High in the forest-scented hills of the Mount Lebanon range, mourners carry 10 coffins draped in Lebanese flags out of the local mosque, one after the other, for a public ceremony before they are buried.

The funeral banner features a typical mix of Lebanese faces, making up three generations of a Shiite Muslim family that lived for decades in this predominantly Christian area north of Beirut.

One man was a teacher, another a municipal engineer; one boy wears a scout uniform. The women are all pictured wearing headscarves, from the beaming matriarch to a young student with a bright, ready-for-the-future smile.

All were killed by an Israeli airstrike that had flattened their home two days earlier, on Oct. 12, leaving the community in shock and raising questions that echo increasingly across Lebanon as Israel prosecutes its military campaign against Hezbollah.

Why this target? Why so many civilian casualties, especially children?

The family has no apparent formal connection to Hezbollah, other than general support for the Iran-backed Lebanese militia. But one coffin is loosely draped with two yellow Hezbollah flags, and the funeral turns into a pro-Hezbollah event, featuring heartfelt chants of loyalty to Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah chief assassinated by Israel in late September.

Two days after the Israeli strike, banners that read “Made in USA,” with an image of the Statue of Liberty screaming, have been strung up across the wreckage. As is typical in Lebanon, grief over citizens lost in conflict is inseparable from politics, and so-called “resistance” to Israel.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Lebanese fire fighters, first responders, and security forces cope with the aftermath of Israeli airstrikes in a crowded central district of Beirut, Oct. 11, 2024. Lebanese officials said at least 22 people were killed and over 100 wounded in an attack that Israel said targeted a high-ranking Hezbollah official.

“We gave a promise to ourselves [that] we will not bring any weapons to this place, and we don’t have any military bases and armed people – and they [Israelis] know that,” Sheikh Mohammed Amro, the white-turbaned Hezbollah chief for Mount Lebanon and the north, tells mourners. “In spite of all that, why are the children killed? Most Lebanese people ask that: What did they do?”

The sheikh was the purported target of an Israeli strike Sept. 25 in Maaysra, which destroyed a house and killed three residents.

“Believe us, the history of the new Middle East will be written by these martyrs – we promise that,” says Sheikh Amro.

A million people on the move

From every corner of Lebanon, people are reeling from the scale, the intensity, and the ever-growing death toll and destruction – estimates reach as high as $25 billion – of Israel’s relentless air campaign, and more recent ground incursion, to decapitate and dismantle Hezbollah.

Hezbollah joined the war against Israel, firing rockets and shells into northern Israel to create what it calls a “support front” for Hamas, a day after the Palestinian militant group’s Oct. 7, 2023, assault on Israel.

One year on, 2,710 people have been killed and more than 12,590 wounded in Lebanon, according to Lebanon’s Ministry of Health. The figure does not differentiate between combatants and civilians. The Israeli military estimates more than 2,000 Hezbollah fighters have been killed in that time.

Lebanon’s hospitals have been overwhelmed, scores of medical facilities have been closed, and first responders have been killed. The government calculates that it needs $350 million each month to provide basic food, water, and sanitation to the 1.3 million people who have fled their homes – 20% of Lebanon’s population.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Lebanese civilians try to cope with the war's devastation and their displacement, in Beirut's central Hamra district, Oct. 15, 2024.

Among the civilian casualties was Selena al-Smarah, a 6-year-old girl killed along with her parents when Israel struck her family’s home in the southern coastal city of Tyre in late September.

Selena and her sister Celine, age 10, who was wounded in the attack, had for many months attended arts workshops run by the Tiro Association for Arts, which converts abandoned cinemas into arts centers. During the war it has run programs for displaced children in Tyre and the northern city of Tripoli.

The impact of Selena’s death could not be more acute for Kassem Istanbouli, director of the Tiro Association, whose eyes well up with tears at her memory. He shows a photograph he took on his phone of a smiling Selena, just a day before her death, holding up a picture of a flower with just two petals colored in.

“She didn’t finish her last drawing,” says Mr. Istanbouli, clearly heartbroken, his usually unbridled positive energy dimmed.

“This family, they are very nice, a poor family selling food by the cinema to stay alive,” he says. “I cried very much. I see Selena like my daughter. I don’t understand. It’s a big shock.”

A joint recipient last year of the UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture, Mr. Istanbouli attracted praise for his work from United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres when he visited Tyre in 2021.

Lebanese decry widespread bombing

Israel launched a new wave of airstrikes on Tyre last week, saying it was targeting Hezbollah command-and-control centers. The refurbished cinema where Tiro worked was already closed, because of its proximity to the strike that killed Selena.

