The siege of Paris by Prussians in the fall and winter of 1870 and 1871 turned the city upside down, radically altering its appearance, social structure, and mood. As Hollis Clayson demonstrates in Paris in Despair, the siege took an especially heavy toll on the city's artists, forcing them out of the spaces and routines of their insular prewar lives and thrusting them onto the ramparts (as many became soldiers).

But the crisis did not halt artistic production, as some have suggested. In fact, Clayson argues that the siege actually encouraged innovation, fostering changed attitudes and new approaches to representation among a wide variety of artists as they made art out of their individual experiences of adversity and change—art that has not previously been considered within the context of the siege. Clayson focuses especially on Rosa Bonheur, Edgar Degas, Jean-Alexandre-Joseph Falguière, Edouard Manet, and Henri Regnault, but she also covers a host of other artists, including Ernest Barrias, Gustave Courbet, Edouard Detaille, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Albert Robida, and James Tissot. Paris in Despair includes more than two hundred color and black-and-white images of works by these artists and others, many never before published.

Using the visual arts as an interpretive lens, Clayson illuminates the wide range of issues at play during the siege and thereafter, including questions of political and cultural identity, artistic masculinity and femininity, public versus private space, everyday life and modernity, and gender and class roles in military and civilian society. For anyone concerned with these issues, or with nineteenth-century French art in general, Paris in Despair will be a landmark work.

Hollis Clayson is professor of art history and the Patricia Koldyke Outstanding Teaching Professor at Northwestern University. She is the author of Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era and the coeditor of Understanding Paintings: Themes in Art Explored and Explained.

— Robert Tombs, Times Literary Supplement

“[Clayson] uses current methods of cultural history and feminist theory that look behind battles, monuments, and leading politicians in order to evoke the everyday lives of women, children, and men as they were transformed by war and siege. . . . The best part of Clayson’s study is her demonstration that the domestic duties of women were transformed into public service and that, as a result, women generally became heroically identified with the wartime state. As she points out, this central engagement of women with matters of life and death subsequently created the militant and collective consciousness of women in the Commune.”

— Robert L. Herbert, New York Review of Books

“The numerous illustrations . . . and dozens of anecdotes that highlight what happens to a large, smug, wealthy, and internationally familiar urban center suddenly constrained by catastrophe . . . will leave a vivid impression on readers.”

— Ronald C. Rosbottom, French Review

“Clayson establishes the intellectual and disciplinary context of her study and breaks new ground.  The book is a magisterial work and historians and art historians alike will find it pleasurable and mandatory reading.”

— Gay L. Gullickson, International History Review

— Patricia Tilburg, CAA Reviews

— Patricia Mathews, The Historian