“For all his apparent divisiveness,” wrote the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, “Trump assembled the most diverse Republican presidential coalition in history and rode political trends that will prove significant for decades to come.” That statement neatly describes Donald Trump’s sweeping electoral victory this week. But Ruffini wrote it more than a year ago.

Even though Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, he dramatically improved his performance that year among Black and, especially, Latino voters compared with 2016. According to Ruffini’s 2023 book, Party of the People, this was no fluke. American politics was undergoing a fundamental reordering in which the old dividing lines of race and wealth were being supplanted by new ones, namely education and trust in institutions. The ties that once bound low-income and nonwhite voters to the Democratic Party, he argued, were breaking. “If this trend continues,” Ruffini wrote, “it would mean the birth of a new party system, replacing the old twentieth-century class divide between the parties.”

Then came 2024. We don’t yet have precise data on how different groups voted, but the geographic swings make certain conclusions unavoidable. Trump made gains everywhere on Tuesday, but the places where he improved the most compared with 2020 were heavily nonwhite counties that have overwhelmingly supported Democrats for decades. Miami-Dade County, which is majority-Hispanic, voted for the Republican candidate for the first time since 1988; Baldwin County, Georgia, which is 42 percent Black, went red too. In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried the 97 percent–Latino Starr County, Texas, by 60 points. In 2024, Trump won it by 16 points.

In Ruffini’s view, the Democratic Party can no longer take the votes of nonwhite Americans for granted. “I think if they want to win back some of these voters,” he told me, “Democrats need to stop presenting themselves solely as the defenders of American institutions and instead as a party committed to change.”

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Rogé Karma: On Election Day, you wrote on X that “the FDR coalition is being dismantled piece by piece and being reassembled in Donald Trump’s GOP.” That’s a pretty provocative statement. So tell me what you were actually seeing in the data on Tuesday that made you think that was happening.

Patrick Ruffini: I often cringe a little bit when this is described primarily in terms of a “racial realignment.” In many ways, it’s a racial de-alignment, because the parties are realigning on educational lines.

If you look at a place like South Texas, which is very heavily Hispanic, Democrats were winning by 50, 60 points in 2012. And now we are at a point where it’s not just trending red but objectively red. You look at a place like Miami-Dade County, Florida, obviously home to a lot of Hispanics—Trump won it by 11 points.

But I think the more interesting county to me was Osceola County, outside of Orlando, a heavily Puerto Rican community. There was obviously a lot of focus on Puerto Rican voters in the closing days of the campaign because of the joke told at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. But Trump actually wins that county, which is unheard of. And if you believe the exit polls, then there’s evidence that this is happening with Black voters and Asian voters as well.

So when I use the term FDR coalition, I’m referring to a lot of groups that have a lot of disparate interests. To me, that has been the character of the Democratic Party for decades. You have groups who are not necessarily ideologically aligned on everything but can all find a home in this big tent. And you’re seeing that more and more in the Republican Party now. Since 2016, educated white voters have shifted left but every other group has shifted right. That was only enough for a near win for Trump in 2020, but this time it was enough for a popular majority in the country.

Karma: The data here are still preliminary, but let’s say you’re right and we are indeed experiencing this racial depolarization. I think the big question is why. One way of viewing it, as you do, is as a continuation of this broader educational realignment in our politics. But another way of looking at it is we’re in the midst of a global anti-incumbent backlash. Ruling parties in countries all over the world are losing left and right, mostly driven by what you once described to me as a “post-COVID inflationary malaise.”

[Rogé Karma: Age isn’t Biden’s only problem]

Ruffini: I think you’re completely right. Absolutely this was an election about the economy. Absolutely it was a change election. But underlying it is a divide in the electorate that has been building for a while now.

I’m not even sure I’d describe it as strictly educational sorting. What happened in 2020—and I think what we’ll continue to see in 2024—is an ideological sorting. Lots of nonwhite voters identify ideologically as conservatives but historically have tended to vote for Democrats anyway. That started to change in 2020. You had data suggesting that Hispanic conservatives, Asian American conservatives, Black conservatives moved by about 35 to 40 points toward Trump. I think that tells us that politics is sorting on an ideological axis.

And I think the reason that’s happening is because the forces that have long kept certain racial and racial-identity groups within the Democratic fold are no longer binding them to the Democratic Party. I think you have large numbers of folks in these groups who are temperamentally not on board with what they perceive to be the race-and-gender identity politics of the left. And that’s very problematic, potentially, for Democrats.

Karma: This is one of the big themes of your book: Democrats have alienated working-class voters of color by moving far too far to the left on issues around race and gender identity. But it seems to me that Democrats really learned their lesson from 2020. Kamala Harris ran way to the right on immigration. She talked about the importance of having a strong military. She played up her background as a prosecutor. She hardly mentioned race. And yet we saw even bigger shifts than we did in 2020. How do you explain that?

Ruffini: Harris ran a very clinically competent campaign. Speaking as a Republican, I was pretty concerned that she was going to successfully erase the taint associated with the Biden policies. I think it was clear she was trying to pivot the party in a more moderate direction on these issues.

