The commune in commodities: Bruno braquehais's photography of the Paris commune of 1871

Perhaps no other photographer of the Paris Commune has received as much art historical attention as Bruno Braquehais. Within this scholarship, he is heralded as unique, either framed as the dedicated photojournalist of the Commune or as the sole photographer sympathetic to the cause of the Commune. However, previous analysis of his photographs of the Commune has been inadequate, because it has failed to consider them in the context of the photographic album in which they appear. This thesis attempts to contest and expand this body of scholarship by analyzing Braquehais's photographs of the Commune not as isolated images, but instead as texts integrated into the album Siège de Paris. With reference to the touristic architectural photographs of Paris and Victorian travel photography of the periphery, I argue that Braquehais's photographs of the Commune exist in the visual lexicon of the travel photograph and situate their Communard subjects (and the Commune itself) as the Other. Importantly, the structure of the album and the visual strategies of the photographs themselves permit the bourgeois viewer to consume the album as a solely aesthetic object and as a way to assuage fear by asserting control over the dangerous Other. This thesis considers the politics behind the representation, production, and consumption of the Commune and the implications of its commodification.

I would first like to offer my sincere gratitude to Professor Lela Graybill, without her guidance this thesis would not have been possible. I would like to acknowledge Luise Poulton and Luke Leither in Rare Books at the Marriott Library and Dr. Maria Celina Soares de Mello e Silva at the Museu Imperial for their assistance in my research. I would like to thank my friends, Julianne Liu and Natalie Blot for being indispensable sources for translation. I would also like to thank my friends, Ezra Lebovitz and Annelisa Kingsbury Lee for their meticulous editing and feedback. I wish to thank my family who kept me sane while writing this thesis in a pandemic. Finally, I submit this thesis to the Honors College on the 150th anniversary of the Commune. To the Communards who envisioned a brave new world: thank you. Krueger 1 ABSTRACT Perhaps no other photographer of the Paris Commune has received as much art historical attention as Bruno Braquehais. Within this scholarship, he is heralded as unique, either framed as the dedicated photojournalist of the Commune or as the sole photographer sympathetic to the cause of the Commune. However, previous analysis of his photographs of the Commune has been inadequate, because it has failed to consider them in the context of the photographic album in which they appear. This thesis attempts to contest and expand this body of scholarship by analyzing Braquehais’s photographs of the Commune not as isolated images, but instead as texts integrated into the album Siège de Paris. With reference to the touristic architectural photographs of Paris and Victorian travel photography of the periphery, I argue that Braquehais’s photographs of the Commune exist in the visual lexicon of the travel photograph and situate their Communard subjects (and the Commune itself) as the Other. Importantly, the structure of the album and the visual strategies of the photographs themselves permit the bourgeois viewer to consume the album as a solely aesthetic object and as a way to assuage fear by asserting control over the dangerous Other. This thesis considers the politics behind the representation, production, and consumption of the Commune and the implications of its commodification. Krueger TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT 1 INTRODUCTION 3 BACKGROUND 5 SIÈGE DE PARIS 8 THE TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPH 15 THE COMMODITY AND THE OTHER 21 CONSUMING THE COMMUNE 28 2 Krueger 3 INTRODUCTION Susan Sontag opens On Photography with an anecdote from Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963). In it, she describes two cronies persuaded into joining the King’s Army under the promise that they may loot and rape the enemy as they please and return home rich. However, when they make their triumphant return home it is with nothing but hundreds of picture postcards of the monuments and wonders of the world. Sontag reminds us, “To collect photographs is to collect the world.” 1 * * * * * * * * * * * By the end of May of 1871, some 20,000 Parisian citizens were dead at the hands of the Versailles forces in the aftermath of the Paris Commune. 2 Thousands more Communards would die in the horrible prison conditions at Versailles or in exile in New Caledonia. The French state needed to ensure that such a credible threat to its power would never arise again. But while the city was still smoldering, photographers who had fled Paris in the months prior returned in droves to capture images of the burnt and gutted buildings or the corpses in the streets. 3 Within a matter of weeks, if not days, photographers were printing and selling images of the Paris Commune and its aftermath. Both the French public and the international public had an insatiable appetite for photographs of the Commune. 4 One Englishman alone bought 50,000 prints of views of the fallen Vendôme Column. 5 Photographs were sold by the thousands as cartes de visite to be collected or sent to loved ones as charming postcard-like mementos or as Susan Sontag, On photography. (New York: Macmillan, 2001), 3. Colette E Wilson, Paris and the Commune, 1871-78: the Politics of Forgetting (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 1. 3 Donald E English, Political Uses of Photography in the Third French Republic, 1871-1914. (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), 24. 4 English, Political Uses of Photography in the Third French Republic,1871-1914. 24. 5 English, Political Uses of Photography in the Third French Republic, 1871-1914. 24. 1 2 Krueger 4 collections in albums to be admired by guests in stylish bourgeois parlors. 6 Before the dead had even been buried, the commodification of their ideology and society was already well under way. After all, the outside world knew very little of the Commune since Commune leaders deemed it unwise to share details of their government, a reasonable policy given that they were at war with Versailles. 7 The world outside the Commune desired visual knowledge of the Commune and contemporary Paris. Modest studio photographer Auguste Bruno Braquehais, who lived in Paris throughout the entirety of the Commune’s life and documented much of its existence through photography, was in the unique position to satisfy this desire. Braquehais’ photographs have been seen as unique in the body of photography surrounding the Commune. 8 Within art historical scholarship, he is portrayed either as the singular true photojournalist of the Commune or the singular photographer sympathetic to the Commune. Many art historians point to his photographs of Place Vendôme as evidence of these sympathies or photojournalistic tendencies. Jean-Claude Gautrand, the art historian who discovered Braquehais wrote, “Braquehais is the true reporter of the Commune because of the extent, the forcefulness and originality of his work.” 9 Indeed, Braquehais’s photography proves itself unique in the body of photography surrounding the Commune because it is the only surviving photography of the Commune itself. However, previous analysis of Braquehais’s photographs of the Commune has not adequately considered the photographs in the context of their production and consumption. In this thesis, I will approach Braquehais’s photographs of the Commune not as isolated images, but rather as visual Jon Wiener, "Paris Commune Photos at a New York Gallery: An Interview with Linda Nochlin," Radical History Review, no. 32 (1985), 62. 7 Pierre Milza, "L'année terrible": La commune mars-juin 1871. (Paris: Perrin, 2009), 118. 