Gustave Dore and l'annee terrible et la semaine sanglante

The Franco-Prussian War--a significant chapter in the personal and professional life of artist Paul Gustave Dore--produces a tragic and terrible year (and one horribly bloody week) in France's history, as Napoleon III's troops are crushed by Otto von Bismarck's vastly superior forces and Paris is laid under siege with the threat of yet another revolution in the air.

Between July 1870 and March 1871, France suffered a crushing defeat in its war with Prussia, the Second Empire of Napoleon III vanished almost overnight, and Paris endured a brief, but bloody civil conflict known as the Commune. This period, christened l'annie terrible (the terrible year) by Victor Hugo, also was a significant chapter in the personal and professional life of Paul Gustave Dore. As a native of Strasbourg. a city routed and besieged by the Prussian army early in the war, Dore had particularly strong feelings about the events unfolding around him, which he expressed in numerous drawings, prints, and paintings.

Dore has been described as both a realist and a visionary--his bleak drawings of the poor in Victorian London or his lively scenes of contemporary Parisian life, for example, make a stark contrast to the hallucinatory illustrations he made for Dante's "Inferno" or Rabelais' "Gargantua." This thematic and stylistic duality is evident as well in his images related to the Franco-Prussian War. which range from documentary sketches and paintings of the siege and bombardment of Paris to rousing battle fantasies and grim allegories of the war and its aftermath. In his major paintings of the era--"The Defense of Paris." "The Black Eagle of Prussia." and "The Enigma"--the symbolic and the documentary appear side by side. In these pictures, on battlefields still charged with the possibility of victory and on those already littered with the proof of defeat, the closely observed uniforms, bayonets, broken cannons, and dead soldiers coexist with an allegorical figure that, for Dore. literally embodied the valor, strength and. ultimately, the Gustave Dore misery of the country and its people during the tumultuous year of war and siege.

In July 1870, Napoleon III received the alarming news that Leopold Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm I of Prussia, had been selected to ascend the Spanish throne. Napoleon demanded that the Hohenzollern candidate be withdrawn, fearing not only a Spanish-Prussian alliance but, more significantly, the Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's ultimate goal--the unification of Germany. When negotiations broke down, Napoleon III declared war on Prussia. This declaration, on July 19, 1870, was the beginning of what would prove to be the swift end of an era. Criticized at home and abroad for its decadence and ostentation, the Second Empire had fallen by early September of 1870 and the Third Republic of France was born.

At first, France was confident of victory over Prussia emboldened by its history of military triumphs, particularly those associated with the current Emperor's uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte. Emile Zola limned this attitude in a passage from his epic retrospective novel of the Franco-Prussian War, The Debacle (1892). In it, an idealistic soldier immersed in his grandfather's tales of the Grande Armee, envisions past glories informing the war that has just begun: "Whatever the battle, the flags floated with the same swirl of glory on the evening air and the same cries of Vive Napoleon!' re-echoed as the camp fires were lit on conquered positions, everywhere France was at home as a conqueror and carried her invincible eagles from end to end of Europe. She had only to plant her foot on a foreign realm and the defeated peoples were swallowed up in the Earth."

Dore seemed less assured than Zola's fictional soldier. In Blanche Roosevelt's flattering biography of Dore, he is described as "an ardent patriot" by one of his close friends. Dore's patriotism, however, was not necessarily synonymous with political support for Emperor Napoleon HI, who was widely considered to be the war's instigator. Although he was the grandson of a Napoleonic officer killed at Waterloo, Dore apparently considered himself a legitimist, believing that the throne of France should be restored to the Bourbon fine.

His opinions of the Emperor and his regime notwithstanding, Dore certainly was inspired by the French troops on the eve of battle with Prussia. His sketch dating from August 1870 called "The German Rhine," was described in one notice as a "patriotic contribution by M. Dore to the war-like enthusiasm of the day ... one calculated to stir a Frenchman's blood, and to excite the meditation and poetic feeling of M. Dore to its highest flight." Another writer suggested that the subject of this drawing was the idea of the Emperor himself, who was anxious that the peculiar genius of the painter should employ itself in producing some characteristic memorial of the reign. When the fatal war against Prussia was declared, Dore was commissioned to paint a grand picture of the crossing of the Rhine by the resistless legions of France. Supposedly, the idea was to introduce upon the canvas a spectral host of the dead soldiers of France who did cross the Rhine, watching in pride over the prowess of their descendants.