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Summary CHAPTER 13 SAYRE DISCOVERING THE HUMANITIES
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Summary of Chapter 13, Sayre Discovering the Humanities. Arts Culture & Media, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.
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Chapter 13 Sayre The Working Class and the BourgeoisieHow did realism manifest itself in nineteenth-century art and literature?
How was new, modernist sensibility reflected in Paris in the 1850s and 1860s?
What is Impressionism?
What are some characteristics of the American sense of self as it developed in the nineteenth
century?
What is imperialism?
Louis XVIII assumed the throne of France after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815.
The revolution and Napoleon himself implemented a lot of reforms, which
could not be ignored. Ultraroyalist movements, composed of families who had
suffered at the hands of the revolution, established itself. Advocating the
return of their confiscated estates and the abolition of revolutionary and
Napoleonic reforms, the Ultraroyalists imprisoned and executed hundreds of
revolutionaries, Bonaparte sympathizers, and Protestants in southern France.
In February 1820 the education system was placed under the control of Roman
Catholic bishops, press censorship was inaugurated, and “dangerous” political
activity banned. In the midst of this turmoil, at the Salon of 1824, Eugène
Delacroix exhibited a large painting entitled Scenes from the Massacres at
Chios. It depicts events of April 1822, after the Greeks had initiated a War of
Independence from Turkey, a cause championed by all of liberal Europe. The stark
contrast between Delacroix’s Scenes from the Massacres at Chios and an equally large
painting by Jean Auguste-Dominique Ingres exhibited at the same Salon, The Vow of
Louis XIII emphatically underscores the competing styles of the two artists. In his
paintings, Ingres never hesitated to adjust the proportions of the body to the overall
composition. A good example is his La Grand Odalisque of 1814. An odalisque is a
female slave or concubine in a Middle Eastern, particularly Turkish, harem. The
odalisque continued to occupy Ingres for the rest of his career, as in fact it did
nineteenth-century French artists as a
group. But when Delacroix took up the
theme in an Odalisque painted in
1845–50, the effect was dramatically
different. Delacroix and Ingres reenact
the aesthetic debate that had marked
French painting since the time of Louis
XIII, the debate between the intellect and emotion,
between the school of Poussin and the school of
Rubens. But Ingres’s Neoclassicism and Delacroix’s Romanticism
entered into this debate not
merely as expressions of
aesthetic taste but as a political
struggle, which already in 1830
had erupted again in a
revolution that Delacroix would
celebrate in his monumental
painting Liberty Leading the
People. It is an allegorical
representation with realistic
details, an emotional call to
political action.
, This chapter explores the rise of an increasingly affluent bourgeois (middle-class) populace in both
Europe and the United States, intent on enjoying a style of life far removed from the realities that led
to revolution in 1848 and American Civil War. If the paintings of Delacroix and Ingres enacted not
only an aesthetic but also a political debate, at the heart of the conflict between the working class
and the bourgeoisie were two other oftentimes-competing ideologies: liberalism and nationalism.
Liberal belief was founded in Enlightenment values—the universal necessity for equality and freedom
at the most basic level. . Liberal politics were transnational; nationalism rested upon claims of
distinct regional, even local, ethnic and linguistic identity. These same politics informed the tensions
between North and South in the United States. The cultural identities of non-Western cultures were,
however, severely challenged as Western nations, revitalized by effective new military,
communication, and naval technologies, sought to expand their influence and reap new economic
and political power in far-distant lands during the nineteenth century. . Worldwide, non-Western
cultures suddenly found that they were defined as outposts of new colonial empires developed by
Europeans, resulting in the weakening of traditional cultural practices, political leadership, and social
systems that had been in place for centuries.
As a result of industrialization, the European workforce increasingly became proletariat—a class of
workers who neither owned the means of production (tools and equipment) nor controlled their own
work, as opposed to the bourgeoisie, shopkeepers, merchants, and businesspeople. Faced with the
reality of working-class life, reformist thinkers and writers across Europe reacted by writing polemical
works that are meant to be understood as critiques of industrial society. Chief among their targets
are the economic engine of the industrial state—its desire to reap a profit at whatever human cost—
and the unbridled materialism that, in turn, seemed to drive industrialism’s economic engine.
Chief among these refomist writers were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, two young, middle-class
Germans who believed that since the conditions in which one earns a living determined all other
aspects of life—social, political, and cultural. Marx and Engels believed revolution was inevitable. The
struggle between the bourgeoisie—which Engels defined as “the class of modern capitalists, owners
of the means of production and employers of wage labor”—and the proletariat amounted to the
conflict between thesis and antithesis, terms derived from Friedrich Hegel. For Hegel, history
proceeds by means of a dialectic: At any given moment, the prevailing set of ideas—the “thesis”—
finds itself opposed to a conflicting set of ideas—the “antithesis.” This conflict resolves itself in a
“synthesis,” which inevitably establishes itself as the new thesis, generating its own new antithesis,
with the process always moving forward. The ultimate resolution, for Marx and Engels lay in the
synthesis of a classless society, a utopian society at “the end of history,” since the dialectic forces
that drive history would then be finally and permanently resolved. Marx and Engels argued that class
struggle characterized all past societies and that industrial society amplified these class antagonisms.
“Society as a whole is splitting up more and more into two great hostile camps, into two great classes
directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.”
The thinking of Marx and Engels actually reflects a widespread concern among social-minded
Europeans and Americans for the plight of working people (and, in America, slaves). Chief among
their targets were the economic engine of the industrial state—its desire to reap a profit at whatever
human cost—and the unbridled materialism that seemed to drive industrialism’s economic engine.
The novels of Charles Dickens illuminate the enormous inequities of class that existed in nineteenth-
century England, with his heroes and heroines, villains and scoundrels, often approaching the point
of caricature. While his sentimentalism sometimes verged on the maudlin, Dickens also had an
unparalleled ability to vividly describe English reality. In depicting the lives of the English lower
classes with intense sympathy and great attention to detail, Dickens became a leading creator of a
new type of prose fiction, literary realism. His aim is not simply to entertain, but also to advocate
reform.
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