“At the beginning it was like a shelter. There were many people and activities, but people feel sad; they feel afraid, especially after these bombs,” says Mr. Istanbouli.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Amid his work preparing a shelter in Beirut, Lebanese actor-director Kassem Istanbouli holds up his phone with the last picture he has of Selena al-Smarah, a 6-year-old girl who took part in his arts workshops. She was killed the day after this photo was taken, in a late-September Israeli airstrike in Tyre, Lebanon, Oct. 15, 2024.

Many families Tiro worked with in Tyre have moved north to Tripoli for their safety. Mr. Istanbouli is now in central Beirut, renovating a long disused cinema that Tiro is racing to fix up to shelter displaced people.

The air thick with the smells of fresh plaster and paint, a dozen mattresses are laid out on the balcony, each with a blanket and a pillow. Among the first to arrive is a headscarfed mother with teenage sons from Tyre, whose house was destroyed in an Israeli strike.

“Thank God we are away from there. We can’t sleep in Tyre,” says the matriarch, who gives the name Umm Abdullah and expresses gratitude for the roof and the tins of rice they received upon arrival.

Across Beirut, in the Christian district of Achrafieh, other survivors of Israeli airstrikes are heavily bandaged as they recover from severe burns at the Lebanese Geitaoui Hospital.

The only specialized burns unit in the country normally treats around 100 cases each year, says Dr. Pierre Yared, the hospital’s co-director.

“When we received 30 cases in a week, it was a big deal – we had to create a new unit” for patients who often require many weeks to recover, says Dr. Yared. The scale of casualties today is four to five times higher than during the last Hezbollah-Israel battle, in 2006, he says.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Mattresses and bedding line the balcony, as Lebanese actor-director Kassem Istanbouli and his Tiro Association for Arts work to refurbish a disused central Beirut theater to house people displaced by a month of stepped-up Israeli bombing against Shiite regions, Oct. 15, 2024.

In one bed, Ronald Antoine Karam, a middle-aged Christian food salesperson, is recovering from multiple burns. He says he was walking to his car in his village near Baalbek – a Hezbollah stronghold in eastern Lebanon – when Israel struck nearby.

“I lost my car. I lost my job. I lost my health – who is going to pay for that?” he asks. “The Israelis don’t ask, ‘Who are you?’ They shoot all the people. People are suffering there.”

In another room is 11-year-old Mohammed Ibrahim, his face bandaged after an airstrike brought down his six-story building east of the coastal city of Sidon. The strike left 71 people dead, including his father and brother; his mother was injured. To shield him from the anguish of those losses, the sixth grader has still not been told of them.

Back in the cinema, Mr. Istanbouli decries the conflict’s civilian casualties.

“What is the reason? They are normal people. This is criminal for humanity,” he says, adding that death of little Selena motivates him to tell her story through art “everywhere in the world.”

“She gives us a lot of energy for the future, to speak about her and all the children,” says Mr. Istanbouli. “We will not stop.”

Paul Sancya/AP

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign event in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Oct. 28, 2024. Ms. Harris said last week she agrees with labeling former President Donald Trump a “fascist.”

“Fascist.”

The word has been tossed around so much lately – mostly by Democrats trying to disqualify former President Donald Trump in the eyes of voters – as to be rendered just another slur in an epic electoral slugfest.

“Fascism” can be a stand-in for “dictatorship” or “autocracy.” Mr. Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, retired Gen. John Kelly, said recently that he believed his former boss’s approach met an online definition of fascism: “a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy.”

At a Washington, D.C., rally Tuesday evening billed as her closing argument, Vice President Kamala Harris called Mr. Trump a “petty tyrant” and called on Americans to “reject the schemes of wannabe dictators.” She spoke from the Ellipse – the very spot near the White House where then-President Trump delivered his Jan. 6, 2021, speech that preceded the storming of the U.S. Capitol by his supporters.

Trump allies say the accusations of “fascism” are reckless and have endangered Mr. Trump’s safety, inspiring two assassination attempts. Moreover, they say it’s the Biden-Harris administration that has actually governed like fascists, policing speech online and using the legal system to try to take down a political rival.

It’s not clear that the escalation of rhetoric will sway many votes. Polls show that for most voters, the future of American democracy ranks well behind the economy, immigration, and abortion as a voting issue.

But one week before Election Day, with the former president and Vice President Harris locked in a dead heat, any voters who change their minds – or are motivated or de-motivated to cast ballots – could be consequential.