8 See Wiener, "Paris Commune Photos at a New York Gallery: An Interview with Linda Nochlin," 61. 9 Quoted in: Wiener, "Paris Commune Photos at a New York Gallery: An Interview with Linda Nochlin," 61. 6 Krueger 5 texts integrated into a photographic album, Siège de Paris. As I will demonstrate, when Braquehais’s photographs are considered within the context of their album they produce a counterrevolutionary effect. Operating within the visual lexicon of conventional travel photography, Braquehais’s photographs effectively commodify the Commune, permitting the visual construction of Otherness between the bourgeois consumer and the Communard subject. Within the post-Commune society, Braquehais’s photographs allow the bourgeois viewer to possess and control the Commune. BACKGROUND The Paris Commune, referred to by some as the Civil War, lasted just over three months, from March 18 to May 28, 1871. The Commune came on the heels of the particularly devastating siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. The people of Paris were, justifiably, upset; their government had forced them to take the brutal brunt of an unwanted war while the Versailles forces (those forces representing the Third Republic and the French state at large) fled to Tours, leaving the Parisian National Guard to defend Paris largely on its own. The siege lasted four long months, and Parisians resorted to eating cats, dogs, and rats. On January 28, 1871, an armistice between Prussia and France was signed in which France lost the highly contested AlsaceLorraine region to Prussia. Tensions had been high amongst the Parisian working classes for a while as socialist movements grew throughout the 19th century and as Napoleon III and the Second Empire at large grew more and more unpopular. Moreover, the Parisians had been abandoned and had endured a horrible siege at the hands of the Second Empire. When the Versailles forces went to reestablish the State in March, they were met with staunch opposition from the Parisian people. Krueger 6 On the morning of March 18, a confrontation between Versailles soldiers and the revolutionary National Guardsmen occurred which resulted in the soldiers defecting to join the National Guardsmen. The Versailles forces were forced out of the city and soon after the Paris Commune was established. The Commune itself marked a radical reorganization of society. It elected working class men to its government and passed a series of decrees which enacted rent remissions and permitted employees to take control of an enterprise, amongst other things. Many Marxists, including Marx himself, viewed the Commune as an embryonic form of a socialist or communist society because of how it reorganized labor and resources. 10 It was a movement by and for the working class of Paris. For the first time in Paris’s history the working class and the bourgeois classes waited in the same lines and promenaded in the same parks side by side. Indeed, to many people living under the Commune it seemed utterly idyllic. Gustave Courbet described it as a dream, “Paris is a true paradise! No police, no nonsense, no exaction of any kind, no arguments! Everything in Paris rolls along like clockwork. If only it would stay like this forever. In short, it is a beautiful dream. All the government bodies are organized federally and run themselves.” 11 It was during this period that plans were made by an executive committee of the Commune to bring down the Vendôme Column—a massive Trajan-esque Column dedicated to Napoleon after his triumph at Austerlitz. It was brought down on May 12 as a symbolically significant action against the state and Bonapartism. Less than a week later, on May 21, the Versailles Army launched its campaign to recapture Paris in what became known as the Bloody Week. This week was marked by the massacring of an unknown number of people by the Versailles troops. As the Versailles forces Karl Marx, The civil war in France. (International library Publishing Company, 1900), 38. Quoted in: Albert Boime, Art and the French Commune: Imagining Paris after War and Revolution, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 17. 10 11 Krueger 7 drew nearer to the center of the city, the Communards decided to burn the Palais des Tuileries, the Palais du Justice, the library of the Louvre, and the Hôtel de Ville, themselves all sites and symbols of state power. This would prove to be a deeply unpopular move in all but the most radical of political factions. 12 The Communards’ burning of such sites of national patrimony was often used as a justification of the massacre of the Communards by the State. 13 And throughout what became known as l’année terrible, the camera was the ever-present voyeur. While a large number of photographers fled Paris before the Commune, many remained in Paris. According to Versailles records, forty photographers were arrested for their involvement in the Commune. 14 Given the scope of the massacre of Communards, a number of photographers were probably also killed during Bloody Week. Braquehais was by no means the only photographer at the Commune; but he is the only named photographer we know of whose photographs have survived. Bruno Braquehais was an unlikely candidate for the position of “true reporter of the Commune.” He was born in Dieppe in 1823 and was deaf from birth. Judging by his claimed assets and inheritances, he was most likely raised in a comfortable petit-bourgeois household. His parents were wealthy enough to send him to attend the Institution Royale des Sourds-Muets. Here, he excelled at lithography and illustrations. Through the Institution des Sourds-Muets, he met Alexis Louis Charles Arthur Gouin, a Daguerreotypist who introduced him to the trade. Braquehais married Gouin’s daughter and the couple worked together in Gouin’s studio producing hand-colored portrait daguerreotypes. Even after Braquehais established his own studio, and certainly long after the daguerreotype had fallen out of fashion, he remained a Wilson, Paris and the Commune, 1871-78, 179. Christine Lapostolle, "Plus vrai que le vrai." Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 73, no. 1 (1988): 72. 14 English, Political Uses of Photography in the Third French Republic, 1871-1914. 30. 12 13 Krueger 8 staunch producer of daguerreotypes, which rendered him a bit of a novelty. 15 Eventually, he ventured into stereoscopes and photography, where he specialized in nude academic photography. In comparison to his contemporaries like Nadar and Disderi, he certainly was not making any splashes in the photographic circles of Paris. But he managed to run a fashionable studio and afford the high rents on the Boulevard des Italiens for several years by sticking to strictly indoor photography through the production of portraits and nudes. 16 Upon first glance, Braquehais’s turn from this mode of photography to photographing the Commune seems extreme, radical even. But, as I will demonstrate, this shift is not as radical as it appears. SIÈGE DE PARIS Braquehais’s album, Siège de Paris, dedicates some thirty of the 110 total photographs to the destruction of the Column and the broader social happenings on the barricades surrounding Place Vendôme. It is this body of work that has propelled him into the spotlight of art history. His photographs of the Vendôme Column depict a clear sequence of the preparation and destruction of the Column. This event is arranged chronologically within the album so the viewer would have encountered the process of destruction in a linear sequence. Nochlin argues that it is this which sets him apart from other photographers—this sequence provides a “complete documentation” of the event that no other photographer of the Commune accomplished or attempted. 17 There is much discussion in the scholarship about whether these photographs expose Braquehais’s Communard sympathies. Boime deems the group portraits of Communards Elizabeth Anne McCauley, Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848-1871. