Abstract: My dissertation excavates an alternative, short-lived French Modernism in the early work of Paul Cézanne, a Modernism characterized not by the celebration of the eye's impression, but an unprecedented psychological intensity. The painting of modern life, it is said, was born through the complex interplay of formal innovation, new social practices, and a cultivated nonchalance on the part of the inhabitants of the modern metropolis. In contrast, I offer a competing vision of modern painting rooted in the evocation of psychological 'expression' and 'extremism,' emblematized by the murder and orgy scenes that distinguish Paul Cézanne's early oeuvre. I explain why such psychological painting was briefly and unsuccessfully raised up against the model of Manet's urbane restraint at the end of the 1860s, only to be abandoned by the mid-1870s. Central to my argument is that Cézanne's paintings are not explorations of his own psychic disposition, but rather careful orchestrations of subjectivity and interiority, exemplifying contemporary understandings of the formation and governance of the self. Within Cézanne's social circle, new scientific models for representing temperament led Cézanne to formulate modern experience differently from Manet. Mobilizing contexts rarely brought to bear on the period, I investigate the neo-romanticism of the late Second Empire, its psychophysiological theories, as well as the 'culte du moi' in art and poetry, all of which Cézanne would have encountered through Zola and his understudied circle of friends, which included, among others, the natural scientist Antoine-Fortune Marion and the poet Antony Valabrègue. Chapter one discusses Cézanne's pictorial adaptations after Manet and his desire to paint himself into Manet's most infamous 1860s paintings like Olympia. Chapter two contrasts Cézanne's The Murder to his Young Girl at the Piano, and argues for their twinned refusal of Manet's urbane attitude. Here, I claim, Cézanne shows the modern self---in clear opposition to Manet---as either utterly uncontrolled, or as overly repressed. And chapter three discusses Cézanne's understudied series of fashion plates copies of around 1871 in relation to their historic and political specificity (to Franco-Prussian War and Commune), as well as to Manet's more explicitly political images of the time.