Organizing Independence

One need only remember the role of Jacques Louis David in the French Revolution of 1789 and the quasi-official status of art in French national history to understand the prominence of art and artists in the Fédération des Artistes of the Paris Commune of 1871. Focusing on artists' political activities rather than their artistic efforts, Gonzalo J. Sánchez Jr. examines the artists' assembly formed in the Commune, recounts the program and activities of the group and its members, and charts their fate after the fall of the Commune and during the ensuing repression of the Communards. Departing from the tradition established by Karl Marx, which views the Commune as a precursor of revolutionary socialism, the author portrays the artists' federation as a complex mixture of conservative and reformist elements, situated at a historical crossroads. These artists—including Gustave Courbet, Jules Héreau, Edouard Lockroy, Jules Dalou, and Léon and August Ottins—were part of a tradition of artists' assemblies dating to 1789 even as they argued for radical change in artists' social status and autonomy. Many of the reforms they advocated were realized during the Third Republic, making the federation a social and political, if not an aesthetic, precursor of modernism.