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A debate continues as to the value and definition of the term 'positivism' to our understanding of Impressionist painting and what came after. The blunt view has been presented by Albert Boime, who stated that 'during a period of conservative political backlash' in the 1870s after the Franco-Prussian War, Commune and semaine sanglante, the Impressionists 'still link[ed] their activities to the positivism and materialism of modern life expressed in Third Republic science, entrepreneurialism and colonialism.'1 James H. Rubin is more precise in a popular account of Impressionism, avowing that positivism was 'undoubtedly the dominant philosophy of the third quarter of the nineteenth century,' implying that its main philosopher Auguste Comte and contemporary representatives in literature, philosophy and history - Émile Zola, Hippolyte Taine, Jules Michelet and Ernest Renan - articulated a means of understanding the world that was shared by the Impressionists, confirmed by the repudiation of realism and positivism in a cruder form by Charles Baudelaire.2
However, Richard Shiffhad earlier criticised the ways art historians had handled positivism and how they had portrayed its relevance to Impressionism. Insisting that '[t]he term "positivism" has so many meanings that further qualification is demanded before it is to be used at all,' he went on to state that 'the more specific brand of positivism derived from Auguste Comte speaks clearly against an art of simple observation or realism.'3 The treatment of positivism as a central epistemological concern in a gendered reading of Impressionism by Norma Broude entailed a re-examination of the origins of its linkage with the movement in the nineteenth century. While accepting that Comte's ideas 'affected to some extent all fields of knowledge and cultural endeavour in nineteenth-century France,' Broude perceived an exaggeration among late nineteenth-century writers of the links between Romantic artists' interest in science 'to support the notion of a predominantly positivist and materialist orientation among artists in France during this period,' and concluded that the Impressionists and their supporters like Zola did not at all view the artist as a positivist in the vulgar sense of an 'impassive recorder of empirical phenomena.'4 Since then, T. J. Clark has weighed in with the opinion that: 'Monet's art is driven not so much by a version of positivism as by a cult of art...