, Le romande GustaveCourbetd'apris une correspondanceriginaledugrandpeintre. Paris 1922, pp. 68, 69.2 Leger, Courbet, 1929, P. 57; the legendreads "grands admirateurs des tableaux deM. Courbet."3 Champfleury, Souvenirs,Paris 1872, p.174.

4 Ibid., pp. 174, 175; Riat, op. cit., p. 76.5 Lager, "Documents inedits sur GustaveCourbet," L'Amour de l'art XII, 1931, p.385 f.6 He describesit in letters to Bruyas (Borel,op. cit., pp. 56, 57) and Champfleury (cata-logue of the exhibition, L'Atelierdu Peintre,Galerie Barbazanges, Paris, n.d. i9i9).' Champfleury, Souvenirs,pp. 185 ff., andAudebrand, DerniersJours de la Boheme,pp.77-212: La Brasserie de la Rue des Martyrs.8 Leger, Courbet elon les caricatures, . 37;see also LUger, Courbet, 1929, p. 27.


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COURBET AND POPULAR IMAGERY 17Ivincial centre, Besan?on, before being sent to the Salon. In a letter to hispatron, Bruyas, in speaking of a plan for a private show in Paris, he drawsacross the letter in a naive domestic style a view of the exhibition building,very much like the booth of a circus, with peaked roof and pennant' (Pl. 4oa).3

Courbet's taste for the people was thoroughly personal and in his blood.But it was also nourished and directed by the artistic and social movementsof his time. Before 1848, he had painted romantic, poetic subjectsas well as hisprovincial world; after I848, the realistic representationof the people becamefor him a conscious programme. The early romantics had already created asentiment for folk traditions; but they valued the exotic primitive, whetherhistorically or geographically remote, more than the contemporary primitiveof their own region.2 Toward 1840, there arose a more insurgent taste forthe people, as if in preparation for the coming struggles. Michelet, LouisBlanc and Lamartine published their histories of the French revolution inpraise of the heroism and the love of liberty of the French people. A newdoctrinaire, evangelical fiction of popular life was created by George Sand,Lamartine and Eugene Sue, and the writings of workers were hopefullywelcomed as the foundations of a coming proletarian culture. This literaturemight be sentimental, melodramatic and vague in its social characterizations;but to keener, independent minds the conflicts of the time, the materialrequirements of society and the impressive conquests of the scientific methodgradually suggested a new standard of exactness in the observation of sociallife. There was a constant criticism of manners, institutions and ideas, andthe awareness of the differences within society and the concept of a socialmechanism and climate, enriched for the next half century most writing andinsight into the individual. It is in this environment of the late forties thatrealism and the folk could be united in a common programme. Even Flaubertwho disavowed the primitive romantic taste3 and the "socialist" art of theforties, was nevertheless pervaded throughout his life by the interest in themodern, the scientific, the popular and primitive which had occupied theyoung radicals of 1848.In the immediate "realist" circle of Courbet, three young writers, Buchon,Dupont and Champfleury, were inspired by the life of the people and by theforms of folk art.The poet, Max Buchon, was a friend of Courbet since their school days

1Borel, op.cit., P1.p. 96.2 On the primitivism of the romantics, seeN. H. Clement, Romanticismn France,NewYork 1939, chap. X, pp. 462-479.3 Cf. his early version of L'Education enti-mcntale,c. 1843-1845, where he says of hishero, Jules (apparently the young Flaubert):"En somme, il fit bon march6 de tous lesfragmentsde chants populaires, traduction de

poemes 6trangers, hymnes de barbares, odesde cannibales, chansonnettesd'Esquimaux, etautres fatras inedits dont on nous assommedepuis vingt ans. Petit at petit meme, il sed6fit de ces pr6dilections niaises que nousavons malgr6 nous pour des oeuvresm'diocres, gofits d6prav6squi nous viennentde bonne heure et dont l'esth6tique n'a pasencore decouvert la cause."


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172 MEYER SCHAPIROin Besanqon.1 His first book of romantic verses had been illustrated by thepainter in 1839.* They were both ardent admirers of their compatriot,Proudhon; and Buchon, for his active part in the Second Republic, wasexiled by Louis Napoleon in 1851. He appears in the Enterrementnd theAtelierand was also painted in a life-size portrait by his friend.3 In Paris hewas known at first as the author of "La Soupe au Fromage," the battle songof the bohemian realists of the late forties, and for his translation of Hebel,a German poet who wrote in Allemanian dialect about peasant and villagelife. His own works describe the peasants and landscape of his native region,of which he also collected the folk-tales and songs. Gautier speaks of him as"a kind of Courbet of poetry, very realistic, but also very true, which is notthe same thing."4 Buchon was not only attached to his native province as apoetic world; he believed that the character of the people was the source ofindividual creativeness. In a book on realism published during his exile inSwitzerland in 1856, he wrote that "the most inexorable protest against theprofessorsand pastiches is popular art."' The pre-eminence of Courbet andProudhon within their different fields was due to their common "puissantecarrure franc-comtoise;" and in describing the genius of Courbet, he intro-duces, perhaps for the first time in the criticism of a contemporary painter,the concept of an instinctive folk-creativenessas the ground of great individualart. Courbet's painting, he says, is calm, strong and healthy, the fruit of anatural and spontaneous productivity ("il produit ses oeuvres tout aussisimplement qu'un pommier produit des pommes"), rooted in his owncharacteristics and the qualities of his native province. Courbet is ignorantof books and entirely self-taught as a painter, but understandsthings throughsympathy with plain people and through "an enormous power of intuition."For a time almost as close to Courbet was the poet Pierre Dupont," theauthor of "Les Boeufs" and of the "Chant des Ouvriers" (1846), whichBaudelaire called the "Marseillaiseof labour." They were good friends from1846 and spent vacations in the country together.7 Dupont was the leadingwriter of songs for the people, some of them political and militant, othersmore idyllic, about the peasantsand the country and the various occupations.8Like his friend'spictures,Dupont's songswere regarded as rustic and criticizedfor their naivete, their clumsiness and realism.9 The music, which he com-posed himself, was based on authentic folk melodies. His L'Incendie:Chant

1 On Buchon (18i 8-i 869) and his writings,see Emile Fourquet, Les Hommesde'lbresdeFranche-Comti,929; on his part in the realistmovement, see the excellent work of EmileBouvier, La Bataille Rialiste (1844-1857),Paris 1913, P- 183 ff.2The lithographsare reproduced by LUger,Courbet, 929, p. 25.3 bid., p. I8 (in the museum of Vevey);there is a second portrait in the museum ofSalins.4Gautier, HistoireduRomantisme,esprogrisdelapodsiefranfaiseepuis 83o, Paris I872.6 Max Buchon, Recueilde dissertationsur le

rialisme, Neuchitel, 1856; it is quoted byLUger,Courbet, 929, pp. 65-67.6 On Dupont (1821-1870), see Bouvier,op. cit., p. I65 ff. A poet of very similarinterests and also close to both Dupont andCourbet was Gustave Mathieu (Bouvier, p.173 ff.); for his portrait by Courbet, seeLUger, op. cit., p. 144.7 His portrait by Courbet is in the museumof Karlsruhe, LUger,op.cit., P1.51.s His collected poems are published inMuse Populaire,Chantset Poisies, of which Ihave used the sixth edition, Paris I861.9Bouvier, op.cit., p. 171.


