BonBock

THE BON BOCK

The swift defeat of France by Germany in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 ended the eighteen-year reign of Napoleon III and ushered in the conservative government of the Third Republic. France's humiliation by Germany, followed by the brutal suppression of the Paris Commune by the army of the Third Republic, led French intellectuals to question traditional institutions along with notions of patriotism and national identity. Edouard Manet's painting Le Bon Bock (The Good Pint), created for the Salon of 1873, was widely identified as a French Alsatian patriot drinking his regional beer. The picture came to serve as a popular symbol of the recent loss of the Alsace-Lorraine region by France to the Germans and a liberal political symbol of national introspection.

This association of Le Bon Bock with democratic ideals inspired Emile Bellot, a printmaker and the model for Manet's corpulent beer drinker, to organize the Bon Bock Society in 1875. For almost fifty years this group hosted monthly dinners in and around Montmartre for its membership, which consisted mostly of artists, writers, and performers. The Bon Bockers rummaged through French cultural history for new ways to define the national spirit, settling on the gutsy humor of François Rabelais, the sixteenth-century satirist. The Bon Bock Society promoted a concept of French national identity, combining a commitment to liberal republicanism with boisterous Rabelaisian laughter. This indivisibility of liberty and humor supported a climate of artistic experimentation and engendered tongue-in-cheek, anti-academic, and anti-institutional satire.

While Bon Bock dinners served for more than forty years as constant reminders of France's forfeiture of its eastern citizens to the Germans, they also kept this Rabelaisian model of parody and raucous humor alive in the minds of two generations of artists and intellectuals. Beginning in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, political thought and aesthetic innovation were unified in the minds of many writers and artists in Paris, and most of those who frequented Montmartre attended the Bon Bock dinners. First inspired by Manet's painting, the Bon Bockers and their freewheeling attitude paved the way for generations of Montmartre denizens to follow.


	Above: After Edouard Manet, detail from the Album du Bon Bock, photolithograph (Paris: Ludovic Baschet, 1878). Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Herbert D. and Ruth Schimmel Museum Library Fund. (Photo by Jack Abraham)