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 151. 16 McCauley, Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848-1871, 185. 17 Wiener, "Paris Commune Photos at a New York Gallery: An Interview with Linda Nochlin.", 62. 15 Krueger 9 at Place Vendôme “emancipated” and “egalitarian.” 18 Many art historians have viewed his portraits of Communards at the Place Vendôme as intimate and sympathetic portraits, and others, like Nochlin, have viewed his photographs documenting the fall of Column also as sympathetic to the Commune. 19 There has even been speculation, with a remarkable lack of evidence, over whether Braquehais was commissioned by the Commune Government itself to document the Commune. 20 But all of this scholarship fails to engage with the photographs in the actual context in which they appear. Prior scholarship decontextualizes Braquehais’s photographs and considers them as isolated, individual photographs, or considers only the portion of photographs relating to the Vendôme. 21 This thesis instead analyzes Braquehais’s photographs as a photographic album, Siège de Paris, and seeks to understand them within a more complete context of their display and consumption. It is likely that Braquehais himself compiled Siège de Paris. The preface page of the album informs us that the album is “by Bruno Braquehais, Deaf-Mute” and includes his studio address on Boulevard des Italiens. This suggests that Braquehais had at least some involvement in the actual production of the album. The specific copy of the album that is the focus of study for this thesis was purchased by Emperor Pedro II of Brazil and is now kept in the Thereza Christina Maria Collection of the National Library of Brazil. It remains unclear if Braquehais Albert Boime, Art and the French Commune: Imagining Paris after War and Revolution. 17. Wiener, "Paris Commune Photos at a New York Gallery: An Interview with Linda Nochlin.", 63. 20 Quentin Bajac and Musée d'Orsay. La Commune photographiée. (Réunion des musées nationaux: Paris, 2000). 22 21 It is worth noting here that most previous scholarship identifies the album containing the photographs of the Commune as Paris pendant la Commune de Paris, the album that Gautrand identifies. However, I was unable to locate the actual object or even find any libraries or museums that had this album listed in their collections. Under all available libraries and museum collections, the album is identified as Siège de Paris. It appears likely that most prior art historians referenced Gautrand instead of referencing the album itself—taking his description of the album at face value. This is corroborated by the frequent misidentification of the number of photographs, the structure they appear in, and presence of captions by previous scholarship that all use Gautrand as a seminal text. Jean-Claude Gautrand, "1870-1871: Les photographes et la Commune," Photo-Cine Revue (February, 1972) (1972): 53-63. 18 19 Krueger 10 curated and compiled the album by himself or if outside parties had any influence in its creation. There are a few separate copies of the album under the same title in other collections, suggesting that Braquehais produced several copies and that Pedro II’s copy is not unique. 22 In any case, given the limited number of these albums, it is unlikely they were ever mass-produced for sale. There are four general categories across the 110 photographs contained within Siège de Paris that correspond to the events of 1870-1871. The first category is that of the damage inflicted by the Prussian shelling of the western suburbs of Paris, with a focus on Saint-Cloud, Neuilly-sur-Seine, and Auteuil. These photographs are almost entirely architectural, if they feature any presence of humans it is nearly always metonymic—abandoned carts and rows of carbines stand in for people (fig 1). While some of these photographs center on damage done to sites of cultural patrimony (Chateau Saint-Cloud), the majority of the photographs are scenes of the industrial suburbs, levelled and gutted. In figure 2, the composition is dominated by an apartment or tenement building in Neuilly-sur-Seine whose exterior wall has been entirely blown off, collecting in a rubble heap at the base of the building. The inside of the building is visible, but there are no signs of life. There is a street that continues on behind the building that is lined with buildings similar to the one in the forefront, they collapse in on themselves and create the effect of endless damage continuing on for as far as the eye can see. The empty, desolate qualities of these photographs stand in contrast to the post-Commune damage photographs because the suburban homes are an ever-present reminder that people lived here and died here. The next chronological event represented in the album is the initial conflict between the National Guardsmen and the Versailles forces in the batteries of Montmartre. This is a miniscule 22 The Royal Collection and the Getty both list different provenances for their copies of the album, indicating multiple copies. Krueger 11 portion of the album, Braquehais devotes only two photographs to this event. Yet, their presence is nevertheless notable because it establishes the formation of the Commune as a crucial point in this tumultuous history. Figure 3 features National Guardsmen stationed at their artillery on Rue des Rosiers in Montmartre. This is the first group-portrait in the album. Interestingly, it recalls other photographs taken by anonymous photographers of this initial conflict establishing the Commune that allegedly depict the street-fighting and barricades that art historian Jeannene Przyblyski sees as the tableau-vivant image (fig 4). 23 The genre of the barricade tableau-vivant was most likely staged and photographed well after the fighting in late March, so it is not actually contemporary to Braquehais’s images of the Montmartre batteries. Przyblyski argues the people pausing and posing to be photographed reflected a desire to produce narrative and occupy history. In Braquehais’s image, the National Guardsmen pose for the camera, presumably interrupted in their work at the artillery, forming their own sort of tableau-vivant. The photographic category of the life of the Commune has certainly garnered the most attention in scholarship on Braquehais—indeed it is what originally thrust Braquehais into art history. It is the second smallest category in the album with twenty-six photographic prints. This category consists of the photographs taken from late March through mid-May of 1871 that depict the Commune and its activities in its life, rather than its nascency or its death. Within a larger photographic survey of the Commune, Braquehais manages to dominate, if not monopolize, this category. His photographs of this period overwhelmingly center on the destruction of the Vendôme Column and Communard activities at Place Vendôme and its surrounding barricades. Place Vendôme. The Felling of the Column. Final Measures (fig 5) is a representative image of Jeannene M Przyblyski. "Moving pictures: Photography, narrative, and the Paris Commune of 1871." Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 253. 23 Krueger 12 this category, depicting—a distanced view politely removed from the actual revolutionary activities while still bearing witness to them. Notably, there is no photographic documentation of the Bloody Week, presumably both because it was an extremely dangerous situation for photographers and because the absence of the snapshot camera would mean that the camera would not have been able to capture the action regardless. 