Tl-cimic, TH£ MiVTtue or 2 The Courbet Legend l have as my guarantee the hatred I hear towards men and towards our society, which will last as long as I live. Courbet to Bruyas, 1S54.1 Baudelaire once planned an essay on Courbet, after their friendship was over. He took as his motto a clumsy phrase from one of the painter's letters to Champ-fleury, 'Puisquc Realistic lLX^k« an4_he began with a page of spleen against Chatnpficury and his tliira^rat^r:musi^ms. Then he' jotted.down two headings: perhaps tbey indicate what he would have written, once the anger had subsidejdj^ '(Analysis of Nature, of the talent of Courbet. oj morality).' 'Courbet savins the world.'z (<\$i>5) .i , . / ---- , . /YWAenJtvy These are cryptic notes, and as so oftcrijwitli Baudelaire, they S'.vij^est an effort to hold together in a single'threat! of narrative' very aiftercnt kind;- ofknowleJge do so would be halt a challenge to the subject m. hand, 1 •ait a 'homage to it analyse Courbet's talcnt^would meaiiexglaining Nature and lis honors, raid mode-^ '-. ing the Realist's worsjno of sanctifiea vegetables. But it would also mean discussing, i.with a a&tairf baffled* admiration, the eccentric morality of Courbet's art; it would .mean taking seriously, for once, the enormous, rjeery'cyrjrism of his greatest [paintings. (One critic in 1853 called the great naked bourgeoi c, who steps from the fwater infThe Bflfjte5>'this ifeipw matter, powerfully ra^crecT, cynically turning its aback on die b^oider'. That could stand as a motto for Courbet's art as a whole feen 1849 and i856\)'And it would mean, above all, putting the talent alongside e pretension's, giving weight to Courbet s immense? rambling philosophy .and *lis desire to save the world. I want to make a living art, I want to be a man: so Courbet thundered in his {J^SjjnanifStgJ The last of Baudelaire's headings sums *kat up. It adapts die proud title that Courbet had invented that same year for his v 1 ■2 fc-Hi VWUS '■ ■ ■ • — (portrait of jean journct7~cEe"Foun'erist prophet) 's_etting_Qu.t for the conquest of Universal Harmony'. Where Joumct went, so the heading implies, Courbct fo lowed: whether to universal harmony, whichJournet never reached, or the paddc ccrls of Salpetricrc, which he knew quite well. What I want to do in this book is follow in Baudelaire's footsteps, or at least set myself the same sort of task. Since there is Realism, and since Courbet's version is a problem still - no less mysterious for being so blatant -^I want to keep quite different kinds of explanation in contact. I want to distinguish the art from the lifestyle, but give each their separate weight. I want to ruggest~the purpose of Courbet's poses; to find what the egotism.and the crazy ambition were for; to see why Courbet cultivated thetonfusion between his art and his life. This is not to accept the poses at their face value, nor abandon Baudelaire's irony in the face of Courbet's bluster. It is not, above all, to apologize for Courbet; but at least tojrescue him from one particular, P^tro^z'ng myth. The myth in question goes like this:ICourbet, afvain]man, a simpleton, a naff, a peas^ant'wha could not spell, 1 rien quutt peintre', was led into Realism and politics by various friends, more or less u^ruputouft^wd then?^raft^m"theories; grew fat on their praise; ended by believing that his art was political; and paid for it in the fiasco of the I CpmmuneJThe myth has many sources, but the main one is Champfleury. 'I am delighted that Courbet is working' - this is one of a score of such passages in his letters in the 18 60s - The way of life in the countryside will be better for him, and healthier, than the brasseries of Paris. The country should make him forget, I hope, his role of savjdur' of the world through painting. He is a painter, a robust, excellent painter. So let mm^remain what nature made him, simply a painter.1 ■ , , , Those instructions have been echoed often enough since; they.are the staple diet, still, of books about Courbet. If only Courbet had'sfbclcto mseaself u only he had not left us those blundering manifestoes, those vulgar pronouncements on politics; if only he had not hstcnedj:cj F'roudhon (or Dupont, or Buchon, or whoever the writer's ideological villain may be): this is the myth in its modem form. And yet Champfleury's letters, the authentic Idurcc^of the myth, are-.transparently dis-honest: an inimitable mixture or personal pique and aesthetic despair; a giving up of the critical ghost. Take for example a comment like this: UndentancLthat it is not exacdy the subjects Courbet chooses which shock mc. If only they wore^uniaent^oTCri'ng, I wouldn't mind if he showed a'bather, some priestS, or Proudhon's family.