File:Guerre Civile (BM 1949,0411.3336).jpg

Height: 425 millimetres

Width: 507 millimetres

(Text from 'From Manet to Toulouse-Lautrec', BM 1978, cat.18) Manet returned to Paris for the last days of the Commune. Duret, his friend and biographer, wrote that the subject of this print was not imagined, but was one that Manet had seen himself and the corner of the rue de l'Arcade and of the boulevard Malesherbes; he had even made a sketch on the spot. Although this drawing does not survive, evidence to support Duret's assertion can be found in the colonnade of La Madeleine which can be seen in the background of the print. This makes it all the more remarkable that the pose of the dead National Guardsman is the same, in reverse, as the dead Toreador of Manet's painting of 1864 now in Washington. This in turn is derived from a seventeenth-century painting now in the National Gallery in London (no. 741). The companion print is also based on an earlier work; thus what is apparently reportage can be shown to have its roots as much in art as in life. As with 'The Execution of Maximilian', Manet could hardly have chosen a more sensitive subject. Although he probably intended the prints as a general condemnation, when it came to publishing them, 'The Barricade' was perhaps imagined to run the risk of being thought pro-Communard; thus only the more obviously neutral 'Civil War' was published in 1874 in a small limited edition of 100, while 'The Barricade' was published posthumously in 1884.