24 The ruins of Paris were by far the most photographed subject of anything related to the Commune, both within and outside of Siège de Paris. About half of the album, or more than twice the number of photographs taken of the Commune in its life, fall within this category. The genre’s larger popularity can at least in part be attributed to the fact that there were a limited number of photographers who actually remained in Paris throughout the Commune; for the photographers who had fled Paris before the Commune, this was what was available to them when they returned en masse to photograph the city. The stars of this genre were the burnt out remains of Palais des Tuileries, the Palais du Justice, the Hôtel de Ville, and the Louvre; although Braquehais does devote a large number of prints to the civilian cityscape in ruins. This body of photographs is marked either by a distinctly anti-Communard sentiment, where the viewer is meant to be driven to outrage upon seeing the beautiful city defiled by Communards, or by a distinctly apolitical aesthetic contemplation of Romantic ruination. In Braquehais’s print of the scorched interior of the Palais des Tuileries (fig 6), for example, the crumbling neoclassical columns and the once-grand interior evoke Romantic paintings of Classical structures in ruin. The title of the album itself, Siège de Paris, misleadingly identifies all of its contents as depicting a “siege.” This holds true for the photographs of the damage done by the actual siege, 24 Lapostolle. "Plus vrai que le vrai." 69. Krueger 13 but it also renders the Commune as a siege upon Paris. This title amalgamates an actual military siege, the combat between the army and the National Guardsmen, the Commune itself, and the Bloody Week as the same event. The subtitle of the album, Album historique des Malheurs de la France (Historical Album of the Misfortunes of France) also uniformly renders the events of 1870-1871 as “misfortunes.” The use of the word misfortune here also displaces culpability and any analysis of the Commune as a political body and the forces which suppressed it. Instead of a critical history which engages with the historical and political forces at play, the album presents the varied events contained within it as coincidental, mere misfortunes that fate brought upon the French people. The structure of the album contests Braquehais’s photographs as objects which tell a linear, chronological history. Siège de Paris opens on the ruination of Paris after Bloody Week, then goes back to the damage done Saint-Cloud several months earlier by the Prussians and then progresses to Montmartre, the Commune, and then closes by returning to Prussian damage in the Western suburbs of Paris. Not only does this undermine claims of Braquehais as the photojournalist of the Commune, it works to dehistoricize and rehistoricize the events of 18701871. By the time the viewer encounters such “emancipatory” photographs of the Commune in its life, the viewer has already encountered the photographs of damage by the Communards. This framing contextualizes the Commune in the damage it caused to the city of Paris. Moreover, the reorganization of the timeline of events confuses the damage done by Prussians with the damage done by Communards. While a Parisian citizen who lived through the Commune and the Siege would be able to distinguish between the damage caused by these separate events, there is nothing in the album to distinguish the damage inflicted by these disparate parties for foreign viewers, or even French viewers who were not in Paris. The album makes no effort to Krueger 14 discriminate between the Prussians and the Communards and their vastly different political aims. Through this, the album renders all violence committed from the Prussian Siege to Bloody Week amorphous, without historical and political forces behind them. By rendering all of the events from the Siege to the Bloody Week as the same, the album depoliticizes the Commune and the Bloody Week. The album is also framed by a preface poem by Placide Cornly which advances a counterrevolutionary, if not outright nationalistic agenda. 25 The poem promises that despite the dark chapter of history enclosed within this album, France emerges victorious. The poem is overwhelmed by its references to nation, and a return to a glorious past. It promises that “Lutèce will be reborn,” which functions simultaneously as a way to cement the photographs of Paris in ruin within the context of the Fall of Rome and as a reactionary, nationalistic return to the Roman Empire. 26 The poem also compounds the equating of the Siege with the Commune. Lines 9-10 equate “steaming gauntlets of a savage war” with the “Palace in ruins” and the “funeral debris.” Once again, the album does not see the Prussians and the Communards as distinct political bodies, but instead as forces which share the similarity of being guilty of committing acts violence and damaging French cultural patrimony. The poem concludes by proposing that the way forward from these atrocities is to “Awaken in our hearts a true love of country.” This attributes the “problem” of the Commune to a lack of patriotism and encourages nationalism as a response to that. Overall, the poem universally condemns violence, especially violence which threatens the power of the French state, and is thus unable to see the Prussians as distinct from 25 26 Perhaps Placide Couly or Placide Corvly. The signature is stylized and difficult to read. Trans. Julianne Liu. Krueger 15 the Communards. Thoroughly reactionary and counterrevolutionary, this poem frames the body of photographs that follow it within this lens. THE TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPH With the context of the album established, we can begin to consider the photographs themselves. In this analysis, I wish to displace the question of Braquehais’s own politics and sympathies that is at the center of so much scholarship. Very little is known about Braquehais’s life other than what was outlined in the brief biography above. Braquehais left behind no correspondence, journals, or writing of any kind. Thus, it is futile, if not impossible, to try and locate Braquehais’s personal politics. Instead of asking what Braquehais’s politics are, it is more important to ask what his photographs do. Or, perhaps, we should start by asking ourselves what his photographs of the Commune don’t do. Braquehais’s photographs don’t compel their viewer to any particular ideology. Siège de Paris does provide captions to its photographs, but the captions only serve to identify the location of the photo, identify prominent structures (such as the Vendôme Column), or, rarely, to identify its human subjects (never by name, only with the label fédérés—National Guardsmen). 27 Barthes argues that all images are polysemous and as such, cultures have developed means by which to anchor meaning or attitude. He asserts that text, when added to the image, can act as anchorage, the primary way of cementing meaning to the photograph. 28 However, without a caption urging the viewer towards a certain narrative or ideology, the photograph remains polysemous. Braquehais’s austere captions assert no such narrative or ideology, and as such are Notice fédérés and not Communards. This is true even for photographs of groups that include a mix of National Guardsmen and civilians. 28 Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image-music-text. (New York: Macmillan, 1977), 39. 27 Krueger 16 at the mercy of their viewer. Benjamin notes the capacity of captions to imbue a photograph with ideology and rescue it from mere aestheticization: “What we should demand from photography is the capacity of giving a print a caption which would tear it away from fashionable clichés and give it a revolutionary use value.” 29 Braquehais’s captions do no such thing. Captions control and mediate how we perceive images, and this is especially true of photography of the Commune. 30 English writes about Paris pendant la Commune, the mysterious other album of Braquehais’s with seemingly no copies, which he alleges is entirely uncaptioned. He argues that uncaptioned photographs of the Commune allow for a complete political ambiguity—proCommunards would view an uncaptioned photograph of the fallen Vendôme Column as a celebration of the might of the Commune where anti-Communards would view the same photograph as a symbol of the barbarism of the Commune. Uncaptioned photographs of the Commune, he argues, would merely recall whatever the viewer felt during the Commune. 