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COURBETAND POPULAR MAGERY 173des Pompiers,s remarkably close in spirit to the great unfinished picture ofthe firemen by Courbet, interrupted by the coup d'6tat of December 2,1851.1 Other subjectsof Courbet appear in the "Muse Populaire" of Dupont;the mdtiers,he hunters, the cattle, the landscapes, the scenes of country life,all pictured with great tenderness.2 His political songs express in a collectivelanguage that radical democratic sentiment which we hear again in moreblustering tones when Courbet speaks of himself as a sovereign individual, asa government opposed to the ruling state.3

Oh marches-tu, gai compagnon?Je m'en vais conqu6rir la terre;J'ai remplac6 Napoleon,Je suis le prolktaire.4Dupont's art is popular in more than theme and feeling; it is very simplein form, with short, easily sung stanzas, repeated phrases and primitive re-frains. It has the freshness of old folk-songs and was appreciated for thesequalities by Gautier5 and Baudelaire.A It was in fact the songs of Dupontthat suggested to Baudelaire that all poetry is essentially a utopian protestagainst injustice, a desire for freedom and happiness.7Courbet, too, attempted to compose popular songs. An example has beenpublished by Silvestre in his history of living artists.8 They are trivial andcrude, gay masculine songs of the brasserie. Courbet thought himself amusician and wanted to take part in the national competition for popularsong in I848.9The third of Courbet's friends, the novelist and critic Champfleury,o1

1 See his Muse Populaire,pp. 286 ff.En ces calamitis publiques,Toujours les premiers p ourir,Nos pompiers, soldats pacifiques,Savent aussi vaincre et mourir.

and the refrain:Au feu! au feu!L'incendie 6clate,La flamme &carlateRougit le ciel bleu.Au feul

For a reproduction of Courbet's painting inthe Petit Palais, see Charles L6ger, GustaveCourbetCollection des Maitres), Paris 1934,fig. 24.2 Interesting also for Courbet, are theChant de la Mer, Muse Populaire, p. 45, and LeCuirassier de Waterloo (ibid., p. 226, on thepainting by G6ricault-"G6ricault, ta malepeinture . . .").3 Cf. Courbet's statement to the Ministerof Fine Arts in I854, recorded in his letter toBruyas: "Je repondis imm6diatement que jene comprendis absolument rien i tout ce qu'ilvenait de me dire, d'abord parce qu'il

m'affirmait qu'il 6tait un gouvernement etque je ne me sentais nullement compris dansce gouvernement, que moi aussi j'6tais unGouvernement et queje difiais le sien de fairequoi que ce soit pour le mien que je puisseaccepter." (Borel, op. cit., pp. 67, 68.)4 It is the refrain of Les DeuxCompagnonsuDevoir,MusePopulaire,p. 233 if.6In his HistoireduRomantisme.6See his preface to Dupont's Chants etChansons, 851, reprinted in his L'Art roman-tique,Oeuvres, I, pp. 403-413, and a secondessay in 1861, ibid., pp. 551-557-7 Oeuvres,I, p. 412.8 Op. cit., pp. 248, 249-9 Riat, op. cit., p. 53 (letter of April I7,1848).10 The nom de plume ofJules Fleury (1821-1889). On his life, writings and part in therealist movement, see Bouvier, op. cit.; P.Martino, Leromanrdalisteous e SecondEmpire,Paris 1913; J. Troubat, Une amiti' lad'Arthez, Champfleury, ourbet,Max Buchon,Paris I9oo (not available to me); the samewriter's edition of the letters of Champfleury,Sainte-Beuve t Champfleury,aris 19o8.


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174 MEYER SCHAPIROwas the leader of the young literary realists of I85o and the author of thefirst general history of popular imagery.Champfleury, like Courbet, was a provincial, but of a more culturedfamily; his father was the secretary of the municipality of Laon, and hisbrother, Edouard Fleury, was the leading archaologist and local historian ofthe dipartement.He came to Paris in 1839 at eighteen, only a little beforeCourbet, but they did not meet until 1848. His first writings belong to thelate romantic style of the dcoleantaisiste. They are short stories and sketchesabout odd types and the corners of Paris life, alternately humorous andgrotesque. Champfleury was anxious to succeed in Paris, where he sharedthe life of Murger'sBohIme nd followed closely the main literary movementsof the forties. He felt himself to be an apprentice who had first to learn thetrade and to acquire a journalistic petitemani'rewhich would enable him toearn a living. In his Souvenirs e tells how he was torn for a time by twointerests, a Monnier-like realism and German romantic, sentimental poetry.In 1849 and I85o, he was caught up in the stream of insurgent realism withits taste for the contemporary and popular, and was able to maintain himselfin it because of his first-hand experience of provincial life and his plebeianconsciousnessamong the better educated Parisian writers. He had discoveredthe Le Nains (artists from his home town of Laon) around 1845, and in 1850published a brochure in which he described them as painters of reality. TheLe Nains were already objects of modern taste in the eighteen-forties; CharlesBlanc in 1846 compares the brothers Leleux (Adolphe and Armand) withthem:x they painted Breton peasant and work scenes and were consideredrealists. But Champfleury'sconversion to realism seems to have been largelyinfluenced by the example of Courbet's imposing art and by his friendshipwith Dupont and Buchon who introduced him to folk literature and theartistic possibilities of themes of lower class life.2 The choice of such subjectswas a central point in the realist doctrine, perhaps as essential as the ideas ofthe little realists about method and style, and was justified by Champfleuryon several grounds.3 The lower classes were the most important in societyand it was in their life that the underlying social mechanism could be re-vealed. They were, moreover, a new and unlimited subject, more attractivethan the rich and the dliteby their great sincerity, a virtue which for the realists

1 Cited by L. Rosenthal, Du RomantismeuRialisme, Paris 1914, PP. 383-386.2 In his Souvenirs, I872, p. 185, Champ-fleury attributes the beginning of the move-ment of realism to Courbet in 1848. Hisdependence on Courbet, Dupont and Buchonis made clear by Bouvier, pp. 165-256, especi-ally pp. 244, 245 on Courbet. He alreadyknew Buchon and Dupont by 1847, before hemet Courbet; he began his studies of folkliterature and art around I848 or I849 (seehis Histoirede l'imagerie opulaire,Paris 1869,2nd ed., pp. xliv, xlv), and published anarticle on the legend of the BonhommeMisdrein x850 (Bouvier, p. i80). His novel, Les

Bourgeoisde Molinchart,I855, was dedicatedto Buchon. Courbet alsohelped Champfleuryin his studies of folk art. In a letter to Champ-fleury about his work at Ornans in 1849 orearly in I850, Courbet speaks of collecting"des chansons de paysans" for Champ-fleury: "je vous porterai les Bons Sabots deBesangon,"he adds. See L'Amour el'ArtXII,1931, p. 389.3 They are stated in the prefaces to hisnovels and collection of short stories (ContesDomestiques, es Aventures e Mariette)and inLe Rlalisme, 1857, and have been broughttogetherby Bouvier,pp. 311, 312.