Experts on democracy see value in the Harris team’s decision to end the campaign by laying out the case that Mr. Trump has fascist proclivities.

“The term ‘fascist’ helps to wake people up, so I think it’s worth using it and underlining it,” says Terry Moe, an emeritus professor of political science at Stanford University. “The problem is, half of the population isn’t listening and doesn’t care.”

The Harris campaign is taking a both/and approach – highlighting the vice president’s plans for the economy and warning about “unchecked power” in one 30-second spot.

Potentially more consequential could be the fallout from Mr. Trump’s rally Sunday at Madison Square Garden in New York, where insult comedian Tony Hinchcliffe hurled crude racist jokes and called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage.” The Trump campaign went into damage-control mode, issuing a statement saying, ”This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”

Marco Bello/Reuters

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump gestures as he attends a press conference at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, Oct. 29, 2024. He has pushed the word "fascist" back at opponent Kamala Harris.

Mr. Trump, who has made gains among Latino voters in polls this cycle, held a rally Tuesday night in Allentown, Pennsylvania – a Puerto Rican-majority city in the nation’s biggest battleground state. He didn’t mention the comedian’s insult.

But President Joe Biden may have helped Mr. Trump Tuesday when he flipped the insult on Trump supporters, appearing to call them “garbage” in virtual remarks to Latino supporters. 

Still, for Democrats, the Madison Square Garden rally added fodder for discussion by providing an easy, if not wholly convincing, analogy to the American Nazi rally staged there in 1939. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made the comparison in a CNN interview last week. 

How Trump flouted norms as president

The Harris campaign is hoping that the latest tempest over rhetoric by and around Mr. Trump will heighten scrutiny of how he might govern if reelected. While in office, Mr. Trump flouted a series of long-established presidential norms – everything from maintaining ownership of his business empire to refusing to release his tax returns to speaking approvingly of dictators.

Most significantly, he insisted the 2020 election had been fraudulent, despite a lack of evidence, and sought to overturn his loss – an effort that culminated in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot by his supporters. But in many instances, he was also blocked by senior advisers from taking actions they deemed reckless, if not illegal or unconstitutional.

In a second term, armed with the knowledge gained from his previous four years in office, some critics warn that Mr. Trump would be a leader unbound.

“There will not be a White House chief of staff in any meaningful sense in a second Trump term,” says Chris Whipple, author of the 2017 book “The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency.”

“He will try to find spineless people who will not oppose him, but who will leap when he says ‘jump,’” Mr. Whipple adds.

But even if a second-term President Trump would face fewer constraints, does that mean America is staring at the possibility of out-and-out dictatorship – or full-on fascism? Is U.S. democracy really that brittle?

Mr. Trump has given his opponents plenty of fodder. Since 2022, he has threatened more than 100 times to “investigate, prosecute, imprison, or otherwise punish his perceived opponents,” according to NPR. In a recent interview, he spoke of using the National Guard – or “if really necessary,” the military – to go after “radical left lunatics.”

Perhaps his most scrutinized comment in this vein came last December, when Mr. Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity that he would not be a dictator – “except for Day 1.”

Trump allies say he was joking. Trump foes say the country should take him at his word. Left in the middle may be voters trying to see reality through all the apocalyptic rhetoric.

Ms. Harris said “yes” when asked in a CNN town hall last week if she agrees with the labeling of Mr. Trump as a “fascist.” She pointed to statements by General Kelly and other senior Trump aides who have used that term to describe their former boss. Gen. Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Mr. Trump, told author Bob Woodward that the former president was “fascist to the core.” General Kelly told The Atlantic that Mr. Trump had expressed admiration for Hitler’s generals, a charge Mr. Trump refutes.

At a rally Monday night in Georgia, Mr. Trump seemed to reference the comparisons made by critics to the 1939 Nazi rally. “I’m the opposite of a Nazi,” he said, adding that Democrats were impugning his supporters. “The newest line from Kamala and her campaign is that anyone who isn’t voting for her is a Nazi,” he said. He also threw the fascist label back at Ms. Harris, saying, “She’s a fascist, OK?”

Do voters see a fascist? Do they want a strongman?

It’s not just former aides questioning Mr. Trump’s fitness for another term. The latest ABC News poll, released Oct. 25, finds that 49% of registered voters say Mr. Trump is a fascist, defined as “a political extremist who seeks to act as a dictator, disregards individual rights, and threatens or uses force against their opponents.” Some 22% said the same of Ms. Harris.

But there’s another way to look at the question. Views of Mr. Trump as a “strongman” – like the leaders of other major global powers, including Russia and China – are also prevalent, and could actually help him get elected to another term as president.