But as the campaign wore on, she was unable to articulate how she would be different from Biden. And Trump got more and more effective at painting her as an extremist. He ran ads saying things like “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you,” in the voice of a Black man. Sometimes campaigns are not just about what you say about yourself. Campaigns are about how the opposition is able to define you.

The big problem for Democrats is there’s a powerful lingering perception that they are too progressive on some of these issues. And I don’t think anything short of an act of full-on repudiation is going to change that. Some kind of decisive action to distance themselves from that agenda—a kind of modern Sister Souljah moment. And Harris didn’t have any of those.

Karma: I’m interested in what you think that kind of moment would look or sound like. Because one critique I think you could make of her campaign is that you can take moderate positions all you want, but what really tells voters you are serious is when you pick fights with your own side. And she didn’t really do that. She wasn’t getting in fights with the immigration groups or the racial-justice groups. And in areas where she did get into fights, like the corporate-price-gouging proposal, she pretty quickly backed down.

Ruffini: I would put it almost exactly in those terms, because obviously conflict and controversy can be incredibly clarifying for voters. When the differences are subtle, voters are not necessarily going to get the message.

Karma: But there is an area where the difference between the parties isn’t so subtle, and that’s on economics. Nonwhite voters are much more likely to vote their material interests and prioritize economic issues. And when you look at where the two parties stand on those issues, Democrats have embraced a very progressive, redistributive economic agenda. That’s included these huge investments in clean-energy and manufacturing jobs. Lowering prescription-drug prices. Expanding the child tax credit in a way that slashes child poverty. Meanwhile, Trump has sort of gone in the other direction: He’s promising huge corporate-tax cuts and joking with Elon Musk about firing striking workers. Wouldn’t you think that kind of difference would make working-class voters more likely to vote Democratic, not less?

[Rogé Karma: Trump isn’t even pretending anymore]

Ruffini: It’s true that nonwhite working-class voters in general are much more materialist. I simply just don’t think that those policies that you mentioned actually register in the same way as the underlying state of the economy. Maybe sometime down the road these things will bear fruit and Democrats will get credit for these programs. But the economic issue that matters most for voters right now is inflation. And that’s poisonous for the Democratic Party.

Karma: We’ve really only seen this shift among nonwhite voters in the past two election cycles. How much of this is a product of just Donald Trump himself? And would these same shifts still hold in a future where a non-Trump figure was at the top of the Republican ticket?

Ruffini: That’s the big question, because I think, in many ways, Trump ran the perfect campaign that was optimized to exactly this coalition.

Karma: Okay, I have to stop you there. Because, if anything, I think the liberal perspective is that Trump ran a way more unhinged campaign. A way more dark, xenophobic campaign. Alongside some super gimmicky things like serving french fries at McDonald’s. So what about his campaign do you think was so good at breaking through?

Ruffini: In response to the McDonald’s thing, you had some Democrats saying, “That’s crazy. That looks weird. The garbage-truck thing backfired.” But that’s the opposite of how it played. Trump was masterful in this election at crafting these images and these contrasts between him and Kamala Harris, where she was very cautious and scripted. And you’ve got that versus somebody like Trump, who is able to go on Joe Rogan and mix it up and just shoot from the hip for hours.

Look, elections are not clinical exercises of people evaluating competing sets of policy proposals and making rational decisions. They are, in a sense, popularity contests and image-making contests. And something remarkable Trump did was, through the Musk endorsement and the podcast appearances and the UFC matches, he was able to bootstrap his own version of pop culture. And he was able to project that forward as something that voters in his target groups could gravitate toward.

I think that was fundamental. And I think that very few Republicans or Democrats understand how to do it well.

Karma: What advice would you give to Democrats who are dismayed by this election, by the fact that they’re losing so many of their core voters, and want to reverse that trend?

Ruffini: I think the thing they can do to best respond to it is take a page out of Bill Clinton’s playbook. On the one hand, he openly repudiated some of the toxic tendencies within the party. But I think fundamentally what he did was, he was able to address himself as a change agent. People outside the political system don’t like Washington. And I think, unfortunately for the Democrats, their position right now, especially on these issues of democracy and upholding institutional norms, is just completely the opposite temperamentally of where most Americans are when it comes to institutions in Washington, D.C., and Beltway politics.

Karma: Say more on that. It seems pretty clear that at its core, the college-versus-noncollege divide is really a high-trust-versus-low-trust-in-institutions divide. Why are Democrats losing those low-trust voters, and can they do anything about it?

Ruffini: I understand why Democrats are so focused on the need to preserve democracy. Obviously, that’s a message a lot of people can agree with. But think about somebody who is disaffected, angry, who dislikes everything about traditional politics. When they hear that, they immediately think that this is a pro-system party. That this is a party that doesn’t share the dislike and distrust they have—maybe not of institutions generally but of Washington, D.C., in particular. And so I think it was a big mistake for Kamala, in the final days of her campaign, to pivot back to defending democracy with Liz Cheney at her rallies.

Barack Obama was a change candidate. Bill Clinton was a change candidate. I think if they want to win back some of these voters, Democrats need to stop presenting themselves solely as the defenders of American institutions and instead as a party committed to change.

