In the 1850’s and 1860’s, several French artists launched attacks on middle-class, bourgeois values. While multiple French artists engaged in this collective attack on middle class respectability, the most notable of these figures are Charles Baudelaire, Edouard Manet, and Emile Zola. While these three artists used different mediums of expression to communicate their disgust with the newly emerging social order, common themes resonate throughout the works of all these artists: an exquisite attention to realistic detail, the lionization of human sexuality, and an acknowledgement of the reality of death. In many ways, France was hugely impacted by the prudish values of the Victorian-era British, who resided across the English Channel. Through the artistic works of Baudelaire, Manet, and Zola, one can witness a collective repudiation of a new public ethos that encouraged people to subjugate their natural drives in service to a new industrial age.
When examining the artistic works that emerged from 1850’s and 1860’s France, one of the most prominent and prolific of these artists is the poet Charles Baudelaire, who is well known for the graphic depictions of sexuality and death that he deployed in his poetry. One of the most famous collections of Baudelaire’s poetry, Flowers of Evil (1865), contained several poems that describe various sexual acts, scenes of death, and graphic depictions of rotting corpses. For these reasons, Baudelaire was at once persecuted and well-received by his contemporary audiences in mid-nineteenth century France. The new bourgeois values dictated that “respectable” people should, in essence, pretend as though the more animalistic aspects of human existence simply did not exist. However, as hindsight proves, it is impossible to expect people to suspend their base drives in favor of abstract ideals, and this is the reason that Baudelaire’s graphic poetry struck such a poignant chord in France, and in the world over.
Use your promo and get a custom paper on
"Essay About Culture".
Baudelaire’s contemporary, the painter Edouard Manet, received similarly mixed reviews when he released his artwork in 1860’s France. One of the most famous works of Manet, Olympia, an 1863 painting that depicts a nude woman lounging in the grass, is typical of the overtly sexual nature of much of his artwork. Another famous painting of Manet, Luncheon on the Grass (1863), almost resulted in his arrest by the French police, as it appears to depict acts of prostitution. While the moral and legal authorities in France had major issues with the artwork of Manet, he nonetheless received a good reception by critics in France and the world over. As it would seem, the intelligentsia of France and the remainder of the Western world were highly suspicious of the sanitized world views that the middle class was attempting to foist upon all other members of society, and thus welcomed artwork that flew in the face of this artificial sanctimoniousness.
Finally, the novels of the writer Emile Zola are another cultural artifact from 1850’s and 1860’s France that serve as a reminder that French artists held a great deal of contempt for middle-class, bourgeois moral values. The most famous and controversial of Zola’s novels, and 1865 autobiographical work, The Confession of Claude, was a highly sexualized depiction of the author’s life and exploits as a young man. When considering the identity of Zola, as well as that of his artistic cohorts, it is interesting to note that almost all of them hailed from familial backgrounds that could best be described as “middle class” or even “elite.” This fact thus begs the question of why these artists were so determined to undermine a value system that would initially appear to benefit them. Regardless of their motives, all three of these artists made a valuable contribution to Western culture.
