Paris in Despair

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 a heavy toll on the city's artists, forcing them out of the spaces and routines of their insular prewar lives and often thrusting them onto the ramparts. 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. Using the visual arts as an interpretive lens, Clayson illuminates the wide range of issues at play during the siege and thereafter. For anyone concerned with life or art in nineteenth-century France, Paris in Despair will be a landmark work.

"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." - Robert L. Herbert, New York Review of Books; "Important and original... A beautifully produced book, whose illustrations - more than 200 - are the substance of the argument rather than mere decoration. Clayson's outstanding strength is that she combines the painstaking technical expertise of the art historian with the broad perspectives of an accomplished social and political historian." - Robert Tombs, Times Literary Supplement"

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 coeditor of Understanding Paintings: Themes in Art Explored and Explained.