A Sunday in the Countryside with Albert and Émile
Attributed to Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) or to an artist he supported
Oil on canvas, circa 1880-1890
Private collection, Paris
Male Sociability Beyond Words
The work belongs to a late nineteenth-century rural imaginary, in which the countryside becomes a space at once ordinary and marginal, conducive to encounters and deviations that village life usually keeps within bounds. A forest clearing, washed in soft green light, evokes a Sunday of rest, a suspended interval when labor stops and men gather among themselves, beyond the immediate oversight of families and parish.
At the centre of the composition, two men we shall designate as Albert and Émile are kissing with an unreserved intensity. One is fully nude, muscular and offered, while the other keeps his trousers and work shirt. This contrast in dress heightens the scene’s erotic charge while anchoring it in peasant reality. The nudity is neither mythological nor allegorical. It is concrete, carnal, tied to an unmistakable sexual act between adult men. The garments laid on the ground, a shirt and jacket cast off without care, signal that the act is neither furtive nor accidental, but fully consensual and lived in the body’s present tense.
Around this central couple, the scene unfolds in rings of male complicity. In the background, two men stand entwined against a tree trunk, their posture more restrained, almost tender. Seated on rocks, another pair exchange a look and the touch of hands, in a silent intimacy, less spectacular yet no less explicit. These groupings suggest that relations between men are not isolated, but multiple, varied in form and intensity.
Set apart, a young man sits alone, watching the scene or lost in thought. His in-between position suggests waiting, desire, or perhaps hesitation. He embodies the one who looks, the one not yet engaged, or the one who remembers. His presence reminds us that rural homosexuality is not confined to the visible sexual act, but also includes longing, solitude, apprenticeship, and individual trajectories.
The whole does not seek excessive modesty. Male sexuality between men is shown here as a possible component of peasant life, inscribed in the rhythm of seasons, bodies, and days off. The forest shelters without concealing, the group exists without self-assertion, and Sunday becomes a time of release in which norms loosen without vanishing. The work thus offers a vision neither idealized nor miserabilist, but deeply embodied, of male homosexuality in the countryside, lived in flesh, proximity, and shared experience.
A Painter of Masculinity
In Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894), a French painter from the upper Parisian bourgeoisie, trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Léon Bonnat’s studio and close to the Impressionist circle without ever dissolving entirely into it, the omnipresence of a dense masculine world, inward-looking and often charged with homoerotic tension, invites us to invert the usual presumption rather than repeat it¹. Far from a neutral thematic preference, this insistence on male bodies at work, at rest, and in male company suggests that, at the very heart of fin-de-siècle social constraints, Caillebotte found in painting a discreet yet steady outlet for his interests and desires. Works such as The Floor Scrapers, where bare-torsoed laborers unfold a physicality offered to the gaze, Boating on the Yerres, with its young rowers bent into effort, Skiffs, or Boating Party, construct an imaginary in which virility is made visible through bodily proximity, repeated gestures, and the suspension of productive time.
Even in scenes of leisure or sport, composition favors male intimacy, partial exposure of bodies, and a diffuse sensuality that exceeds mere social description. From this perspective, the known biography is insufficient either to confirm or to deny an orientation. Yet the work itself, in its coherence and persistence, strongly suggests that painting was for Caillebotte a space of freedom, a place where desire could circulate under the cover of modernity, labor, and virile leisure.
Loving Without Leaving Traces
In the French peasant world of the late nineteenth century, male homosexuality is not absent, but it is rarely formulated, owing much to oral culture, the scarcity of personal writing, and the village’s close regulation of behavior. The historian’s difficulty lies in the fact that what is lived at the level of everyday life leaves few direct traces, especially when discretion is a condition of social peace. Yet this silence is not proof of nonexistence. It is a mode of regulation, and therefore an indirect sign of a reality that must remain unsaid². The intellectual background of the nineteenth century helps clarify this mechanism, as the period tends to transform certain behaviors into moral or medical categories, reinforcing caution and concealment. In this context, male homosexuality can exist as practice, attachment, intimacy, while avoiding the language that would expose it. In other words, lives are possible, but they pass through implication, arrangements, and a finely tuned understanding of local limits.
Judicial Prism and Proofs of Existence
Judicial records are often the most reliable entry point into the social history of discreet lives and intimate relationships, because they document what ordinarily remains hidden. The difficulty is obvious. These documents do not describe a free rural gay life. They register what has become rupture, conflict, or scandal. Yet precisely through these filters, we see that acts between men existed, and that they could emerge in very ordinary contexts of neighborhood, work, and daily proximity³. The penal categories mobilized in the nineteenth century, such as public indecency or indecent assault, often function as detours, since French law does not condemn an orientation as such but can sanction acts depending on circumstances and their visibility. This mechanism explains why rural traces appear in flashes rather than as continuous narratives. Even so, these archives remain precious, because they attest, in black and white, that male homosexuality was practiced, and that it navigated constraint by seeking zones of lower risk.
Albert and Émile
A court record from the Isère archives, dated 1897, sheds significant light on the forms of conditional tolerance that same-sex relationships could receive in the French countryside at the end of the 19th century. The protagonists, Albert D, a weaver, and Émile F, a farm labourer and charcoal burner, were only prosecuted for public indecency after several years of a known relationship ⁴. This delay is itself an indication of the low degree of seriousness initially afforded to their conduct, so long as it remained confined to the private sphere and caused no overt disturbance. Their indictment stemmed not from their longstanding attachment, but from their discovery in flagrante delicto in a wood—an incident that turned their discreet liaison into a public scandal.
