The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848–1851

T. J. Clark's subject is painting and printmaking in the years following the 1848 Revolution in France, “a time”, he argues, “when art and politics could not escape each other.” The book tells the story of a handful of artists trying to take advantage of that unfamiliar and short‑lived situation. Daumier and Millet are central, particularly in their dealings with the new State's art patronage machine; Delacroix figures as painter and diarist, in agonized withdrawal from the possibility of change, haunted by his own Liberty Guiding the People; and Baudelaire is depicted, after a moment of tortured political involvement in the first months of the Republic, as the great poet of postrevolutionary despair.