Imaging the French Revolution: Depictions of the French Revolutionary Crowd

An On-Line Collaboration Organized By

JACK CENSER AND LYNN HUNT Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/110/1/38/12636 by guest on 01 October 2021

POPULAR VIOLENCE DEFINED the French Revolution. Without crowds of lower-class people, there would have been no fall of the Bastille, no overthrow of the monarchy, no arrest of the Girondins, no spectacle of the guillotine. The middle-class deputies who led the French Revolution depended on popular support, which inevitably meant popular violence, but they also feared that violence, felt repulsed by it, and constantly maneuvered to get a handle on it. Popular violence pushed the Revolution forward, but it also threatened to dissolve it altogether in an acid wash of blood, political vengeance, and anarchic disorder. Because of its centrality to events, the crowd drew a lot of attention during the French Revolution, though revolutionaries themselves did not use the term. Rather, they referred to the populace as simply /e peup/e, or "the people." This nomenclature carried through most of the next century as historians still deployed this general term. Whether on the right like Edmund Burke and Hippolyte Taine or on the left like Jules Michelet or Alphonse Aulard, scholars saw the actions of the peup/e as unified, almost mythic. The peup/e "personified good or evil," depending on the inclination of the author.! Twentieth-century historians dismantled the dichotomy of romantic vs. villain­ ous images and replaced them with a sociology. Who were these people? Why did they act as they did? George Rude used the term "crowd" to break away from the unidimensional peup/e, from the right wing's terms of denigration (/a canaille or dregs), and even from "the masses," as Karl Marx had seen them in other contexts. Rude showed that the French revolutionary crowd was composed of workers and the bottom rung of the commercial classes-master artisans, shopkeepers, and wage earners. Its members did not come from the bourgeoisie, which included

Many people contributed to this project, most significantly our collaborators-Vivian Cameron, Barbara Day-Hickman, Wayne Hanley, Joan Landes, and Warren Roberts-who penned essays, participated in on-line discussions, and helped shape the final product. In addition, the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University provided technical support, especially Mark Jones, Elena Razlogova, and Simon Kornblith. Center director Roy Rosenzweig was a great source of information, guidance, expertise, and general acumen regarding the marriage of history and media. Robert Townsend of the American Historical Association suggested this project, and Marjorie Censer helped in the final stages. Finally the University of California at Los Angeles Department of History and the Center for History and New Media provided crucial funding. 1 George Rude, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford, 1959). The quotation is on page 4.

38 Imaging the French Revolution 39 major merchants and manufacturers, members of the liberal professions, and the nobility.2 Later in-depth studies undertaken by Albert Soboul and Richard Andrews sought to describe the crowd's attitudes, political views, and political structure in greater detail.3 Even when they disagreed, Rude, Soboul, and Andrews all participated in "history from below" and demonstrated that a focus on the crowd's members and their attitudes and political networks could transform the under­ standing of revolutionary politics. They insisted that the mobilized multitudes of ordinary people did not act incoherently or hysterically. Even the most horrifying violence often had some kind of rationale that could be explained by referring to the composition of crowds. Although the pendulum has not yet swung all the way in the other direction, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/110/1/38/12636 by guest on 01 October 2021 historians have begun to express a certain dissatisfaction with this view of the crowd as resolutely rational actor.4 Rituals of violence did not always express, much less restore, community consensus. Large informal gatherings of people were some­ times mobs. Without returning to the discredited crowd psychology of Gustave LeBon, in whose view the member of a crowd "descends several rungs on the ladder of civilization" and becomes like "beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution," it is possible to make more of the ambivalence of contemporaries to crowd actions.5 Colin Lucas took an important step in this direction in his 1988 essay comparing Old Regime and revolutionary crowds in France. He argued that "the crowd and the elites coexisted uneasily in the public space of power vacated by the monarchical state." While unable to do without popular pressure in the form of demonstrations and even attacks on public buildings (the Bastille and the Tuileries, for example), the revolutionary authorities nonetheless aimed to channel and eventually subdue crowd violence. They got control of the original spontaneous celebrations of revolution by orchestrating a system of coordinated revolutionary festivals, and in an unplanned but nonetheless significant nationwide movement, local revolutionary leaders set up a national guard to contain if not suppress crowd formation. 6 We (Jack Censer and Lynn Hunt) propose to examine contemporary attitudes toward crowd violence in a very different manner. Lucas drew his analysis from the acts and pronouncements of the revolutionaries, even though as he admits, only the conservatives were willing to say what they really thought about the crowd. Mallet du Pan's denunciation of "the Huns, the Harudes, the Vandals, and the Goths ... in our midst" would not have been ventured by an ardent supporter of the Revolution.7 To get beyond this barrier of politically acceptable speech, we asked a group of specialists in French revolutionary imagery to write about depictions of

