READINGS OF GUSTAVE COURBET MARK EDWIN SOUNESS A ...

II: Pierre Hawke: physical and moral beauty as a means of social reform
In a number of articles concerning the Salon exhibition of 1848, the engraver and
critic Pierre Hawke provides a positivist interpretation of Courbet‟s work. These articles all
appear in the radical left-wing journal Le Représentant du peuple and claim that Courbet‟s
work is potentially an important component of social reform. In one such article, „Quelques
mots sur le Salon de peinture au Louvre. 1848,‟ published on 1 May that year, the critic
identifies Courbet with a young generation of artists who have great faith in the future and
who understand that art should serve society. 1 According to Hawke, art‟s mission of social
reform is a divine vocation instituted by God to create an altruistic and unified society. 2 He
argues that art fulfills this social role by expressing physical and moral beauty in
representations of people whose physical appearance reveals their social nature – their love
for their fellow man and their desire for a society based upon such love. 3 Representations of
1 Pierre Hawke, „Quelques mots sur le Salon de peinture au Louvre. 1848,‟ Le Représentant du
peuple, 1 May 1848, p4. Hawke refers to „une jeune génération pleine de foi dans l‟avenir et qui
comprend la mission de l‟art dans la société.‟
2 ibid, p4: „Pour eux, l‟art, c‟est un sacerdoce divin, institué par Dieu même pour élever le peuple à
la dignité d‟hommes aimans et libres.‟ As Neil McWilliam informs us, Hawke was a former Saint-
Simonian. In an autobiographical letter to Michel Chevalier, the famous Saint-Simonian, engineer,
statesman, economist and free-market liberal, dated 21 August 1832, Hawke recalls how Saint-
Simon‟s Nouveau Christianisme of 1825 became the fulfillment of his hopes after the false promise
of the July Monarchy; see Neil McWilliam, Dreams of Happiness, Social Art and the French Left
1830-1850, Princeton University Press, 1993, pp95-97. In Nouveau Christianisme, Saint-Simon
foregrounds the ethical basis of social relations and advocates a religious and altruistic faith in love
and fraternity. In this view of society, an alliance between the artist and the savant exists to cultivate
moral principles and brotherly love. For Saint-Simon, the artist is an authority on „sentiment‟ and a
propagandist whose representations of love and fraternity move the people to reform society; see
McWilliam, 1993, pp43-44. In his articles on Courbet, Hawke takes a similar view to Saint-Simon
and considers that the artist‟s social role of reforming society through positivist representation has a
divine origin.
3 Pierre Hawke, „Quelques mots sur le Salon de peinture au Louvre. 1848,‟ Le Représentant du
peuple, 1 May 1848, p4. Hawke‟s view, like Saint-Simon‟s, demonstrates the connections between
positivism, medical science and physiology and promotes a theory of society based upon knowledge
of the relations of „the physical and the moral.‟ Such a view is clearly evident in Saint-Simon‟s
Nouveau Christianisme, which asserts that religion is duty bound to bring about the swiftest possible
amelioration of the physical and moral existence of the poor: „J‟admets que Dieu n‟ait donné aux
hommes qu‟un seul principe; j‟admets qu‟il leur ait commandé d‟organiser leur société de manière à
35