Paul Gauguin, His Life and Art

About the middle of the last century, there occurred in Paris a series of events which seemed at the time likely to be of importance to future history, secondary only to the days of the French Revolution. You will seek Paris in vain for any public monument to these events, known as the Revolution of 1848. Only the name of the hideously utilitarian Boulevard Raspail may perhaps remind you, that in this year France achieved another one of those political failures which have been so curiously common in her history since 1789.

In February of that year, King Louis Philippe and his ministers had fled before the rising storm of popular feeling. It seemed at last that the great popular revolution of the working classes, dreamed of by every artist since 1789, proclaimed in the Rabelaisian caricatures of Daumier, latent in the troubled Romanticism of the epoch, was at hand. A provisional republic was formed and elections were held to the National Assembly. But the provinces showed that it mattered little to them whether the form of Government was changed or not. So long as the peasant had his farm, his cow, his money safely stowed away in a stocking, a hard-working wife, a pipe and a glass of wine, he was content with things as they were. If the industrial classes of Paris were starving, that was not his affair. He shared none of their fanatic Socialism, none of their dreams of the millennium. He wanted to be left alone.

The National Assembly proved to be overwhelmingly moderate, and the leaders of the Provisional Government discovered that they preferred to stand with the majority rather than to fall with the Parisian extremists. But the latter were not to be beaten without a struggle. On the fifteenth of May, a mob attempted to take the Assembly by storm, and failed. On the eighteenth, Lamartine, the former idol of the Revolutionaries, was hooted down while making a conciliatory speech. The Government found that it must either provide work and wages for the Parisian unemployed or run the risk of an appeal to force. A scheme was started, but it proved to be costly, and on the twenty-first of June the Government faced about and announced that it intended to proceed no further with its project. Three days later the storm broke. Two hundred and twenty-one barricades arose as if by magic in the streets, crowned with red flags and manned by sixty thousand men. For three days the mob kept up a desperate resistance; then the last barricade fell, the blood was washed off the pavements, the cause of "moderation" and "good sense" was restored.

There is a poetic justice in the coincidence of some events. On the seventh of June a son, Paul, was born to M. and Madame Gauguin, residing in Paris. This infant, brought obscurely into the world to the sound of cannon, was destined by one of the ironic dispensations of Nature to become later the leader of an art-revolution as far reaching and as important in its effects as the great attempt of 1848. His life was to be a constant struggle with the growing bourgeois civilization, the middle-class morality, of the late nineteenth century; his art was to speak the promise of a renewed world, a world where man could again walk naked, unashamed and free, as in Eden. He was destined to break beneath the inert weight of social conventions and stupidities, as the revolution had been broken by the armed forces at the disposal of the government: but his ideas were to point the way to, new conceptions of art and of life, which only the future can realize.

Clovis Paul Gauguin, to give the father his full name, was a petty journalist from Orleans. He had a post as collaborator on one of the obscure newspapers of Liberal opinion, that so greatly flourished about this time. His influence upon his son was slight, as is the case with the fathers of most artists. It is to Madame Gauguin that we must turn for an explanation of the character of her famous son.

Portrait of Gauguin's mother.

Aline Marie Gauguin was the daughter of a certain Chazal, of whom we know nothing, and of the then celebrated Socialist pamphleteer and agitator, Flora Tristan.

Flora Tristan was born in 1803 at Lima, Peru. Her father was a Spaniard of noble descent, Mariano Tristan y Moscoso. He served as an officer in the Peruvian Army, and probably took part in the wars of independence which severed Peru from Spain, since we find him and his family later occupying positions of dignity and affluence under the Republic. In 1818 he sent his daughter to school in Paris. She eloped the next year with Chazal and was disowned by her parents. After the birth of her child she separated from her husband and returned to Peru, seeking a reconciliation with her family. But the family had determined to do nothing for the self-willed, impulsive daughter, and she drifted back to Paris, where she attempted to support herself by writing pamphlets of strongly Socialistic tendencies. She became a pioneer of woman's suffrage, of humanitarianism, of the trade-union movement. She toured France making speeches. In 1836 she had the misfortune to meet Chazal again in Paris, who stabbed her in a fit of jealousy and was condemned to twenty years of penal servitude for the offense. A few years later she died in Bordeaux, and the trade-unions, remembering her zeal for their cause and her personal beauty-which had moved them perhaps more than the fervor of her speeches-subscribed the sum necessary to put up a monument.

Such were the parents and the grand-parents of the child who had just been born into the world. The tragic and violent union of Chazal and Flora Tristan serves to explain the man and the artist he later became. In Chazal we find the source of his violence and headstrong irritability; in Flora Tristan we see whence he drew his love of personal and individual liberty, his hatred of moral restraint, his scorn of the bourgeoisie, his Spanish hauteur and stoicism. Half-savage Spanish blood flowed in his veins, a mixture of Arab, Celt and African. Perhaps in his Peruvian descent there were even other currents-currents of that Inca race which the Spaniards had subdued but not conquered. Whatever else destiny held in store for him, it was certain from the beginning that Paul Gauguin could never be wholly assimilated to the intellectual effort of the frivolous and fickle city of Paris.

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