A prominent figure of the early French Third Republic, Émile Deshayes de Marcère (1828–1918) combined a career in public service with a firm commitment to moderate republican ideals. Trained as a lawyer, he entered politics after 1870, serving as a deputy and later as Minister of the Interior under President Jules Grévy. A skilled orator and pragmatic reformer, he played a role in consolidating the fledgling Republic after the upheavals of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune. His speeches and writings often emphasized the need for stability, civic duty, and the careful balancing of democratic freedoms with national unity. In his later years, he was named a life senator, and in 1905 he became one of the last surviving senators of the early Third Republic, symbolizing the generation that had helped to establish France’s republican institutions after the fall of Napoleon III.

Issued in installments by the Parisian publisher Goupil between 1876 and 1884, the Galerie Contemporaine, Littéraire, Artistique brought together 241 portraits of prominent figures in literature, music, science, and politics offring the French public an unprecedented visual gallery of the people shaping their cultural and civic life during the Second Empire and the early Third Republic.

The project was fueled by a spirit of national pride and by a new, more modern fascination with fame. Its subtitle—Littéraire Artistique—signaled a desire to elevate photography as a vehicle for high culture, while also capitalizing on the growing appetite for celebrity portraiture.
The images themselves were printed as woodburytypes giving the portraits a richness and permanence that aligned perfectly with the project’s lofty cultural ambitions.

Today, Galerie Contemporaine endures not only as a milestone in the history of photography and publishing, but also as a vivid record of the artists, scientists, and statesmen whose lives and ideas defined modern France.