Faute de mieux, the Republican form of government held France together during the last decade of the nineteenth century better than anyone would have guessed. How did art and artists of the period reflect, mediate, and express the major stresses and strains of that decade when the society felt the full impact of modernity? And how can this approach to art and society help bring coherence and meaning to the immense and varied artistic production of the period? These are the two challenges that Richard Thomson sets out to meet in his new book. In answer to these questions, he offers the thesis that modernity with its embrace of science and technology informed artistic production, making it part and parcel of the social discourse of the period. Thus, artists as seemingly different as Albert Besnard and Hermann-Paul are best understood as participants in broader debates that obsessed the Republic’s educated population. A wedding of the history of art and social history, the book succeeds better at responding to the first than the second question.

The book focuses on the urban environment, and especially Paris, bracketed by the universal expositions of 1889 and 1900. The text and wealth of images are organized around four themes that garnered public attention: first, the fitness of the national body and the individual body—physical health and sexuality; second, the crowd, its varied character, its unpredictability, the possibilities for understanding its psychology and the means of organizing and controlling it; third, religion defined by the relationship between the Catholic church and the Republic, and the issue of religious faith in a secularizing society; and finally, nationalism and militarism, particularly the notion of revanche against Germany. Like a shepherd dog nudging cantankerous geese into a new enclosure, the Republic steered any number of reluctant groups into its modernist pen, where they struggled with one another over the meaning of these issues. Scientific theories of the period added new psychological and evolutionary dimensions to their discourse (that of artists included).

In each section Thomson combines discussions of salon art, avant-garde productions, popular print images, art criticism, contemporary philosophy, and scientific theories with political events, ideologies, and personal agendas to illuminate the many-threaded relationships that wove art and political issues together. He also recognizes the complexity of viewpoints, stresses, and strains at work at all levels, and the ways in which this troubled condition was embodied in the art itself—another connection between artists, art, and society. Because of personal proclivities, market demands, professional traditions, political opportunities, and events often supported by the Republican government, artists took up these themes while taking positions on the issues through choices of subject matter, interpretation, and style.

The first three themes are well documented by historians as significant subjects of public discussion and political concern. The array of images and Thomson’s discussion of them help flesh out and provide a vivid visual presence to the complex and varied responses people had toward them. In an era when visual images were proliferating exponentially, the range of visual data Thomson gives readers is especially important for a complete historical discussion. And it is helpful to art historians and historians alike to have visual and political culture integrated into the consensus categories that override the fragmented view one gets in approaching the decade as a cacophony of individual voices, independent groups, secessionist styles, and a gamut of political positions.

There are some difficulties, however. Thematically, while Thomson shows that revanche was alive and well in French art of the period, his claim that he is revising current historical wisdom on this theme is arguable given the work of Wolfgang Schivelbush and historians working on the history of French science and engineering schools founded during that period. From a broader historical perspective, the thematic approach has taken precedence over, rather than integrated, the analysis of change. This yields a picture of the period as frozen in its tropes and leaves the universal expositions ten years apart as curiously identical twins—hard to substantiate when one takes a closer look at the work of Charles Rearick, Deborah Silverman, Rosalind Williams, and this reviewer.¹ From an aesthetic point of view, his claim that art historians have largely limited themselves to the study of symbolism during these years is certainly overstating the case. Most importantly given the conceptual framework of the book and its thesis, he himself is unclear about why innovative artistic production associated with these themes took the various self-consciously publicized aesthetic paths it did in the 1890s (e.g., Gauguin’s Breton primitivism, Nabism, symbolism, and art nouveau). How and why artists connected the technically and expressively progressive in art to the thematic obsessions of society remains a mystery at the end of 256 pages.

One reason for this oversight is Thomson’s failure to recognize that progress itself is a major theme of the period, worthy of its own chapter. Along with religion, the human body, and revanche, progress was, as contemporaries like Gustave Le Bon, Emile Durkheim, Frédéric Le Play, and Hermann-Paul recognized, one of the neurotic obsessions of French society in the 1890s. Framed within a republican form of modernity, progress identified with the quest for new knowledge, material improvement, and social happiness was as multifaceted a cultural construct as the crowd. The expositions were one materialization of progress. And it is regrettable that Thomson interprets them as governmental attempts to mask social problems with carefully contrived technological diversions, rather than as vast contested social, intellectual, cultural, and economic projects engaging many different constituencies. In his view the expositions promoted a false consciousness that the author intends to dissipate through his examination of the real cultural markers of the period. In a curious contradiction, details of the book bear evidence against his own interpretation. Examples within the chapters that include Pissarro, the exhibitors at the decennial exposition, and the Society of Decorative Arts show that Thomson does recognize the expositions and by association the progress project as stimulating innovative responses from some contemporary artists.² It would have added a great deal to the book and to our understanding of the relationship of art and society in this decade if Thomson had drawn together this material into a chapter on the theme of progress.

As it stands, the book integrates and orders artistic production of the period into an existing historical construction in ways that are very suggestive for future research.