The most potent icon of this disastrous period in French history is Édouard Manet's lithograph Civil War, an unblinking depiction of the corpse of a soldier lying near a ruined barricade. Manet had served in the National Guard, fighting in Paris against the Prussians, but left to join his family in the west of France after the city surrendered. He was back in Paris during the bloody defeat of the Communards in late May, and according to his friend and biographer, Théodore Duret, based this print on his eyewitness sketch of a specific scene at the intersection of rue de l'Arcade and boulevard Malesherbes. The date of 1871 on the print most likely refers to the original drawing, rather than Manet's execution of the lithograph, which was not published until 1874.