Picturing War in France, 1792–1856.
Katie Hornstein,
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017.
197 pp.; 100 color and 46 b&w illus.; index.
$70.00 (hardback)
ISBN: 9780-300228267
Reviewed by David O’Brien, University of Illinois
"...this book is not an idealistic account that asks readers to imagine a world without art or war, nor is its primary goal to protest the racist, jingoistic, or sadistic aspects of the images in question. Hornstein is too fascinated with the muddiness and complexity of the nineteenth century for that. She takes seriously popular, middle-brow, and mainstream attitudes toward art, and finds both important lessons and irresolvable questions in them. For example, her account dramatizes a tension at the core of public debates on war in nineteenth-century France between, on the one hand, rational, compassionate, or critical understandings of war, and, on the other, those that were more irrational, chauvinistic, or blindly celebratory. Visual depictions of warfare changed radically over the course of the century and played critical roles in defining individuals’ relationships to the nation, history, politics, and many other things, but it is difficult to draw conclusions about whether, overall, the increased publicity of martial imagery whetted or dulled the appetite for war. Hornstein respects the complexity of her subject, and the result is a deeply fascinating book."