The witness statements from the investigation reveal an assiduous and longstanding intimacy, dating back more than four years, marked by meetings in places linked to their work: barns, charcoal burners' huts. Described as young men with no prior convictions, living with their parents and integrated into the local economy, Albert and Émile moved in an environment where temporary male proximity was commonplace. Several villagers indicated that their closeness was known and suspected, but that it had never prompted a formal complaint. The depositions emphasise the breach of visible order rather than the moral condemnation of the relationship itself, showing that the judicial system only became involved at the precise moment the tacit social equilibrium was broken. The charge thus penalised the public display of intimacy and the offence to public decency, not the private attachment which, as long as it remained discreet, could be tacitly accepted by the village community.
Peasant Masculinity and Practices Between Men
In the countryside, masculinity is first assessed through labor, endurance, reputation, and a man’s capacity to hold his place within the community. This creates a paradox worth grasping. A man may remain socially a man while having, at certain moments, sexual practices with other men, so long as this does not unsettle the family order, hierarchy, or public respectability⁵. Part of the historical work on masculinity and its norms recalls that families and authorities may tolerate what they interpret as transitional, provided it does not become a matter of exposure or challenge. This de facto tolerance does not mean ideological acceptance, but it opens interstices, especially among the young, the long-term unmarried, or men in positions of economic dependence. The difficulty here is that sources rarely speak of adult consent between peers, and the historian must constantly distinguish, without conflating them, sexuality between men and sexual violence, which belongs to a different problem. With these precautions in place, the picture that emerges remains clear. Men desire men, and they find ways to live that desire within a rural framework of virility, sometimes without naming it.
Rural Proximity and Relational Possibilities
Late nineteenth-century peasant life multiplies situations of bodily proximity, with shared spaces and collective work rhythms that keep men together for long stretches. The hard part is that this proximity rarely yields positive, explicit testimony, because what goes well is not narrated, and what is narrated often appears as rumor or complaint. Yet research on rural society grounded in judicial procedures shows how strongly public rumor functions as a social alarm, fixing a threshold of tolerance and deciding, collectively, what must be brought before the courts⁶. This logic implies that some practices could exist quietly so long as they remained discreet and offered no purchase to malice or scandal. We then understand how male homosexuality can be quite real, sometimes even known to a few, while remaining socially invisible so long as it does not disturb the village’s equilibrium. This does not paint a picture of total freedom, but rather of adaptive capacity, in which intimacy is built in practical margins, places, timings, and complicities.
Religion, Discretion, and Social Balance
Rural Catholicism officially condemns sexuality outside marriage, but in everyday village life, management often passes through discretion rather than frontal confrontation⁷. The difficulty is that this discretion can look, from afar, like a blanket of silence, whereas it is also a technique of coexistence, allowing men to remain integrated while living desires that are not spoken. Studies of morals cases in rural settings show that denunciation is not automatic, and that many actors, families, mayors, priests, neighbors, first seek to contain the matter, settle it, or avoid public exposure. When a case rises despite this, it is often because local balance has broken, or because rumor has decided a threshold has been crossed. This dynamic suggests an implicit, fragile yet real space in which certain practices between men could be lived, sometimes durably, so long as they remained compatible with social appearances. It is not a world without pain, but it is a world in which male homosexuality can survive, make its way, and organize itself around prudence, trust, and the unspoken.
What History Allows Us to Affirm Today
Historians converge on a sober but important assertion. Male homosexuality existed in the countryside. It was practiced, and it adjusted to strong constraints⁸. The difficulty is not to project a contemporary identity onto men who often had neither the words nor the social frameworks to define themselves as one might today. But the absence of an identity vocabulary takes nothing away from the reality of gestures, relationships, bonds, and sometimes long-established habits. Research on public and judicial discourse reminds us that in France, repression operates less through direct incrimination than through notions tied to modesty and visibility, which encourages strategies of discretion rather than total erasure. This framework illuminates a form of resilience. To live something, protect it, shift it, wrap it in the ordinary, and carry on nonetheless. Ultimately, the most accurate picture is neither that of a countryside pure and free of homosexuality, nor that of a uniform clandestinity, but of a real presence, modulated and often quiet, finding ways of life within norms.
Love and Sex Always Find a Way Through
This historical reading still resonates strongly with the present. Even today, for many men across the world, whether they live in rural or urban settings, the absence of public articulation remains a strategy of protection, sometimes of survival, in the face of social, familial, political, or religious constraints. The fact that these are practices between men nonetheless creates a particular configuration. Male closeness is often more socially admissible and less immediately suspect, whether it takes the form of shared work, sport, leisure, or ordinary companionship. This continuity reminds us that love and sex between men do not depend first on official recognition in order to exist. They find paths, forms, and their own temporalities, even in unfavorable contexts. History also shows that these equilibria are not fixed. Norms change, sometimes slowly, sometimes abruptly, and spaces of freedom can expand. Between the persistence of discreet strategies and the gradual opening of new frameworks of visibility, hope remains well grounded. A possible affective and sexual life, protected when it must be, affirmed when it can, and always capable of reinventing itself.
Curiosity Piqued?
1. Exhibition catalogue, Caillebotte. Peindre les hommes, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 2024–2025.
2. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, New York, Pantheon Books, 1978.
3. Anne-Emmanuelle Demartini, « Dire et juger le sexuel au XIXe siècle », Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle, no. 36, 2008.
4. Departmental Archives of Isère, series U, prosecution file for public indecency concerning Albert D. and Émile F., 1897.
5. Pierre Darmon, Trial by Impotence: Virility and Marriage in Pre-Revolutionary France, London, Chatto & Windus, 1985.
6. Jean-Claude Bologne, Histoire de la pudeur, Paris, Plon, 1986.
7. Jean Jaurès Foundation, historical syntheses and dossiers on sexuality, social norms, and repression in France.