The Execution of Emperor Maximilian

We stand with the firing squad. Their backs—six gray coats with white belts and cartridge pouches—form a rhythmic barricade that blocks access to the victims. The rifles stretch in a strict horizontal, their barrels eerily level with the horizon so that the landscape and the volley share a single line of force. Puffs of smoke seep between bodies, a quiet record of an action already underway. At the extreme left, the condemned are broken into parts: a head and a pair of clasped hands, as if the execution has begun by cutting them out of the picture itself. On the right, a noncommissioned officer coolly loads his weapon, preparing the coup de grâce, the routinized “finishing” act that reduces killing to procedure ². Manet’s flat light and cool palette suppress heroics; the anonymity of the shooters and their French-looking kit sharpen the accusation that imperial policy—not just Mexican soldiers—engineered this death ²⁶. Form and politics lock together. The canvas is literally pieced: raw margins and recomposed fragments are legible as scars, materializing how the image—and the event—were cut, censored, and reassembled in public discourse ¹². Manet pursued multiple versions and a lithograph that the state suppressed; the shifting details across versions track the flow of photographs and press reports into the studio, making the painting read like a dossier compiled under pressure ²⁴⁵. In this London version, the compositional compression is ruthless: the victims are displaced to the edge, the squad fills the center, and the distant blue hills remain serenely indifferent. The result is not melodrama but administrative death—violence carried out by faceless functionaries, its horror amplified by understatement ²³. Manet’s dialogue with Goya’s Third of May 1808 is unmistakable, yet he refuses Goya’s theatrics. Where Goya humanizes the condemned with a frontal martyr, Manet denies us faces; where Goya dramatizes light, Manet uses reportorial coolness that mirrors photography’s claim to truth while exposing its detachment ²³. The viewer’s station—shoulder-to-shoulder with the squad—implicates us as witnesses and potential accomplices. The painting therefore acts as a double indictment: of Napoleon III’s failed Mexican adventure, signaled by the French-style uniforms, and of modern spectatorship that consumes atrocity as a composed image ²⁶. In the Mannheim finale Manet even dates his signature to the day of the execution, insisting on the historical charge of the scene; the series as a whole becomes an ethics of looking, a modern history painting that measures how images can both register and occlude state violence ⁵².