* It is gad, I think, that phrase 'sufficient covering'. Sad from a man who had made a real effort at^ri.ticism between 1848 and 1855. It seems almost as if the myth itself were to blame MAhc myth of Courbet produces the critical bathosin the face of his work. And the question becomes why the myjh^urvived at all, if these were its origins. But to answer that would lead us to France in the 1870s, after the 22 1 • WvaW Commune, and the world of art in the twentieth century, which is much too far from 1848. injury I shall offer instead one example of Courbet as his enemies saw him. This is Alexander Dumas the younger, writing his 'Lettrc sur les choses du jour* on 6 June 187I: l-ftvV^'O'C From what fabulous crossing of a slug with a peacock, from what genital antitheses, from what sebaceous oozing can have b.ecn generated, for instance, this thing called M. Gustave Courbet? Under what gardener'srctocn'eSvith the help of what manure, as a result of what mixture of wine, beer, corrosive mucus and flatulent oedema can have grown this sonorous and hairy pumpkin, this aesthetic belly, this imbecilic and impotent incarnation of the Self? Wouldn't one say he was a force of God, if God - "Whom this non-being has wanted to destroy - were capable of playing pEtnH) and could have mixed Himself up with this? This is much better writing than most on the same subject. InsteacTof the myth, let usso^back tojCourbet before he was famous, on the eve of the 1848 revolution. Evidence is scarce from this time, but what we have suggests a Courbet without a persona. (It is as if the life-style is chosen - almost constructed - in the next few years, at the same time that Courbet discovers his style as a painter.) When Baudelaire drew Courbet on a sheet of caricatures, perhaps as early as 1847, he already sported his Assyrian profile, and was already perhaps the poseur. But when Francis Wey^saw him for the first tim^inhis^studio in 1848, he was still 'a tall young man, with superb eyes, but very thin, sallowjhony, gawKy (so he was then), and he nodded to me without uttering a word'. He was already 'bizarre', already 'in revolt at one time or another against most theories, and imbued with a deliberate,lgnrjrance, w^rucn aimed at making an effect .5 But there is an air of sobriety, even sombreness,\"bout.W/eY's account "of Courbet at .Vi-VVVVV'"! sobriety, even sombreness, a'bout.Wey's a twenty-nine; and that is also the tone of the most reliable witness we have - he is the only one who writes free from hindsight - Prosper Haussard in his Salon of i84S^J t*TfW V M. G. Courbet, who has come to Paris from a village in the provinces, promised himself that he would be a painter and r^hjsyswn master. He lias kept his word. After ten years qf^ ^ ^ j/JvwtH"^! studying, of painful effort and hesitations after ten yean of hardship, poyer^y and obscGSty, 0 U W_< ay which has to be left -2' Courbet whom Zola described in liis notes for VOcuvrc: 'the monster puffed up with his own personality, unselfcritical, who has become God: Courbet, Hugo'.8 (Not that this was Zola's last word on either of them.) Once it was chosen, Courbct's persona was often described in print. The finest account is by Jules Valles, Courbet's friend, novelist and Communard; he transcribes the artist's version of the French language in a intact; '' Courbet. Eh Ion Ion laire, Ion la! Quai? quoua? l'Hi-dai-ial? Mon mairc e"tai un honge! -La Cnxma, mon tiharnmi? Mais, si jc voullai, je pourrai me foutrrre un calvairc au cul . . . -En quarrant-huit i gn'iavai qu'deux hommes de prraits: moa et Pcurrouddhon. Vous aitcs don un imposteur qu'vous dites que Jaisus-Christ i vivai o daipens dais fammes ai qu'vous voulai pas dire qu'e'etai un maqquero? Corrmicn qu'yous aval dit 9a? . .. l'Hidai-ial? And circumflexes, and modulations, with bursts of laughter exploding in his beard, which he would then wipe with the back of his hand. His belly danced, he p^cSJup and down, laughed till he cried, wiped away a tear from the comer of his cow-like eye with his fat fist.rn ' i<$Sb%'$ The mpst beautiful^uiimal I have seen, this blessed fellow! Works like an ox, but as gay as a