31 Although Siège de Paris does have captioned photographs, this argument holds true. Because the captions of these photographs only identify locations, they are equally open to interpretation of meaning. The photographs in Siège de Paris either elicit these preexisting political feelings in the viewer (be they pro or anti Commune) or simply encourage aesthetic contemplation, rather than embody a particular political ideology. Importantly, these photographs do not radically reimagine or reorganize space or their subjects. Instead they adhere to the established conventions of architectural views and portrait photography. Formally, they are unremarkable in how they decline to challenge conventions (see fig 5,11). We might imagine a body of photographs of the Commune which visually embodies Walter Benjamin, "The author as producer," New Left Review 1, no. 62 (1970): 91. English, Political Uses of Photography in the Third French Republic, 1871-1914, 46. 31 English, Political Uses of Photography in the Third French Republic, 1871-1914, 47. 29 30 Krueger 17 the restructuring of society under the Commune. Braquehais’s photographs do no such thing. Przyblyski discusses Braquehais’s group portraiture as distinctly unrevolutionary. Braquehais, she argues, strictly adheres to the long-established conventions of portraiture in photography and painting. His working-class subjects are adopting bourgeois poses and consigning themselves to convention as well. 32 While Przyblyski confines this argument to this discussion of the group portraiture photographs at Place Vendôme, this idea can be applied to his architectural views of the Place. This body of photographs is also distinctly unrevolutionary. If Braquehais’s photographs of the Place resemble anything, they resemble Victorian travel photography. Travel photography, often taking the form of an album or architectural views in cartes de visite, had been a staple of the Parisian photograph market for several decades by 1871. 33 In this context, ‘travel photography’ refers to architecturally focused photographs sold for touristic purposes. There was certainly a precedent for travel photography and travel albums in the 19th century. This body of photography arose in tandem with mass tourism. 34 It was particularly common for the European bourgeoisie to embark on the Grand Tour and purchase photographic albums of major cultural sites as souvenirs. Images of the boulevards of Paris or the sites of French cultural patrimony such as the Louvre, the Palais des Tuileries, Notre Dame, Place de la Bastille, and Place Saint-Michel were particularly popular within the travel photography of Paris. The visual conventions that these photographs operate within are unchallenging and straightforward. They present the object of interest either dead center or on a third. Within the photographs, the sky is almost always eliminated so that the architectural subject fills the entirety of the frame to emphasize its grandeur. In figure 7, for example, the Jeannene M Przyblyski, "Revolution at a Standstill: Photography and the Paris Commune of 1871," Yale French Studies, no. 101 (2001): 54-79. 33 Wilson. Paris and the Commune, 1871-78: the Politics of Forgetting, 176. 34 Deborah Harlan. "Travel, pictures, and a Victorian gentleman in Greece," Hesperia, 78 (2009): 421. 32 Krueger 18 viewer looks out from high within the Palais des Tuileries across the street and into a large courtyard of Louvre. This high point of view places the Louvre within the viewer’s dominion— the Louvre is something to be possessed by the viewer. The horizontal composition reinforces the grandeur of the Louvre; the sweep of the eye across the horizontal axis is overwhelmed by the continuity of this massive structure. The Louvre seems to be an endlessly large structure, as this photograph frames this building so that the only side that ends is cut off by the left edge of the photograph. The photograph allows us to believe that the Louvre could extend even beyond the boundaries of the photograph. Architecture dominates this photograph, in subject and form. The viewer is meant to be dazzled by the scale of the structure, and by the beauty of such a site of cultural patrimony. The composition is rigidly ordered and blocked out into different sections of the photograph where no element of the composition transgresses the neatly ordered lines around it. This creates total visual order, which simultaneously allows for an uncomplicated consumption of the photograph as well as it emphasizes the power, order, and control of the state of France. We observe this strict ordering from a similarly high vantage point in figure 8, another travel image of Paris. This stereoscopic view looks down the Rue de Rivoli with the buildings of the Louvre bordering the side of the image. This photo seeks less to highlight the monumentality of the Louvre than the grandeur of the boulevards of Paris. The long, wide street—characteristic of post-Haussmann Paris—extends at a diagonal to a building far from the viewer. The buildings bordering the street diminish in scale along this perspective line to emphasize the grand stateliness of the city. This time, the high point of view allows the viewer to hold dominion over the city of Paris itself, not just the Louvre. This photograph holds the same priorities as the photograph of the Louvre: they emphasize architecture, and the grandiosity of Paris (and the Krueger 19 implicit claims to patrimony and power held within that) and allow the viewer to possess these aspects of the city. The activities of people on the street, represented by handcarts in the first photograph, are merely another aspect for the viewer to hold dominion over. Braquehais’s photographs of Place Vendôme operate well within this visual lexicon of travel photography. In figure 5, we see these conventions of travel photography replicated throughout the photograph. Braquehais implements the same higher point of view, the strict structural lines of buildings surrounding Place Vendôme, and the implicit claims of the grandiosity of the city. This photograph is similar to figure 9 in how it prioritizes the object of interest (the Pont des Artes and the Vendôme Column) and how it configures people. Both photographs depict passive subjects seemingly unaware of the camera and unengaged with any activity other than looking. Visually, the photographs reduce their human subjects to mere metrics for scale. The viewer looks at a massive monument, or infrastructure of the city, and then marvels at how small the people in the photograph are in comparison, which once again centers grandeur as the ruling concept of the work. Both photographs situate the viewer from a higher point of view, privileging the viewer over the people in the photograph. They, like the city around them, are held within the dominion of the viewer. Perhaps the most convincing piece of evidence in establishing Braquehais’s photographs of the Commune as being within the lexicon of travel photography emerges when we compare Braquehais’s photograph of the Vendôme Column (fig 11) to Achille Quinet’s travel photograph of the same subject (fig 10) from just a few years prior. The images are nearly identical, with Braquehais’s print distinguished only by the scaffolding erected around the Column in preparation for its destruction and a few figures included in the foreground. Clearly, Braquehais is working from these established photographic conventions of the travel photograph. Krueger 20 Braquehais’s photographs of the Commune are visually much more the travel photograph than, say, the photographs of the other Civil War staged just a few years before. Aside from the Crimean War, the American Civil War is considered by many to be the first “event” at which the camera was present. 