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Conscripts sleep in their greatcoats with their caps still on, heads down on their packs. A white dog is stretched out among them. The stacked rifles wait behind for the morning.

France after 1870 was a country organized around a bruise. The defeat by Prussia had cost it two provinces, an emperor, and its settled belief that it had Europe's first army. The Third Republic rebuilt its forces around universal conscription: every young man to the barracks, the nation itself as the army in waiting. The word for the mood was revanche, and it needed pictures. Édouard Detaille, star pupil of Meissonier and the most exact military painter alive, supplied the definitive one at the Salon of 1888, and the state bought it at once. Le Rêve is a bivouac, an army camped in the open, at first light during the autumn maneuvers. A field of conscripts sleeps in greatcoats in two long rows, kepis still on, a white dog stretched out among them. The rifles are stacked in neat tripods down the line, with the furled colors laid flat across them. Above, in the dawn clouds, is the dream, shared by the whole field as one man. The armies of the First Empire come on at full charge, eagles up, flags gloriously shredded, the grandfathers' wars flying past over the grandsons. The painting's craft is all in the way the two halves touch. The mist of the real field rises until it becomes the smoke of the imagined one, and nothing marks the line where the weather ends and the inheritance begins. It became the Republic's icon: engraved, chromolithographed, hung in schoolrooms and barracks, the approved image of what military service meant, sleep now, glory pending. Read from the other side of 1914, the picture changes temperature without changing a brushstroke. The boys in the greatcoats, or their sons at the same age, would get the war the dream was advertising, against machine guns the eagles knew nothing about. That makes the fly-past overhead the most honest thing in the painting: a nation's ideas marching high up, out of reach of the facts. Detaille died in 1912 and was spared the comparison. The canvas hangs in the Musée d'Orsay, in the old station hall of the railway age. The crowds pass a sleeping army on their way to the Impressionists, and the dog, at least, sleeps untroubled by any of it.