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COURBET AND POPULAR IMAGERY 175was almost the whole of art. Finally, their own literature is valuable andsuggestive; their songs and legends include masterpieces of realism. Champ-fleury admired the inherent good taste of the people and imagined that theywould be spontaneous allies and appreciate the sincerity and vigour ofmodern realist works.As the chief journalistic defender of Courbet in the early fifties, Champ-fleury was publicly identified as the apostle of realism, and assumed theresponsibility of its theoretical defence, although he sometimes disavowedthe name as misleading and vague; it was less adequate than the slogan of"sincerity in art" which he opposed to l'artpourl'art.' His own stories andnovels took on a more intimate, realistic air, shedding the elements of fantasyand the grotesque that he had cultivated up to 1848. But he preservedalwaysa humour and sentimentality that his writing had had from the beginning.Beside the large, robustpainting of Courbet, his realismwas a "little manner,"and it is surprisingnow that they could be regarded in their time as similarexpressions. During the eighteen-fifties Champfleury produced a regularstream of stories and novels which established him as a leader of the realisticmovement in literature. But by I86o, he was dwarfed by Flaubert, and inthe coming decades the works of the de Goncourts and Zola overshadowedhis slight and often badly written novels. His historical studies took more andmore of his time; he became an expert on old pottery and was appointed anofficial of the national factory at S&vres,a post which he held until his deathin I889. During the last twenty-five years of his life, he published manyvolumes on the history of caricature, popular imagery, folk literature,patriotic faiences, romantic vignettes, Monnier and the Le Nains.2 Thesebooks were based on extensive reading and search for original documents,and although very limited as historical studies, were sometimes pioneeringworks. In most of them his curiosity was directed by the original impulse of1848 toward realism and popular art, however far he might have movedlater from the ideals of that time.

4What is most important for us in Champfleury's "History of PopularImagery" is the fact that he attributes an absolute artistic value to the naiveengravings made for the peasants and the villagers.Popular poetry and songs had long before attracted the attention ofwriters; Montaigne, Molikre and Malherbe spoke with enthusiasm of thesongs of the common people and preferredcertain of them to the most highlycivilized works.3 Their judgments, which were isolated in their time,

1 See the articles collected in Le Realisme,1857, and especially p. 3 ff.2 The chief works are: Histoirede la carica-ture, in 5 volumes (1865-188o); Histoiredel'imageriePopulaire,1869; Les chansons opu-lairesdesprovinces e France, i86o; Histoiredesfaiencespatriotiques,1867; Les vignettes oman-tiques,1883; Les FrdresLe Nain, 1862; Henry

Monnier,Sa Vie, Son Oeuvre,1879; Les Chats1869; Bibliographie iramique, i88I.3 The history of the taste forpopular poetryand songs is sketched by Champfleury, De lapoesiepopulaire n France,extr. n.d. (c. 1857),pp. 137-182. For a more recent and fulleraccount, see N. H. Clement, RomanticismnFrance, New York, 1939-


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176 MEYERSCHAPIRObecame general in the eighteen-forties and fifties. Folk songs were inten-sively collected and studied then.1 It was recognized that they did not followthe rules of modern European poetry and music; their rhythms were strange,the rhymes vague and imperfect, the combinations inharmonious, yet theywere considered admirable,-"il en resulte des combinaisons mdlodiquesd'une etrangete qui parait atroce et qui est peut- tre magnifique," wroteGeorge Sand.2 Other forms of popular literature were enthusiasticallyinvestigated in the middle of the century. Nisard published in 1854his pioneerwork on the literature of colportage with illustrations of popular prints,3andabout the same time, Magnin broughtout a historyofmarionnettes4 to confirmthe universality and dignity of a taste which was then cultivated by devotees ofpopular art, especially by George Sand and the young realist, Duranty.5Flaubert, who brought his friends, Turgenieff and Feydeau, to the fair atRouen to see the puppet-play of the Temptation of St. Anthony, borrowedfrom it some lines for his own version of I849."The corresponding taste for contemporary popular images came moreslowly. Perhaps the directly representative character of the pictorial sign andthe established standards of resemblance stood in the way. They were begin-ning to be noticed, however, by the writers and artists in the eighteen-thirties.In describing the interior of a farm-house in Auvergne in the Peau deChagrin(1830-1831), Balzac pointed to the images in "blue, red and green, whichrepresent 'Credit is Dead,' the Passion of Jesus-Christ and the Grenadiers of

1See the bibliography of recent publica-tions from 1844 to 1857 in Champfleury'sarticle, p. I37.2 In a letter to Champfleury quoted in thesame article, p. 157; other mid-nineteenthcentury opinions with the same content arequoted on pp. 156-159. In an article of 1853,reprinted in Le Rialisme,1857, pp. I86, I87,Champfleuryalso speaksof French folk musicin relation to exotic (Chinese and AmericanIndian) music. He remarks on the peculiarcoincidence of the originality of folk musicwith the most recent refinements of civilizedtaste: "Depuis deux ou trois ans des espritsdistinguds cherchent ' introduire le quartdeton dans la musique moderne. La musiquepopulaire est une mine d'intervalles har-moniques impr6vus, sauvages ou raffinds,comme on voudra." And alsoon the melodiesof popular songs which are "toutes en dehorsdes lois musicales connues; elles 6chappentA la notation, car elles n'ont pas de mesure;une tonalit6 extravagante en apparence,raisonnable cependant, puisqu'elle est d'ac-cord avec une po6sie en dehors de toutes lesr6gles de prosodie, ferait g6mir les didac-tiques professeurs d'harmonie."3Histoiredes livrespopulaires, u de la littira-ture du colportagedepuisle XVe sidcle usqu'a

l'etablissement e la Commissiond'examendeslivres du colportage(30 nov. 1852), Paris I854-Also important for the interest in populararts is Charles Nisard's Des Chansonsopulaireschez es anciens tchez esFranfais;essaihistoriquesuivi d'unedtude ur la chansondes rues contem-poraine,Paris 1867, 2 volumes. Volume 2 hadalready been published in great part as LaMuseparidtaire t la Muse oraine, Paris 1863.Nisard also published a book on the languageof Paris: Etudesur la languepopulaire upatoisde Paris, 1872.4 Charles Magnin, Histoire des Marionnettesen Europe, 2nd ed. 1862.5Edmund Duranty, Thidtre des Marion-nettesdujardindesTuileries,Textes tcompositionsdes dessinspar M. Duranty,Paris n.d. (1863).It is illustrated by two kinds of colouredlithographs, one in the style of the earlysixties, with rococo qualities, the other repro-ducing the naive style of the marionnettes andtheir settings in illustrations of the marion-nette shows. On the judgment of children'sdolls and toys, see Baudelaire's essay, Moraledu Joujou (1853), in Oeuvres, II, pp. 136-142.6 See the introduction to his Oeuvres,d. A.Thibaudet and R. Dumesnil, Paris, N.R.F.,1936, I, pp. 42-45, and Edouard Maynial,La JeunessedeFlaubert, . 137 ff.