A June Washington Post poll in six key states found that more than half of voters “classified as likely to decide the presidential election” said threats to democracy were extremely important to their vote. And of those voters, more trusted Mr. Trump to handle those threats than President Biden, who was then still the presumptive Democratic nominee.

Most of those voters also said they believed that the “guardrails in place to protect democracy” would hold, even if a dictator tried to take control of the United States, according to the report on the poll conducted by the Post and the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. The six states polled were Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia.

As the nation contemplates the possible return of Mr. Trump to power, the question of “guardrails” is central. William Howell, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, says that while Mr. Trump wouldn’t staff his White House and other key positions with “traditional conservatives,” the way he did in his first term, he’s still hopeful that the system would hold.

“There are plenty of other checks in play,” says Professor Howell, who’s also director of the Center for Effective Government. A return of Mr. Trump “doesn’t mean the courts, the larger bureaucracy, and Democrats in Congress are going to suddenly become weak-kneed and compliant.”

Editor's note: This article, originally published Oct. 29, was updated Oct. 29 with news from Kamala Harris' speech at the Ellipse in Washington, and Oct. 30 with news of a comment by the president.

Mike Blake/Reuters

A single-family housing development is under construction in Menifee, California, Sept. 4, 2024.

The housing affordability crisis has spread so widely across America that both major presidential candidates are weighing in on a topic that usually gets little attention in national campaigns.

Whichever candidate is elected will face a daunting task.

Once mainly a problem for low-income residents in a handful of big cities, the lack of affordable housing now increasingly affects the middle class and communities nationwide. Home prices hit an all-time high this year, while surging rents stressed the finances of a record number of renters in 2022, the latest numbers available. Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies reports that about 1 in 4 renters spend more than half their income on housing and utilities.

Both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump say they would address the problem by increasing the housing supply. In two areas, they even agree on how to do it. Both would use federal land to allow new housing projects and streamline permitting rules so homes could be built faster and more cheaply. But they face a fundamental problem.

The federal government has little sway over new housing permits. Instead, cities and towns increasingly restrict where they allow construction. Even places that once embraced growth, like Houston and Atlanta, are issuing fewer housing permits than they did 20 years ago.

Anxious to avoid overcrowded schools and streets, many desirable localities have made it hard to build new middle-class subdivisions, let alone affordable rental housing for people with low incomes. Homeowners have another reason to resist growth: home value.

“You’re … not going to convince people that it’s a great idea to destroy the value – or to lower the value – of their most precious asset” by increasing the housing stock, says Edward Glaeser, a Harvard economics professor and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. But that local, “not-in-my-backyard” logic – known as NIMBY – is dimming the American Dream of owning a home and moving up the income ladder – and slowing national economic growth.

Ms. Harris aims to overcome that local reluctance with federal incentives. Mr. Trump acknowledges NIMBYism and has even promised to protect it. “I will also stop Joe Biden’s sinister plan to abolish the suburbs,” he said in New Jersey. This means he would limit his deregulation push to federal rules.

Here’s what the candidates propose.

Vice President Harris:

• Sets a goal of 3 million new housing units in her first four years, boosting construction activity by roughly 50%. If successful, it would rival the peak of home building in the 1970s.
• Proposes a $40 billion Innovation Fund for Housing Expansion (double the Biden administration’s proposal), which would encourage more flexible local zoning and expanded development.
• Calls for a $25,000 down payment credit for the nation’s 4 million first-time homebuyers.
• Supports a boost for the tax credit that creates most of the nation’s low-income housing, including the development and renovation of single-family to four-family housing in distressed neighborhoods.
• Wants to stop institutional investors from buying homes in bulk and marking up prices.
• Seeks a 5% cap on rent hikes for corporate landlords, for two years.
• Pledges to curb price-fixing among corporate landlords. (In August, the Justice Department sued RealPage, a real estate software firm, charging that its price-setting tool allowed landlords to collude to raise rents.)

Former President Trump:

• Promises general low inflation and deregulation, which would allow mortgage rates to fall and homes to be built more cheaply.
• Points to his restrictive immigration policies as a solution to easing housing demand.
• Says he would ban federally backed mortgages for undocumented immigrants.
• Calls for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants to ease demand for low-income rental housing in large cities.

Some experts criticize Ms. Harris’ down payment assistance for first-time buyers, saying the effort could fan inflation and would be better spent helping builders make housing projects pencil out.

Others point out that Mr. Trump’s planned deportations could deprive employers, including home builders, of their most sought-after corps of workers, raising labor costs and fueling inflation the former president said he could avoid.

