"The half century in France from 1848 to 1898 witnessed one of the most astonishingly productive periods in the Arts of any country or any age. This was the era of Baudelaire, Hugo, Verlaine, Mallarmé and Rimbaud among the poets; of novelists such as Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant and Huysmans; of Rodin among the sculptors and Debussy among the composers; and of a series of artists, ranging from Courbet to Cézanne, who in numbers and quality are equalled only in seventeenth-century Holland or Renaissance Italy. Yet, as Professor Hemmings emphasizes, this was a Dissident Culture--one in which writers and painters were frequently misunderstood by and at odds with the society which brought them to birth. How then to explain the paradox that art of every kind flourished supremely at a time when the divorce between the artist and his public was more profound than it has ever been before? Professor Hemming's explanation takes the form of a narrative of events: an examination of the arts in society; but a narrative which for breadth of understanding, elegance and exactitude of language, and illuminating insight it would not be easy to parallel. Starting with the appearance of the artists on the barricades in the 1848 Revolution, the survey follows the estrangement between culture and public which reached a height with the work of Van Gogh and Cézanne, and the momentary reconciliation which was symbolized by Zola's critical role in the Dreyfus affair."--Jacket.