"The revolutionary boy at the barricades was memorably envisioned in Eugène Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People (1830) and Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables (1862). Over the course of the nineteenth century, images of the Paris urchin entered the collective social imaginary as cultural and psychic sites of memory, whether in avant-garde or more conventional visual culture. Visual and literary paradigms of the mythical gamin de Paris were born of recurring political revolutions (1830, 1832, 1848, 1871) and of masculine, bourgeois identity constructions that responded to continuing struggles over visions and fantasies of nationhood. With the destabilization of traditional, patriarchal family models, the diminishing of the father’s symbolic role, and the intensification of the brotherly urchin’s psychosexual relationship with the allegorical motherland, what had initially been socially marginal eventually became symbolically central in classed and gendered inventions and repeated re-inventions of ""fraternity,"" ""people,"" and ""nation."" Within a fundamentally split conception of ""the people,"" the bohemian boy insurrectionary, an embodiment of freedom, was transformed by ongoing discourses of power and reform, of victimization and agency, into a capitalist entrepreneur, schoolboy, colonizer, and budding military defender of the fatherland. A contested figure of the city became a contradictory emblem of the nation."
By:
Marilyn R. Brown (University of Colorado Boulder)
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 246mm,
Width: 174mm,
Weight: 589g
ISBN: 9781138231139
ISBN 10: 1138231134
Series: Routledge Research in Art History
Pages: 152
Publication Date: 12 May 2017
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Further / Higher Education
,
A / AS level
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Table of Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Ch. 1 Revolutionary Ancestors of the Gamin de Paris Ch. 2 Child of the People and Child of the Fatherland in Nineteenth-Century French Social History Ch. 3 Child of the People and Child of the Fatherland in the French Social Imaginary Ch. 4 The Gamin de Paris and the Revolution of 1830 Ch. 5 The Gamin de Paris in Panoramic Literature and in the Revolutions of 1848 Ch. 6 The Gamin de Paris, the Second Empire, and the Commune Ch. 7 The Gamin de Paris during the Early Third Republic Epilogue Bibliography
Marilyn R. Brown is author of Degas and the Business of Art: A Cotton Office in New Orleans (CAA Monograph, 1994) and editor of, and contributor to, Picturing Children: Constructions of Childhood Between Rousseau and Freud (Ashgate, 2002; Routledge 2017). She is professor of art history at the University of Colorado.
Reviews for The Gamin de Paris in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture: Delacroix, Hugo, and the French Social Imaginary
"""Brown’s meticulously researched illuminating study of the trajectory of the gamin across the nineteenth century makes a compelling case for the centrality of the gamin topos in French visual culture ... In her perceptive critical reading of individual images Brown offers a compelling demonstration of the challenges and rewards of examining visual culture in relation to political events and the vicissitudes of history."" --Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide"
