Cézanne, Murder and Modern Life offers an original approach to early French modernism, one informed by the art’s unprecedented psychological intensity. Focusing on the early work of Paul Cézanne, it offers a competing version for modern painting rooted in the evocation of emotive “expression,” emblematized by scenes of murder, sexual violence, and anxious domesticity. Mobilizing contexts rarely brought to bear on our understanding of art in the age of Impressionism, let alone the work of Cézanne, this book investigates the “culte du moi” and the conceptions of authorial function in art and literature, theories of neo-romanticism and early symbolism of the 1860s, as well as psycho-physiological analyses of the human mind and other positivist theories of modern sociality and instinctuality popularized during the Second Empire and early Third Republic.