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School of Society and Environment - Department of History
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Salome Jacques

Salome Jacques

Email: s.a.jacques@qmul.ac.uk

PhD Project

The Impact of the Paris Commune on Impressionist Representation of Women (1870-1896).

During its 73 days of life, the Paris Commune transformed attitudes to abour, equality, and sexuality, challenging gender defining institutions like marriage, religion and the nuclear family. With the creation of the 'Union de Femmes pour la défense de Paris et les Soins aux Blessés' in April 1871, women were given political agency through their participation in the public sphere. The Commune fought to give rights to women which would guarantee their livelihood, such as the principle of equal pay for equal work with workers’ cooperatives, education for girls, etc. The promise of these advances was, however, abruptly halted with the Semaine Sanglante (bloody week), when the Commune was violently repressed by the Versailles Army and the murder of 20,000-35,000 Communards. Survivors were trialed for treason, shot, or deported to the distant land of New Caledonia. The self-proclaimed government of the Third Republic was committed to the complete erasure of the memory of the Commune in order to legitimize its existence and secure its longevity. By restoring l’ordre moral, the regime utilized what it characterized as the chaos of the Commune to implement a bourgeois order. In this new era, the ideal of republican womanhood was encouraged to remain within the parameters of the patriarchal family. The domesticated private sphere guaranteed a woman’s place within a well-structured society, compared to the Commune which had encouraged women to reject their ‘true’ nature of devotion and nurture for unwomanly pursuits in the public sphere. The figure of the devoted wife and mother positively embracing modesty; and purity became the antithesis of the devilish Communarde, who played an active role in the overthrowing of ‘civilisation’ and embodied ‘all evils’ of the Commune.

    Impressionism, as an art movement, is often envisaged as the first of the avant-garde intervention that led to the cultural revolution of modernism. In that familiar art-historical narrative, its stylistic radicalism is frequently conflated with political radicalism. Taking a socio-historical approach, however, this doctoral thesis reveals a very different view of art and politics in late nineteenth-century Paris. Arguing that Impressionist artists played a crucial role in shaping the new reactionary social order of the Third Republic, each chapter demonstrates how recurring female archetypes in Impressionist iconography embody the gender norms of bourgeois morality promoted by the State to assert long-term control over French cultural identity. Rather than examining Impressionism purely as an avant-garde movement of ‘rebellious’ aesthetic choices, this doctorate thesis explores the ways artists as a social group whose visual language reflected and reinforced bourgeois moral values.

Supervisors

Dr. Emilie Oleron Evans, Department of History, QMUL
Dr. Hannah Williams, Department of History, QMUL

Research Interests

19th Century art & Society, 19th century Socialist Thought, Feminist Art History

Academic Background

Salomé holds Masters Degrees in Contemporary Art Curating (RCA, 2023) & Art History (UCL, 2021), as well as a Bachelor Degree in Comparative Literature & History (QMUL, 2020).

Other

Salome practices as a curator and arts writer in London.

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