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COURBETAND POPULAR MAGERY 177the Imperial Guard" (the three bulwarks of society--commerce, religion andthe army). He knew also how to reveal the spirit of the countryside incharacterizing the signboard of the village tavern in Les Paysans(1844-5).lDecamps reproduced a rustic religious print in a painting of a Catalaninterior in the eighteen-forties.2And with a real awareness of the qualitiesof the primitive style, T6pffer illustrated one of his NouveauxVoyagesn Zigzagwith a copy of a popular image, HistoiredeCicile,that he had seen on this trip.3For these writers and artists, the popular images had only a relativevalue, or were interesting as parts of the environment that they were describ-ing. Even Baudelaire, with his extraordinary perceptiveness and romanticrespect for the primitive imagination, was still attached to normsof paintingthat limited his judgment of primitive styles. He might observe as Goethedid the infallible harmony of colouring of the tattooed faces of Indians, andrecognize in their whole bearing a Homeric elevation.4 Yet when he wishesto account for the mediocrity of modern sculpture (Pourquoi la sculpture estennuyeuse),6 he points to the more primitive character of sculpture as anart, as if in ironical reply to the classicistpretensionthat sculptureis the highestart;6 it is rather the art par excellence f savages, "who carve fetishes veryadroitly long before they undertake painting, which is an art of profoundreasoning and requires for its enjoyment a special initiation."' "Sculptureis much nearer to nature and that is why our peasants who are so delightedby a piece of wood or stone that has been industriously turned, remain blankat the sight of a beautiful picture." In its highest state, among civilizedpeoples, sculpture is a complementary art, coloured and subordinate toarchitecture; but now having lost this connection, it has become isolated andempty, returning to its primitive condition. Our contemporary sculptors,he says, are "Caraibes," fetishistic artisans.8When he wrote these lines in reviewing the Salon of 1846, he apparently

1 Oeuvres,N.R.F., Paris, 1937, p. 45.2 The Card Players, in the Louvre.3 NouveauxVoyagesen Zigzag, Paris I854,p. 38 (written before 1846).4Salonde I846, Oeuvres,I, p. 9o, and Salonde 1859, ibid., II, p. 255.5 Salonde 1846, ibid., II, p. 127; the sameideas in Salon de 1859, ibid., II, p. 275.6 In the same Salon,speaking of Delacroix,he says that sculptors have railed againstDelacroix's drawing unjustly. They arepartial and one-eyed people, whosejudgmentat the most is worth half the judgment of anarchitect. "La sculpture, a qui la couleur estimpossible et le mouvement difficile, n'a riena d6meler avec un artiste que preoccupentsurtout le mouvement, la couleur et l'atmos-phere. Ces trois dlements demande neces-sairement un contour un peu indecis, deslignes l1gbres et flottantes, et l'audace de latouche" (p. 79).SIbid. The idea that sculpture is the first

and the most primitiveart is also Winckel-mann's:"fora child also can give a certainform to a softmass,but he cannot drawon asurface;for the first, the mere conceptof athing is sufficient,but for drawing muchmore knowledgeis needed."-Geschichte erKunst des Altertums, rster Teil, Das ersteKapitel.sBaudelairedoes not have in mind here,asonemightsupposerom hepassagequotedin note 6 above, a distinction between theplasticand the picturesque, he tactile andthe optic, in the modernsense, in order todeduce the necessarynferiority f the sculp-turein a periodof impressionisticaste. Onthe contrary, he declares that sculpture,though"brutalandpositive ike nature, s atthe same timevagueandintangible,becauseit shows oo manysidesat once"(Oeuvres,I,pp. I27, 128); it lacksa uniquepointof viewand is subject to accidents of illumination.What he condemnsabove all in sculpture s


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178 MEYER SCHAPIROthought no better of the qualities of primitive painting. In his little knownSalon Caricaturall f the same year, he resorts to the conventional parodies ofarchaic forms in ridiculing certain pictures as child-like or savage because oftheir rigidity or bright colours.

In contrast to those views Champfleury found in primitive and contem-porary folk arts qualities that justified their comparison with the highestcivilized art. "The idol," he said, "cut in the trunk of a tree by savages, isnearer to Michelangelo'sMoses than most of the statues in the annual salons."'The loud colours of the popular prints are disdained as barbarous, but theyare "less barbarous than the mediocre art of our exhibitions in which a uni-versal cleverness of hand makes two thousand pictures look as if they havecome from the same mould." Modern folk art shares the qualities of the firstwood-cuts of the fifteenth century. "The naive execution of the BibliaPauperum has an equivalent only in certain engravings of the BibliothequeBleue of Troyes. The stammeringof children is the same in all countriesit offers the charm of innocence, and the charm of the modern imagierscomes from the fact that they have remained children . . . they have escapedthe progressof the art of the cities."3In Champfleury's comparison of the savage idol with the Moses ofMichelangelo, there is perhaps an echo of the posthumous work of RodolpheT6pffer, Reflexionst menus roposd'unpeintreGenevois,which was published inI848 and again in 1853 and 1865. In his sprightly, amiable style, T6pfferdevotes two chapters to the drawingsof children: Ou l estquestion espetitsbons-hommes, nd Oul'on voitpourquoi'apprenti eintre st moinsartisteque egamin asencore pprenti.4 n the latter, he asserts: "il y a moins de dissemblance entreMichel-Ange gamin griffonneur et Michel-Ange devenu immortel artiste,qu'entre Michel-Ange devenu un immortel artiste et Michel-Ange encoreapprenti."5 The beginnings of art are not to be found in the legendary effortto trace the profile of a lover, but in children's drawings. Art exists alreadycomplete in the latter. The same mannikinformsappearin Herculaneum andGeneva, in Timbuctoo and Quimper-Corentin. But there are "petits bons-hommes et petits bonshommes," the merely imitative of nature and theits vulgar artisan reality, that efficient in-dustrial character which in the mid-nine-teenth century gave savage handicraft somevalue to Victorian taste. Cf. Melville, MobyDick, chap. LVII on the "ancient Hawaiianwar-club or spear-paddle" which is "as greata trophy of human perseverence as a Latinlexicon;" cf. also the "beautiful New Zealandpaddle," that Owen Jones admires in the firstchapter of his Grammarf Ornament1856). Itis the skill rather than the fantasy of thesavage that Baudelaire despises.