The first former president to be convicted of a felony is now also the first convicted felon to be elected as president.

Donald Trump won reelection on November 5, paving the way for his return to the White House—as well as the end or postponement of the criminal cases against him. The extent to which those cases also paved the way for his return to the White House will be a topic for years of debate. One plausible argument is that the sense that Trump was being persecuted strengthened his support; another is that the failure to bring cases sooner and finish them deprived voters of complete information. Both may be true.

In any event, the discussion is moving from the legal to the political because the legal side seems to have reached a dead end. Special Counsel Jack Smith and the Justice Department are expected to end the cases against him related to attempting to subvert the 2020 election and hoarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, neither of which has made it to trial. The documents case, long considered the most straightforward, was bottled up by a Trump-appointed judge on dubious procedural grounds. The election-subversion case took a detour to the Supreme Court, where a conservative majority ran down the clock before ruling that a president has very broad immunity for most acts done as president; the lower court hearing the case only recently got back on track, but on November 8, Smith asked the judge to pause the case, citing Trump’s victory.

But now, given that DOJ guidance says a sitting president can’t be tried, and that Trump has promised to fire Smith and immediately dismiss the cases anyway, the two federal cases are likely to wind down. An election-subversion case in Fulton County, Georgia, is effectively frozen already amid challenges to the prosecutor’s handling of the case. Trump has been convicted but not sentenced in New York State related to hush money paid to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels, and sentencing in that case may never happen, either.

If the failure to swiftly prosecute Trump enabled his election, then, his election seems to guarantee that he will never face accountability for the acts he committed, including those for which he has already been convicted of 34 felonies.

What follows is a summary of the major legal cases against Trump, assessments of the gravity of the charges, and the prognosis. This guide will be updated as necessary.

New York State: Fraud

In the fall of 2022, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a civil suit against Trump, his adult sons, and his former aide Allen Weisselberg, alleging a years-long scheme in which Trump fraudulently reported the value of properties in order to either lower his tax bill or improve the terms of his loans, all with an eye toward inflating his net worth.

When?
Justice Arthur Engoron ruled on February 16 that Trump must pay $355 million plus interest, the calculated size of his ill-gotten gains from fraud. The judge had previously ruled against Trump and his co-defendants in late September 2023, concluding that many of the defendants’ claims were “clearly” fraudulent—so clearly that he didn’t need a trial to hear them.

How grave was the allegation?
Fraud is fraud, and in this case, the sum of the fraud stretched into the hundreds of millions—but compared with some of the other legal matters in which Trump is embroiled, this is a little pedestrian. The case was also civil rather than criminal. But although the stakes are lower for the nation, they remain high for Trump: The size of the penalty appears to be larger than Trump can easily pay, and he also faces a three-year ban on operating his company.

What happens now?
On March 25, the day he was supposed to post bond, an appeals court reduced the amount he must post from more than $464 million to $175 million. Trump has appealed the case. In a September hearing, New York appeals-court judges seemed skeptical of the case against Trump and sympathetic to his arguments. They have not yet ruled.

Manhattan: Defamation and Sexual Assault

Although these other cases are all brought by government entities, Trump also faced a pair of defamation suits from the writer E. Jean Carroll, who said that Trump sexually assaulted her in a department-store dressing room in the 1990s. When he denied it, she sued him for defamation and later added a battery claim.

When?
In May 2023, a jury concluded that Trump had sexually assaulted and defamed Carroll, and awarded her $5 million. A second defamation case produced an $83.3 million judgment in January 2024.

How grave was the allegation?
Although these cases didn’t directly connect to the same fundamental issues of rule of law and democratic governance that some of the criminal cases do, they were a serious matter, and a federal judge’s blunt statement that Trump raped Carroll has gone underappreciated.

What happens now?
Trump has appealed both cases, and he posted bond for the $83.3 million in March.

Manhattan: Hush Money

In March 2023, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg became the first prosecutor to bring felony charges against Trump, alleging that the former president falsified business records as part of a scheme to pay hush money to women who said they’d had sexual relationships with Trump.

When?
The trial began on April 15 and ended with a May 30 conviction. A judge is scheduled to rule September 16 on whether the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity invalidates the case. On September 6, he announced that he was postponing sentencing to avoid interfering with the election.

How grave was the allegation?
Many people have analogized this case to Al Capone’s conviction on tax evasion: It’s not that he didn’t deserve it, but it wasn’t really why he was an infamous villain. Trump did deserve it, and he’s now a convicted felon. Moreover, although the charges were about falsifying records, those records were falsified to keep information from the public as it voted in the 2016 election. It was among the first of Trump’s many attacks on fair elections. (His two impeachments were also for efforts to undermine the electoral process.) If at times this case felt more minor compared with the election-subversion or classified-documents cases, it’s because those other cases have set a grossly high standard for what constitutes gravity.

What happens now?
Sentencing was scheduled for November 26, but with Trump now in the middle of a presidential transition, some observers expect that Justice Juan Merchan will either postpone sentencing or even forgo a sentence altogether.

