Based on Michael Dorsch’s doctoral dissertation (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2001), French Sculpture Following the Franco-Prussian War, 1870–80 explores the aftermath of what Victor Hugo called France’s “Terrible Year” as reflected in the field of sculpture. Memorialized in many cases by artists who had themselves endured the long standoff (from 19 September 1870 to 28 January 1871), the commemoration of the siege of Paris forced French artists to confront difficult and unfamiliar themes. Both privately and in public, painters and sculptors struggled to devise personifications appropriate to the representation of Resistance, Defense, and Defeat. Among the maquettes and finished monuments designed in the decade following the war, Dorsch identifies a recurring motif: the pairing of what he terms the “strong woman and fallen man.” This iconographic inversion of established nineteenth-century gender roles, Dorsch argues, served a palliative purpose. The widespread representation of fallen men succored by strong women functioned, readers are told, to salve the wounds of a devastating social crisis. Why else would critics endorse a trope that allegorically emasculated French fighters—including fallen friends—if not to counter the bald facts of defeat?

The strong women and weak men of Dorsch’s dissertation (“Strong Women, Fallen Men: French Commemorative Sculpture Following the Franco-Prussian War, 1870–1880”) remain the protagonists of the present study, but a subtitle has been added to the book: Realist Allegories and the Commemoration of Defeat. However intriguing the concept of the “Realist allegory,” this is not the true focus of Dorsch’s study, a fact that is to be regretted given the promise of the title and the paradox it implies. Instead, the theme of the virile woman and unsexed man found in French sculpture commemorating the war of 1870–71 is considered over the course of five chapters, beginning with Alexandre Falguière’s Resistance (modeled in snow in December 1870) and concluding with Auguste Rodin’s Age of Bronze (first exhibited in 1877). Along the way, Dorsch devotes chapters to the usual suspects in the field of late nineteenth-century French public sculpture: Antonin Mercié’s Gloria Victis (1873) and Ernest Barrias’s monument to the defense of Paris (1883).

Dorsch’s thesis is succinctly stated in the first chapter, regarding the “hermaphroditic” power of Falguière’s Resistance, an immovable female personification seated stoically on the phallic barrel of a French cannon: “Falguière’s sculpture presented a vision of gendered inversion that quickly became the dominant sculptural trope French artists used to represent and mediate the complex emotions stemming from the defeat of 1870, which, in turn, laid the foundation for the revolutionary rethinking of the sculptural idiom that characterizes the final decades of the nineteenth century” (26). What Dorsch terms “hermaphroditic” power in his discussion of Falguière’s snow sculpture has “erupted” into a full-blown “crisis of masculinity” by chapter 2. This is familiar ground. Even when he is not directly citing Abigail Solomon-Godeau, whose Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997) explored the image of the ephebic youth in Revolutionary-era French art, Dorsch is restating her conclusions. Paraphrasing Solomon-Godeau, he informs readers that after 1870–71, “as during all such periods of cultural insecurity, the longing for strict border controls around the definition of gender, as well as race, class, and nationality identity, became especially intense” (72). Solomon-Godeau’s pioneering study challenged received ideas about French representations of masculinity, investigating the “fallen man.” Dorsch turns, however, to the psychoanalytic theory of Jean Laplanche in his discussion of the “strong woman.” The latter’s notion of the “phallic woman” gives a good sense of the theoretical ground Dorsch is staking in this study. The politics that concern him most are not the policies of the Second Empire or of the nascent Third Republic, but the sexual politics of the late nineteenth century.

The inversion of established gender roles in art commemorating the siege of Paris was one of the subjects explored by Hollis Clayson in the excellent Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life under Siege, 1870–71 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), which included chapters on “Gender and Allegory in Flux,” Falguière’s sculpture of Resistance, and the contest to commemorate the Defense of Paris. Clayson’s discussion of “feminized men” forms a corollary to Dorsch’s thesis, and her close reading of visual and textual sources probes the uses of allegory in the service of politics. In contrast to the breadth of Clayson’s materials, Dorsch doggedly investigates a single iconographic motif.

Despite the subtitle of the book, the tantalizing concept of the “Realist allegory” is given short shrift in Dorsch’s study. Like Realism and Naturalism, the concept of allegory had, by the mid-nineteenth century, taken on highly charged aesthetic connotations. While artists and critics in the 1840s and 1850s had successfully articulated a “Realist doctrine” in the field of painting, the term was not much applied to sculpture before the beginning of the Third Republic. In contrast to more nuanced interpretations in the realm of painting, art historians have generally considered Realism in sculpture only under its most literal aspect. Dorsch’s study is no exception. Involving the identification of Realist details (an unfastened button or the imprint of a garter), such superficial attempts to parse the “Realist allegory” serve only to underscore the sense that it is a hollow pursuit.

The relationship between public art and national identity in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War is the subject of two essays in June Hargrove and Neil McWilliam’s edited volume, Nationalism and French Visual Culture, 1870–1914 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, 2005). In “Qui vive? France!,” Hargrove outlines the ideological debates surrounding sculptures commemorating the Franco-Prussian War; and in his essay on the cult of the painter Henri Regnault, perhaps the most celebrated victim of the Siege, Marc Gotlieb considers the intersection of allegory and Realism in works memorializing the artist’s death. Dorsch cites Gotlieb in his chapter on the Defense of Paris, and quotes Hargrove’s essay in his conclusion, which, like the chapter that precedes it, concentrates on Rodin’s Age of Bronze. Without referring explicitly to Symbolism, Dorsch suggests that: “The closed eyes, enigmatic pose, and ambiguous signification of Rodin’s figure speak a novel sculptural idiom, an oblique, evocative language that appealed to artists who sought to eschew the hackneyed jumbles of allegory and realism that increasingly populated city squares throughout France” (169). It is a shame that after so much consideration, the “Realist allegories” of the book’s subtitle remain a “hackneyed jumble,” a mere foil, in the end, for Rodin’s modernism. Read against the grain, it is the clash of allegory and Realism (not merely the iconography of the “strong woman, fallen man”) that can be seen, in the monuments commemorating the Franco-Prussian War, as emblematic of the contradictions at the origins of modernity.