1 Le SalonCaricaturalritiqudn verset contretous illustrdde 6o caricaturesessindesur bois.Premiere annie. Paris 1846. Reprinted infacsimile in Ch. Baudelaire, Oeuvres n Col-laboration,with introduction and notes by

Jules Mouquet, Paris 1932, cf. pp. 9, 15, 17-2Histoire de l'Imageriepopulaire, 2nd ed.1869, p. xii. In the i886 edition, he changes"most" (plupart) to "many" (bon nombre).3Ibid., p. xxiii.4 Livre 66me, chap. xx, xxi, pp. 249-255of the Paris 1853 edition. That Champfleurywas acquainted with T6pffer's books appearsfrom his reference in his Histoiredela caricatureantique(n.d.-1865?), p. 189, to T6pffer'sEssai dePhysiognomonie,eneva 1845, a proposT6pffer's studies and reproductions of chil-dren's drawings in this book. However,Champfleury is probably mistaken in callingthe ancient graffito he reproduces oppositep. i88 a child's drawing.5 Reflexionset menuspropos, pp. 254, 255.


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COURBETAND POPULAR MAGERY 179artistic expressionsof a thought. Send the gamin to an art school and with hisgreater knowledge of the object, he will have lost the vivacity and the artisticintention he had possessed before; the attributes of the sign will replace theartistic beauty of which it is the sign. Savages, as artists, show the same forceas the "gamins de nos rues et nos tambours de regiment." As images of man,the idols of Easter Island with their hideous features and strange proportionsresemble nothing in nature and hardly make sense. But considered as signsof a conception, "they are, on the contrary, cruel, hard and superior, brutedivinities, but divinities, grandiose and beautiful; as signs they have clarityand meaning; they live, speak and proclaim that a creative thought has beeninfused in them and is manifested through them."'Topffer could arrive so early in the nineteenth century to this sympatheticjudgment of the drawings of children because of his personality and specialexperience. That art was not imitation, but the expression of "ideas," thatthe natural formswere only "signs"of the conceptions of the artist, and histori-cally relative to a time and place, all this was a commonplace of the asthetictheory of his time. But T6pffer, as a gifted artist, compelled by a defect ofvision to give up in his youth his ambition to be a painter and to restricthimself to drawing; as a Swiss schoolmaster, devoted to the boys, with whomhe had made his pioneer Alpine voyages in zig-zag; as an illustrator of his ownplayful stories; and as an original caricaturist, who had reflected on his artand exploited the primitive graffitesque side of caricatural drawing,2 he wasmore readily able to see the universality of art as an instinctive expression ofan idea in the child as well as the professionalpainter. In his enthusiasm forthe child, there is perhaps also a connection with the enlightened, advancedtraditions of Swiss pedagogy.T6pffer's book was well known in Paris where he was warmly recom-mended as a writer by Sainte-Beuve3 and discussed at length by TheophileGautier in his L'art moderne 1856).4Gautier regretted that T6pffer had attacked the theory of l'artpourl'artas a senseless formalism; but he was enchanted by his assertionof the superi-ority of children's art. He now discovered in T6pffer's own drawings thevery qualities Topffer had found in the children's. Comparing him withCruikshank, Gautier wrote: "There is in the Genevan less wit and morenaivete: one sees that he has studied very attentively the little bons-hommeswhich children chalk on the walls with lines worthy of Etruscan art in theirgrandeur and simplicity. . . . He must have been equally inspired by theByzantines of Epinal. . . . He learned from them the art of rendering histhought in a few decisive strokeswithout losing any of its strength."5

1Ibid., chap. xx.2 See his delightful albums, which are thetrue forerunners of the comic strip and theanimated cartoon: Histoire de M. Jabot, LeDocteur Festus, Histoire d'Albert, Histoirede M. Cryptogame, all of which were re-printed in Paris.3 See Sainte-Beuve's preface to his NouveauxVoyagesnZigzag, Paris 1854: Notice urTpiffer

considirdomme aysagiste also in the Causeriesdu Lundi,VIII). Sainte-Beuve speaks of the"caractere a la fois naif et reflechi de sonoriginalit6," and citesT6pffer's maxim "Tousles paysans ont du style" and his interest inthe "langage campagnard et paysanesque."4 See pp. 129-I66, Du beau dans l'art.5Ibid., pp. 130, 131.


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180 MEYERSCHAPIROWe see here that the primitive is regarded not only as an example of auniversal naivete, but as the source of a conscious nalvetd in modern art.Yet only a few years before in 1851 Gautier had dismissed Courbet's Enterre-mentd Ornans s rustic and had compared it with tobacconists' signs.' Between

185 and 1856, taste had apparently changed, and T6pffer's book, with itsrevelation of the creativeness of children, undoubtedly had much to do withthis new opinion. Champfleury's first articles on popular images had alsobegun to appear since 1850.2How radical were these judgments which extended the concept of theideal primitive (a generation before the circle of Gauguin and the firstscientificwritings on children's art) to include the artof children, the lower classesandsavages, may be gauged from the attitude of Baudelaire. No French writerof the nineteenth century has written with more passion of the child as theprototype of the painter and poet of genius." Yet the art of the child orthe savage has no interest for him; it is clumsy, imperfect, the result ofa struggle between the idea and the hand. When Guys began to makepictures for the first time, in his maturity, he drew, according to Baudelaire,"like a barbarian, like a child, angry at the clumsinessof his fingers and therecalcitrance of his tool. I have seen a great number of these primitive daubsand I confess that most people who know, or think they know, painting,would not have been able to divine the latent genius which dwelt in thesetenebrous sketches. . . . When he comes upon one of these early efforts, hetears it or burns it with a most amusing shame and indignation."'4 Neverthe-less, in learning by himself all the tricks of the trade, Guys preserved "fromhis first ingenuousness what was necessary in order to give an unexpectedseasoningto his rich gifts."5 With a paradoxical rhetoric, Baudelaire describesthe genius of this dandy and acute observer of the elegances of Parisiansociety as child-like and barbarian in its most subtle aspects and presents thechild as the pure archetype of the "painter of modern life." The child is nolonger for Baudelaire, as for the romantics and T6pffer, an example of freeimagination, but is now regarded as a creature who, in opening his eyes onthe world, discovers and remembers the appearances of things with anincomparable intensity of feeling. In Baudelaire's child, the direct vision ofunsuspected colourings and shapes is an ecstatic experience. "L'enfant voittout en nouveaut6;l est toujours ivre."8 But in this intoxication of the visual,the child automatically preserves an ideal and barbarian clarity. "I wish tospeak of an inevitable, synthetic, infantile barbarism, which often remainsvisible in a perfect art (Mexican, Egyptian or Ninivite) and which is derivedfrom the need to see things in the large and to consider them especially in theeffect of their ensemble."' Baudelairethus attributes to the child two moments

1 Riat, op.cit., p. 88, speaks of the "6trang-et6 caraibe du dessein et de la couleur."2His first article on the legend of the'BonhommeMis"re'was published in L'Evene-ment, October 26, 1850.3 "Le g6nie n'est que l'enfanceretrouvieAvolont6" (Oeuvres,I, p. 331) ; and in the Salonde 1846: "I1 est curieux de remarquer que,

guid6 par ce principe-que le sublime doitfuire les d6tails,-l'art pour se perfectionnerrevient vers son enfance" (ibid., II, p. Ioo).4Ibid., II, p. 329-5Loc. cit.6Ibid.,p. 331.SIbid.,p. 338.


