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When did Realism become a conscious artistic movement in France?

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Painting by Gustave Courbet showing the artist at his easel in a crowded studio, surrounded by figures including a nude model, onlookers, and a child with a white dog. — Realism *The Painter's Studio*, showing Gustave Courbet at the easel, oil on canvas by Courbet, 1854–55; in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

Realism was not consciously adopted as an aesthetic program until the mid-19th century in France. While the term had appeared as early as 1826 to describe a doctrine focused on the truthful depiction of nature and contemporary life, it emerged as a defined movement between 1850 and 1880.1

The painter Gustave Courbet became the leader of this new school, rejecting the artificiality of Classicism and Romanticism in favor of portraying the unadorned lives of ordinary people. His influence extended to literature, where a conscious program of literary realism appeared in the 1850s, inspired by his aesthetic stance. This transition was further solidified by the journalist Champfleury, who popularized these theories in his 1857 manifesto, Le Réalisme, and by the publication of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary that same year.123