9THE RHETORIC OF REALISM:COURBET AND THE ORIGINS OF THEAVANT-GARDERHETORICS OF REALIST ART ANDPOLITICS2116USTAVECOURBET(1819-77) BELONGED TO THEGPost-Romantic generation of French artists and writersthat includedHonoreDaumier, J.-F. Millet, Gustave Flaubert, and Charles Baudelaire. They were born at the close ofan heroic age. In their youth, they witnessed the breakdown ofa common language of Classicism, the dissipation of revol-utionary idealism, and the growing division between artistsand public. In their maturity, they saw the abandonment ofEnlightenment principle and widespread accommodation ofauthoritarianism. At the end of their lives, they beheld thepromise and threat of Communist insurrection- and thecomplete collapse of a bourgeois public sphere. Together,these crises and caesuras combined to convince the artists andwriters of the mid-century that they were living through acultural rupture of unprecedented dimension: the name givenfor that broad epoch of change was "modernity," and thename for that specific post-Romantic generation was Realist."I am not only a socialist," Courbet wrote provocatively to anewspaper in 1851, "but a democrat and a Republican aswell-in a word, a partisan of all the revolution and above all aRealist ... for `Realist' means a sincere lover of the honesttruth."The rhetoric of Realism, however, is not confined to artists'manifestos or to France; it is written across the age and acrossEurope, in its politics, literature, and painting. The artists andwriters mentioned above may not have read Marx'sManifestoofthe Communist Party(1847), but their works shared withitadepiction of epochalanxiety,transformation, anddesacralization:The bourgeoisie has stripped ofits halo every occupationhitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It hasconverted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet,the man of science into its paid wage-laborers.... Constantrevolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbanceof all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agi-tation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.. . .All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned,and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, hisreal conditions of life., and his relations with his kind.Marx's words are redolent with images from Realist art andliterature. Physician, lawyer, priest, poet, and man of scienceare veritably the cast of characters in Flaubert's bitter satire ofcountry life,Madame Bovary(1857); the depressing resultsfor humankind of the "uninterrupted disturbance of all socialconditions" are exposed inDaumier'sTheThird-Class196Carriage(ca.1862),Millet'sTheGleaners(1857), and 197Courbet'sThe Stonebreakers(1850); the poet stripped of his206halo is the subject of Baudelaire's ironic prose-poem "TheLoss of a Halo" inParis Spleen(1869).In the art and literature of Courbet and Flaubert, reverencefor the ideal and honor of the Classic have no place: the formerdepicted gross wrestlers, drunken priests, peasants, prosti-tutes, and hunters; the latter described common scribes,pharmacists, journalists,, students, and adulterers. In thecaricatures of Daumier and the poems of Baudelaire, thereappear no Romans in togas (except for purposes of satire) ormedieval knights in armor:theypreferred to honor ragpickersin their shreds and patches, country bumpkins in their111-fittingcityclothes, and bourgeois men in their black suits. "Itis true that the great tradition has been lost," wrote Baudelaireat the dawn of this new age, in "On the Heroism ofModernLife" (1846),and that the new one is not vet established.... But all thesame, has not this much abused garb its own beauty and itsnative charm? Is it not the necessary garb of our sufferingage, which wears thesymbol of a perpetual mourning evenupon its thin black shoulders? Note, too, that the dress-coat and the frock-coat notonlypossess their political196 HONORS DAUMIERThe Third-ClassCarria,ge ca. 1862.254 x 35} (65.4 x 90.2)197JEAN-FRANGOISMILLETThe Cleaners1857.33 x 44 (83.8 x 111.8)beauty, which is an expression of universal equality, butalso their poetic beauty, which is an expression of thepublic soul-an immense cortege of undertakers' mutes(mutes in love, political mutes, bourgeois mutes ... ). Weare each of us celebrating some funeral.Compared to modern men in "frock-coats," like those fromBalzac's novels, the poet then explains, "the heroes of the Iliadare but pygmies."RHETORICS OF REALIST ART AND POLITICS207::.u.~ILNM,•,J avail[itl'.artd'aimerrIt)vide:plein do respectp,urlebeau sexe, et plusIwliquc9extuc,jemeretirai.LapoussiereduForum m awaitdess,1chdlegosier,Ientrai (tansuncaf6,--- Peer! mecrini-je,apponez-m,nune-,lace6 lapommedc,Hcsperidc,et au rhum.Absorbepar un flamine quipnaitla demi-tasseadeuxvetale.•, legar;nnneprenaitpoint gardehmoi.24198 GRANDVILLE"Apple of the Hesperides and rum ice," fromL'nAutre:Monde18.}.}.In contrast to Baudelaire's irony, Daumier and his fellowcaricaturist GrandvilleU.-I.-I.Gerard,1803-47) choseanachronism to satirize the "real conditions" of their"suffering age." In the 1840's, they highlighted the dubiousheroism of the present by depicting the stylishness of figures198from the Classical past, as in Daumier's lithograph "TheAbduction of Helen," fromLe Charivari(1842), and Grand-ville'sengraving of Romans ordering an "apple of theHesperides and rum ice." In the latter sheet, from theFourieristUnAutre Monde(1844, see pp. 203 and 298), amodish menage wearing Roman sandals are seated in a bistro,being served drinks by asurlywaiter standing in Classicalcontraposto.Once again the rhetorics of Realist art and politicsmay be seen to overlap. Anachronism and caricature were thelinguistic weapons of choice for Karl Marx a few years laterwhenhe sought to describe the hypocrisy andservilityof thebourgeoisie who permitted Louis Napoleon (nephew- to thefirst Napoleon) to destroy the Second Republic in acoup d'etaton December 2,1851:20 8RHETORICS OFREALISTART AND POLITICStact,and1xcrtitmaL,~c~incur,,itc\ctc,t~NICC.Ilctirr~wtoadd: the first time astraced%,the second asIarce.Caussidierefor Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, theMountainof 1848-31 for the %fountain of 1793-1795, theNephew for the Uncle. And the same caricature occurs inthe circumstances in which the second edition of theEighteenth Brumaire is taking place.[18Brumaire is thedate in 1799, according to theRevolutionarycalendar,when Napoleon I assumed supreme power.].No longer can