The Enigma (L'Énigme)

The Enigma (L'Énigme) is an oil on canvas painted by Gustave Doré in 1871, in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune; measuring about 130 × 196 cm, it is in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris (RF 1982 68).

Doré, born in Strasbourg, felt the loss of Alsace to Germany keenly, although, like many artists, he had spent the war in London. The defeat, the Prussian siege and occupation, and the destruction during the Commune left Paris starved and damaged, and many painters responded with commemorative or allegorical images. Doré chose allegory. The canvas is painted in a near-monochrome range of greys and cold, dull colours. In the lower half lie the bodies of soldiers and civilians, among them a mother clutching her dead child, with an abandoned cannon and useless weapons; in the distance a city burns, its smoke filling the sky.

On the hilltop a laurel-crowned winged figure kneels before a sphinx, and each lays a hand on the other's head as they look into each other's faces. Interpretations differ. The winged figure has been read as the angel of Humanity or Conscience, or as Paris or France, begging the sphinx to reveal the eternal riddle that sets men against one another. The historian Dominique Lobstein notes that the gentle, symmetrical gesture and the sphinx's Egyptian-style headdress make it less the cruel questioner met by Oedipus than a consoling figure, one who might answer the question of what tomorrow will bring.

Doré grouped the picture with two other grisaille canvases, The Black Eagle of Prussia and The Defence of Paris, under the title Souvenirs of 1870. At the posthumous sale of his works in 1884 it was accompanied by two lines, probably chosen by Doré himself, from Victor Hugo's poem 'À l'Arc de triomphe' (1837), lamenting how everything that peoples create must die. Lobstein links its apocalyptic vision to Doré's illustrations for Dante's Inferno of 1861. The Louvre acquired the painting in 1982, and it was assigned to the Musée d'Orsay the same year.