Genre: A Social Contract?

Abstract

Critical support for Manet, Monet, and their associates emerged a few years before the end of the Second Empire, between 1866 and 1868, when Emile Zola and Jules-Antoine Castagnary, and then other men of letters, took up the pen in their defense. This support coincided with a revitalization of political opposition to the Empire, enabled by its loosening of strictures on the press and public gatherings. Artistic and political rhetoric often used a similar vocabulary and tone of voice. Indeed, there were “republics” of letters and “republics” of artists. Military metaphors, especially, pervaded contemporary criticism, all “sporting moustaches,” as Baudelaire noted sarcastically. “Battalions” of painters who carried “flags” and were called “recruits” marched through even the most sedate critiques. Yet in discussing the new tendencies in painting, neither Zola nor Castagnary made an explicit correlation between an oppositional painting and politics. Political associations in art criticism remained in the unde...