Department of Justice: Mar-a-Lago Documents

Special Counsel Jack Smith charged Trump with 37 felonies in connection with his removal of documents from the White House when he left office, but Judge Aileen Cannon has dismissed the case, finding that Smith’s appointment was not constitutional. Smith has appealed. The charges included willful retention of national-security information, obstruction of justice, withholding of documents, and false statements. Trump took boxes of documents to properties, where they were stored haphazardly, but the indictment centered on his refusal to give them back to the government despite repeated requests.

[David A. Graham: This indictment is different]

When?
Smith filed charges in June 2023. On July 15, 2024, Cannon dismissed the charges. Smith appealed that dismissal on August 26.

How grave is the allegation?
These are, I have written, the stupidest crimes imaginable, but they are nevertheless very serious. Protecting the nation’s secrets is one of the greatest responsibilities of any public official with classified clearance, and not only did Trump put these documents at risk, but he also (allegedly) refused to comply with a subpoena, tried to hide the documents, and lied to the government through his attorneys.

How plausible is a guilty verdict?
Vanishingly unlikely. Smith and the Justice Department are reportedly working on winding down the case now, both because Trump would quash it on his first day in office and also because long-standing guidance says a sitting president cannot be prosecuted. This once looked to be the most open-and-shut case: The facts and legal theory here are pretty straightforward. But Smith drew a short straw when he was randomly assigned Cannon, a Trump appointee who repeatedly ruled favorably for Trump and bogged the case down in endless pretrial arguments. Even before her dismissal of the case, some legal commentators accused her of “sabotaging” it.

Fulton County: Election Subversion

In Fulton County, Georgia, which includes most of Atlanta, District Attorney Fani Willis brought a huge racketeering case against Trump and 18 others, alleging a conspiracy that spread across weeks and states with the aim of stealing the 2020 election.

When?
Willis obtained the indictment in August 2023. The number of people charged makes the case unwieldy and difficult to track. Several of them, including Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis, struck plea deals in the fall. Because a challenge to Willis’s presence on the case isn’t going to be heard until December, the case will not begin before the election.

How grave is the allegation?
More than any other case, this one attempts to reckon with the full breadth of the assault on democracy following the 2020 election.

How plausible is a guilty verdict?
Trump’s election casts even more uncertainty over an already murky future. This is a huge case for a local prosecutor, even in a county as large as Fulton, to bring. The racketeering law allows Willis to sweep in a great deal of material, and she has some strong evidence—such as a call in which Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” some 11,000 votes. Three major plea deals from co-defendants may also ease Willis’s path, but getting a jury to convict Trump will still be a challenge. A judge on September 12 tossed three counts as outside state jurisdiction, and dismissed several other but said the state can refile them with more detail. The case has also been hurt by the revelation of a romantic relationship between Willis and an attorney she hired as a special prosecutor. On March 15, Judge Scott McAfee declined to throw out the indictment, but he sharply castigated Willis. Trump’s victory may result in the case being frozen indefinitely.

Department of Justice: Election Subversion

Special Counsel Smith has also charged Trump with four federal felonies in connection with his attempt to remain in power after losing the 2020 election. This case is in court in Washington, D.C.

When?
A grand jury indicted Trump on August 1, 2023. The trial was originally scheduled for March but was frozen while the Supreme Court mulled whether the former president should be immune to prosecution. On July 1, 2024, the justices ruled that a president is immune from prosecution for official but not unofficial acts, finding that some of Trump’s postelection actions were official and sending the case back to the trial court to determine others. Smith obtained a new indictment on August 27, which retains the same four felony charges but omits references to corrupting the Justice Department. On November 8, Smith asked the trial-court judge to pause the case because of the “unprecedented circumstance” of Trump’s reelection.

[David A. Graham: Trump attempted a brazen, dead-serious attack on American democracy]

How grave is the allegation?
This case rivals the Fulton County one in importance. It is narrower, focusing just on Trump and a few key elements of the paperwork coup, but the symbolic weight of the U.S. Justice Department prosecuting an attempt to subvert the American election system is heavy.

How plausible is a guilty verdict?
It’s not happening, folks.

Additionally …

Once upon a time, cases were filed in more than 30 states over whether Trump could even appear on the 2024 ballot under a novel legal theory about the Fourteenth Amendment. Proponents, including J. Michael Luttig and Laurence H. Tribe in The Atlantic, argued that the former president was ineligible to serve again under a clause that disqualifies anyone who took an oath defending the Constitution and then subsequently participated in a rebellion or an insurrection. They said that Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election and his incitement of the January 6 riot meet the criteria.

The Supreme Court conclusively disagreed. The justices ruled unanimously on March 4 that states could not remove Trump from the ballot, and appear on the ballot he did. Trump is set to be sworn in as the 47th president on January 20, 2025.

For museums and their public, Impressionism is the Goldilocks movement: not too old or too new, not too challenging or too sappy; just right. Renaissance art may baffle with arcane religious symbolism, contemporary art may baffle on purpose, but put people in a gallery with Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Camille Pissarro, and explanatory wall texts feel superfluous. Eyes roam contentedly over canvases suffused with light, vibrant with gesture, and alive with affable people doing pleasant things. What’s not to love?