bear-caiDjj a bea|t ofthe fields and, a b^ast_ofjheJ^._JV^ So naively vam^so grotesquely eloquent) disorderly and patient, hard-working and thirsty, with the paunc^ of Silenus, the pride ofjupiter, die beauty of Sesostris: on top of all this as careful of his''purse as Sancho, wishing for windmills on his island, and talking of the 'million' to be won!' 2j [red other caricatures and anecdotes tell the same, story rustic patois,'the enormous stomach, the beer, the vanity, th official police report of 1873 put it succinctly: 'the air1 of a'jeering^peasant*. A police spy sat next to him in the brasserie one day in 1872 and reported his truculent style or pontics![a sad disguise for his own recantation in the previous year): It seems he reproached Martin Bernard with abandornfig 'the Commune, and told him that he and Louis Blanc would be the nrst victims of a new commune.'10 But tliis, of course, is Courbet in full decline, dying of alcoholism and political shell-shock, theprisoner of his jsublic face. In the period which concerns us, the persona was still under construction; the poses were being chosen, but the reasons for the choices were clearer. In_the earlyi850s, Courbet was well aware that 'to live the life of a'savage?, as he decided in the letter to Francis Wey which I used to beginlhis booh, was a dangerous and costly project - a necessity, but a bitter one. For Courbct the alcoholic, Courbet the father of an abanSonect'bastard, die idea that his public personality was no more than a mask was not just rhetoric. He wrote to his patron Alfred Bruyas in November 1854: 'Behind diis laughing mask of mine which you know, I conceal grief and bitternesK'and a sadness which clingsN'1 to my heart like a vampire. In the society in which we live, it doesn't take much wVVeffort to reach the voicL^__,\"*-V VMa-A'V. This is a rare moment in Courbct's letters, an important one. Its language is the commonplace of Romantic c^fessidn^ borrowed and ill-digested, like Courbet's pictorial Romanticism of the 1840s. But its very clumsiness is revealing: the way \A hundr deliberated - the same lie, laugh. The 7 Nadar Jean Joume! 1857 thebaic" sombre young man of 1848 suddenly reappears, only to be stoically (vTeprcss'cčfan the next sentene'ror two. Courbct himself is not at home in this veiň;P"4A*-' and the next sentence is a return to his public voice: he had met a Spanish woman in Lyons, and 'She "prescribed^a rcmeSy which cured me completely'. • We do not know much of Courbct's sexuality, beyond the comic promiscuity depicted in a letter to Buchon and in another to Alfred Bruyas. In 1847 his mistress Virginie Binet bore him a son; and some time in the early 1850s she left him, taking her son with her. All that survives of that crisis is a letter to Champfleury, didactic, pathetic: 'I shall miss my boy^very much, but art gives me enough to do without buraeliuJ'l mvself" with a household; moreover, to my mind a married man is a reactionary.'1*'This'was anathema to Chamrjfleury, a solid family man; much later he recalled Chenavard and Courbet poking fun at Proudhon in 1S52 for his new-found bourgeois domesticity (he had married three years earlier, a few days after taking his Confessions d'un revohtioimaire to the press), f? That was one of the few occasions when Proudhon came in for Champfleury's sympathy. j^iPy-j! So this is the 'life of a savage' which Courbet chose in 1850: a disguise'which was necessary (the letter to Wey is certain of that), but bought at some cohsiSeraSle cost. The question must be: what was the advantage in the elaborate disguise, what did. it_enable Courbet to do? I think the answer is this: the mask let Courbet^ remain inside Paris - at the veryjcentre of the world of art, in a way quite different from Millet or D3umier - without becqjrung_parj_of it. He acted the part of t invader, outsider, vulgarian, in order to stay in the middle of things, but keep his own distance from them. My point is more or less the opposite of Champfleury's in the letter I cited:{l~think the evidence shows that Courbet needed the brasseries of Paris in order to sustain liis painting of rural life; he played the rustic - believing in the role, of course - in order not to be a bourgeois, but to have access to everything that only a bourgeois knew.J Courbet wanted knowledge: there is ignorance of things, but he thrive^ OTOt^r people^s sophistkation. For a painter w^o^ according to the