The Rhetoric of Realism: Courbet and the Origins of the Avant-garde Rhetorics of Realist Art and Politics

2116 USTAVE COURBET (1819-77) BELONGED TO THE G Post-Romantic generation of French artists and writers that included Honore Daumier, J.-F. Millet, Gustave Flau bert, and Charles Baudelaire. They were born at the close of an heroic age. In their youth, they witnessed the breakdown of a common language of Classicism, the dissipation of revolutionary idealism, and the growing division between artists and public. In their maturity, they saw the abandonment of Enlightenment principle and widespread accommodation of authoritarianism. At the end of their lives, they beheld the promise and threat of Communist insurrectionand the complete collapse of a bourgeois public sphere. Together, these crises and caesuras combined to convince the artists and writers of the mid-century that they were living through a cultural rupture of unprecedented dimension: the name given for that broad epoch of change was "modernity," and the name for that specific post-Romantic generation was Realist. "I am not only a socialist," Courbet wrote provocatively to a newspaper in 1851, "but a democrat and a Republican as well-in a word, a partisan of all the revolution and above all a Realist ... for `Realist' means a sincere lover of the honest truth." The rhetoric of Realism, however, is not confined to artists' manifestos or to France; it is written across the age and across Europe, in its politics, literature, and painting. The artists and writers mentioned above may not have read Marx's Manifesto of the Communist Party (1847), but their works shared with it a depiction of epochal anxiety, transformation, and desacralization: The bourgeoisie has stripped ofits halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science into its paid wage-laborers.... Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. . . . All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life., and his relations with his kind.