“One can understand that at this time preoccupations are elsewhere,” begins a pamphlet circulated around Paris in late February, 1848. This brochure, in the works for months, was published just as France was in the throes of yet another revolution. The radical artists behind the document noted, that in the capital of late, “talk was replaced by rifle shots.”1This was no call to arms to overthrow the monarchy, but an appeal to oust the academic juries which governed the Salon de Peinture et de Sc...