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COURBET AND POPULAR IMAGERY x81of vision: the synthetic, and the more realistic, discriminating perception ofdetails; he speaks of the joy of the child-destined to become a celebratedpainter-who discovers the variegated, nuanced colour of the father's nakedbody.' If he is indifferent to the drawings of the child, Baudelaire has trans-formed him, however, into a modern sensibility, penetrated and obsessed bythe beauty of the external world.2 His imaginary child, stirred by the shockof sensation, forecastsimpressionismand the later theories of art as a purified,intense visibility. It owes something to the realism of the fifties, which inrestricting the scope of painting to the immediately apparent, deepened theawareness of the visual.Courbet himself belongs to the period of transition from the culturedartist of historicalpainting, who moves with an elaborate baggage of literature,history and philosophy and whose works have to be understood as well asseen, to the artist of the second half of the nineteenth century, who relieson sensibility alone, working directly from nature or from feeling, an eyerather than a mind or an imagination. Beside the great mastersof the preced-ing period, this newer type of artist was for a critic like Baudelaire a mereartisan, ignorant and plebeian. Baudelaire, who belonged to the generationof Courbet and was twice painted by him, was still attached to the aristocraticview and despised realism; he speaksoften of the difference between Delacroixas a sovereign, universal mind, the consort of Shakespeare and Goethe, andthe rude maneuvres hose works now fill the Salons. To enjoy Courbet in 1850,one had to accept works with banal subjects, painted without an evidentrhetoric of classical or romantic beauty, and revealing a personality whoseresponse to nature and social life, however decided and hearty, seemed uncul-

1 Ibid., p. 33r,-"un de mes amis me disaitun jour qu'etant fort petit, il assistait A latoilette de son phre, et qu'alors il contem-plait, avec une stupeur mCl6ede d6lices, lesmuscles des bras, les degradations de couleursde la peau nuanc6e de rose et de jaune, et ler6seau bleuatre des veines." On the child aspotential colourist, see also his remarks inL'Oeuvre t la ViedeDelacroix, bid., II, p. 305.But Baudelaire could hardly approve thedrawings of children, since he required thatdrawing "doit etre comme la nature, vivantet agit6 . . . la simplification dans le dessinest une monstruosit6" (Oeuvres, I, p. 163),and protested against the classicistic taste forstable, closed, simplified forms as a prejudiceof savages and peasants (Oeuvres, I, p. 305).Interesting in this context is Delacroix's dis-like of children (ibid., p. 320); in his paint-ings, they are often blood victims.2 Baudelaire's conception of the child asendlessly observant and curious reappears asan original scientific observation some fifteenyears later in Taine's article on the Acquisi-tion of Language by Children, in the firstnumber of the RevuePhilosophique,anuary

1876; it was translated into English in Mind,II, 1877, and inspired Darwin to publish hisown famous article on the development of thechild in the same volume of Mind. Taine saysof the twittering of a little girl: "its flexibilityis surprising; I am persuaded that all theshades of emotion, wonder,joy, wilfulnessandsadness are expressed by differences of tone;in this she equals or even surpassesa grownup person." And of the wonderful curiosityof the infant: "No animal, not even the cator dog, makes this constant study of allbodies within its reach; all day long the childof whom I speak (at twelve months) touches,feels, turnsround, lets drop, tastesand experi-ments upon everything she gets hold of;whatever it may be, ball, doll, bead, or play-thing, when once it is sufficiently known shethrows it aside, it is no longer new, she hasnothing to learn from it and has no furtherinterest in it. It is pure curiosity. . . ." Thisarticle was reprinted in Taine's De l'Intelli-gence,Volume I, Note i. In the same book,he speaks of infancy as the most creativeperiod of the intelligence (Liv. IV, chap. i,ii).5


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182 MEYER SCHAPIROtured and even boorish beside the aristocratic inventiveness of Ingres andDelacroix.1 The imaginative aspect of his art was not at once apparent in themeanings and gestures of the objects painted; it had to be discovered in thevery fabric of the painting (as Delacroix later recognized); so that Courbet,who vigorously opposed l'artpour 'artand spoke of expressing his time, couldalso become for the young artists of the sixties the modern example of a purepainter." To his positive conception of nature as given completely in senseexperience corresponded his conception of the painting as a self-sufficientmaterial object.In his painting of the Atelier(P1. 40ob)whereBaudelaire is shown in theright corner, absorbed in a book, Courbet has representedwith great tender-ness and an admirable naivetd a little child drawing a bonhommen a sheet ofpaper stretched out on the floor (P1.40c). Since he calls this work an AllegorieReelle3of the most significant aspects of his life during the past seven yearsand challenges the spectator to divine the sense of all the parts, we can besure that the child has a symbolic meaning for Courbet. In the centre is thepainter himself at work, at the right is the world of art, which he calls theliving world,4formedby his closest friends, including Baudelaire and Buchon;nearest to him sits Champfleury, and at the feet of his,defender is the childdrawingits mannikinfigure.5 A second child gazes at the painting of Courbet.On the other side he has placed on the ground a bandit's plumed hat, adagger and a guitar, the cast-off paraphernalia of romantic art.6 In paintingthe child in this manner at the feet of Champfleury, the student of folk art,Courbet affirms, I think, Champfleury'sdefence of his work as naive and his1Delacroix could say of the 'Bathers' ofCourbet that "the commonness and useless-ness of the thought are abominable." Journal,April 15, 1853.2 See Theodore Duret, Lespeintresfranfaisn1867, Paris I867, chapter on Courbet.3 The full title in the catalogue of the ex-hibition of 1855 was: "L'Atelier du Peintre,allegorie r~elle determinant une phase desept ann~es de ma vie artistique" (Lager,Courbet, I929, p. 62). For Courbet's ideasabout the meaning of his work, see the letterto Champfleury, published in the catalogueof the exhibition of the painting at theGalerie Barbazanges in Paris in i919; andthe letter to Bruyas (Borel, op. cit., pp. 56,57).4

