Chez Manet : BIOGRAPHY : EDOUARD MANET: Rebel in a Frock Coat,<i> By Beth Archer Brombert (Little Brown: $23.95; 322 pp.)</i>

Edouard Manet’s life (1832-1883) coincided with the modernization of Paris and the invention of modern art. In the year of the artist’s birth, Victor Hugo published “Notre-Dame of Paris,” in which he lamented the cheap artifice of the fast-growing capital. The new Paris of King Louis-Philippe was a mere facade compared to the old fortressed city of Louis XI: “Our fathers had a Paris of stone,” Hugo wrote, “our sons will have a Paris of plaster.” He continued with alarm: “At the rate Paris is going, it will be renewed every 50 years.”

A bit more than a decade later, while the future painter of “Dejeuner sur l’herb” (“The Picnic”) was earning Cs in Latin grammar at the College Rollin (a fancy private high school), Manet’s friend Charles Baudelaire published a mournful and mocking essay entitled “On the Heroism of Modern Life” (1846). The great tradition of classical antiquity was gone forever, the poet stated, “but the new one is not yet established.” Modern women and men would look foolish wearing Greek peploses or Roman togas: They must instead content themselves with crinoline petticoats and black frock-coats, bought off the racks of Bon Marche. “But all the same,” Baudelaire wrote, “has not this much abused garb its own beauty and native charm? Is it not the necessary garb of our suffering age, which wears the symbol of a perpetual mourning upon its thin black shoulder?”

During Manet’s maturity, the city of Paris (as Hugo foresaw) was almost wholly renewed and rebuilt. Parks, sewers and broad avenues were constructed; brasseries, nightclubs, dance halls, vaudeville houses and circuses were licensed to provide cheap entertainment for tourists and the working-class masses of Paris. As never before, Paris life was lived in the open air of city squares and sidewalk cafes, amid the rush of omnibuses and the glare of gas street lamps and new electric footlights. “We [Parisians] need publicity, daylight, the street, the cabaret, the cafe, the restaurant,” wrote Jules and Edmond Goncourt in their journal in 1865. “We like to pose, to make a spectacle of ourselves, to have a public, a gallery, and witnesses to our life.”

By the time of Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergeres” (1882), Paris had truly become, in the words of the 20th century critic Walter Benjamin, “capital of the 19th century”: It had become the “city of lights” and the glamorous prototype of a dozen other bustling metropolises from London to Rio de Janeiro. Manet’s daring painting of the young barmaid standing in front of a mirror and behind an intoxicating display of champagne, beer, liqueurs, flowers and orange is indeed the very picture of that glittering modernity; it is also however, an image of vulnerability and loneliness.

Nineteenth century Paris was perhaps as much nightmare as utopia. Tens of thousands of newly impoverished immigrants from the countryside swelled the population of the capital to more than a million and a half. Luxury and deprivation existed cheek by jowl and gaiety was partner to alienation. The German Karl Marx, resident in Paris from 1844 to 1845, described the revolutionary temper of the modern metropolis two years later when he wrote in “The Communist Manifesto” that capitalism was characterized by “constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions. . . . All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”

The authors cited above--Hugo, Baudelaire, the Goncourts and Marx--devoted their prodigious talents to the representation of this modern world of false urban facades, standardized consumer goods, mass-produced entertainments, luxury, poverty, exuberance and anomie. They devised, for the purpose, a set of literary and formal procedures--chiefly Realism and Naturalism--perfectly suited to their chosen tasks. They created a new language for a modern age in which the use value of handcrafted things was replaced by the exchange value of mass-produced commodities, and the richness of human intercourse by the impersonal abstraction of relationships constituted by the exchange of cold cash.

Manet was no less a revolutionary in his chosen profession than was Marx in his. The blase gaze of the girl behind the bar in Manet’s late painting conveys the numbing equality of things and people. The disorienting reflections of mirrors, electric chandeliers and marble surfaces creates an emotional no less than a spatial flatness. The intercourse between the pale girl with blond bangs and thick wrists and the top-hatted man in the mirror at right is as routinized as the rapport between the audience and the trapeze artist whose feet are visible at upper left. More than any painter of his generation, Manet devised a new way of seeing--a new optics even--for his epoch. We have inherited and internalized much of Marx’s and Manet’s incisive visions of modernity.

In “Edouard Manet, Rebel in a Frock Coat,” Brombert describes many of the most remarkable personages, places and events of Manet’s Paris, but fails to adequately convey the critical salience of her subject. Despite repeated assertions of Manet’s “genius,” “astounding originality” and “phenomenal energy,” Brombert’s artist is a centrally passive figure whose works are mere effects of revolutionary modernity. Manet “observes,” “reflects,” “takes a snapshot” or “documents” modern life and culture; he does not himself produce it, manipulate it or take a knife to it. The scandal of Manet’s art thus remains a mystery.

Brombert’s Manet, as her title indicates, is very much the rebel, not the revolutionary. “The revolutionary,” Sartre once wrote, “wants to change the world . . . and move toward an order of values that he himself invents. The rebel is careful to preserve the abuses from which he suffers so that he can go on rebelling against them.”

Brombert accordingly writes in her preface: “Despite his innovative ideas, Manet was neither a social radical nor a cultural revolutionary. . . . He longed to enhance the prestige of his name and social position by pursuing the least bourgeois of professions; he hungered for critical and popular success but refused to yield to the taste of the day.”

Brombert does not see Manet’s personality as marred by hypocrisy; it is instead simply constituted by “paradoxes” and “contradictions.” She proposes that Manet’s art mirrors his character: “Rather than the end of the line . . . he is a bridge, joining the tradition behind him with a new approach to painting . . . not an iconoclast overturning altars, but a man with a vision, convinced the future would prove him right . . . whereas others saw him as the firebrand of a revolution, he saw himself entering the pantheon of painting through the front door, his works accepted by the salon and hanging in the Louvre.”

The chain of cliches and mixed metaphors is stunning, and brings us no closer to an understanding of either the man or his works.

Unlike the artist in Baudelaire’s celebrated essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” whose achievement was “to marry [epouser] the crowd,” Brombert’s painter instead carries on a long and chaste engagement; he is like the biographer herself, synthesizing some of the great achievements of the past but never challenging the audience or creating anything daring or new.

The modernity and urbanity that Brombert effectively invokes in her biography were indeed paradoxical and contradictory but the artist who compellingly documented and interrogated that revolutionary social and cultural order was not. Manet was instead constant in his intellectual and artistic focus and commitment; the evidence is in his pictures.