France’s defeat by Prussia in 1870, closely followed by an agonizing civil insurrection, led to the christening of that period as the country’s année terrible. While 1870–71 marks a crisp line for historians between the Second Empire and the Third Republic, the events of the Prussian siege of Paris from September 1870 to January 1871 have not been interrogated for their art-historical significance. Hollis Clayson’s groundbreaking work, Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life under Siege (1870–1871), provides just such an interrogation. Clayson seeks to complicate social art histories that read artists only as “exemplars of a collectivity, usually a social class,” and instead to be equally attentive to “the distinctive and dynamic share of the individual qua psychological entity” in the creation of art (6–7). The fusion of this focus on artistic agency with a meticulously researched social history of art during the siege of Paris enables Clayson (and her readers) to reap a hefty reward: a richly drawn and revealing study that moves seamlessly between biography, cultural history, and art history, vividly exposing the historical characters and vie quotidienne of the Prussian siege.

The organizing question of Clayson’s study is how the artistic practices of the Second Empire fared under the peculiar wartime conditions of besieged Paris. She persuasively establishes that the “smooth crossing of the threshold constituted by the Terrible Year” implied by many histories of French art may not have been so smooth after all (9). While other historians have posited continuity between the art of the Second Empire of the 1860s and that of the Third Republic, Clayson discerns an important if overlooked disruption in the history of French art through an analysis of a wide range of wartime images, from the grand Orientalist history paintings of Henri Regnault to the numerous popular lithographs that circulated during the siege.

In contrast to what Clayson calls a “normative model of modern warfare,” the Prussian siege of Paris offered an atypical wartime experience distinguished by boredom, claustrophobia, and gender mixing (12). Besieged Paris housed some four-hundred-thousand troops, many of whom returned to private dwellings in the evening. Thus, far from the radical separation of gendered spheres typical of war, the siege saw private practices brought into public and a concomitant blurring of gender roles. In examining the distinctive social implications of such conditions, Clayson profitably evaluates a series of some thirty-six paintings commissioned by a Parisian entrepreneur named Binant in order to commemorate key moments from the siege. The Binant series, executed by thirteen artists during the Terrible Year, offers remarkably detailed views of everyday life in Paris in 1870–71. From soldiers bathing in the fountain of the Tuileries to bourgeois women caught in a riot at the Hôtel de Ville, the Binant series furnishes Clayson with numerous illustrations of what she terms the “jarring reversals in the spatial and social order of things” during the siege, in which “the domestic became militarized” and “the military was embedded in civilian private life” (22). Clayson contends that this series of paintings was the expression of an “ideological strategy,” presumably on the part of the bourgeois sponsors of such art, to represent the siege in a certain way (39). By including the non-suffering, dignified bourgeois and bourgeoise in nearly all of the paintings, the Binant series ordered the trauma of the siege.

Clayson argues that popular images such as the Binant series produced several new figures in the iconography of modern Paris: the soldier, the courageous besieged woman (the assiégée), and the displaced refugee from the banlieue. All three of these figures were novel public presences in Paris; as such, they became a common visual means of representing the siege, serving to “index (but also exaggerate) the classed, gendered, and spatialized transformation of daily life” (44). During the siege, Parisian boulevards inhabited by flâneurs parading their ennui became egalitarian streets peopled by displaced peasants, soldiers, and housewives suffering the anxiety and restlessness of a closed city.

Some of the most intriguing moments of Clayson’s study come from the representations and caricatures of siege life found in popular lithographs, particularly those dealing with the food crisis. From a portrait of an apocryphal rat butcher to cartoons that played with the “cannibalistic desire” of starving Parisians, Clayson gathers together an absorbing array of visual documents to support her claim that “the unease produced by the blurring or loosening of social boundaries” and concerns about hunger “bubbled up into jokes about meaty women, vegetable people, and chopped-up Prussians . . . the carnivalesque language of food caricature” (173). Indeed, food was the implicit focus of an entire genre of siege images that featured depictions of women standing in lines outside of food stores. According to Clayson, this image was so common in 1870–71, that “it became an emblem of the transformation of everyday street life during the siege of Paris” (163). This genre consistently expressed admiration for the orderly nature of food lines and for the civic virtue of the assiégée’s “disciplined, unselfish public action” (189). Such images are indeed surprising if one takes into account European women’s historic role as instigators of riot in times of food shortage. Indeed, Clayson’s skilled analysis would have been strengthened by more attention to the synchronic history of these images. One suspects that, like the strategic placement of well-dressed bourgeoises in other images of everyday life under the siege, depictions of orderly food lines conveyed a certain anxiety on the part of observers about the potential for such a scene to become an instance of threatening female disorder.

