
Paris in Ruins
Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism
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Narrated by:
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Julian Elfer
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By:
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Sebastian Smee
About this listen
From the summer of 1870 to the spring of 1871, famously dubbed the "Terrible Year" by Victor Hugo, Paris and its people were besieged, starved, and forced into surrender by Germans-then imperiled again as radical republicans established a breakaway Commune, ultimately crushed by the French Army after bloody street battles and the burning of central Paris.
In stirring and exceptionally vivid prose, Sebastian Smee tells the story of those dramatic days through the eyes of great figures of Impressionism. Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Edgar Degas were trapped in Paris during the siege and deeply enmeshed in its politics. Others, including Pierre-August Renoir, joined regiments outside of the capital, while Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro fled the country just in time. In the aftermath, these artists developed a newfound sense of the fragility of life. That feeling for transience-reflected in Impressionism's emphasis on fugitive light, shifting seasons, glimpsed street scenes, and the impermanence of all things-became the movement's great contribution to the history of art.
Incisive and absorbing, Paris in Ruins captures the shifting passions and politics of the art world, revealing how the siege and the chaos of the Commune had a profound impact on modern art, and how artistic genius can emerge from darkness and catastrophe.
©2024 Sebastian Smee (P)2024 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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Beyond the sainted Rembrandt—who harbored a startling darkness—and the mysterious Vermeer, whose true subject, it turned out, was lurking in plain sight, Moser got to know a whole galaxy of geniuses: the doomed virtuoso Carel Fabritius, the anguished wunderkind Jan Lievens, the deaf prodigy Hendrik Avercamp. Year after year, as he tried to make a life for himself in the Netherlands, Moser found friends among these centuries-dead artists. And he found that they, too, were struggling with the same questions that he was.
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Great Book
- By PaulB on 02-29-24
By: Benjamin Moser
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Mad Enchantment
- Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies
- By: Ross King
- Narrated by: Joel Richards
- Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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We have all seen, whether live, in photographs or on postcards, some of Claude Monet's legendary water lily paintings. They are in museums all over the world and are among the most beloved works of art of the past century. Yet, ironically, these soothing images were created amid terrible personal turmoil and sadness.
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Wonderful book. Awful awful narration.
- By StphnyC on 06-23-17
By: Ross King
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The Grand Affair
- John Singer Sargent in His World
- By: Paul Fisher
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 17 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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A great American artist, John Singer Sargent is an abiding enigma. He scandalized viewers with the frankness and sensuality of his work, while dressing like a businessman and crafting a highly respectable persona. In The Grand Affair, scholar Paul Fisher explores the enigmas of fin de siecle sexuality and art, fashioning a biography that grants the man and his paintings new and intense life.
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Not what I expected.
- By Anonymous User on 04-19-23
By: Paul Fisher
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The Slip
- The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever
- By: Prudence Peiffer
- Narrated by: Melissa Redmond
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a collection of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses clustered at the lower tip of Manhattan became the quiet epicenter of the art world.
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The narrator mis-pronounces everones name
- By Stephanie Laffont on 12-26-23
By: Prudence Peiffer
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Picasso's War
- How Modern Art Came to America
- By: Hugh Eakin
- Narrated by: Mack Sanderson
- Length: 15 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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In January 1939, Pablo Picasso was renowned in Europe but disdained by many in the United States. One year later, Americans across the country were clamoring to see his art. How did the controversial leader of the Paris avant-garde break through to the heart of American culture? The answer begins a generation earlier, when a renegade Irish American lawyer named John Quinn set out to build the greatest collection of Picassos in existence. His dream of a museum to house them died with him, until it was rediscovered by Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
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Better Books on Picasso Available
- By john burke on 08-17-22
By: Hugh Eakin
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Paris Reborn
- Napoléon III, Baron Haussmann, and the Quest to Build a Modern City
- By: Stephane Kirkland
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Traditionally known as a dirty, congested, and dangerous city, 19th Century Paris was transformed in an extraordinary period from 1848 to 1870, when the government launched a huge campaign to build streets, squares, parks, churches, and public buildings. The Louvre Palace was expanded, Notre-Dame Cathedral was restored and the French masterpiece of the Second Empire, the Opra Garnier, was built.