Famously, of course, Impressionism was not greeted with love at the outset. In 1874, the first Impressionist exhibition was derided in the press as a “vexatious mystification for the public, or the result of mental derangement.” A reviewer called Paul Cézanne “a sort of madman, painting in a state of delirium tremens,” while Berthe Morisot was privately advised by her former teacher to “go to the Louvre twice a week, stand before Correggio for three hours, and ask his forgiveness.” The very term Impressionism was born as a diss, a mocking allusion to Monet’s shaggy, atmospheric painting of the Le Havre waterfront, Impression, Sunrise (1872). Few people saw affability: In 1874, the term commonly applied to Monet and his ilk was “intransigent.”

Impressionism’s rom-com arc from spirited rejection to public rapture informs our fondness for the pictures (plucky little underdogs), and has also provided a lasting model for avant-gardism as a mechanism of cultural change. We now take it for granted that young mavericks should team up to foment new ways of seeing that offend the establishment before being vindicated by soaring auction prices and long museum queues. For most of history, however, that wasn’t the way things worked. Thus the 1874 exhibition has acquired legendary status as the origin point of self-consciously modern art.

Its 150th anniversary this year has been celebrated with numerous exhibitions, most notably “Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment,” organized by the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris, and the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C. (where it is on view until January 19, 2025). Given the masterpieces that these museums could choose from, this might have been an easygoing lovefest, but the curators—Sylvie Patry and Anne Robbins in Paris, and Mary Morton and Kimberly A. Jones in Washington—have delivered something far more intriguing and valuable: a chance to see what these artists were being intransigent about, and to survey the unexpected turns that art and politics may take in a polarized, traumatized time and place.

Nineteenth-century French history was messy—all those republics, empires, and monarchies tumbling one after the other—but it contains a crucial backstory to Impressionism, often overlooked. In the 1860s, France was the preeminent military and cultural power on the continent. Paris was feted as the most sophisticated, most modern, most beautiful of cities, and the Paris Salon was the most important art exhibition on the planet. Then, in 1870, some fatuous chest bumping between Emperor Napoleon III (nephew of the original) and Otto von Bismarck set off an unimagined catastrophe: By the spring of 1871, mighty France had been vanquished by upstart Prussia, its emperor deposed, its sublime capital bombed and besieged for months. When France sued for peace, Paris rebelled and established its own new socialist-anarchist government, the Commune. In May 1871, the French army moved in to crush the Commune, and the ensuing week of urban warfare killed tens of thousands. In the nine months between the start of the siege in September and the destruction of the Commune in May, perhaps as many as 90,000 Parisians died of starvation and violence.

These events and their impact on French painters are detailed in the art critic Sebastian Smee’s absorbing new book, Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism. His main focus is on the star-crossed not-quite-lovers Morisot and Édouard Manet, but nobody in this tale escaped unscathed. Morisot was in the city through the bombardment, the famine, and the street fighting; Manet and Degas volunteered for the National Guard; Pierre-Auguste Renoir served in the cavalry. Some of their most promising peers were killed. Everyone saw ghastly things.

[From the April 1892 issue: Some notes on French Impressionism]

And yet nothing about Degas’ ballerinas practicing their tendus or Renoir’s frothy scene of sophisticates out on the town suggests recent experience with terror, starvation, or climbing over dead bodies in the street, though they were painted when those events were still fresh. The Boulevard des Capucines, where the first Impressionist show took place, had been the site of “atrocious violence” in 1871, Smee tells us, but in 1874, Monet’s painting of the street is limpid with light and bustling with top hats and hansom cabs. If most fans of Impressionism remain unaware of its intimacy with the horrors of what Victor Hugo dubbed “l’année terrible,” it’s because the Impressionists did not picture them.

Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s unbarking dog, this suggests an absence in search of a story, and indeed, “Paris 1874” ultimately leaves one with a sense of why they chose to turn away, and how that choice helped set a new course for art. The standard version of Impressionism—the one most people will come through the door with—has, however, always emphasized a different conflict: the David-versus-Goliath contest between the young Impressionists and the illustrious Salon.

With more than 3,000 works displayed cheek by jowl, the 1874 Salon was nearly 20 times the size of the first Impressionist show, and attracted an audience of about half a million—aristocrats, members of the bourgeoisie, workers with families in tow. (Of the latter, one journalist sniffed: “If he could, he would even bring his dog or his cat.”) Presided over by the nation’s Académie des Beaux-Arts, an institution whose pedigree went back to Louis XIV, the Salon was allied with the state and had a vested interest in preserving the status quo. The Impressionists, wanting to preside over themselves, had founded their own organization—the Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, etc.—with a charter they adapted from the bakers’ union in Pissarro’s hometown.

“Paris 1874” is built from these two shows. With a handful of exceptions (mainly documentary photographs of the shattered city), the art on the walls in Washington now was on the walls in Paris then. (Identifying the relevant works to select from was no small achievement, given the 19th-century catalogs’ lack of images or measurements, and their penchant for unhelpful titles like Portrait.) Labels indicate which exhibition each artwork appeared in, beginning with the Salon’s medal-of-honor winner, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s L’Éminence Grise (1873), alongside Monet’s celebrated and pilloried Impression, Sunrise.

