How have artists responded to state violence? How has their work remembered, suppressed, erased, or otherwise forgotten acts of violence administered by states against their own citizens? When confronted by this type of violence, what is the responsibility of the artist who is neither its victim nor perpetrator? Prompted by such questions, this course analyzes photographs produced during, and paintings and drawings made in the three decades following the Paris Commune of 1871. An urban uprising motivated by the anarchist belief that power should be held by those directly affected by its exercise, the Commune existed for just over two months before its violent repression, which resulted in the death of thousands of Parisians. We begin with photography, then still a young medium. Key issues concern whether the “instantaneity” of the photograph precludes its capacity for historical reflection, the transformation of slaughter and destruction into spectacle, the police use of photographs to identify participants, and the state’s belated attempt to control their proliferation for fear of their mnemonic (and thus potentially incendiary) power. We then analyze the work of leading modernist painters such as Courbet, Manet, Morisot, Seurat, Signac, and Luce, considering the extent to which their work grapples—directly or indirectly—with this major historical trauma. We conclude with the relationship between, on the one hand, the resurgence of anarchist thought and public discussion of the Commune in the 1880s and 1890s, and, on the other, the development of Neoimpressionist painting.