Manet’s Realism and the Erotic Gaze: Photography, Pornography, and Censorship

Lauren S. Weingarden

It is well known that Édouard Manet referenced museum masterpieces in his 1863 Salon paintings, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Salon des Refusés; fig. 1) and Olympia (Salon of 1865; fig. 2), particularly engravings after Raphael, Ti- tian, and Giorgione. Less known is Manet’s reference to photography in the representation of the classical female nude, a new genre that emerged with the development of commercial photography during the early 1850s.1 Within a few years many photographers turned their technical devices to the more profitable commodity of erotic/pornographic photography. To date, only a few scholars have referred to Manet’s use of this photographic genre, both licit académies or études après nature (figs. 3, 4) and illicit erotic nudes (fig. 6). In this article, I go beyond these visual sources to explore the broader dimension of censorship and to examine how Manet signified in his art the slippage between these legal and illegal images of female nudity.2 In doing so, I demonstrate how, ironically, textual and illustrated obscenities challenged the efficacy of censorship laws, while the laws, in turn, made more vivid the efficacy of the obscene. Given the visual matrix of licit and illicit nudes, I argue that Manet ex- posed his photographic sources at an extremely volatile moment in the re- ciprocal histories of the medium and of nineteenth-century censorship. Both Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia are inscribed within a web of censorship and, in turn, a discourse on obscenity, engendered during the 1850s and 1860s by realist literature as well as by the photographic nudes. By review- ing the 1857 obscenity trials of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal,3 I show how word and image intersect in the pejorative language used for critical and legal discussions. The rubric “realism” stands at the center of this lexicon, signifying a literary style, a pictorial iconography, and a photographic portrayal of contemporary women exposed with dirty bodies and indecent poses. As a preliminary to this word-and-image discussion, it is important to review briefly the history of moral, as opposed to political censorship in nine- teenth-century France.4 Specifically, Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du mal were prosecuted under the law of 17 May 1819, “which aimed to suppress 288 Lauren S. Weingarden

Fig. 1. Édouard Manet (1832–83), Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1863. Oil on canvas, 81 x 101 cm. Paris: Musée d’Orsay, donation Étienne Moreau-Nélaton. the exhibition, distribution, or sale of any printed matter which constituted an ‘outrage à la morale publique et religieuse et aux bonnes moeurs’” (Har- rison 52; ‘an offense against public and religious morals and decency’). The 1819 law was also extended to graphic matter; first, in 1835, to include draw- ings, prints, and paintings (Article 20, of 9 September 1835). Subsequently, in 1852, Article 20 of the 1835 law was reinstated to include photography (Ar- ticle 22, of 17 February 1852; McCauley, Industrial Madness 155; McKee). I now want to argue that Manet referenced, in Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olym- pia, the obscenity trial of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (20 August 1857), and by association, the earlier trial of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (29 January–7 February 1857).5 My argument is based on the premise that, given the shared narrative ex- pectations or the literary conventions omitted from or parodied in a text, nineteenth-century readers could infer what the author self-censored or the state suppressed without the extrapolation being stated directly (Harrison 46; Burt 23). Thus, the censors in the Flaubert case assumed that the ex- cised (pre-censored) passage of Madame Bovary, the shuttered coach scene,