The Commune

Henri Lévy signed and dated this canvas in 1871, the year of the Paris Commune, the revolutionary government that held the city from March to May and went down in fire and mass executions. Painted during those weeks or just after, it is openly hostile to the uprising. The Commune appears as a gaunt, wild-haired woman in a Phrygian cap, dagger in hand and the red flag behind her, raised above a heap of bodies and rubble. A crucifix and a French flag lie among the dead. Lévy borrowed the imagery of revolutionary painting, Delacroix above all, and turned it into a nightmare. The canvas stayed with the painter and then his widow until his studio sale in 1905. It surfaced again on 3 June 1968, when the art historian Bruno Foucart bought it from a flea-market dealer, and his family gave it to the Musée d'Orsay in 2021.