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It has often been noted that Seurat’s early paintings and drawings downplay representation in favour of an increased attention to formal properties. What remains unexplored is how this quality can be understood in relation to the politics of the French Third Republic. This essay argues that Seurat’s early work was haunted by political events (most notably the Paris Commune), and by aspects of the artistic past (specifically the radical associations of naturalism) that many wished in the early 1880s to forget. With reference to the writings of Marx and Zola, each of whom offered perceptive diagnoses of the Third Republic’s uncertain relation to the past, I read Seurat’s depiction of the Tuileries Palace ruins and his series of stonebreaker images as reflections upon this crisis in historical memory. Whilst the repetitive weave of paint and conté crayon from which these images are constituted might seem to predict the emphasis on pictorial structure that characterized later forms of abstraction, it is argued here that in Seurat’s work it operates as a screen that occludes but at the same recalls repressed histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conflicts over cultural memory represent a significant stake in definitions of Frenchness advanced by opposing nationalist groups in the years before the First World War. The concept of a new ‘renaissance française’, broached by conservative critics and historians of art and literature often at odds with prevailing democratic republicanism, looked to the past to fashion a programme of renewal that challenged both the artistic vanguard and royalists’ advocacy of a Latinist classicism. This essay maps the social and cultural forces that shaped critics’ promotion of a new generation of artists credited with reinvigorating an indigenous tradition rooted in the Gothic and in a vernacular classicism associated with figures such as the Le Nains and Chardin. This loose grouping sought to reassert France’s cultural leadership in Europe under the aegis of a creative elite committed to the synthesis of the nation’s exceptional qualities embedded in its diverse, though complementary, artistic traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]