myth, was nodung but an eye and a technique, Courbet surrounoMlffimself with an unlikely collection of friends. Who frequented the Brasserie Andler and the Geniclade_Bas:Meudon? Who but the intellectuals and nhilosophers of artistic Paris: ^henavarOjJthe very type of artist-philosopher, 'mystic and Bohemian, 'brah- no doubt'of that. He pretended total V \ t-<" 'acquainte3 with Hegel himself; ( min' as Courbet called him in 1849, biographer of St John of the Cross; Francis ffiey,) fr|end,of Remusat and the official Republicans of the National, king of the roman-feuttleton, author of atweircPand provocative Almanack democratique in 1848; (Jean Wajlonj the philosopher of Murgcr's Scenes de la pie de Bohcmc, translator of Hegel's Logic, author of De la nature hyperphysique de I'homme; complex opportunist, in 1847 still planning a history of Egyptian art and at the same time writing pantomimes for the Funambules ;(Baudelair^(^knchg; critic, academic, eccentric, friend of Balzac, enemy of Realism ;(PJerreDupont)ind Gustave (Mathieu; the worker-poets of 1848; the young^Jules ^lles^jusTescaped from school; Proudhonv from time to time. (a i£<- 29 What Baud theoretical detcrmina |^ Vt? vi, Li? In some strange way, Courbet was the force that held die Brasserie Andler together (Hcrr Andler admitteifit, rather ruefully: Courbet was good for business). Heufirivecl'on its mixture of the grosshand the intellectual; the others sat and laughed at his hour-long tirades against the Ideal and in favour of Alsatian beer: they laughed but th^yj^stened, night after night. CourJjc^v^SiiiL^L^J^J^-i_ ajtajf, almost an'illiterate, with wild spelling and^disintcgrating syntax spilling over page after page. Yet he was also, in his own cahla^e^ous way, a theorist, a doctrinaire, Proudhon himself groanecf tinder the onslaught of the twelve-page letters, beer-stained and crumpled, which greeted his drafts of Du principe de elairc feared and despised in Courbet was not his naivety but his crmmation, his manic resolve to push the theory or Realism to its logical conclusions: he had taken ur> Cjiampfleury's half-laughing, casual catch-phrase and taken it seriously, ruthlessly even; he was the theorist of Champfleury's opportunistic practice. 'As for Courbet, he has become the clumsy^Machiavelli to this Borgia. . . . Courbet has made a theory out of an innocent farced with a strict- ( ness of (fenvictiorTwhich is positively dangerous.'14 And what was fearsome about " that was,the way. in which, theory, in Courbet's hands, became an instrument of personal domination ^at least over such a fragile psyche-as Baudelaire's). As Baudelaire put it later in Pauvre Belgique, 'the philosophy of our friend Courbet, poisoner" with a vested^intercst.V(Paint only what you see! I.e. you will paint only what I see.)'lJ J Courbet the theorist is an unfamiliar animal, but n_ot simply a figment of Baudelaire's imagination. There is other evidence. In spite of the spelling ancTthe syntax, there is plenty of intellectual force in Courbet's letters between 1848 and__ 1855. When late in 1849 he wrote Francis Wey a description of his own Stone-breakers, Wey took it over, word for word, as the centrepiece of a chapter in his own novel Biez de Serine. This was a calculated tribute (which the critics misunderstood, thinking Courbet had based his picture on Wey's story), but appropriate. The letter itself solved problems: There is an old man of seventy, bent over his work, pick in air, skin burnt by the sun, his head in tic shade of a straw.hat; his trousers of rough cloth are patched all over; he wears, inside cracked wooden clogs, stockings which were once blue, with the heels showing through. Here's a young man with his head covered in dust, his skin greyish-brown; his disgusting shirt, all inVags^xposes his arms and his flanks f leather braces hold up what is left of a pair of trousers, and his muddy leather shoes are gaping sadly in many places. The old man is on his knees, the young man is bchindjiim, standing up, carrying a basket of stones with, great energy. Alas, in this ocoipation you begin like the one^an^ end like the odier! Their tools are scattered here and there: a back-basket, a hand barrow, a ditching-tool, a cooking-pot, etc. All this is set in the bright sun, in the open country, by a ditch at the side of the road; the landscape fills the whole canvas.115 V * *f / . Courbet's rapid, accurate phrases; his visual