"l"esgens qui vivent de la vie" . . hespecifies them also as "les actionnaires, c'est-a-dire les amis, les travailleurs, les amateursdu monde de l'art" (letter to Champfleury).6 He is not mentioned in the letter (nor isthe child who looks at Courbet's painting).But it is surprising that Champfleury in anessay on Courbet in 1855 (published in LeRialisme, 1857, Pp. 279, 280) describes thelittle boy as playing with some prints. This

incorrect observation of the realist, whoprided himself on the exactness of details inhis own writing, arises, I think, from hisvexation with Courbet for having made hisportrait in an unflattering manner, "like aJesuit general," he wrote to Buchon (April14, I855--see Lettresnedites eChampfleury,aRevueMondiale, 133, 1919, p. 532) ; but insteadof reproaching the painter for his portrait, hefinds fault with the conception of the littleboy at his feet: "Is M. Courbet reallycertain," he asks,"that a little child of a richbourgeois would enter the studio with hisparents when there is a nude womanpresent?"; and characteristically enough heconverts the child from an artist into anamateur. The question is all the more sur-prising in a book in which Champfleurycriticizes the prudery and hypocrisy of theFrench bourgeoisie in disliking the popularsong, "La Femme du Roulier" (Le Realisme,p. I88 ff.); here the little children of theunfaithfulwaggoner tell theirgrieving motherthat they will do as their father when theygrow up.6 Courbet calls them "les d6froquesroman-tiques" in the letter to Champfleury.


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eC-oo3 Zf- -b~gi~~ ~r~L~CLtC~ AL^-uA-A-~

a-Courbet, Letter to Bruyaswith Sketch of Circus Pavilion(P. I71)

b-Courbet, "L'Atelier." Louvre (p. 182) c-Courbet, Detail fr


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COURBET AND POPULAR IMAGERY 183conception of naivete as the ground of all creativeness. Perhaps this circum-scribes Courbet's intention too narrowly, but there is undoubtedly here ametaphor of the painter's avowed originality and naivete.'

5Champfleury'sinterest in the art of the child, the peasant and the savagegoes back to his first years in Paris, before his meeting with Courbet. In hisstory, Chien-Caillou,written in 1845 about the engraver, Rodolphe Bresdin,he tells how the hero, having run away from his brutal father, fell in with agroup of rapins. "He was only ten years old; he drew in so naive a fashionthat they hung up all his works in the studio . . . he thought of makingengravings, but his engravings resembled his drawings; there was somethingof the primitive German, the Gothic, the naif and the religious which madethe whole studio laugh . . . he was an artist like Albert Diirer with as muchnaivetd."2In his own writing, Champfleury tried to attain naivete also; the lettersto his mother describe his assiduous efforts to cultivate this quality. "I havearrived at naivetd, which is everything in the arts," he tells her in I849.3 Heread Diderot especially as a model of unaffected directness in prose.' Headmired the simple strength of popular songs ahd found in them a great truthto life. The simplest, the most naive art was also the most veracious; injudginga song the peasant does not say it is beautiful, but it is true.5 Hence Champ-fleury could believe that realism and naivetd, far from being antagonistic,are complementary and united in the single concept of sincerity.6Yet in his taste for popular prints and songs, Champfleury seems tocontradict his notion that realism is the indispensable art of modernity. nhis book on popular images (1869), he recommends in the concluding chapterson the art of the future two opposed things: the preservation of popularimagery as a conservative didactic instrument, conciliation being the "supremegoal" of art, and the further development of realism by vast murals ofmodern industry in the railroad stations and public buildings.' On the one

1Between Courbet as a child and Courbetas a master, there was no Courbet "ap-prenti": in the catalogue of the exhibitionof 1855, he adds the following footnote to no.I, L'Atelier du Peintre,-"C'est par erreurque, dans le livret du Palais des Beaux-Arts,il m'est assigne un maitre: deja une fois j'aiconstat6 et rectifi6cette erreurpar la voie desjournaux; . . . Je n'ai jamais eu d'autresmaitres en peinture que la nature et la tradi-tion, que le public et le travail." (The fulltext of the catalogue is reproduced by LUger,Courbet, 1929, pp. 61, 62.)2A similar conception appears in MobyDick (I851), where Melville compares theworkmanshipof a savage and a sailorin bone-carving: "full of barbaric spirit and suggest-

iveness,as the printsof that old Dutch savage,Albert Ddirer" (chap. LVII).3-Troubat,Sainte-Beuvet Champfleury,. 92.SChampfleury, Le Rialisme,p. 194 ff-5De la poisie populaireen France, p. 141,quoted from M. de la Villemarqu6 and theGrimm brothers.6 On his ideas on sincerity in art, see LeRialisme, 1857, PP- 3 ft.SHistoirede l'imageriepopulaire,1869, pp.286-301 (L'imagerie de l'avenir), especially,p. 290 on the murals. He had already pro-posed such murals in his Grandes iguresd'hieret d'aujourd'hui, 86 . This was a typical St.Simonien and Fourierist idea, and was dis-cussed in 1848 at the meetings of the socialistgroup of the Ddmocratieacifique,ed by Cour-


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184 MEYER SCHAPIROhand, realism is the lyric of modern progress,on the other hand, the primitiveart and the sentiments of the peasantry are the bearersof an eternal wisdom.Thus the movement attacked for its positivism and materialism, also promotedthe taste for primitive arts which were to serve later as an example in therepudiation of realism and the idea of progress.It is true that some critics looked on realism in its positivist aspectas the product of a peasant mentality, the peasant being described assceptical and narrowly focused on the here and now. "The exclusive love ofexactness is the root of the characterof peasants, usurers and liberal bourgeois,-realists in the full sense of the word, who always make an exact count."'But the art of the peasant is hardly realistic in this sense, and the notionthat realism springs from a peasant mind disregards its precise content andthe complexity of its forms. The peasant or lower middle class origins of therealist painters and authors may have determined the direction of their art,but they determined it only in Paris, where these writers and artists en-countered a higher culture and consciousnessof social life. The detailed andexact description of contemporary manners which was for Champfleury oneof the criteria of sincerity in modern prose is inconceivable in the literature ofthe folk. The interest of Courbet and Champfleury in folk art never entailedfor them the imitation of its simpler, shadowless styles. The seeminglyregressivetendencies in the looser and more static compositionsof Courbet arebound up with unprimitive conceptionsof a new colouristic,tonal and materialunity of the painting and prepare the way for Impressionism. Champfleuryhad a presentiment of this when he compared the freergroupings of Courbet,his "horrorof composition," with the work of Velasquez. And he expressedthe same idea in arguing that the novel, relatively formless but realistic andopen to an unlimited range of experience, was the truly modern art, as againstthe artificially contrived verse and the narrow scope of the romantics.The seeming contradiction in Champfleury'stwin programme of folk artand murals of industry arises, I think, from the unstable, problematic char-acter of the social movements which promoted realism and which terminatedin the dictatorship of the Second Empire.In the beginning, the realism of Champfleury's circle was the art thatdiscovered the life of the lower classes; it derived from their growing con-sciousness and importance a great self-confidence as a progressive andnecessary art. Since these classes threatened the existing order, the sympa-thetic preoccupation with them in art was a radical interest. And at a timewhen critical observation of social life was a revolutionary force, the idealsof directness and realism in painting or literature were politically suspect.The mere presentation of the lower classes on the monumental scale of formerbet's countryman, Victor Consid&rant. Ac-cording to Estignard (G. Courbet,1897, pp.104, 105), Courbet spoke to Sainte-Beuve,with whom he spent much time in 1862, ofhis desire to decorate the railroad stationswith such murals. This was also an ambitionof Manet's. The importance of the former

St. Simoniens in the development of theFrench railroads during the Second Empiremay have contributed to the prevalence ofsuch projects.1Silvestre, Histoiredesartistesvivants,I856,p. 277.