The gendered dynamic of siege images is a central concern of Clayson’s study. She traces the transformation of the female allegorization of Paris and the nation during the months of the siege, drawing fruitful connections between “the rise of female allegorizations of the city, and the simultaneous feminization of the city’s male political leaders” (121). The numerous images of a rather mannish and militarized female allegory of Paris are startling and suggestive, and Clayson puts a number of them to particularly good use.

Given the weight of gender in Clayson’s study, readers may find the absence of a comprehensive comparison of siege images of women to those generated during the Commune or during other revolutionary or wartime moments in French history unsatisfactory. Though Clayson outlines the limits of her study in the conclusion in an effort to head off such a critique, images of militarized yet praiseworthy women and of orderly bourgeoises in public during the siege seem ripe for such a comparative analysis. In her conclusion, Clayson proposes that a post-Commune sculpture commemorating the defense of Paris in the form of an imposing, non-maternal woman in a military great coat “may have also served to erase the memory of the radicalized, pugnacious women, especially the notorious and vilified pétroleuses . . .” (349). As with her analysis of representations of the food queues, Clayson here misses an opportunity to draw out the historical significance of such seemingly uncommon images of French women during moments of political upheaval. Studies such as historian Gay Gullickson’s Unruly Women of Paris: Images of the Commune (Cornell University Press, 1996) have exposed the gendered terms by which the Commune was understood by those inside and outside of Paris during those months. Given the richness of the female images Clayson analyzes—from Puvis de Chavannes’ modern female allegory to popular representations of Paris as a woman—Paris in Despair would benefit from more attention to the historical tradition of female imagery in revolutionary moments.

In addition to her attention to popular siege imagery, Clayson offers close readings of several individual artists who worked in Paris during the months of the siege. She is particularly interested in the “new positions that artists assumed and imagined for themselves,” especially those male artists who took part in the military defense of the city. She exposes Édouard Manet’s difficulties in portraying his wartime experience, and argues that during this besieged winter Manet “‘saw’ as an Impressionist for the first time” (232–33). This goes to Clayson’s broader contention that the conditions of the siege changed artistic practices. In her concluding remarks, she suggestively indicates that only modernist painters such as Degas and Manet engaged in a “postwar prolongation” of their new artistic orientation, while those artists who did not “align with modernist innovation” abandoned the artistic experimentation of the war months (363).

Amongst the individual studies of Paris in Despair, Clayson’s discussion of painter and National Guardsman Henri Regnault, killed in the final months of the war, stands out for its engaging integration of biographical, art historical, and historical analysis. Regnault’s large-scale renderings of the opulent interior of an Oriental harem were painted during the harsh fall and winter months of the siege. At first glance, both canvases seem a logical continuation of the exotic colors and themes of Regnault’s pre-war work. But Clayson elegantly unpacks the complex psychological and social conditions of the siege paintings—from Regnault’s engagement to Geneviève Bréton to his restlessness as a soldier serving on the ramparts. Through Clayson’s intensive reading, it becomes clear that the harem paintings were as much a meditation on the lassitude and claustrophobia of military life under the siege, as they were an escapist depiction of a warmer, sensual climate. In this way, Clayson convincingly argues that the reclining Moor of Hassan et Namouna (1870) “incarnated a languorous, indolent, self-absorbed, sensuous oriental masculinity while enacting an image of selfhood that must have briefly resonated with Regnault’s own disconnected, martial, European male self, a self that was chafing to do something militarily effective” (268).

Clayson’s study persuades even the most skeptical reader that art was important during the months of the siege, not simply as a reflection of wartime anxieties but as a significant means of understanding the events of those traumatic months for those who lived through them. The reader repeatedly is struck by just how thoroughly Parisian artists were integrated into the war effort and vice versa. Clayson’s text fully incorporates the treasure trove of images she has unearthed, from striking color plates of paintings by Regnault to black-and-white cartoons.

In addition to providing an original and much-needed analysis of art under the siege that will doubtlessly be of great interest to art historians, Paris in Despair serves as an invaluable history of the siege itself. From details of soldiers’ wages to information about food availability, the reader is treated to an evocative study of life “backstage” in Paris during the Terrible Year. In this way, Clayson’s study moves beyond an insular art history, and adds significantly to historical scholarship on the period. Her engrossing analysis of siege art is an important contribution not only to the history of nineteenth-century French art, but to the history of France tout court.