accuracy at the expense of verbal 30 'awkwardness; his casual interjection of a moral ('Alas, in this occupation, you „ QT'V, . ijf, begin like the one and end like the other!') which hardly interrupts the flcrw" of '^vV ' *3 an description, whichrauses to be a_ verbal climax:" all this is language that Wey, or Champfleury, or Buchon, still jsnrug^gTing in 1849 to adapt older styles of rhetoric to new purpose's, could justly envy. (It will be argued of course that Courbet simply did not sec the problem. What, after all, had he to do with the writers his friends admired and imitated, people like Hoffmann, or Chateaubriand, or George Sand? But this does not explain away his management of description in this passage; or his effect on writers who knew Hoffmann and George Sand too well.) , Macliiavelli' is a good description, an essential''oneT " —n . * Baudkla^re^sj^ase clumsy Even the 18^5 Manifesto has the appearance of personal thoughrnpt dictation from Champfleury or Bruyas. It is a struggle to appropriate 3} multitude (too many) ■ of other people's ideas, but also to define their use for his own project, to turn a j tl4>'J>%^ U The^sult is "confusion, but it is Courbet's i ^v^-y^.-^ sequence of complex ideas into a creed, contusion, no one else s. t Wc have come a long way from the Courbet of caricature, the naif, the rustic, arranging his Assyrian profile for the camera of Nadar or Carjat. Let's go no further, for the camera does not lie. The naivety is the essence of the man: all we have to do is learn to take that naivety seriously. Seriously enough to see its purpose, the advantage for Courbet in his laughing mask, his vie de sauvaoe. *" ughing masK, nis vie cse sauvag The advantage, in one word, was distance - detachment from the Stming,tlvtwV*1 chaotic agreement which prevailed among the members of the Parisian avant-garde; rjperuiess to ideas and experience which were profoundly alien to that world 1 (^THX^KT-and its coteries. To be in Paris but not of it: that was what Courbet wanted. To j /^-y^V use the ideas and inventions of the avant-garde for his own ends: that was the ambition, spelt out in the letters to Francis Wey. One could not do this si&iply by changing places, though Courbet in his thirties was an adept at that - moving from Brussels to Montpellier, Munich to Berne, Salins to the Indre, with a mixture of ^unease and e>dii'laration^In the end one came back to Paris, to the Salon, to the brasserie, to one's own reputation. How to survive in that world? And not merely to survive, how to dominate, mstructjanta^gomze? One needed camouflage, and that Courbet had in plenty - obstinate patois, provincial manners, the pose of a peasant^but to dominate one needed more than that. This was where the naivety did its work: it was, for Courbet, a strategy of exposure to^Taris, a kind of power over the city's confusionsL^ W-wv Buchon saw this clearly when he talked, in a famous passage, of the advantages of Courbet's spontaneity: y Courbet's greatest advantage, in the midst of the chaos surrounding him, is undoubtedly his rich spontaneity. ... I have mentioned Courbet's spontaneity. Let me now mention the sureness of his glance/tie subtlety of his moral sense, the ease with which he follows and often dominates .the movement of current sane ideas [saines idhs amhiantes], helped only by -feEB=|M 31 his great intuitive power. Courbct has never had anytliing in the way of instruments of education and study except his magnificent vision, and that lias been quite enough.17 The point here is not the general praise of Courbet's simplicity, but the fact that Buch^on saw what it was for. It did not pit Courbet off from social and moral iawarencsT; on^nc ^ntrafy, it was the source of his political assurance, his open responsiveness to the saines idees ambiantes of his time. (And the ambiance was not just Paris: Courbet's politics in 1850 had a different frame of reference, and that is why they proved so explosive in Paris itself.) There are moments when naivety docs not^closc horizons, but opens new ones: does not^siuit a painter witTun the (5onfniS of his^craft', but breaks those limits completely. The Courbet I propose is both rustic and theoretician - a peasant in order to be doctrinaire, doctrinaire in order to stay a peasant. He is the naif surrounded by bv^^C^** 1 k.t->i*- intellectuals^ the jeering peasant with the enormous paunch, in the brasserie witbT c^t*V ^tJter*>«4? Chcnavard, or Proudhon, or Villiers de l'lsle Adam. Hejs above all an extremis^ /^Vt-wv\V^»-' an excentrique, a refractaire. Which leads us back to Baudelaire's phrase: 'Courbet saving the world'. If there was one man who served as a model for Courb^nt^y^a^JSfiJoTirneQ the half-mad,' fearle'sv1 ridiculous prophet of Fourierism, whom Champfleury had described in an 184.7 feuilleton,1* and Courbet had painted 'setting out for the conquest of Universal Harmony' in 1850J6]. Courbet became Jean Joumet, as Baudelaire ironically implied: adopted his manic style, decided (in the 1850 letter to Wey) that he too would' embark on 'the great vagabond and independent life of the Bohemian'. He became Journet, even in pictorial terms: he had based the 1850 portrait of Journet on a popular image from Le Mans of the Wandering Jew; and he used the same image as the source of his own definitive self-portrait in 1854, The Meeting. To read Champflcury's essay on Journet is - in spite of the patronizing, trivial tone - to discover the prototype of Courbet's life-style. Journet was desperate, prodigious, unstoppable: raining pamphlets from the balcony of the theatre before the police closed in; breaking up a literary soirie at Lamartine's; persuading Dumas to give him an^nn4a],incoirie; pouring scorn on Fourierist 'revisionists' like Con-siderant - 'orrimvaJous omnTarch', he called turn. Journet's^ language kept pace with his personal style. Two examples ^Mopnbsying doom, very accurately, on . 20 February 1848j ^The frenzy is mounting irom hour to hour, the labyss is ^4/^^gapmg* for its^prey, the cataclysm is upon us. It is upon us, and none of us but 1 .1» !/t''.. Twit. knows it! 19 1 Or, more brilliantly, chiding Lamartine for his reception at the soiree: ( pi Ppet, you have eyes so that you may not hear. You are deaf to the cries of children and the groans of the aged. You are blind to woman's tears^and man's despair. Pcct, dowri with ^hypberisy'enough of this feigned religiosity. The firce is"played out: faint1 star, hide thy light! The sun of understanding is flooding the hori2on. The Last Judgment will precede the social resurrection. Everything is stirring, seething, preparing; O future, future! 'May God enlighten you!,J0 32 Shades of Baadcr in the Reichstag, or Douanicr Rousseau at his banquet. Talking of Journet, taking him seriously for a moment as a model for Courbet's life-style, leads us to the most important problem: what was Bohemia, and to what atffip Courbet a member of it? First of all, what Bohemia was not. It was not the5sTy^y,skifer"drebm-world which Champfleury had pioneered in his Confessions de Sylvius of 1845, and to which Henry Murger gave definitive form. About tins Sainte Boheme, as Theodore de Banvillc called it, the best remarks were made by Albert Cassagne: (Of -3 :l(x The metteurs en seine of Bohemia knew how to fashion it^adrq^tly to make it agreeable to [the bourgeois public]. They knew how to use real resemblances between the Bohemian life and the life of the bourgeois student in the Latin quarter, in order to establish a useful confusion, a confusion which is already manifest in [Murger's] Scenes de la vie de Bohlme. To sing of Bohemia was thus, to a degree, to sing of bourgeois youth." The reality of Bohemian life in the 1840s and 1850s was quite different. In the early days, for a few_ycar5.aftcr.the 1830 revolution, Bohemia had been a comfort-able part ofjthe.jzvgttkgardt, supported by doting fathers and therefore carefree, fashionable, unscrupulous (Gautier, Houssaye, Nerval, Roger de Beauvoir had been its leading lights). But that group had broken up and gone its separate ways, into various kinds of accommodation with the market and the official world of art. Bohemia, after that, was an unassimilated class, wretchedly poor, obdurately anti-bourgeois, living^ on in the absolute, outdated style of the 'Romantics', courting death by'starvanon. Nerval lived through that change in the definition of Bohemia, and died in madness and hunger; Journet was committed to the Salpetriere more than once. WsfeiiiiSM/v1 It was this Bohemia, this confused, indigent, shifting population, with its Romantic postures, that Jules Valles tried to rescue from Murger and myth in his book Les Rifractaires. published in 1865. He tried to show the real Bohemia: a : /K-f • I— is world of grinding' poverty, of absolute refusal of bourgeois society, rather than the