READINGS OF GUSTAVE COURBET MARK EDWIN SOUNESS A ...

contexts within which positivist interpretations of his work were produced and consumed.
The first two chapters focus upon the Second Republic (1848-1852), a period in French
history whose extreme social upheaval and violent political conflict impacted directly upon
the relationship between Courbet‟s work and positivism. These chapters critically examine
the two key positivist concepts of „progress‟ and „order,‟ which were articulated in
commentaries about Courbet‟s work across the political spectrum. Shaped by these
methodological imperatives, chapter one follows a trajectory from the extreme political left
to the moderate centre. The chapter discusses three different views of Courbet‟s work
formulated in the press by the engraver Pierre Hawke, the poet Max Buchon and the
novelist Francis Wey. The discussion highlights the distinct character of these views and
demonstrates that positivist interpretations of Courbet‟s work had a rich range of concepts
at their disposal, concepts that were articulated differently according to the contrasting
social implications they were perceived to have. Hawke and Buchon were left-wing radicals
who condemned the prevailing capitalist bourgeois society and who sought to ameliorate
the working class. Their revolutionary readings of Courbet‟s paintings sought critical
leverage from the positivist assertion that social progress was driven by a sympathetic
instinct inherent in the human physiology. Both readings argued that Courbet‟s work could
help reform society and postulated the aesthetic power of a positivist truth expressed in the
artist‟s paintings. Hawke referred to the artist‟s inspiring reaffirmation of human sympathy
in the face of social decay and Buchon pointed to the artist‟s emotive exposure of the
bourgeois oppression of such sympathy. Representing the political centre, Wey supported
the maintenance of social order and postulated a different positivist truth expressed in
Courbet‟s work: the existence of a biological order governing all living beings and
physiological organisms, including humans. Wey attributed an underlying and enduring
social stability to this order and, reading Courbet‟s representations of human suffering as
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