“The good news is Trump is saying, ‘Hey, we need housing!” says Ben Metcalf, managing director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley.

“The problem is a lot of the stuff that he’s put forward either won’t be terribly successful or will have very severe and negative unintended consequences.”

Ghada Abdulfattah

UNRWA's Deir al-Balah school, where the Monitor's Gaza reporter studied from seventh through ninth grade, is now an evacuee center for Palestinians displaced by war, in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, in October 2024.

When I was growing up in Gaza, my childhood was shaped by the walls of schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) painted a distinctive U.N. blue.

It was there that I learned math and science, enjoyed reading “Harry Potter” novels, picked up some computer skills, and wrote a significant number of unfinished stories while perfecting my English.

On Monday we heard that the Israeli parliament had banned UNRWA from operating in Israel. That threw into immediate doubt health and schooling for 3 million Palestinians, including the entire population of Gaza. But I looked further into the future, wondering what tomorrow will hold for our children.

Supporters of the ban cite Israeli assertions that 19 UNRWA employees took part in Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 assault on Israel. After an internal investigation by the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services, UNRWA fired 10 of them. Evidence in the other nine cases was found to be too thin to justify action.

Monday’s law would ban Israeli banks from dealing with UNRWA and prohibit any contact between the organization’s employees and Israeli officials starting in January 2025.

That would make it impossible for UNRWA teams to deliver food, medical aid, or anything else in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where Israeli checkpoints are unavoidable.

No matter the war or current controversy, the backbone of UNRWA is education. In Gaza, where the vast majority of residents are refugees, nearly every child goes to an UNRWA school.

I attended two UNRWA schools in my youth: one on Salah al-Din Road close to an Israeli settlement before it was dismantled in 2005, and the other in the Deir al-Balah refugee camp. For me, these schools were not just places to learn. They were vital community centers.

Ohad Zwigenberg/AP/File

Israelis block the entrance to the offices of UNRWA, the main U.N. agency providing aid in the Gaza Strip, during a protest in Jerusalem, March 20, 2024.

My parents, born just after 1948, when their family had fled their home in what became Israel, also attended UNRWA schools. They are members of an educated generation. They worked as teachers in Libya for nearly 25 years, teaching history, geography, and design.

They always attribute their careers to the education they received at UNRWA schools, which opened doors for them, and, later on, for me. My sister became a teacher. Many of my friends and classmates at university went on to become UNRWA teachers.

This focus on education may explain the Gaza Strip’s 96.8% literacy rate.

From flour to soap to fresh water – UNRWA had it

UNRWA’s role became broader and even more critical when the war between Israel and Hamas broke out in 2023.

Drawing on its 13,000 staff members in Gaza and dozens of facilities, it became the main source of aid in Gaza, distributing around 70% of the food, fuel, and health and hygiene kits that entered the strip.

UNRWA hands out flour and food parcels to the most vulnerable Palestinians in Gaza, providing 215,000 poor families with sacks of flour to make bread – for many their only source of calories.

I have watched volunteers deliver flour to families even amid the threat of airstrikes. It was heartening to know that, when markets were shuttered and food was scarce, some sustenance was reaching those who had lost everything.

Ghada Abdulfattah

Residents resell sacks of UNRWA-given flour at the agency's Deir al-Balah school-turned-displacement center in central Gaza in October 2024.

Our family, like most people in Gaza, has received food packages from UNRWA, containing flour, rice, and canned meat. For us and for our neighbors, these aid boxes have been especially valuable when the markets were practically bare and food prices were soaring.

At times, UNRWA has been our only source of soap.

Families I visited in displacement camps rely on UNRWA for their daily meal.

Seven out of UNRWA’s 27 health centers in the strip are still operational, providing primary health care, pediatric care, medicine for older people, and vaccinations for children.

When clean water has been scarce, I have watched UNRWA workers drive water trucks into displacement camps and distribute water bottles. They have also provided fuel for water desalination plants.

UNRWA schools serve as shelters

The UNRWA school I attended in Deir al-Balah, like most schools in Gaza today, has been converted into a makeshift evacuation center for evacuees. Even its library hosts families in tents among the books; some have burned books as a source of cooking fuel.

Tens of thousands of Gaza residents displaced by Israel’s military offensive now live in these schools, seeking refuge in classrooms and school courtyards in the belief that living under the U.N. flag would protect them. Israeli strikes on and near these schools, said by the Israeli military to be sheltering Hamas militants, have killed 563 people.

