All art is a product of its time, but few movements have been as irrevocably tied to a political moment as Impressionism. The careers of Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and the artists who inspired them, notably Courbet and Manet, assumed shapes forced on them by the upheavals of 19th-century France, in particular the events that brought the Second Empire into being and those that immediately followed its dissolution. 

The French Revolution of 1789 left in its wake a series of popular revolts, autocracies and flimsy republics. Flaubert took a dim view of the tenor of the age when he remarked, ‘Everything traces back to stupidity and the immense human capacity for self-deception.’ Few were immune to self-deceit. Just how closely involved the artists of the Impressionist circle were with contemporary events is the subject of Sebastian Smee’s detailed, lively and at times richly novelistic Paris in Ruins. Smee is an art critic for the Washington Post and writes with both knowledge and panache, transmitting the sense of urgency and immediacy that animated the painters. 

Of course, most artists simply carried on as always, submitting works to the Salon, the annual showcase of officially sanctioned art. Even radicals such as Courbet and Manet, both committed republicans with a profound contempt for Napoleon III, exhibited there. Success at the Salon, as Smee says, ‘was almost