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COURBET AND POPULAR IMAGERY 185images of history was an aggressive act, a displacement of the ruling classby its chief enemies.' In i85o, the difference in scale alone already dis-tinguished Courbet from the contemporary painters of peasant genre. Likethe great size of his signature,2 the size and energy of his paintings were anirritating provocation to his conservative critics.But this initial radical aspect of the realist movement was very short-lived. In hisjudgments of folkart in I85o and even during 1848, Champfleurywas already affected by the political reaction and the desire for peace. Withina few years the people, that vague undifferentiated mass on which the radicalleaders of the forties had placed their hopes for the emancipation of society,had changed its face and colour. The events of 1848 to 1851 had made clearthe sharp differences of interest among them, the stratification of peasantsand small proprietors,of factory workers and artisans, the firstgroup attachedto its soil, conservative, often religious; the others, without possessions,brought together in work and more apt to independent resistanceand struggle.If the immediate likelihood of socialism was shattered by the events of thesefour years, for the first time the working class appeared as a revolutionaryforce, concerned with its own interests. The defeat of the Paris workers inJune 1848, the establishment of the dictatorship of Louis Napoleon in 1851,rested in part on the support given to the upper classes by the mass of thepeasantry, frightened by the spectres of revolution.3 Champfleury, whoseart moved between two regions, the Paris boheme and the petit-bourgeois lifeof his native province, had never been secure in his political views andvacillated constantly with the broad movement of events. Before 1848 hehad written attacks on the Fourierists and socialists, criticizing all partisanor tendentious art.' In February I848 he was editor with Baudelaire of theSalutPublic,a republican newspaper of only two issues, with confused radicaland religious slogans.5 At this time he was an admirer of Proudhon.6 Butin June of the same year he became co-editor of Le Bonhommeichard, ournalde Franklin,with Wallon, who supported a new Holy Alliance of Germany,Russia and France.' A few months later, in August, he was among thecollaborators of L'Evdnement,he moderatejournal of Victor Hugo.8 He wrotethen to his mother about the literary advantages of this association and hisindifference to politics.* In February I849, although detached from politics,

1Courbet aid in x86i: "Ler6alisme stparessencel'artd6mocratique"Estignard,Courbet, p. 117, I18).2 This is ridiculed by Bertall in his carica-ture of the Enterrement (LUger,Courbetelonles caricatures, . I5).3The political and social history of Francefrom 1848 to 1851 has been brilliantlywritten by Karl Marx, The ClassStrugglesnFrance(1848-1850), and The EighteenthBru-maireof LouisBonaparte.4Bouvier, op. cit., pp. 30 ff.5 It has been republished in facsimile witha preface by Fernand Vand6rem (Le Salut

Public,no. 1-2, Paris 1848), Paris n.d. (1925?).Wallon, La Pressede 1848, ou revuecritiquedesjournaux,Paris, I849, p. 6, calls it a "journalde fantaisie democratique."6 See his Souvenirs, . 298.7 It had only three numbers, June 4, Ir,18. On its contents, see Wallon, op. cit., pp.7o-72, and p. 125.8 Wallon describes it as "moderate reac-tionary," with "hatred of anarchy, tenderand profound love of the people."9 See Troubat, Sainte-Beuve t Champfleury,p. 77.


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I86 MEYER SCHAPIROhe declared himself anti-bourgeois and "red, rather than reactionary;"' thebourgeoisie, he said, is still master under the Republic, but cannot last. Hewas invited in December I849 to contribute to Proudhon's socialistjournal,La Voixdu Peuple,and published there his story, Les Oiesde Noel.2 He stillfelt himself to be completely unpolitical, but he wrote at this time: "Nousautres travaillons pour le peuple, et nous devouons a cette grande cause."3The coup-d'etat of December i851, however, endangered him because of thecensorship and his connection with the formerly republican journals.4 Toprotect himself he turned for a while from literature to historical researchon folk art and poetry.5But instead of abandoning the ideas about art which he had formedunderthe impact of 1848, he changed their content and tone. He was still attachedto reality and the "people," but the latter were now regarded as the un-changing element in the nation and their own art as a profound lesson inresignation to life and the conciliation of opposed interests.6 The eternaltasks of the peasant were recommended as a happy alternative to the incon-stancies and revolutions of urban society. Already in 1848, while withWallon, he had planned a series of articles on "all the poets who have sungthe family;"7 and it was in the same year that he conceived the work onpopular imagery and legends in order to calm the people in a period ofinsurrection and to teach them, as he said, the lesson of reconciliation byrecalling their own traditional acceptance of destiny.8 In this reaction to theviolence of the barricades, he is a little like his friend Monnier'sJosephPrud-hommewho retires in 1848 to his country estate and addresses the gardeners:"Bons villageois! hommes primitifs qui avez garde, malgre les revolutions, lerespect des superiorites sociales, c'est parmi vous que je veux couler mesjours."9

1 Ibid., p. go. He also supported the re-public, he said, because of its friendlyattitudeto writers and artists,-ibid., p. 93.2 Ibid., pp. 100, Ioi, letter to mother,December I849; see also Bouvier, op. cit., p.277 ff. on this novel, the first of his realisticworks, and very much influenced by Dupontand Buchon.3 Troubat, op. cit., p. IoI.* Ibid., letter of December 14, 1851, p. 131,and December 31, p. 133. But he did notwholly disapprove of the censorship; "jen'aime le journalisme, je ne l'ai jamais aimeet tout ce qui pourra comprimer son bavar-dage, je l'approuve" (p. 131), he wrote beforethe censorship was actually applied to hisown works. He also said: "je crois, malgr6n'importe quels 6venements, que la littera-ture dolt vivre, qu'il y ait un Empire ou unComit6 de Salut Public. Je ne crains rien,ne m'occupant pas de politique" (p. 131)."Ce fut alors que, par un brusque sobre-saut, je me plongeai dans l'6rudition pour

6chapper aux dangers de mon imaginationqui avait failli suspendre deux importantsjournaux (la Presseet l'Opinionnationale)"-this statement by Champfleuryin a notice onBuchon in 1877 is quoted by Troubat in LaRevue,P