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Why Paris looks the way it does today
- By Neil Chisholm on 11-28-13
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Turner
- The Extraordinary Life and Momentous Times of J. M. W. Turner
- By: Franny Moyle
- Narrated by: John Sackville
- Length: 17 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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J. M. W. Turner is one of the most important figures in Western art, and his visionary work paved the way for a revolution in landscape painting. Over the course of his lifetime, Turner strove to liberate painting from an antiquated system of patronage. Bringing a new level of expression and color to his canvases, he paved the way for the modern artist.
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Terrible narration drags down adequate bio
- By Lynn on 10-19-20
By: Franny Moyle
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Chasing Beauty
- The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner
- By: Natalie Dykstra
- Narrated by: Maggi-Meg Reed
- Length: 15 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Isabella Stewart Gardner’s museum, with its plain exterior enfolding an astonishing four-story Italian palazzo, rose from Boston’s Fens at the turn of the twentieth century. Its treasures encompassed not only masterwork paintings but tapestries, rare books, prints, porcelains, and fine furniture.
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The best narrator I have ever listened to on an Audible!
- By William P. Anderson on 03-15-25
By: Natalie Dykstra
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Last Light
- How Six Great Artists Made Old Age a Time of Triumph
- By: Richard Lacayo
- Narrated by: Mack Sanderson
- Length: 13 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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One of the nation’s top art critics shows how six great artists made old age a time of triumph by producing some of the greatest work of their long careers—and, in some cases, changing the course of art history. Though these six artists differed in many respects, they shared one thing: a determination to go on creating, driven not by the bounding energies of youth but by the ticking clock that would inspire them to produce some of their greatest masterpieces.
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An art history course in one slim book
- By LC on 02-19-23
By: Richard Lacayo
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In Montparnasse
- The Emergence of Surrealism in Paris, from Duchamp to Dalí
- By: Sue Roe
- Narrated by: Kristin Atherton
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In Montparnasse begins on the eve of the First World War and ends with the 1936 unveiling of Dalí’s Lobster Telephone. As those extraordinary years unfolded, the Surrealists found ever more innovative ways of exploring the interior life, and asking new questions about how to define art. In Montparnasse recounts how this artistic revolution came to be amidst the salons and cafés of that vibrant neighborhood.
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Great Second of Two Books
- By Robert Keith on 10-26-19
By: Sue Roe
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Hilma af Klint
- A Biography
- By: Julia Voss, Anne Posten - translator
- Narrated by: Doria Bramante
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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The Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was forty-four years old when she broke with the academic tradition in which she had been trained to produce a body of radical, abstract works the likes of which had never been seen before. Today, it is widely accepted that af Klint was one of the earliest abstract academic painters in Europe. But this is only part of her story. Not only was she a working female artist, she was also an avowed clairvoyant and mystic.
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Ruined by narration
- By Adeliese Baumann on 11-23-23
By: Julia Voss, and others
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In Montmartre
- Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art
- By: Sue Roe
- Narrated by: Emma Bering
- Length: 12 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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A lively and deeply researched group biography of the figures who transformed the world of art in bohemian Paris in the first decade of the 20th century. In Montmartre is a colorful history of the birth of Modernist art as it arose from one of the most astonishing collections of artistic talent ever assembled. It begins in October 1900, as a teenage Pablo Picasso, eager for fame and fortune, first makes his way up the hillside of Paris’s famous windmill-topped district.
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Florid narrative history with suspect details
- By Keith on 10-30-19
By: Sue Roe
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Get the Picture
- A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See
- By: Bianca Bosker
- Narrated by: Bianca Bosker
- Length: 10 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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An award-winning journalist obsessed with obsession, Bianca Bosker’s existence was upended when she wandered into the art world—and couldn’t look away. Intrigued by artists who hyperventilate around their favorite colors and art fiends who max out credit cards to show hunks of metal they think can change the world, Bosker grew fixated on understanding why art matters and how she—or any of us—could engage with it more deeply.