The agency’s employees, our friends and neighbors, continued their work as they themselves went hungry and were forced out of their homes by Israeli warnings of missile strikes. Israeli fire has killed 233 UNRWA staff members as of Tuesday.

Their dedication has given me hope.

The U.N., the United States, and international aid organizations have expressed their fears for the future of humanitarian aid in Gaza if the UNRWA ban is applied.

But my fears go beyond this war.

If UNRWA halts its services, I wonder about my nephews and nieces. Will they have the same opportunities I once had? I worry that they will lose their chance of a brighter future.

Education is not just textbooks and classrooms; it is about hope and the belief that a better life is possible. If UNRWA is forced to abandon its schools, I fear, it will leave in its wake an uneducated and unhealthy generation, perpetuating a cycle of poverty and despair.

I can’t help but feel that the little hope we have left is being taken away.

Visitors to a new exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, “Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment,” are greeted early on by war. The Franco-Prussian War – and the devastating insurrection in its wake – to be exact.

To Sebastian Smee, art critic for The Washington Post, that is a good place to start. Any consideration of the origin of the beloved art movement, he noted in a recent column, needs to include an understanding of the depravations and loss French society endured before it.

In his latest book, “Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism,” he convincingly argues that the Franco-Prussian War, which began in July 1870 and lasted six months, was more than just an interruption in the timeline of the burgeoning movement. Rather, he contends, more than any other development, the war decisively shaped the lives and careers of impressionism’s major players.

Courtesy of The Getty Museum

Édouard Manet’s “The Rue Mosnier With Flags” from 1878, shows a man, possibly a war veteran, walking near the artist’s studio on a national holiday celebrating peace.

The central artists had very diverse experiences during this tumultuous time. Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, and Berthe Morisot remained in Paris and were actively involved in military and political matters. Pierre-Auguste Renoir served in a military regiment outside the city. Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro fled to England, where the art establishment was unwelcoming. Paul Cézanne retreated to the south of France to avoid military service. Frédéric Bazille was killed on the front lines.

Smee organizes the book by focusing on the experiences of Manet, Degas, and Morisot, especially during the war and the rise of the Commune – a group dominated by anarchists and revolutionaries elected to govern Paris after Napoléon was defeated by Germany in the war.

Each of the artists wrote frequent, detailed letters to family and friends, and this provides a good picture of the hardship and devastation they witnessed. The author pays particular attention to the relationship between Manet and Morisot. They were exceptionally close – Smee uses the word “love” to characterize their relationship – but does not conclude that they were lovers.

A. Binant Collection/Musée Carnavalet, Paris

In “The Carrier Pigeons, November 1870,” Jacques Guiaud and Jules Didier depict how Parisians received letters during a tumultuous time.

For Morisot the year was especially traumatic, and she features prominently in Smee’s account. Morisot was unmarried and in frail health. The already married Manet was unavailable. Her much-loved older sister had recently married, moved to Normandy, stopped painting, and started a family. Morisot’s future looked sad and lonely. It was during this year, Smee asserts, that she made a commitment to become a professional painter, a remarkable decision for someone of her gender and class in 19th-century France.

When she made the decision, she found herself increasingly drawn to the rococo painters of the 18th century and their “scenes of intimacy, youth and femininity. They embraced happiness and grace, in ways that appealed to Morisot.” The changes to her art came slowly at first. “She worked in watercolors, trying to to find her way into a new language of lightness and evanescence – a language based in close observation, devoid of rhetoric or hysteria.”

In May 1871, the French army stormed Paris, destroyed the Commune, and killed thousands of communards – many by summary execution. But the end of the Commune did not mark the end of the turmoil. France suffered political convulsions for the rest of the decade.

Art, too, was a battleground. Smee writes that “Public calls to renovate French art – to shun radical experiment, to recommit to patriotic subjects, to find again value in tradition – grew even louder.” Art, wrote one critic, “must produce virile and grand works, worthy of the task in front of us.”

"Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism," by Sebastian Smee, W.W. Norton and Company, 416 pp.

But the events of what author Victor Hugo called “The Terrible Year” fundamentally altered the worldview of the avant-
garde artists. For them, there was no going back. When the young artists gradually reconvened in Paris, they began to paint “what they yearned for: a secular, open, and democratic society where nature, commerce, and industry were in a provisional, constantly evolving struggle for harmony, in configurations that were as changeable and unsettled as the weather. ... [Their] work was rooted in the here-and-now rather than in exhausted mythologies, religious parables or legends of the ancients.”