35 There was a visual lexicon of war photography, of the photography of events, which was available to Braquehais. For example, Alexander Gardner’s photographs, considered to be the preeminent photographs of the Civil War, have little investment in grandeur and focus far more on quiet, solemn scenes of uncertainty. 36 In figure 12, for example, the disjointed remains of a bridge form unnatural ridges that jut out from placid waters. The destruction of this landmark is not depicted with the straightforward and uncomplicated conventions that define the travel photograph. Across these two Civil Wars, Gardner presents the conflict in ways which contest the travel photograph and leave their viewer disquieted. Braquehais, on the other hand, is approaching the city not as a war photographer, but as a travel photographer. Moreover, Braquehais frames the Paris Commune visually within the lexicon of the commodity. Just as travel photography renders the city as a commodity to be consumed, so too do Braquehais’s photographs. They figure the Commune itself as a commodity to be bought, sold, and consumed. Obviously, there is a straightforward commodification of the Commune happening across the body of photography of the Commune. These photographs allow people to buy and possess the image and idea of the Commune, or, more often, the aftermath of the Commune. Braquehais takes it a step further. Not only is he commodifying the image of the Commune, he is figuring the Commune within the visual lexicon of commodity—the travel Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, (London: Penguin, 2003), 18. Anthony W Lee. "The Image of War." On Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil War, ed. Anthony W. Lee and Elizabeth Young. (Berkeley: University of Berkeley Press, 2007), 50. 35 36 Krueger 21 photograph. While other photographers are commodifying the ruination of Paris and capitalizing on anti-Communard sentiment, Braquehais is commodifying images of the Communards and the Commune. And if the Commune is the commodity, then who is the consumer? THE COMMODITY AND THE OTHER In all likelihood, the consumers of Braquehais’s photographs were not the Communards themselves. Albums like Siège de Paris typically sold for around 80 francs. 37 This was not outrageously expensive, but neither was it affordable for the average working-class family. The people who were buying these albums were probably upper class, ranging from the petitbourgeois to bourgeois. In other words, the people participating in the Commune, and the people in these photographs were largely not the people consuming Braquehais’s photographs. When we consider the role of the bourgeoisie in relation to the Commune, an additional element of this commodification comes to light. As mentioned above, the Commune was a movement by and for the working class. The middle class came out in various degrees of support for the Commune— they were quite active in the first few weeks of the Commune but their support dwindled as time went on. 38 Few, if any sources mention any involvement or support from the bourgeoisie who remained in Paris in the Commune. Additionally, the Commune kept itself quarantined from the rest of the world for its three-month existence. The Communards were at war with Versailles and they did not want Versailles to have access to information about their movements or plans. 39 The world outside the Commune was kept in the dark for months and people were curious as to what was going on in the capital. Furthermore, the two known copies of Siège de Paris with full Wilson, Paris and the Commune, 1871-78: the Politics of Forgetting, 192. English, Political Uses of Photography in the Third French Republic, 1871-1914, 27. 39 Milza, "L'année terrible": La commune mars-juin 1871, 118. 37 38 Krueger 22 provenance belonging to the Royal Collections and the National Library of Brazil were purchased by King Edward VII and Emperor Pedro II, respectively. Not only were these two men bourgeois foreign citizens who themselves witnessed nothing of the Commune, they were ruling monarchs. For the Parisian bourgeoisie who fled Paris and saw nothing of the Commune and the international bourgeoisie including Pedro II and Edward VII, Braquehais’s photographs were artifacts of the Other. Art historians Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten argue that within the context of the art of modernity, the categories of “primitive” and the “Other” are constructed along axes of oppression in binary, oppositional relationships. 40 For example, along the lines of race, the “us” is the civilized white man, where the “Other” is the primitive, colonized body of color. They note how particular these notions of modernity were to Paris. Modernity was situated in Paris, in the bourgeois, white, man working and observing the world from Paris. 41 We see this notion of the civilized “us” versus the barbaric “Other” everywhere in modern visual culture. It was especially prevalent in Victorian travel photography, where the periphery is depicted as primitive, barbaric, or backwards. 42 This colonial lens of photography upholds the position of the viewer and reaffirms their identity through this comparison of the other. The establishment of this relationship also provides justification for the colonial project—if the viewer believes that colonized peoples are backwards, then they must need the help of the colonizer. The relationship of the ‘us’ versus the ‘Other’ here is that of the metropole looking at the periphery. But Antliff and Leighten suggest that this relationship of Otherness is not confined to the axis of race. They Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, “Primitive,” in Critical Terms for Art History: Second Edition, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (University of Chicago Press, 2003), 170. 41 Antliff and Leighten, “Primitive,” 172. 42 Peter D. Osborne. “The Reverie of Power: Victorian Travel Photography and the Depiction of Egypt, the Holy Land, and India,” In Travelling Light: Photography, Travel, and Visual Culture. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 200), 31. 40 Krueger 23 argue that Otherness is also constructed along the axis of class. The modern man is bourgeois, and therefore, in his search for the primitive, he doesn’t have to look to the colonies—he can find the backward Other in the lower classes of the metropole. 43 Existing in the lexicon of travel photography, Braquehais’s photographs replicate this gaze from Victorian travel photography of the viewer looking at the Other. Braquehais’s photography upholds this relationship between the viewer “us” and the subject “Other” when we take into account the viewer being bourgeois and the subject being working class. As the metropole configures the Other through photography in the periphery, the metropole now looks at itself to find the Other in a similar way. This is the inverted gaze of the metropole looking at itself as the Other. 44 Once we consider these class dynamics, a new reading of Braquehais’s photography emerges. Whatever we as 21st century viewers see in these photographs, it is important to consider how the original bourgeois audience of the album would have seen the photographs. In figure 13, for example, the bourgeois viewer perhaps would have seen the felling machinery and the barricades as alien bodies in the Place Vendôme. Coming from a visual culture of travel photography of Paris (and, more broadly, painting and prints of Paris) the viewer might have read these aspects of the photographs as visual intrusions. Against the strict symmetry of the rest of the photograph—which primarily consists of the Column and the city—the barricades and machinery in the foreground introduce an element of disorganization through contrast. This otherizes the Commune as an alien force which is disrupting the bourgeois organization of the Antliff and Leighten, “Primitive,” 182. In no way do I wish to equate the political relationship between the French bourgeoisie and the French proletariat with the political relationship between the French colonizer and the colonized subject. Race simply cannot be overlooked in discussing 19th century political relationships. It is perhaps the single most important determining factor in manufacturing Otherness, then as now. I merely wish to suggest some similarities in the way which 19th century metropole viewed the periphery, and how the viewer of Braquehais’s album viewed its subjects. 