READINGS OF GUSTAVE COURBET MARK EDWIN SOUNESS A ...

Chapter One
Progress and Order during the Second Republic: Views of the Left and Centre
I: Introduction
In this chapter, I examine varying interpretations of Courbet‟s work published
during the Second Republic and formulated by three writers closely associated with
positivism, Pierre Hawke, Max Buchon and Francis Wey, who were connected with either
the left or centre-left of mid-nineteenth-century French politics. Hawke, on the extreme left,
was an advocate of revolutionary reform. Buchon was connected with both violent and
more peaceful currents of political reform and Wey was closely connected with the political
centre. According to two of these writers, art played an important part in improving society:
Hawke claimed that art could incline people to reform society by acting on their sentiment
and Buchon saw art as a diagnostic tool for highlighting social ills. By contrast, Wey saw
art as a means of reinforcing a system of order governing society. Each of these diverse
programmes, promoting either social and artistic reform or the maintenance of a system of
social order, was built on positivism in ways unrecognised in the existing scholarship on
Courbet. In this chapter, I explain Courbet‟s work and its positivist characteristics by
examining the social programmes of these three writers, the French positivist philosophy of
the period from which their ideas derived, and the newspapers in which their respective
works on Courbet were published. The 1848 Revolution had a direct impact on positivist
interpretations of Courbet‟s work and led to a dramatic increase in the number of
newspapers and journals published between 1848 and 1851. Here, my analysis follows a
trajectory from the extreme left to the moderate centre. In each case, I look at the respective
critical positions on Courbet taken by the three writers, the roots of these positions within
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