Paul Gauguin, His Life and Art

Self-portrait of Gauguin.
Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are the roads of genius.
WILLIAM BLAKE.
CONTENTS
About the middle of the last century, there occurred in Paris a series of events which seemed at the time likely to be of importance to future history, secondary only to the days of the French Revolution. You will seek Paris in vain for any public monument to these events, known as the Revolution of 1848. Only the name of the hideously utilitarian Boulevard Raspail may perhaps remind you, that in this year France achieved another one of those political failures which have been so curiously common in her history since 1789.
In February of that year, King Louis Philippe and his ministers had fled before the rising storm of popular feeling. It seemed at last that the great popular revolution of the working classes, dreamed of by every artist since 1789, proclaimed in the Rabelaisian caricatures of Daumier, latent in the troubled Romanticism of the epoch, was at hand. A provisional republic was formed and elections were held to the National Assembly. But the provinces showed that it mattered little to them whether the form of Government was changed or not. So long as the peasant had his farm, his cow, his money safely stowed away in a stocking, a hard-working wife, a pipe and a glass of wine, he was content with things as they were. If the industrial classes of Paris were starving, that was not his affair. He shared none of their fanatic Socialism, none of their dreams of the millennium. He wanted to be left alone.
The National Assembly proved to be overwhelmingly moderate, and the leaders of the Provisional Government discovered that they preferred to stand with the majority rather than to fall with the Parisian extremists. But the latter were not to be beaten without a struggle. On the fifteenth of May, a mob attempted to take the Assembly by storm, and failed. On the eighteenth, Lamartine, the former idol of the Revolutionaries, was hooted down while making a conciliatory speech. The Government found that it must either provide work and wages for the Parisian unemployed or run the risk of an appeal to force. A scheme was started, but it proved to be costly, and on the twenty-first of June the Government faced about and announced that it intended to proceed no further with its project. Three days later the storm broke. Two hundred and twenty-one barricades arose as if by magic in the streets, crowned with red flags and manned by sixty thousand men. For three days the mob kept up a desperate resistance; then the last barricade fell, the blood was washed off the pavements, the cause of moderation and good sense was restored.