![](http://www.tumblr.com/share/photo?source=http%3A%2F%2Flibbymurphy.com%2Fhumancomedy%2Fstorage%2Fcache%2Fimages%2F000%2F054%2F19623%2Clarge.jpg%3F1382211599&caption=%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3E%3Ca href="http%3A%2F%2Flibbymurphy.com%2Fhumancomedy%2Fcontent%2F19623-1%2F" title="19623.jpg"%3E19623.jpg%3C/a%3E%3C/strong%3E%3C/p%3E%3Cp%3EÉdouard Manet
(French, 1832–1883)
Guerre Civile (Civil War), 1874
Lithograph
Friends of Art Fund, 1962.3
This print depicts a victim of the violent repression by
government troops of the Paris Commune, a worker-led counter-government that formed in Paris at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in early 1871. During the semaine sanglante, or bloody week, soldiers sent by the conserva-tive provisional government at Versailles took the capital back from the communards. While Manet was not himself a communard, he witnessed the slaughter of some 30,000 Parisians and later made two lithographs about the events. Here Manet borrows the traditional religious funerary motif of the gisant or outstretched body at its final rest, to confer a solitary dignity upon an otherwise chaotic and degraded scene of brutality.
In “On Some French Caricaturists,” Baudelaire alluded to the role that lithography could play in documenting the tragic events of history. During the course of the 19th
century, the strict rules about history painting—that it should be monumental and heroic, in the noble medium of large-scale oil painting—began to change. Not only did everyday subjects and common people begin to be
depicted in large-scale oil paintings, but also key moments in the nation’s recent history were chronicled in small-scale print media like etchings and lithographs.
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The Human Comedy: Chronicles of 19th-Century France
19623.jpg
Édouard Manet (French, 1832–1883) Guerre Civile (Civil War), 1874 Lithograph Friends of Art Fund, 1962.3
This print depicts a victim of the violent repression by government troops of the Paris Commune, a worker-led counter-government that formed in Paris at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in early 1871. During the semaine sanglante, or bloody week, soldiers sent by the conserva-tive provisional government at Versailles took the capital back from the communards. While Manet was not himself a communard, he witnessed the slaughter of some 30,000 Parisians and later made two lithographs about the events. Here Manet borrows the traditional religious funerary motif of the gisant or outstretched body at its final rest, to confer a solitary dignity upon an otherwise chaotic and degraded scene of brutality.
In “On Some French Caricaturists,” Baudelaire alluded to the role that lithography could play in documenting the tragic events of history. During the course of the 19th century, the strict rules about history painting—that it should be monumental and heroic, in the noble medium of large-scale oil painting—began to change. Not only did everyday subjects and common people begin to be depicted in large-scale oil paintings, but also key moments in the nation’s recent history were chronicled in small-scale print media like etchings and lithographs.