2 Rude, The Crowd, 178-90. 3 Albert Soboul, The Parisian Sans-Culottes and the French Revolution, 1793-4, trans. Gwynne Lewis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964); Richard Mowery Andrews, "Social Structures, Political Elites and Ideology in Revolutionary Paris, 1792-94: A Critical Evaluation of Albert Soboul's Les Sans­ Culottes Parisiens en l'an II," Journal of Social History 19, no. 1 (1985): 71-112. 4 See, for example, Suzanne Desan, "Crowds, Community, and Ritual in the Work of E. P. Thompson and Natalie Davis," in Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley, Calif., 1989), 47-7l. 5 As quoted in Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, Conn., 1981), 169. 6 Colin Lucas, "The Crowd and Politics between 'Ancien Regime' and Revolution in France," The Journal of Modern History, 60 (September 1988): 421-457, quote p. 45l. 7 Lucas, "The Crowd and Politics," 452.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2005 40 Jack Censer and Lynn Hunt crowd violence: Vivian Cameron, Barbara Day-Hickman, Wayne Hanley, Joan Landes, and Warren Roberts generously agreed to take a leap in the dark and join us in this experiment. Their essays constitute the heart of this project. The essays and the images and image tools are located on-line at http://chnm.gmu.edu/ revolution/imaging. Rather than try to tackle the entire corpus of thousands of known images, most of them anonymous, many of them undated, and few of them cross-referenced between collections, we chose an initial group of some thirty prints, which was then revised to forty-two in consultation with the other authors. The number of prints is large enough to afford considerable variety of images and small enough to maximize intersections between the essays. These images do not constitute a Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/110/1/38/12636 by guest on 01 October 2021 representative sample in any statistical sense. Given the current state of knowledge about revolutionary visual images, a representative sample would be impossible to construct. No one knows exactly how many prints are extant. Michel Vovelle estimated that the Bibliotheque Nationale de France had in its collections approximately 55 percent of the visual images of the revolutionary period, but he meant 55 percent of the images available in France. The De Vinck collection of the Bibliotheque Nationale has 9,000 prints, the Hennin Collection 4,500, and the Qbl Collection for the History of France 12,500.8 Many of these are duplicates, but no one knows just how many. In addition, there are trophies, playing cards, cockades, calendars, maps, costumes, uniforms, crockery, snuffboxes, and letterheads, not to mention paintings that are held in various museums. If the size of the corpus of images is unknown, then it is perhaps not very surprising that little is known about the audience reception of the images. Scholars know that the consumers targeted must have been various: prosperous subscribers to fine art commemorative collections of prints had little in common with artisans or shopkeepers who might just have afforded a 10 sous print when bread cost 3 sous a pound and a modest artisan earned 20 to 50 sous a day. Even more people would have seen engravings available in newspapers or pamphlets that could be purchased for as little as 2 sous, and no doubt many others still saw cheap woodblock prints pasted up along the walkways.9 Attaching particular images to specific publics is very difficult, however, except where the artist, engraver, printmaker, and price are all known, which is true in very few cases. For the most part, audience has to be inferred from the medium, artistic quality, and thematic content of the image. The chosen images come from two main sources: the Musee de la Revolution fran~aise in Vizille, France and the Library of Congress. lO Without the generous collaboration of the Musee de la Revolution fran~aise, this study would not have been possible; they have a much larger collection of prints and other visual objects than any American institution. Our team picked many colored prints for our

8 Michel Vovelle, ed., La Revolution fram;aise: Images et recit, 1789-1799, 5 vols. (Paris, 1986), 1: 13-14. 9 Some of the research on audience is summarized in Vincent Milliot, Les Cris de Paris ou Ie peup/e travesti: Les representations des petits metiers parisiens (XVIle_XVIIle siecles) (Paris, 1995), 322. 10 The Bibliotheque Nationale de France has by far the largest collection of revolutionary prints, but the cost of reproducing them for our purposes was too high. Anyone wishing to carry out research on this topic must consult their collections, and we have on many occasions. The Musee Carnavalet in Paris also has many prints and engravings. These are now in the process of digitization and when available will be a marvelous on-line resource for researchers.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2005 Imaging the French Revolution 41