L’Éminence Grise (1873), Jean-Léon Gérôme (© 2024 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

The two paintings might be mascots for the opposing teams. Impeccably executed, the Gérôme is an umbrous scene in which Cardinal Richelieu’s right-hand monk, François Leclerc du Tremblay, descends a staircase as the high and mighty doff their caps. The fall of light is dramatic and convincing, the dispatch of color deft, the actors choreographed and costumed to carry you through the action. Every satin ribbon, every curl of Baroque metalwork seems palpable.

Beside it, the Monet looks loose and a bit jangly. The muted gray harbor flits between solidity and dissolution. The orange blob of a sun and its shredded reflection are called into being with an almost militant economy of means. And somehow, the painting glows as if light were passing through the canvas to land at our feet. The Gérôme is a perfect portal into another world. But the Monet is a world. More than just displaying different styles, the pictures embody divergent notions of what art could and should do.

Impression, Sunrise (1872), Claude Monet (© Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris / Studio Christian Baraja SLB)

For 200 years, the Académie had defined and defended visual art—both its manual skill set (perspective, anatomy, composition) and its intellectual status as a branch of rhetoric, conveying moral ideals and building better citizens. (L’Éminence Grise is, among other things, an engaging lesson in French history: When Cardinal Richelieu was the flashy power behind the throne of Louis XIII, the somber Capuchin friar was the “gray eminence” behind the cardinal.) Such content is what made “fine art” fine and separated painters and sculptors from decorators and cabinetmakers.

This value system had stylistic consequences. Narrative clarity demanded visual clarity. Figuration ranked higher than landscapes and still lifes in part because human figures instruct more lucidly than trees and grapes. Space was theatrical and coherent, bodies idealized, actions easily identified. Surfaces were smooth, brushstrokes self-effacing. This is still what we mean by “academic art.”

Most visitors confronting the opening wall at the National Gallery will know which painting they’re supposed to like—and it’s not the one with the fawning courtiers. Impressionism is universally admired, while academic art is sometimes treated as the butt of a joke. Admittedly, Jean Jules Antoine Lecomte Du Nouÿ’s huge, body-waxed Eros with surly cupids is easier to laugh at than to love, but most of the academic art on view strives, like the Gérôme, for gripping plausibility. You can see the assiduous archaeological research that went into the Egyptian bric-a-brac pictured in Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s pietà The Death of the Pharaoh’s First-Born Son (1872), or the armor of the sneaky Greeks descending from their giant gift horse in Henri-Paul Motte’s starlit scene of Troy.

[From the July 1900 issue: Impressionism and appreciation]

Today these pictures look like film stills. It’s easy to imagine Errol Flynn dashing up Gérôme’s stairs, or Timothée Chalamet brooding in the Alma-Tadema gloom. Perhaps the reason such paintings no longer move audiences the way they once did is that we have actual movies to provide that immersive storytelling kick. What we want from painting is something different—something personal, handmade, “authentic” (even when we aren’t quite clear what that means).

It’s a mistake, though, to assume that this impulse was new with Impressionism. Beginning in the 1840s, concurrent with the literary “Realism” of Stendhal and Honoré de Balzac, Realist painters turned away from the studio confections of the Académie and began schlepping their easels out into the weather to paint en plein air—peasants toiling in fields, or fields just being fields. Visible brushstrokes and rough finish were the price (or certificate of authenticity) of a real-time response to a real world. These were aesthetic choices, and in turn they suggested political viewpoints. In place of explicit narratives valorizing order, sacrifice, and loyalty, Realist art carried implicit arguments for social equality (“These plain folk are worthy of being seen”) and individual liberty (“My personal experience counts”).

The Salon was the Académie’s enforcement mechanism: In the absence of anything like today’s gallery system, it represented the only practical path for a French artist to establish a reputation. Yet for decades it flip-flopped—sometimes rejecting Realist art, sometimes accepting it and even rewarding it with prizes. Manet, considered a Realist because of his contemporary subjects and ambiguous messaging, had a famously volatile history with the Salon. In 1874, Degas explained the rationale behind the Société Anonyme in these terms: “The Realist movement no longer has to fight with others. It is, it exists, it needs to show itself on its own.”

But nothing in 1874 was quite that simple. A room at the National Gallery is given over to art about the Franco-Prussian War, both academic and Realist. All of it appeared in the Salon. The contrast is instructive: The elegant bronze by Antonin Mercié, conceived (prematurely) as a monument to victory, was altered in the face of actual events and titled Glory to the Vanquished. Although the naked soldier in the clasp of Victory has breathed his last, arms and wings still zoom ecstatically skyward and draperies flutter. He is beautiful even in death. The corpses laid out on the dirt in Auguste Lançon’s Dead in Line! (1873), dressed in the uniforms they were wearing when they fell, are neither naked nor beautiful. Their skin is gray, and their fists are clenched in cadaveric spasm. In the background, troops march by, officers chat, and a village burns. There is no glory, just the banality of slaughter. Unlike Mercié, Lançon had been at the front.

