Robert Gildea, Children of the Revolution

Realism and Impressionism

  Princesse Mathilde's   salon  was  home  to  the Realist  school  of writers, but  these  also had other venues  for

meeting.  From  1874 Flaubert organized monthly  dinners, suceeding  those  at Magny's restaurant in the 186os, for  'the  Five' whose  novels may have been successful but whose plays had  been shouted  down  by theatre audiences. 'We were all gourmands,' recalled Alphonse  Daudet, 'with  as many gourmandises as temperaments and  provinces  of origin. Flaubert wanted Normandy  butter  and  R0uen ducks,  Zola demanded seafood,  Edmond  de Goncourt ordered ginger delicacies  while Turgenev tasted caviar. Ah! We were not easy to feed and  the Paris restaurants remembered   us.  We often had  to change  the  venue.'

After Flaubert's death in I88o the group was kept together  by Daudet who held his own salon on a Thursday in the avenue de l'Observatoire, presided over by his wife Julia, while in 1885  Edmond  de Goncourt refurbished the loft at Auteuil where his brother Jules had died, done up with Japanese  art, and  visited with some trepidation by the Princesse Mathilde the following year. Zola  bought  a villa at Medan on the Seine  in 1878  with  the  royalties from   L'Assommoir  and  held meetings of  his own  young  proteges  such as Guy de Maupassant and Joris-Karl Huysmans, son of a Dutch  father and French mother. In 1880 they published  a collection  of short  stories,  Les Soirées de Médan, which served as a manifesto  for  the  Naturalist  school and included  Maupassant's Boule  de  suif,  a short story  set during the war  of  1870 about  a prostitute who  is persuaded  by her bourgeois travelling  companions to sleep  with  a  Prussian officer so that the coach can move on, and described  by Flaubert as a masterpiece. Naturalism, depicting humanity  as determined   by hereditary and environmental laws  and  reduced almost  to  bestiality, in fact drove a wedge between Zola  and his circle on the one hand and Goncourt and Daudet  on  the other.  In  I887, after the publication of Zola 's La Terre, an attack on his work's 'indecency  and filthy terminology' was published in Le Figaro, which Zola  believed to have been inspired by Goncourt and  Daudet.

Close  links  had  been  established before  this  break  between  the Realists  and  the Impressionists. Both challenged

the literary and artistic  establishment  with  their treatment of  modern  life, warts and  all, and were often marginalized by it. Monet  and Degas held court  in  the  Cafe Guerbois in  the Batignolles  district, then in the more  refined Cafe de la Nouvelle  Athenes,   which  were also frequented by Zola. Nana, the prostitute who appears in L'Assommoir before  having  a  novel  to  herself in  I88o, was painted  by Manet, a picture  rejected  for  the Salon  of 1877, while Zola tried to defend Impressionism through his  treatment  of  the struggling artist in L'Oeuvre of 1886. Huysmans was launched  as an art critic by Zola, attacking the  academic art  of  the Salon and preaching the virtues of Manet and  Degas.  'A painter of modern  life is born,' said Huysmans  of Degas in  188o, painting the  flesh of ballet dancers  lit by gaslight or the pale glow  from   courtyards, completely different from  the classical  school  of Bouguereau's Birth of Venus, a 'badly pumped-up windbag, without muscles,  nerves or  blood. A single pinprick  in the  torso and  it  would  collapse. That said, Zola and Huysmans found other Impressionists  such as Monet and Pissarro guilty of 'indigomania' and Gauguin  argued that  Huysmans  liked Degas and Manet only because their work was figurative: 'it is naturalism that gratifies him.'

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, The Birth of Venus (1879)