43 44 Krueger 24 city, both literally and visually. The bourgeois viewer might have connected the light sky with the light buildings of the city and the light streets, which all contrast against the darkness of all the activities of the Commune and the Column. To the bourgeois viewer, the Commune in this photograph may very much appear as an intrusive force of the Other. This works to otherize the Commune and lends the Commune a foreboding presence. Moreover, the presence of the lines of rifles on either side of the photograph frame the whole endeavor within the context of violence. Additionally, much of the equipment in the foreground is not immediately identifiable, which heightens the alienness and strangeness of the Commune to the bourgeois viewer. This is an architectural view which has been corrupted by the Other. The photograph situates the bourgeois viewer so as to identify more with the emblematic cultural patrimony of Paris than with the Communards. Thus, figure 13 represents a union of the travel photograph of Paris and the Victorian travel photograph of Other. These two concepts should, given the oppositional framework of “us” versus Other established by modernity, intrinsically be at odds with one another. The photograph is undeniably Parisian and consequently emblematic of the “us” of modernity as with most travel photographs of Paris. And yet it is also undeniably a view of the Other, of the society built by this exoticized underclass. But within this photograph the conventions of the travel photograph of Paris work in tandem with the logic of the colonial photograph. Figure 13 renders the ostensibly modern Parisian as the Other through depicting the Commune as a foreign, intrusive body against the conventions of the travel photograph of Paris. Braquehais’s photographs of the Commune effect a marriage of these two lexicons of travel photography. Similarly, in figure 15, the Commune is more of a spectacle than a political activity to the bourgeois viewer. None of the subjects of the photograph are discernible as individuals with an Krueger 25 identity. Most of the subjects are too far from the camera to appear as little more than silhouettes. They do not encourage the sympathy of the viewer; they stand as an indistinct mass for the viewer to observe. For the vehemently anti-Communard bourgeoisie, this photograph represents an unforgiveable vandalization of the city by the hordes of Communard criminals. 45 The Communards climbing on top of the fallen, broken Column and the Communards triumphantly raising the red flag of the Commune above the stump of the Column visually represent a barbaric inversion of the social order. Once again, the light sky and the light, and the elegant bourgeois Parisian buildings lining the Place come to signify the grandeur and the cultural patrimony of France, whereas the dark and indiscernible crowds gathering around the fallen Column are rendered as the intrusive Other. Even for the hypothetically ambivalent or sympathetic bourgeois viewer, this otherization persists. This photograph, and other photographs depicting the Communards in a sympathetic light (fig 16), still operate like travel photography to bourgeois viewers who did not participate in the political activities of the Commune. As in travel photography, where the exotic Other is brought close enough for the viewer to observe voyeuristically without ever “endangering” themselves, so too do Braquehais’s photographs of the life of the Commune. 46 The Other is made available to the viewer; they are a puzzling, alien group who the viewer can consume safely through the medium of photography. Braquehais’s photographs allow for this consumption to occur in ways which no other photograph of the Commune does because they depict this active political body of the Commune. While other photographs of the Commune can connote the Communards through the damage they inflicted upon Paris, Braquehais’s Przyblyski, "Moving pictures: Photography, narrative, and the Paris Commune of 1871," 255. Osborne. “The Reverie of Power: Victorian Travel Photography and the Depiction of Egypt, the Holy Land, and India,” 45. 45 46 Krueger 26 photographs allow for the direct consumption of the people and political body of the Commune through images. The Communards, to the bourgeois viewers, are novelties. Even if they are criminals, they are still different, still the Other, and they are something to be gawked at. More importantly, they are something to be consumed and controlled. Peter Osborne remarks on the quality of Victorian travel photography to impose control over the colonized landscape and subjects. 47 For example, a Victorian British viewer viewing a photograph of India could experience India in all its exoticness and wonder from a place of safety, while still imposing Britishness and control over the landscape. As in figure 14, a photograph of India by English photographer Samuel Bourne, the viewer is removed from the scene, placed at a safe distance from the dangerous Other. The photograph positions its subjects, all Indian, as alien and strange. The figures closest to the camera are engaged in work, carrying mossacks on their backs and unaware of the camera. Their dress and the mossacks they carry mark them as foreign and exotic. A few of the figures in the background under the tree address the camera, but they are far enough away that their faces are barely discernable. These figures pose no immediate threat to the viewer, thus they are easily consumed. Osborne notes that the colonial subjects within Victorian photography of India submit to being photographed and to the visual order of the photograph. 48 The camera controls and freezes the dangerous Other. Braquehais’s photographs do much the same thing, especially his group portraits at Place Vendôme. They allow the bourgeois viewer to experience the thrill of seeing the working-class Other in their world of the Commune from a place of safety, and also to possess it. The Other is dangerous, so once the Other is established, the photograph must exert control over it. Sontag Osborne, “The Reverie of Power: Victorian Travel Photography and the Depiction of Egypt, the Holy Land, and India,” 39. 48 Osborne, “The Reverie of Power: Victorian Travel Photography and the Depiction of Egypt, the Holy Land, and India,” 42. 47 Krueger 27 writes, “As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure. Thus, photography develops in tandem with one of the most characteristic of modern activities: tourism.” 49 For the bourgeois viewer to own Braquehais’s photographs is to calm their fears over the Other; owning a photograph of the Commune is asserting control over it. As Osborne argues, the Victorian travel photograph establishes difference, us versus the Other, but always affirms the superiority of the “us.” 50 Braquehais’s photographs operate similarly. In figure 15, the viewer’s superiority over the scene is reinforced through the point of view being above the Communards, and, importantly, separated from them. The photograph reassures the viewer that they are not like those teeming masses of Communards; they do not belong with the poor. The figures, like those in the Bourne photograph, are distant. They are to be observed and consumed, but never to pose a direct threat to the viewer. The Commune demonstrated the legitimate power of the proletariat and situated it as a threat to bourgeois power. But collecting Braquehais’s photographs of the Commune in a fashionable album allowed the bourgeoisie to, at the very least, visually possess this power of the Commune. To collect Braquehais’s photographs is to collect the Commune, to own it, to control it, to possess it. Holding the album in one’s hands, physically possessing it, symbolically allowed the bourgeoisie to assert power over the Commune and regain control over the proletariat. Sontag, On Photography. 