This is the summary and contents for the series titled Urban Revolutionaries showing paintings of the urban growth of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe and North America.

The lure of city life was all about the promise of material goods and wealth, fine clothes, and smart carriages, all the things that were lacking in rural life. By 1780, Paris had trebled in size from that of the early fourteenth century, to reach a population of 650,000. Its accelerated growth during the nineteenth century saw it grow to 2.7 million in 1901. This was enabled by the agricultural and industrial revolutions.

Introduction

During these centuries, the majority of those who had farmed the country abandoned their homes and livelihoods for a fresh start in the growing cities. This Danish family group has just arrived in the centre of Copenhagen, and stick out like a sore thumb, with their farm dog and a large chest containing the family’s worldly goods.

1 Leaving the country

Those who arrived from the country found towns and cities to be alien places. Although many were extensively redeveloped during the nineteenth century, common people were often forced into cramped slums away from their grand buildings and streets, such as these tenements for immigrants in New York City.

2 Living in the city

Urban areas had to provide paid work, often in mills and factories. Towns grew rapidly across the coalfields of northern Europe as mines were sunk to extract coal, and again where iron ore was readily available.

3 Factories

Industry turned to coal to fuel its growth, and mining expanded in the coalfields across northern Europe. Industrial nations developed an insatiable need for young men to work as miners. In Britain alone, annual production of coal grew from 3 to 16 million tons between 1700 and 1815, and doubled again by the middle of the nineteenth century.

4 Coal and construction

Unrest grew among the workers in industrial towns and cities, leading to the Paris Commune of 1871, and a succession of strikes across Belgium in 1886. Those spread to other areas, resulting in violent confrontations between workers and the police and military.

5 On strike

Cities had plenty of inns and taverns where folk could consume alcoholic drinks until they couldn’t pay for them any more. While alcohol abuse also took place in the country, it was in the towns and cities that it became most obvious and destructive.

6 Demon drink

Women were widely engaged in light factory work, such as production of fabrics and garments by spinning, weaving and assembly. Many were also employed in domestic service industries including laundry and sewing, to service the middle and upper classes.

7 Women’s work

Prostitution was one of the most common ways for women to earn a living in the growing cities of Europe during the nineteenth century. Like bars and places of entertainment, it only thrived where there were plenty of potential customers with money, in cities like London and Paris.

8 The Oldest Profession

Few who migrated from the country ever made their fortune in the city, and most faced a constant battle to avoid poverty. Just as some social realists painted rural poverty in the middle of the nineteenth century, others depicted urban poverty.

9 Poverty

A few who migrated to the towns and cities did prosper. For young women, success could come through the growing world of fashion.

10 Rags to riches

As population density rose, so accommodation became crowded, the streets were often full of people, and vehicle traffic threatened the safety of pedestrians.

11 Crowds and traffic

As cities grew and swallowed up surrounding countryside, some substantial areas within them were retained as urban parks. But those who used them were overwhelmingly middle class, not the city’s workers.

12 Parks

Holidays were a privilege for the lower classes, and unpaid until legislation often as late as the twentieth century. Despite that, some workers saved all year and took a week’s unpaid leave to travel by railway to coastal and other resorts.

13 Holidays

Early cities were swept by epidemics of plague. In the nineteenth century, those were replaced by other communicable diseases including cholera, influenza and tuberculosis. Although improvements in sanitation brought cholera under control, epidemics continued to take their toll.

14 Epidemic

Although life in the country could be thoroughly miserable, stress of city life brought (and still brings) strain resulting from the stress of everyday life.

15 Angst

Painting in Europe during the latter half of the nineteenth century was centred on Paris. A lot happened in other countries too – such as the Pre-Raphaelites – but the major movements of the time came together in the capital city of France. Yet in the middle of this, from 1870-71, there was a major war in northern France between two of the great empires of the day, France and Prussia. Paris was put under siege, fell to Prussian occupation, and was then torn apart by the Commune.

These events had great impact on art and artists at the time. Some fled for safe places: several went to London, where they were exposed to important influences such as the paintings of Turner and Constable, who were formative to the Impressionists. Some died during that war, and promising and influential careers were terminated abruptly. Many stayed, and witnessed the horrors of war at first hand.

This weekend I look at the Franco-Prussian War and its immediate aftermath, stopping short of the ensuing turmoil of the Paris Commune.

Like so many wars, the Franco-Prussian War arose because of the conflicting ambitions of countries. The French Second Empire under Napoleon III had been in decline for several years, and had already demanded Belgium, Luxembourg, and the left bank of the Rhine in ‘compensation’ for Prussia’s annexation of territories to form the North German Confederation. Prussia was clearly seeking to become the dominant power in Europe, by forming a single nation from those previously separate states, plus the Southern German States and the French territory of Alsace-Lorraine.

