Art and the French Commune

In this bold exploration of the political forces that shaped Impressionism, Albert Boime proposes that at the heart of the modern is a "guilty secret"--the need of the dominant, mainly bourgeois, classes in Paris to expunge from historical memory the haunting nightmare of the Commune and its socialist ideology. The Commune of 1871 emerged after the Prussian war when the Paris militia chased the central government to Versailles, enabling the working class and its allies to seize control of the ca