sowing of flippant Wild oats. It was not an irrelevant book for Valles the Socialist and revolutionary to write; for^Bohemia in mid nineteenth-century Paris was a real social class, a real locus of^dissent. And if we want to locate it within the complex social structure of Paris, we should put it alongside not the students of the Latin quarter but the classes dangereuses. It was this dangerous element - this mob of unemployed, criminals and declasses of every sort, die first victims, the first debris of industrialism - which made up one part of the rebel fighting force in June 1848. The great social historian of tlicJunCj Days, R6mi Gossez, closes his description of the class origins of the insurgents By saying that the last category of tire rebels comprised 'social outcasts of all kinds: tramps, street-porters, organ-grinders, ragpickers, knife-grinders, tinkers, errand-boys, and all those who lived by the thousand little occupations of the streets of Paris, and also that confused, drifting mass known as la Bohhne'.21 These are wqrds which throw Bohemia and Bohemianism into new relief. They rescue them from Mimi and Sylvius, and reinstate them as part of working-class «3 1 33 \ I ... v if -vlv. Paris. This was the Bohemia to which Valles gavccrc^dcncc and definition. This was Daumier's Bohemia,: the ragpickers and organ-grinders of Gosscz's list come straight from his canvases. This was Courbet's Bohemia, this was Journet's, this was Baudelaire's ('Perhaps the future belongs to the declasses? .. .': letter to Ancelle, uo . rt> 5 March 18 ^z.).13 ,h_was a life-style C*) ing individuality,' as Baudelaire put it in 1851. It meant a place between the classes dangereuses of proletarian Paris and the intelligentsia; between two classes which were themselves strange, intricate misfits in any class system, and remained unsure of whose side they were on. So that in June the intelligentsia stayed loyal - ferociously loyal - to the Government, and many of Baudelaire's friends fought with the Latin Quarter detachment: and the classes danucreuses closed ranks with the Garde Mobile, and slaughtered rebels with the best of them. Courbct hesitated and arjstainect^bn Utopian grounds. Baudelaire fought for the rebels, with Bohemia. One wonders what Journet did and said in June. The effectiveness of the Bohemian style was this: in a city which still half-believed in the first dreams andjdeals of capitalism, in the fairy world of arcades, exhibitions, the bazaar,othe e^e^eneur^and the vote for everyone, the Bol^mun^.---caricatured the claims^f^oourgeois society^ He_took the slogans at face-value"; if* the city was a playground he would play; if individual freedom was sacrosanct then he would celebrate the cult twenty-four hours a day; laissez-faire meant what it said. The Bohemian was the dandy stood on his head: where the dandy was the bourgeois playing at being an aristocrat (hence his pathos), the Bohemian was the bourgeois playing at being a bourgeois - the heroic, absurd, mythical bourgeois of 1789. (One could say that the Bohem^an^style .only works in a capitalism with a myth of itself, a belief in its future, fience the failure of its British variants; hence Its relppea&n^eln Galif^p.) pf^X Courbet's game was even more infuriating, in its way. He shifted identities from picture to picture, year to year. Was he peasant or Bohemian? Was there a reason for being both? In 1851, when the great Bohemian self-portrait M^wjth^gige accompanied the Jom^t,^portrait and the JhtriaJ^aJ^mcws to the Salon, which picture was Courbet? (However naive it may seem to us, it was the kind of question which critics asked in 1850.) The critics could accept the self-portrait easily enough: what hurT,' what puzzftcTthem, was its relation to the other pictures, to the other allegiances they suggested. y ^ ,\^^^W & M^tMV No doubt some wiljjavjhat these allegiances and ambiguities never occurred to 0 Courbet. The centraHenetof the Courbet legend is, after all, that to be naive and untutored means to have extremely simple ambitions, a very narrow field of vision - to_b_e interested in digjecbniriue of painting not just primarily (which goes without saying: any artist is'involved first with his material and its problems) but '^exclusively. TT^s is simply a non sequitur, a theory of naive^ which has to Ibs ,,: supported by probfs^like any other. I think the proofs are laclung'. What evidence* Ll/1 we have points to Courbet's naivety as a source of complexity, not of simplicity. 