France and Prussia were on a collision course, and on 19 July 1870 France declared war on the North German Confederation, a war for which the French were almost completely unprepared.

Fleury Chenu’s father in Briançon, France, was a master tailor working for the French Sixth Regiment at the time. Chenu’s Trainees, Snow Effect from 1870 gives a good idea of the limited preparation which the French had made as tensions mounted during the previous winter. Although a detailed realist painting, Chenu’s sky is powerful, and sets the scene for the straggling trainees as they make their way along the icy road.

Pierre-Georges Jeanniot had become an officer in the French infantry in 1866, and at the time of the war was a Lieutenant in the 23rd Infantry. He must have known how numerically inferior and weak the French forces were when he painted these Reservists (1870) queueing in the heavy showers to enlist and serve their country. This mobilisation occurred before reforms had been implemented to the system, and proved chaotic and inadequate.

Jeanniot was wounded at Rezonville, was awarded the Légion d’Honneur for his service during the war, and eventually left the army in the rank of Major.

Emperor Napoleon III left Paris for the new headquarters in Metz, as commander of the Army of the Rhine, on 28 July 1870. Although the Prussian army had its own professional General Staff under the command of Field Marshal von Moltke, Adolph von Menzel here shows the ceremonial Departure to the Army of King William I, 31 July 1870 (1871). That same day, Napoleon’s forces moved towards the Saar River to pre-emptively seize the Prussian town of Saarbrücken.

Anton von Werner had been sent with the staff of the Prussian Third Corps under the command of Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia. When French and Prussian forces fought their first substantial action in the Battle of Wissembourg on 4 August, the French were soundly defeated and forced to retreat. The commander of the French I Corps was killed, and von Werner committed that to canvas in 1888 as Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm with the Body of General Abel Douay, Weißenburg, 4 August 1870.

That was the first of a series of major defeats for the French during August.

Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville made his reputation with a succession of popular paintings showing the war. The Last Cartridges (1873) shows French snipers from the Blue division of the Marines ambushing Bavarian troops in l’Auberge Bourgerie in Bazeilles just prior to the Battle of Sedan, in which the French suffered their most disastrous defeat to date: on 2 September 1870, Napoleon III himself was forced to surrender with 104,000 of his soldiers.

De Neuville’s The Spy from 1880 shows a scene exploiting the humiliation of the French defeat. As Prussian forces advanced through northern France, they captured and shot good French citizens who they considered had got in their way. The Frenchman in blue to the right of centre is being searched and stripped in front of a group of Prussian officers, clearly accused of trying to defend his own country. Paintings like this fuelled Revanchism, the lasting sense of bitterness and demand for revenge against Prussia, and were disturbingly popular.

De Neuville’s In the Trenches (1874) is perhaps a more faithful depiction of the conditions that French soldiers had to endure as the Prussians took more French territory during the early winter. Members of the Garde Mobile take what shelter they can in the bitter cold.

Paul-Émile Boutigny’s undated Scene from the Franco-Prussian War shows that life was no easier for the better-trained and properly equipped Prussian forces as the fighting moved into the winter. I’m very grateful to Boris for decoding the uniforms and equipment shown here (see his comment below). The soldier on the left is French, and holds a French Chassepot musketon with a long yataghan bayonet, while his colleague on the right appears to be Prussian, with his pickelhaube spiked helmet and a heavy cavalry cuirass that’s essentially modernised armour. Behind them is a group of mixed French and German soldiers who appear to be walking wound proceeding in front of an ambulance wagon.

Émile Betsellère’s moving L’Oublié! (Forgotten) from 1872 shows the appalling conditions facing the wounded after a winter battle.

Albert Anker was a Swiss artist who you wouldn’t have expected to have painted scenes from the Franco-Prussian War. However, in January 1871, he was witness to a strange event that must have affected him deeply.

The French General Charles Bourbaki (1816-1897) had been put in command of the Army of the East, soldiers who had been hastily trained and were ill-equipped. He and his troops were defeated in their attempt to raise the siege of Belfort, and were pursued by the Prussians until they crossed the border into Switzerland in late January and early February. Just over half of his 150,000 men had survived, and were in desperate straits by this time, as the winter conditions worsened. The Swiss disarmed them, gave them as much shelter and aid as they could, as shown in Anker’s painting of Bourbakis from 1871, and returned them to France in March.

Most important of all, though, was the fact that on 19 September 1870, Prussian forces had taken control of the country around Paris, and put the capital under siege.