The barricade, Rue de la Mortellerie, June 1848 known as Souvenir of the civil war
Paris, Musée du Louvre
Enrolled as a captain in the Artillerie de la Garde nationale, Meissonier viewed at close quarters the days of 1848 during which the troops of General Cavaignac annihilated the Parisians in revolt. This small picture is almost a piece of reportage; the implacable realism of a daguerreotype. «This is the horror of the truth», was Delacroix’s comment.
The many disappointments resulting from the revolution of 1848 and the Second Republic opened to the door to Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, enabling him to play a role on the French political stage. And he managed to rally to his cause not only the bourgoisie worried by the revolutionary disorders, and the peasants hostile to the Republic, but also a part of the working classes which believed in his social programme. On 10 December, 1848, Louis-Napoleon was elected President of the Republic. However, Meissonier’s barricade is the prefiguring of future brutal repression, namely that which followed the coup d’etat of 2 December, 1851, staining right at the outset the future Imperial regime.