Abstract
Taking the majority of its examples from the Salon of 1872, this article explores the extent to which official intervention was effective in eliminating from the exhibition potentially inopportune representations of the Franco-Prussian War. The withdrawal of a certain number of works deemed to risk offending the Prussians coincided with the very moment the French government was trying to negotiate the departure of occupying enemy troops under the terms of the May 1871 Treaty of Frankfurt. It initiated, or reignited, a debate about censorship during the course of which art criticism was itself politicized. Drawing on information in the Salon catalogue and analysing the reviews of the exhibition which appeared in the Parisian press, the article takes issue with much scholarship to date. In particular, it demonstrates how the interpretation of artistic works on display is inflected by polemical and ideological determinants. What emerges from this is precisely the incipient revanchard discourse which the government had hoped to suppress.
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