. However, the idealism of the Romantics proved illusory on the line, and the Revolution of 1848 in particular, including the one in France that voted in the Second French Republic, left a legacy of class hatred that was to be fueled in subsequent decades by Marx's Communist Manifesto, also published in 1848.
The point is that Rodin's milieu, as citizen and artist, was patterned by change and difference and punctuated by war. Indeed, throughout the 19th century, Europe in general and France in particular was punctuated by a series of territorial wars and attempts at social transformation by way of revolution. As Rodin's biographers report, his life and work were subject to the vicissitudes of social and political change. The philosophical temperament dominating the culture in Rodin's early life was the Romanticism of the intellectual elite, juxtaposed against what could be called the practical, nouveau-riche anti-intellectualism of the industrializing bourgeois culture. Clark refers to these competing trends as "a chasm in the European mind as great as that which had split up Christendom in the sixteenth century, and even more dangerous" (1969, p. 316). Artists of the period, Clark says, "felt themselves . . . cut off from the prosperous majority. They mocked at the respectable middle class and its bourgeois king . . . But what could they put in place of middle-class morality?" (pp. 316-17).
Cladel finds artistic significance in the fact that Rodin was a product of the lower classes and poor quarters of 1840 Paris and not the bourgeoisie. "Rodin was a son of the people and spent his youth among the people . . . Had he been born of a bourgeois family, he would not have been Rodin; his fearless and resigned acceptance of life's ordeals, his inflexible endurance, his robust realism which required an ideal and a faith, his profound simplicity, his credulity, his naivety reinforced with shrewdness--all these qualities would h...