34 .iSLVj^U Ivy p s ~<^VV*^ .^^.^,Wv^y 35 Proudhon's language with Courbet's in his 1861 statements. 2. The Courbet Legend (pp. 21-35) 1. Cited Borel (1), pp. 71-2. 2. B.O.C., p. 637. The notes were probably written late in 1855. 3. 29 Oct 1864, cited Troubat (2), p. 177. 4. 'Remarquez que ce ne sont pas précisé-ment les sujets choisis par Courbet qui me choquent. S'ils étaient reconverts d'un manteau süffisant, peu m'importe qu'il montre une baigneuse, des cures ou la famille de Proudhon.' 23 Apr. 1865, cited Troubat (2), pp. 180-1. 5. Wey Mss., cited C, IT, 184-5. 6. 'M. G. Courbet, venu du village ä Paris, s'est dit qu'il serait peintre et son maitre a lui-meme. II s'est tenu parole. Apres dix ans ďétudes, d'efforts et de titotinernents douloureux, apres dix ans de privations, de pauvreté et ďobscurité, au moment méme d'etre ä bout de courage et de ressources, le voila peintre et, peu s'en faut, déja maitre. ... Ces durs commencemens, cet apprentis-sage solitaire et ces longues épreuves de M. Courbet se lisent sur ses ouvrages empreints d'une certaine force sombre et concentrée, d'une expression triste et d'une maniěre un peu sauvage. Ses paysages... ne sont que des esquisses; mais de ce méme caractěre grave et penetrant.' Le National, 7 Aug. 1849. 7. 'Non seulement socialiste, mais bien encore démocrate et républicain, en un mot, partisan de toute la Revolution et par dessus tout, realisté, e'est-i-dire, ami sincere de la vraie vérité.' Letter to Le Messager, 19 Nov. 1851, cited R., pp. 93-4. 8. B. Nat. Mss. Nafr. 10316 fol. 286, cited Henrrnings, p. 216. 9. 'Journal d'Arthur Vingtras, Courbet, portrait-charge', in Gil Bias, 9 May 1882. See Valles (2), pp. 250-1. ' 10. 'L'air d'un paysan goguenard'; '11 y aurait reproche" 1 Martin Bernard d'avoir abandonne la Commune, et il lui aurait dit que lui et Louis Blanc seraient les premiers victimes d'une nouvelle commune.' Archives de la Prefecture de Police, Courbet file, Ba. 1020. For the spy's report, see 1872, Fiche 173. 11. Cited Borel (1), p. 55. 12. Cited M., p. 86, written in winter 1851-52. 13. See Troubat (2), pp. 125-7, undated letter to Buchon. 14. B.O.C., p. 635. 15. B.O.C., p. 1429. 16. 'La est un vieillard de soixante et dix ans, courbe" sur son travail, la masse en l'air, les chairs bilees par le soleil, sa tete 1 l'ombre d'un chapeau de paille; son pantalon de rude etofie est tout rapi&e^ puis dans ses sabots feles, des bas qui furent bleus laissent voir les talons. Ici, e'est un jeune homme a la tete poussiereuse, au teint bis; la chemise d 'Auxmurs deuxgravures,les deuxseules reproductions d'un collégue, la Promenade des I ,íwrás et les Seminaristes aux champs, d'Amand Gautier; un couple de charbonniers eroti-ques figurant au besoin Adam ct Eve; des e'tudes bizarres, enfantines, la Hake du soldat et VHomme casqui, des dames cmbuissonnees de dentelles, une platee de cerises noires; le fameux Sauvage traversant les rapides, cette toile fantastique dont on n'a jamais pu s'expliquer l'incubation; un Combat maritime (sa deuxi£mc tode!) cascade d'orangeade et de groseille a terrifier le flagomeur le plus impudent - la coquetterie d'atelier du maitre consistait pr^cisfment dans cet £talage presque affects des infirrnites de son dehut - une Pythonisse pretee au Domini-quin; enfin ses essais statuaires.' Published in LaLanteme, 26 Jan. 1878, collected in Arch, de la Pref. de Police, Ba. 1020, Fiche 562. 6. Poe, pp. T45-6. 7. Novalis, pp. 7-9 (translation slighdy modified). 8. E.g. Prud'hon's Portrait de Yimpiratrice Josiphine, the various Arab subjects of Vernet or Decamps, Deveria's Naissance de Henri W (1827 Salon), Leopold Robert's Italian peasant subjects. Couture showed Le Trouvere in the 1843 Salon, and later painted an Orgie parisienne, complete with Pierrot and Harlequin. 9. A much disputed date, but this seems the most likely on grounds of style. It may have been retouched later, perhaps c. 1849. It is not the exhibit in the 1849 Salon called LePeintre; this was a drawing with quite different dimensions. 10. The pseudc-GericauIt is now in the Musee Fabre, Montpellier, the Deroy is at Versailles. ■ 11. There has been confusion about which picture the Portrait of Monsieur X* ** really is. Leger says it is the Besancon self-portrait; its style and the closeness of its dimensions to those, in the Salon registers suggest he is right.