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I Don’t think I Got the Picture
- By Emily J. on 03-23-24
By: Bianca Bosker
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Dawn of the Belle Epoque
- The Paris of Monet, Zola, Bernhardt, Eiffel, Debussy, Clemenceau, and Their Friends
- By: Mary McAuliffe
- Narrated by: Nancy Peterson
- Length: 16 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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A humiliating military defeat by Bismarck's Germany, a brutal siege, and a bloody uprising - Paris in 1871 was in shambles, and the question loomed, "Could this extraordinary city even survive?" Mary McAuliffe takes the listener back to these perilous years following the abrupt collapse of the Second Empire and France's uncertain venture into the Third Republic. By 1900, Paris had recovered, and the Belle Epoque was in full flower, but the decades between were difficult, marked by struggles.
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A massacre
- By BL on 10-02-22
By: Mary McAuliffe
What listeners say about Paris in Ruins
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- kim
- 11-26-24
The author’s crisp prose and the fluidity of the narrative
A flawless and captivating account of the cultural, artistic and political background which brought about impressionism
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5 people found this helpful
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- Edith Tatel
- 04-05-25
Instructs & delights
I’m a huge reader, but not especially either an art or history buff. Paris in Ruins inspires me to read more of both.
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- James Hanley
- 11-28-24
a fascinating historical, political, cultural, and artistic nexus in time
Smee puts you in the moment,.. in the hearts and minds of these artists, politicians, leaders and friends. What a wonderful way to to go back 150 years for a history lesson through the eyes of some of the world's greatest artists. Bravo!
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10 people found this helpful
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- Leslie
- 01-07-25
The perspective of Berthe Morisot
I enjoyed learning about the allegiances of the impressionist painters with the Republicans and also learning more about that period of Parisian history.
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1 person found this helpful
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- vaporgirl
- 01-24-25
Great story, well told. Completely factual? Maybe.
I’m an artist and I listened to Paris in Ruins while I worked in the studio. Well written, well performed, perfect studio listening. And certainly an interesting and relevant period in French history - the roles artists took are central to the book. It does often veer into docu-drama, recreating conversations and interior thoughts based on correspondence and accounts from the period, placing the reader / listener in the room or battlefield. But of course the person reporting wasn’t necessarily in the room or at the battle. This was mildly distracting but not enough so to kill the considerable entertainment and informational value of the book.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Deborah
- 01-20-25
Engaging but overwhelming…
This book is very thorough; perhaps too thorough. The author obviously loves his subject and just can’t stop himself. Art, artisits’ personalities, their social circles, politics, history, and military successes and failures all come together in detail. But in covering all of these areas, it overwhelms. There is a lot of great information here, but to maximize it will require more than 1 read or 1 listen.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Julie Seavello
- 12-26-24
Stunningly great narrator!
This is the story of the beginnings of French Impressionism set against the siege of Paris in 1870. It showcases the painters Manet and Morisot. I learned so much, and am very enriched by the author’s approach and research. I thoroughly enjoyed the excellent French pronounciations of the narrator- so, so good!
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11 people found this helpful
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- carpsmarsh
- 01-22-25
Amazing Background on the Impressionistsk
I was totally unaware of this turbulent period in French history or its effects on the young impressionists. What I found most interesting, was the painters themselves, their strong belief in themselves and their work despite being repeatedly rejected by the establishment. I was fascinated by their friendships (to the point of painting each other into their canvases) and how they copied each other - not as an apprentice would do in his master’s studio, but lifting subjects and motifs from each other’s works and putting their own spin on it. Julian Elfer is an animated reader, but it felt to me like he was racing through the text. There was so much going on that I think it would be easier to process and savor many parts of the book if read in print.
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1 person found this helpful