ABSTRACT
The Third Republic's profession of equality and unity among classes translated into the actual practice of bourgeois class rule. And in the contestation of nationhood, the gamin de Paris could defend the interest of the fatherland in its colonies. The loss of political agency on the part of the gamin during the early Third Republic comes across most clearly in depictions of boys as victims. There are striking compositional similarities between the victimized gamins de la rue of Bastien-Lepage and Pelez, including stark, shallow backgrounds and the transformation of Murillo's beggar boys into modern faits divers. Yet gamins de Paris could be deployed as less-victimized salesmen. Liberty, the former revolutionary partner of the gamin de Paris, has been trans mogrified and institutionalized as the hegemonic emblem of the government, and the urchin is now her salesman. Shifted to France, however, Marie Bashkirtseff's boys inevitably allude to the recycled iconography of the Paris gamin, now depoliticized.