The conservative art establishment’s “program of national rejuvenation,” which would have required them to paint moralistic, uplifting subjects with obvious displays of technical skill and finish, was completely at odds with the younger artists’ “loose, unfinished-looking brushstrokes that captured colored light and sensations of transience.”

Robert B. Menschel Fund/Courtesy of The National Gallery of Art, Washington

“Self-Portrait With Wife Ernestine in a Balloon Gondola” is by pioneering French photographer and balloonist Nadar, circa 1865.

Between 1874 and 1886, the impressionists staged eight exhibitions that presented their vision to a skeptical public. The path was rocky. The first, in 1874 – offered 150 years before the current well-regarded exhibit at the National Gallery – was widely panned. Acceptance came slowly. The artists found themselves in bitter disagreement over the years, and some of the most important members of the group – including Manet, Morisot, and Gustave Caillebotte – died long before the triumph of impressionism was clear. But they had inspired other young artists both inside and outside France to follow their own vision and, by doing so, destroyed the power of the art establishment to put in place any sort of official or state-approved art. They also created some of the most loved and recognized artwork in history.

Smee examines the political history of the era in detail and devotes considerable attention to the military aspects of the Franco-Prussian War. In doing so, he conveys a clear and compelling idea of the time that the radical young artists lived through and how it altered their vision and inspired them to move forward. Smee blends political and military history and biography into a seamless narrative that will fundamentally change the way that we think about the emergence of impressionism. For art history lovers, this is required reading.

Fantastic Negrito’s new album is about his experience running away from home to live on the streets. He was 12 years old. The year prior, his father had stopped talking to him.

“Every time one of us hit puberty, he would disown you,” the musician, raised with 13 siblings, says during a video call.

Music saved him, he has said many times in the past. Upon discovering that his pop star hero, Prince, was self-taught, the teen picked up a guitar. Then he started sneaking into music classes at the University of California, Berkeley, and signed with Interscope Records in the 1990s.

After a serious car accident damaged his strumming hand, he left music for a time. Then, after learning to play guitar in a different style, he reinvented himself as Fantastic Negrito.

The rock star was born Xavier Dphrepaulezz. Except that name isn’t entirely real, either. His well-educated father, born in 1905, fabricated the family’s last name. Also puzzling: Why did his dad fake a Somalian accent and claim he was of royal heritage?

His just-released sixth album, “Son of a Broken Man,” is an open letter to his long-deceased father. The rock-, funk-, and R&B-influenced artist’s previous albums focused on social commentary. (Fans include Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, and Sting, who duetted with the musician on this summer’s single “Undefeated Eyes.”) This time, he’s chronicling his search for identity and belonging. The Monitor spoke with the three-time Grammy Award winner in a conversation edited for length and clarity.

You began to explore your heritage on your 2022 album, “White Jesus Black Problems.” ... How did the revelation that you’re a seventh-generation descendent of a Scottish grandmother make you think about race and identity?

To me, it’s all a construct that’s made up. Five hundred years ago, a Black person didn’t exist. You were a Nigerian, Bantu, or Yoruba, or you were an Englishman or you were a Scotsman. [Race] didn’t exist. It’s a construct, and we’re obsessed with it. We’re mostly all alike and the same, probably in more ways than we think. I didn’t know I was 28% European. Go figure. And then on my dad’s side, this guy lied about everything. We were raised to think he was from Somalia. That was a lie.

Thomas Lange

Fantastic Negrito’s previous albums focused on social commentary. With “Son of a Broken Man,” he’s chronicling his search for identity and belonging. “I’m trying to be vulnerable,” he says. “I was raised with this tough-guy [attitude]. But it’s more tough to show vulnerability and love.”

When you were a teenager in foster homes, which you describe in the new song “Living With Strangers,” how did that impact how you thought about your own self-worth?

Some of it turned to anger. That’s what made me compelled to write the album, to just try to lay it on the line [for people who know me]. I’m really sorry for how I’ve treated some of you. A lot of my behavior is so toxic and so bad and so destructive because I just don’t feel that good. I started to call myself a recovering narcissist. “Son of a Broken Man” made me comfortable being unsure, not knowing what this album is going to be. I’m sitting there writing this thing, and I’m crying my eyes out. And maybe that’s OK.

You started dealing drugs and burglarizing homes. But as you sing in “California Loner,” “If you could only see me now / I’m not so bad.” You wish that your dad, who died while you were still in foster care, could have witnessed that. But you have a son now. Is this album a message to him?

