ABSTRACT
In this opening chapter I attempt to set a scene of rapid social change during the Paris Commune of 1871 and to establish within it the role of cultural processes, including in this case the destruction of a public monument. Through discussion of Gustave Courbet’s art and his involvement in the destruction of the Vendôme Column, I sketch what I take to be a first avant-garde, which is epitomised by French Realism. This avant-garde, which is politicised through a link to French utopian socialism in the mid-nineteenth century, is not entirely extinguished by the fall of the Commune. It contrasts with the anti-art avantgarde of early twentieth-century art discussed in Chapter 2, yet has some relation to the utopianism of the Modernist project in architecture discussed in Chapter 3. The problem of what, apart from public monuments like the Vendôme Column, constitutes a public sphere is taken up in Chapter 9. Setting the pattern for the book, I begin with an anecdote:
Anecdotes are not documentation. Nonetheless, they provide useful insights
not like rat-catchers but as executioners.