Dead in Line! (1873), Auguste Lançon (© Département de la Moselle, MdG1870&A, Rebourg)

Here also is Manet’s quiet etching of women queuing at a butcher shop in Paris as food supplies dwindled. Black lines, swift and short, capture a sea of shining umbrellas above a snaking mass of black dresses, at the back of which you can just make out the faint lightning-bolt outline of an upthrust bayonet. It’s a picture with no argument, just a set of observations: patience, desperation, rain.

In “Paris 1874,” a model of curatorial discretion, the art is allowed to speak for itself. Visitors are encouraged to look and guess whether a given work appeared in the Salon or the Société before checking the answer on the label. One quickly finds that applying the standard checklist of Impressionist attributes—“urban life,” “French countryside,” “leisure,” “dappled brushwork”—is remarkably unhelpful. The dog-walking ladies in Giuseppe De Nittis’s Avenue du Bois de Boulogne (1874, Salon) sport the same complicated hats, fashionable bustles, and acres of ruched fabric as Renoir’s The Parisian Girl (1874, Société). Charles-François Daubigny’s The Fields in June (1874, Salon) and Pissarro’s June Morning in Pontoise (1873, Société) are both sunny summer landscapes laid out with on-the-fly brushwork. Both sides did flowers.

As for the celebration of leisure, the Salon seems to have been full of moony girls lounging around and people entertaining fluffy white lapdogs, while the artists we now call Impressionists were paying much more attention to the working world. The glinting light of Pissarro’s Hoarfrost (1873, Société) falls on an old man trudging down a road with a large bundle of wood on his back. The backlit fug of Impression, Sunrise was probably smog—the admirably informative exhibition catalog alerts readers to Stendhal’s description of the same vista, “permeated by the sooty brown smoke of the steamboats.” Pictured at labor, not at play, Degas’ dancers stand around splayfooted, bored and tired, adjusting their shoe ribbons, scratching an itch. Even the bourgeois family outing in Degas’ transcendently odd At the Races in the Countryside (1869, Société) is focused on work: Together in a carriage, husband, wife, and dog are all transfixed by the baby’s wet nurse, doing her job. As for the scenes of mothers and children, it is possible that later observers have overestimated the leisure involved.

Hoarfrost (1873), Camille Pissarro (© Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt)

Jules-Émile Saintin’s Washerwoman (1874, Salon) is assertively a picture of urban working life, but in an entirely academic mode. The scene is “modern” in the same way that Alma-Tadema’s pharaoh was ancient, time-stamped by an array of meticulously rendered accessories. But the Alma-Tadema at least had the gravitas of tragedy. Saintin is content with smarm: He arranges his working girl awkwardly in the street, grinning coquettishly at the viewer while twirling a pole of white linens and hoisting her skirt to give a peek of ankle—the eternal trope of the trollop.

[Read: Why absolutely everyone hates Renoir]

Then there is art so wonderful and so peculiarly modern, it seems unfair that it went to the Salon. In contrast to Saintin’s washerwoman, Manet’s The Railway (1873) is reticent to the point of truculence. Against the backdrop of an iron railing, a little girl stands with her back to us, watching the steam of a train below, while next to her, a poker-faced young woman glances up from the book and sleeping puppy in her lap to meet our gaze. A bunch of grapes sits on the stone footing of the fence. The emotional tenor is ambiguous, the relationships between woman, child, dog, grapes, and train unclear. Everything is perfectly still and completely unsettled. Why was this at the Salon? Manet believed that appearing there was a necessary career move and declined to join in the Société event.

The Railway (1873), Édouard Manet (Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art)

He had a point. The Société chose, in its egalitarian zeal, to have no jury and to give space to anyone who paid the modest membership fee. The exhibit ended up even more of a grab bag than the Salon, so alongside some of the most adventurous and lasting art of the 1870s, you got Antoine Ferdinand Attendu’s conventional still-life pile of dead birds, and Auguste Louis Marie Ottin’s marble head of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the great master of hard-edged Neoclassicism, made more than 30 years earlier.

One function of “Paris 1874” is to debunk the tale of the little exhibition that could. The “first Impressionist exhibition,” it turns out, wasn’t all that Impressionist (only seven of its 31 participants are commonly categorized as such). Many artists took part in both shows simultaneously, prioritizing career opportunities over stylistic allegiance. (Not only was organized avant-gardism not a thing before 1874; it appears not to have been a thing in 1874.) As for those famously annoyed reviews, the catalog explains that they came from a handful of critics who specialized in being annoyed, and that most of the modest attention the Société show received was neutral or even friendly. Impression, Sunrise was “barely noticed.” Just four works sold. Goliath wandered off without a scratch, and David went broke.

But debunking is a short-lived thrill. The real rewards of “Paris 1874” lie in the rising awareness one gets walking through the galleries of a new signal in the noise, a set of affinities beyond either the certainties of the Académie or the earthy truths of Realism, and even a hint of how the unpictured traumas of 1870–71 left their mark. We know about the highlights to come (Monet’s water lilies at Giverny are hanging just down the hall), but there is something much more riveting about the moment before everything shifts into focus. By contrast, later Impressionist shows (there were eight in all) knew what they were about. The standard checklist works there. In 1874, it wasn’t yet clear, but you can begin to see a kind of opening up, a sideways slip into letting light be light and paint be paint.