Absolutely. Everything I write, I write for my son. I try to stop my dad every day. The bad guy who lives inside of me. I haven’t been great all the time. But that’s my fight. And I think if I’m more transparent, I become stronger at my fight. So I can tell my son, “Man, I’m sorry. I didn’t know what I was doing.” I’m continuing on this generational trauma thing. But I’m going to stop, and I’m going to hug you and tell you, “I love you.” I’m going to kiss you every day. And I do it.

How old is your son?

Fifteen. We’re in a good space because I’m trying to be vulnerable. I was raised with this tough-guy [attitude]. But it’s more tough to show vulnerability and love. I’m learning that. If I seem a little bit corny, that’s what I’m going to do because I believe it’s my salvation. I keep on writing this stuff, and it’s helping me do better. If I’m better, the world’s better. If I’m a better dad, the world’s better. If I’m a better husband. If I’m a better friend. Better uncle. I really feel like that’s the meaning of life. We’re supposed to improve, be creative, and help each other. Repeat. Repeat.

On Instagram, you posted a note about living on the streets from age 12 and you wrote, “Only the dreamers survive,” which echoes a lyric in the title track. How did discovering music like Prince and Led Zeppelin and Funkadelic show you that you could take this whole different path in life?

All of those people you named were just titanic visionaries. They envisioned a world probably that we all couldn’t quite see. They were brave and they did what they believed. Those are dreamers. And all that music still enriches our lives. I remember writing that lyric, writing that song like, “I want to be on the side of the dreamers. ... Everything is infinitely possible.” I love that.

The penultimate track is a cover of the gospel standard “This Little Light of Mine.” Tell me what that song means to you.

My grandmother and her affinity and love of spirituals really heavily influenced me. She was the person that could drag me to church. I remember going on social media and just feeling that it’s just dark all the time. Everybody’s screaming at the top of their lungs. The left is screaming. The right is screaming. Nobody’s talking to each other in a way that’s civil or [engaging in] any discourse that can actually be productive. I wanted to do a song where I wanted to say to the world ... “How do we paint this place a new face? How do we step up to the next level here in life?” I’m going to let it shine. I know that comes from a very old tradition in church. A salvation. It’s a little light, but, man, I’m going to shine it all around the world.

AP

Elections officials process mail-in ballots in Maricopa County, Arizona, Oct. 23.

The world will be watching next week’s presidential election in the United States for clues on the health of American democracy. A better measure might be community pancake breakfasts.

That’s because the way Americans view politics and each other changes in meaningful ways closer to home. “The good news is we’re much less ideologically polarized than we think,” notes Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior scholar on democracy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“When you look at how people feel about their politics in terms of can they have agency, can they get things done, local politics is really where it’s at, and that agency matters,” she told “You Might Be Right,” a podcast of the University of Tennessee, last month.

The discrepancy of faith in democracy between the national and community levels is striking. Almost 60% of Americans worry the Nov. 5 election will be tainted by fraud, an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found earlier this month. A separate survey by the Bipartisan Policy Center, however, found that 74% of Americans are confident that their votes will be counted accurately in their own community.

While voters express exhaustion with national politics, they thrive on local political competition. Contested mayoral elections in small towns consistently draw some of the highest levels of voter participation in the country, according to a paper published last month in the journal Urban Affairs Review. In Michigan, a state that may help decide who wins the presidency, a study by the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan this month found that civic trust in local institutions outpaces confidence in most state or national institutions.

These indicators reflect what Cindy Black, executive director of Fix Democracy First in Seattle, sees as a “democracy renaissance.” Across the country, a widening network of civil society groups is tapping into new civic enthusiasm, particularly among younger people. They hold community fundraisers to support college scholarships, rally neighbors to protect local environments, and work with local officials to protect voting access.

“Despite what is going on I am very optimistic, because I see more groups and community leaders talking to each other than they had before,” Ms. Black told Danielle Allen, a Harvard professor.

Such goodwill and civility at the grassroots may be having an upward influence. In Johnson County, Kansas, for example, Republican and Democratic candidates for state offices feel voters pulling them back toward the center. “People are tired of the vitriol,” Karen Thurlow, a Democrat seeking a seat in the state Senate, told The Beacon, a local newspaper.

Since May, Republican Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah has urged a similar theme through the National Governors Association, asking his colleagues from both parties to uphold election results and recognize the humanity and decency of their political opponents.

“The survival of constitutional democracy depends on people learning to practice democracy at the grassroots level,” Professor Allen wrote recently in The Washington Post. “This entails committing to the rule of law, to constitutionalism, to nonviolence, to inclusion, and to taking responsibility for the health of our communities.”

Pancake breakfasts may capture what polls cannot. Where Americans live and mingle, partisan divides still yield to neighborly care.