"sample" because these have not appeared very often in books and articles on the French Revolution; unlike illustrations in print forms, on-line reproduction of color images is no more expensive than black and white. We wanted to give some sense of the diversity of representations, so we included relatively unschooled black and white prints as well as more elaborate colored ones, coins and medals, and even a handful of German and English engravings for the sake of comparison. Some images do not focus directly on violent crowds, but they do all make some reference to violence, however oblique. The usefulness of cd-rom and the World Wide Web for pedagogical and archival

functions is now well established. Historians can find a wealth of digital represen­ Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/110/1/38/12636 by guest on 01 October 2021 tations of texts, pictures, film clips, and music for use in their classrooms, and many use electronic forms of periodicals, on-line text searching tools, or other kinds of on-line data collections for their research. Yet despite the explosion in these new electronic sources, scholarship in visual culture has benefited less from electronic media than scholarship in printed texts. It is much easier, for example to find every reference to "women" in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract than it is to trace changes in the representation of women in the work of an eighteenth-century French painter or engraver; visual images do not break down as nicely into comparable, searchable, syntactical units. Millions of images from every time and place have been digitized, but they still must be viewed one by one or at best as a "sheet" of thumbnail (miniaturized) versions. When images appear in on-line articles, they are usually called up as individual electronic pages. Comparison between images is still very undeveloped.

WE HAD THREE AIMS in organizing this on-line experiment: 1) to bring together a group of researchers for a discussion of images that is designed to advance scholarship, 2) to offer a new way of viewing and comparing images, and 3) to provide access to the images and the discussion of them to a much wider audience. It is already the case in mathematics, for instance, that mathematicians work on some problems collectively "on-line." Is it possible to go beyond historians' and art historians' more customary model of the scholar-working-alone? We asked each of the authors to prepare an essay on depictions of the crowd using the preselected set of prints. Then we circulated the essays, including one co-authored by us, among the participants and began an on-line discussion of our separate but related findings. At the same time, a team of collaborators at George Mason University'S Center for History and New Media developed a useful method of presentation of images for this venture. Although it is ultimately up to our readers to decide how well we have succeeded in achieving these goals, we do have some reflections to offer on the experiment as a whole. The last of our goals-wider dissemination of images and discussion of them-is easiest to evaluate: nothing compares to the resources made possible by the Internet. The Center for History and New Media had already made accessible hundreds of revolutionary images at http://www.chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/. Origi­ nally the companion to a textbook and cd-rom published by Penn State University

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2005 42 Jack Censer and Lynn Hunt

Press (co-authored by Censer and Hunt), the web site offers an essay on images for students and provides explanatory captions as well.ll Although professors and students might use these images for further study, they would have to seek scholarly analysis of the images in print sources. In contrast, the essays here do not refer to as many different images, but they offer a more focused approach to one central aspect of revolutionary politics, even while emphasizing the variety of scholarly analyses that might be offered. Thus they disseminate not only the images themselves but also the scholarship about them. Our second goal of offering a new way of viewing images is closely related to the wider dissemination of images and scholarship about them. The image tool offered on-line makes it possible to view many images side by side, to zoom in and out on Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/110/1/38/12636 by guest on 01 October 2021 any particular image, and even to drag one image over another for the sake of comparison. An unprecedented level of interactivity with the images is thus made possible; rather than the authors determining the order, magnification, or method of comparison of the images (the numbers assigned the images are merely cataloging devices), the reader has the capacity to make those decisions as he or she prefers. Moreover, the linking between image discussions in the different essays also makes it feasible for a reader to immediately see the points of agreement and disagreement, some of which the authors themselves might have missed. Theoret­ ically, students and scholars anywhere on the globe can have access to the images and the scholarly discussion (although at this moment access is restricted to subscribers or users at subscribing libraries). In this way, a much wider conversation about history takes place, and the dialogue does not end with publication; it begins anew with virtually every "hit" on the site. On-line presentation of images is not without its problems, however. Informa­ tion that would be available to a researcher who saw the images in person is available only in captions: the size, the material or paper type, and the technique used (woodblock, etching, engraving, aquatint, mezzotint, gouache, to cite just some possible examples). Reading dimensions or names of techniques is very different from seeing them in person. Web presentation therefore tends to efface crucial differences between images even as it facilitates other kinds of comparisons. The Internet can serve as a gathering place for discussion and debate, but it cannot instantly remedy the defects in the sources. Much remains to be done in dating, describing, comparing, and interpreting the thousands of extant images from the French Revolution. The Bibliotheque Nationale de France has developed massive collections of prints and cartoons over the years, and some serious cataloguing was undertaken at the beginning of the twentieth century.12 But the "History of France" collection, for example, has never been systematically catalogued, and prints are often categorized according to the date of the event depicted rather than the date of the print itself. The celebration of the bicentennial of the French Revolution gave rise to a useful videodisk and many new scholarly works about revolutionary

11 Jack R. Censer and Lynn Hunt, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution (University Park, Penn., 2001). 12 The best known of these catalogues is Bibliotheque nationale (France). Departement des estampes. Collection de Vinck, Un siecle d'histoire de France par l'estampe, 1770-1871; Collection de Vinck; inventaire analytique, 8 vols. (Paris, 1909- ).

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2005 Imaging the French Revolution 43 prints and cartoons.13 Yet no one has undertaken to compare prints across collections or to gather crucial information in one central place. Presumably the World Wide Web makes this dream a distinct possibility for the future.

