The poor reception of the work is explained by the social and historical context of the late Second French Republic - the rural electorate helped bring Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte to power as emperor and to keep him in power, yet the painting showed the Franche-Comté, a strongly republican area, forcing rich Parisians to face up to the harsh realities of the countryside - rather than showing an idealised, tranquil and pacified countryside, it showed a potential enemy of middle-class city-dwellers, enriched by the industrial revolution and about to take part in the 1848 Revolution. Some saw the painting as the start of Courbet's political engagement, which took root both in his home-town and in his painting of the class struggle, as embodied in the tense eye contact between the women's lapdog (representing the arrogant middle class) and the young calves (symbolic of the peasant world about to erupt into rebellion). Others see it as simply reusing an old philosophical archetype of generously giving charity to the poor, albeit in a balanced and distanced manner far from the Roman Catholic aesthetic rules at the forefront of other painters' work, abandoning their high level of finish and heightening the format and line.