As the Salon-tagged items demonstrate, the battle over subject matter had abated by 1874. Myths and modernity were both admissible. The shift that followed had less to do with what was being painted than how. The most frequent complaint about Impressionist art concerned style—it was too “sketchy.” The preference for loose brushwork, the disregard for clean edges and smooth gradients, was seen as slapdash and lazy, as if the artists were handing in early drafts in place of a finished thesis. More than one painting in the Société show was compared to “palette scrapings.”

Now we like the slap and the dash. We tend to see those independent-minded brushstrokes as evidence not of diminished attention, but of attention homing in on a new target—a fresh fascination with the transitory fall of light, at the expense, perhaps, of the stable object it falls on. Like a shape seen in the distance, sketchiness has the power to suggest multiple realities at once. Monet’s dark-gray squiggle in the Le Havre water might be a rock or a boat; certainly it is a squiggle of paint. Emphasizing the physicality of the image—the gloppiness of the paint, the visible canvas below—calls attention to the instability of the illusion. Step backwards and it’s a harbor; step forward and it’s bits of colorful dried goo.

At the Races in the Countryside (1869), Edgar Degas (© 2024 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

Sketchiness wasn’t the only means of undermining pictorial certainty. Degas never went in for fluttering brushstrokes or elusive edges, but his Ballet Rehearsal (1874) is scattered with pentimenti—the ghosts of a former foot, the trace of an altered elbow, the shadow of a male observer removed from the scene. He had sketched the dancers from life, but then used and reused those drawings for years, reconfiguring them like paper dolls, exactly the way an academic artist might go about peopling a crowd scene. The all-important difference is that Degas shows how the trick is played. In At the Races in the Countryside, the carriage and family are placed so far down and to the right that the nose and shoulder of one of the horses fall off the canvas, as if the painting were a snapshot whose taker was jostled just as the shutter clicked. It’s a way of calling attention to the bucket of artifice and conventions on which painterly illusion depends. This is art being disarmingly honest about being dishonest.

What this fledgling Impressionism puts on offer, distinct from the works around it, is a kind of gentle disruption or incompleteness—a willingness to leave things half-said, an admission of ambiguity, not as a problem to be solved but as a truth to be treasured. Nowhere is this more compelling than in Morisot’s The Cradle (1872). A portrait of the artist’s sister Edma watching her sleeping daughter, it takes a soft subject—mother and child, linen and lace—and girds it with a tensile framework of planes, taut lines, and swooping catenaries. Look beyond the “femininity” and you can see the first steps of the dance with abstraction that would dominate 20th-century painting from Henri Matisse to Richard Diebenkorn. At least as astonishing, though, is the neutrality and distance of the expression on Edma’s face. It might be exhaustion, or reverie, or (because before her marriage, she too had been a gifted professional painter) dispassionate study. Think what you will.

The Cradle is not harrowing or angst-ridden. It doesn’t picture unpleasantness. But when Smee writes of Morisot’s pursuit of “a new language of lightness and evanescence—a language based in close observation, devoid of rhetoric or hysteria,” he’s talking about a response to 1870–71. Both the right-wing empire and the left-wing Commune had ended in pointless, bloody, self-inflicted tragedies. The survivors, at least some of them, had learned to mistrust big ideas. An art about nothing might seem a strange defense, but the act of paying attention to what is rather than what should be—to the particular and ephemeral rather than the abstract and eternal—could be a bulwark against the seductions of ideology.

Resistance, of necessity, adapts to circumstance. In China during the Cultural Revolution, when message-laden art was an instrument of the state, artists belonging to the No Name Group took to clandestine plein air painting in the French mode precisely because it “supported no revolutionary goals—it was hand-made, unique, intimate and personal,” the scholar and artist Chang Yuchen has written. “In this context nature was less a retreat than a chosen battlefield.”

I used to think that Impressionism’s just-rightness was simply a function of time’s passage—that its inventions had seeped so deeply into our culture that they felt comfy. But although familiarity might explain our ease, it doesn’t fully explain Impressionism’s continued hold: the sense that beyond being nice to look at, it still has something to say. The more time I spent in “Paris 1874,” the more I cooled on the soft-edged moniker “impressionist” and warmed to the bristlier “intransigent.” It was a term often applied to unrepentant Communards, but the most intransigent thing of all might just be refusing to tell people what to think.

The contemporary art world, like the world at large, has reentered a period of high moral righteousness. Major institutions and scrappy start-ups share the conviction that the job (or at least a job) of art is to instruct the public in values. Educators, publicists, and artists work hard to ensure that nobody gets left behind and nobody misses the point. But what if leaving the point unfixed is the point?

Whether all of this would have developed in the same way without the violence and disillusionment of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune is impossible to know. But there are worse lessons to derive from trauma than these: Take pleasure in your senses, question authority, look around you. Look again.

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “The Dark Origins of Impressionism.”