Much of central Paris was burned during the Franco-Prussian War that saw the death of the Commune. The resulting ruins of Paris at once became a tourist attraction, and the subject of remarkable photographs made for the tourist trade. The novelist Gustave Flaubert came to visit the ruins, and found in them a lesson for his contemporaries: if only they had understood the novel he had published some months earlier, "Sentimental Education," this cataclysmic destruction never could have happened. Peter Brooks explores that cataclysm, and the specific role of photography in the historiography of the moment.
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