Guerre Civile (Civil War)

This print depicts a victim of the violent repression by government troops of the Paris Commune, a worker-led counter-government that formed in Paris at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in early 1871. During the semaine sanglante, or bloody week, soldiers sent by the conservative provisional government at Versailles took the capital back from the communards. While Manet was not himself a communard, he witnessed the slaughter of some 30,000 Parisians and later made two lithographs about the events. Here Manet borrows the traditional religious funerary motif of the gisant or outstretched body at its final rest, to confer a solitary dignity upon an otherwise chaotic and degraded scene of brutality.