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| Johannes Jelgerhuis (Netherlands) Shop of the book dealer Pieter Meijer Warnars, Amsterdam 1820 oil on canvas Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
"Just as the industrial labor process separates off from handicraft, so the form of communication corresponding to this labor practice – information – separates off from the form of communication corresponding to the artisanal process of labor, which is storytelling. This connection must be kept in mind if one is to form an idea of the explosive force contained within information. This force is liberated in sensation. With the sensation, whatever still resembles wisdom, oral tradition, or the epic side of truth is razed to the ground."
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| Le Charivari (Paris newspaper) Fashion plate - Costumes de Humann 1841 lithograph Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Antoine Claudet (France) Portrait of girl in blue dress ca. 1854 hand-colored daguerreotype Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| J. de Clerq (Netherlands) Still-life 1860 oil on canvas Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Gustave Courbet (France) Flowers 1863 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
"Then, in the Assemblies of the Commune, side by side with the workers of Paris, with the warriors of socialism, one could see the poet of the International, Potier; the author of L'Insurge, Jules Valles; the painter of L'Enterrement à Ornans, Courbet; and the brilliant researcher into the physiology of the cerebellum, the great Flourens."
"With the Commune emerged the project of a Monument to the Accursed, which was supposed to be raised in the corner of a public square whose center would be occupied by a war memorial. All the official personalities of the Second Empire (according to the draft of the project) were to be listed on it. Even Haussmann's name is there. In this way, an "infernal history" of the regime was to be launched, although the intention was to go back to Napoleon I, "the villain of Brumaire – the chief of this accursed race of crowned bohemians vomited forth to us by Corsica, this fatal line of bastards so degenerated they would be lost in their own native land."
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| Gustave Courbet (France) Reclining woman 1865-66 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| François Marius Granet (France) Meeting of the Monastic Chapter 1833 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| François Marius Granet (France) Choir of Capuchin Church Piazza Barberini, Rome 1818 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| François Marius Granet (France) Monks in a cave before 1849 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
"In feudal society, leisure – freedom from labor – was a recognized privilege. In bourgeois society, it is no longer so. What distinguishes leisure, as feudalism understands it, is that it communicates with two socially important types of behavior. Religious contemplation and court life represented, as it were, the matrices through which the leisure of the grand seigneur, of the prelate, of the warrior could be molded. These attitudes – that of piety no less than that of representation – were advantageous to the poet. His work in turn benefited them, at least indirectly, insofar as it maintained contact with both the religion and the life at court. (Voltaire was the first of the great literati to break with the church; so much the less did he disdain to secure a place at the court of Frederick the Great.) In feudal society, the leisure of the poet is a recognized privilege. It is only in bourgeois society that the poet becomes an idler."
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| Honoré Daumer (France) Les Intrépides cartoon from Le Charivari 1834 lithograph Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Honoré Daumier (France) Le Constitutionnel Napoléonien cartoon from Le Charivari 1848 hand-colored lithograph Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Honoré Daumier (France) Two lawyers shaking hands before 1879 wash drawing Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Honoré Daumier (France) The Reading ca. 1857 oil on panel Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Honoré Daumier (France) Man reading before 1879 drawing Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
– quoted passages and citations are by Walter Benjamin from The Arcades Project, composed between 1927 and 1939, translated into English by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin for Harvard University Press, 1999