Abstract

In Degas's Place de la Concorde (ca. 1875), an urban genre portrait of Viscount Lepic and his daughters proves to be layered with political signification, making it an eloquent visual account of the vexed nature of early Third Republican democracy. Most prominent among its signs is the erasure of the sculpture Strasbourg behind Lepic's hat, creating an absence evocative of France's territorial loss. Degas's protomodernist vocabulary—fragmentation, cropping—also appears in the popular imagery expressing the contradictions of the Third Republic's contested early history. Ultimately, Place de la Concorde emerges as a careful record of the ideologies of Impressionism's formal language.

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