Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Defence of Paris

"The [Franco-Prussian] War: Defence of Paris-Students Going to Man the Barricades"

 * Reason:Kind of an iconic image of France, with real-life imitating Hugo's literature. A year later, we'd get the Paris Commune (and there's so much I want to upload about that!)
 * Proposed caption:"The [Franco-Prussian] War: Defence of Paris-Students Going to Man the Barricades" After the surrender of Napoleon III, the French Republic refused the German settlement terms, and the war was forced to continue. Paris was besieged, and people of all walks of life entered into its defence.
 * Articles this image appears in:Franco-Prussian War, Les Misérables (A somewhat weak usage, as it's a few years after the book's publication, even if history repeated the book shockingly closely), Siege of Paris
 * Creator: Mr. Barnard. Two-part Scan stitched together and straightened by Graphics Lab members VegitaU and Rugby471


 * Support as nominator Adam Cuerden talk 00:44, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
 * support--Mbz1 18:06, 5 August 2007 (UTC)Mbz1
 * Support - A historic view; and it's the epitome of Les Misérables. Chris.B 10:58, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Oppose. This is a lovely detailed scan of this image, but I just don't get it. I'm presuming that 'the students' are the group we can see marching behind what appears to me to be the main characters - the couple of soldiers (?), the old man, the young woman. Perhaps this has some deeper message about the students going off to do the soldiers work because they were mucking around doing other things like flirting with young women, but I really can't be sure of that. It's also an issue that other than the image captions, I can see nowhere in the articles where it's mentioned that the scene depicted occurred (i.e., the students going to the defence), or why it occurred - maybe I haven't read the articles closely enough. Incidentally, aren't the students going to man the fortifications, not the barricades? And how can we be sure that 'Barnard' is 'Mr Barnard'? Sorry. --jjron 09:03, 10 August 2007 (UTC)
 * We can tell he's a Mr. because, frankly, the image is Victorian, and women weren't being apprenticed as engravers. Sexist times make sex-identification easy. Adam Cuerden talk 07:34, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Quite true - however, the not insignificant number women that did do 'men's' work at the time, like science, art, etc, often did so under male pseudonyms, or variations on this such as publishing as their husband. It could be that a female artist recorded her name simply as Barnard to avoid 'outing' herself as being a woman. Of course, as you say it most likely it is indeed a man, but it is an assumption and would therefore seem to defy No original research; I think the 'Mr' should go and the name simply be recorded as Barnard. --jjron 16:08, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Eh, fair enough. Cut the Mr. Adam Cuerden talk 16:19, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Eh, fair enough. Cut the Mr. Adam Cuerden talk 16:19, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

(quorum not reached). MER-C 10:28, 16 August 2007 (UTC)