8. Osborne, “The Reverie of Power: Victorian Travel Photography and the Depiction of Egypt, the Holy Land, and India,” 36. 49 50 Krueger 28 CONSUMING THE COMMUNE The control and assertion of power made possible by the album helps rationalize the outwardly bizarre historical fact that the two known copies of Siège de Paris belonged to two ruling monarchs. For Emperor Pedro II, the function of Siège de Paris was twofold. On its most basic level, its function for him was a souvenir of a trip to Paris. The touristic aspect should not be overlooked. Pedro II purchased the album while in Paris on his own tour of Europe in 18711872. On this rudimentary level, the album functioned as a travel album for him, despite the fact that it professes to be a “Historical Album.” Pedro II was also an avid photographer and collector of photographs. He left behind a massive personal collection of photographs which became the Thereza Christina Maria Collection. In fact, he was the first Brazilian photographer, as he was given a daguerreotype camera in 1840. 51 Siège de Paris was most likely one of many albums purchased by the Emperor to commemorate his tour of Europe and expand his vast collection. Far from having revolutionary function, these photographs served as entertaining mementos for a ruling monarch, effectively neutralizing the political force of the Commune. The album also functioned to assuage fear. The Paris Commune must have been frightening to Pedro II and Edward VII; it challenged, and momentarily overthrew, the very systems which kept them in power. The threat the Commune posed to them was twofold: it threatened the dominant economic system and the monarchy. If it can happen in Paris, it can happen in Rio de Janeiro, and it can happen in London. In 1871, Brazil was still in a state of social upheaval from the devastating Paraguayan War, which had ended only one year ago. 52 The sovereignty of the British monarchy was also under threat (or at least perceived itself to be under Vasquez, Pedro Karp. O Brasil na fotografia oitocentista. São Paulo: Metalivros, 2003. Romañach, Alfredo Boccia. Paraguay y Brasil: crónica de sus conflictos. Asunción: Editorial El Lector, 2000. 89. 51 52 Krueger 29 constant threat) from growing socialist movements in the country throughout the Victorian era. It is no coincidence that two copies of this album were owned by monarchs. By owning this album, they were able to exert some amount of control over the Communards, even if it is just visual, metaphorical control. The viewer is able to simultaneously indulge in the voyeurism of watching the exotic Other and controlling it. Whether Siège de Paris existed as a thrilling souvenir or as a way to assuage fear of the Other, both of these functions remain distinctly counterrevolutionary. Braquehais’s photographs are unique in their status as capitalist intrusions into and exploitations of Commune life. His photographs act as more than faithful documentation of the Commune; they are visual commodifications of the Commune. Prior scholarship heralded Braquehais as the photographic liberator of the Commune by removing his photography from the context of its album, Siège de Paris. Once we consider his photographs of the Commune within the context of the album, and subsequently their consumption, they are revealed to be counterrevolutionary, if not outright nationalistic. His photographs also allow his bourgeois viewer, like the colonial viewer in the metropole looking at photographs of the periphery, to possess and control its subjects. They are a means of establishing difference and maintaining power over the Other. The photographs transform the Commune into something to be bought and sold, possessed and controlled. After the tectonic reckoning of class represented by the Commune, these photographs assuage the fear of their bourgeois viewer. And yet, this analysis should not be totalizing in its application. A few portrait photographs of the Communards here and there, while perhaps not revolutionary, convey the power and will of the Communards. Returning to figure 3, the viewer encounters a much more complex and uneasy photograph than the remainder of the album. This photograph radically departs from the conventions of travel photography that the majority of Siège de Paris adheres Krueger 30 to. It looks out east, over the newer suburbs of the city in the 18th arrondissement and the vast system of railway leading into Gare du Nord. This is not the tourist’s city, this is the city of the Communards. Paris is overexposed and amorphous, not monumental or beautiful here. This photograph does not render the city of Paris under the Commune as the site of cultural patrimony as we see elsewhere in the album. The camera looks down rue des Rosiers only to be abruptly cut off by the battery of cobblestones and the artillery canon. The National Guardsmen, while still distanced from the viewer, are visibly armed and confront the viewer head on. Certainly, other photographs in the album depict the Communards in a full frontal view (fig 16) or the weaponry of the Commune (fig 13), but here they are married in this uneasy photograph. The artillery still isn’t pointed at the viewer—instead, it points out over the city—yet the implicit threat remains. The Communards are still a dangerous Other to the bourgeois viewer, but now the visual distance and safety promised by the other photographs of the Communards is gone. Here is more than just a reminder of the nuance of Braquehais's work. In this photograph, for a brief moment, the dead speak. They speak to us of the full power of the Commune, a power beyond commodification, a power no monarch could ever fully control. Krueger 31 figure 1. Bruno Braquehais, Near the Porte of Auteuil, 1871. Photograph. Krueger 32 figure 2. Bruno Braquehais, Neuilly; Rue du Roule, 1871. Photograph. Krueger 33 figure 3. Bruno Braquehais, Rue des Rosiers (Buttes Montmartre), 1871. Photograph. Krueger 34 figure 4. Anonymous, Commune de Paris barricade rue Saint-Sébastien, 1871. Photograph. Krueger 35 figure 5. Bruno Braquehais, Place Vendôme. The Felling of the Column. Final Measures, 1871. Photograph. Krueger 36 figure 6. Bruno Braquehais, Tuileries Palace; Stairway Leading to the Pavilion de Flore, 1871. Photograph. Krueger 37 figure 7. Anonymous, Le Louvre, c. 1865. Photograph. figure 8. H. Jouvin, Rue de Rivoli et hôtel du Louvre, c. 1865. Albumen print, stereoscope. Krueger 38 figure 9. Adolphe Braun, View of Paris/The Ponts des Arts, 1868. Photograph. Krueger 39 figure 10. Achille Quinet, Colonnne Vendôme, c 1860s. Albumen print. Krueger 40 figure 11. Bruno Braquehais, Vendôme Column, 1871. Photograph. Krueger 41 figure 12. Alexander Gardner, Ruins of Richmond and Petersburg Railroad Bridge Across the James. [n.d.]. Photograph. Krueger 42 figure 13. Bruno Braquehais, Vendôme Column and Felling Machinery, 1871. Photograph. Krueger 43 Figure 14. Samuel Bourne, Mussucks for Crossing the Beas River Below Bajoura, 1866. Albumen silver print. Krueger 44 figure 15. Bruno Braquehais, Place Vendôme. The First Red Flag after the Fall of the Column, 1871. Photograph. Krueger 45 figure 16. Bruno Braquehais. Group of Federated Soldiers near the Column, 1871. Photograph. Krueger 46 figure 17. The preface poem by Placide Cornly. c 1871-1872. Krueger 47 Bibliography Antliff, Mark, and Patricia Dee Leighten. "Primitive.” In Critical Terms for Art History, edited by Robert S. 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