THE WORLD OF SCHOLARSHIP does not usually move at a lightning pace, but the study of French revolutionary imagery may prove to be an exception to that rule. It is only in the last twenty years that scholars have shown much interest in the cartoons and political prints of the French Revolution. Most art historians considered politici­

zation, terror, and constant warfare incompatible with the production of great art, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/110/1/38/12636 by guest on 01 October 2021 and in any case, they did not consider prints or cartoons as fine art.14 Historians rarely considered visual culture part of their regular repertoire of possible sources; at best, paintings or prints served as illustrations of points established through text-based research. In the last twenty years, this situation has changed dramati­ cally. The fact that we could find so many collaborators already distinguished for their contributions to this field is a sign of how remarkable the change has been. But historians and art historians have all been laboring in our individual vineyards in isolation from each other. What we as a group have gained from the scholarly collaboration is not so much definitive answers as newly pertinent questions. From the start we all agreed that prints and engravings could be considered just as significant sources of information as newspaper accounts or police archives. But the rules of interpretation of visual evidence are much less well developed, at least among historians. How, for example, did the tension between aesthetic and political concerns work in different media? Can political biases be deduced from aesthetic styles? Are engravings like paintings in this regard or very different because of their different audiences? In our on-line discussion, we spent considerable time (one cannot really speak of "spilling ink" on-line) going back and forth on interpretive issues: How important is determining authorial intent, even if you happen to know the name of the engraver or designer? How can we get at audience reaction in the absence of figures about print runs or text sources recounting reactions to the images, especially since such sources are virtually nonexistent? Does the very act of framing an event by depicting it somehow reduce both its immediacy and its threatening quality, or does it enhance these by fixing the event in memory? Readers will find different, if rarely entirely contradictory, answers to these questions in the essays. Without anticipating the rich arguments of the essays available on-line, and endeavoring not to impose a Censer-Hunt line on all the others, we can offer a few preliminary conclusions. Artists and engravers, even those who had worked for the lUXUry market under the Old Regime, had no choice but to depict crowds in action once the Revolution began; the phenomenon simply could not be ignored, at least not before 1799 and the coming of Napoleon Bonaparte to power. Artists did have

13 The videodisk accompanies Images de la Revolution frant;aise (Paris, 1990). 14 "When the guillotine operates, when cannons and rifles talk, it is rare that art flourishes." Jean Tulard, Jean-Fran<;ois Fayard, and Alfred Fierro, Histoire et dictionnaire de la Revolution frant;aise, 1789-1799 (Paris, 1987), the article Beaux-arts, p. 572 as quoted in Claudette Hould, "La Gravure revolutionnaire et son impact sur les consciences," in Michel Grenon, ed., L'lmage de la Revolution frant;aise iiu Quebec, 1789-1989 (Ville LaSalle, Quebec, 1989), 173-82, quote p. 173.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2005 44 Jack Censer and Lynn Hunt considerable choice, however, in how they represented those crowds: at the moment of violence, before, or, more often, just after; as unruly savages or the well-ordered people; allegorically, satirically, or "realistically"; as commemoration or cautionary tale. Sometimes authorial intent mattered; other times, artists conveyed meanings almost inadvertently. The tension between intent and inadvertence is perhaps especially salient in depictions of women and lower-class men, since such repre­ sentations had long been subject to stereotypes in popular prints. Could such stereotypes continue to exercise their power as the political landscape altered out of all recognition? We see this collaborative experiment as part of a broader effort to expand the meaning of politics. Artistic representation of events and people was integral to the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/110/1/38/12636 by guest on 01 October 2021 conflict over the meaning of the French Revolution. Political leaders in Paris or other cities did not just react to the individual artisans and shopkeepers making up the crowd or to the appearance and actions of large groups of people, especially when they turned violent. They also reacted to the celebrations, commemorations, and satires of them in visual images. Those images served as memory triggers and also helped build up competing narratives of the revolutionary process. Can anyone even now think of the French Revolution without recalling the guillotine, the women's march to Versailles, or the Festival of Reason? These are not speeches or documents; they are actions immortalized in print and in printed images. But we and our collaborators also learned some harder lessons in this process. Although students, and dare we say historians, sometimes like to think that they can read any visual image without help, in fact our exchanges forcefully reminded us that reading images is a skill much like reading texts. Individual political inclina­ tions and general circumstances play a role. Convincing reading depends on knowing the codes of artistic representation in the late eighteenth century: the significant differences between genres and techniques, the generally accepted meanings of allegorical symbols, and even the specific visual rhetoric developed by individual artists and engravers. A woman is sometimes not just a woman but rather a Roman deity transformed into revolutionary symbol. Prints may communicate inadvertent and multivariate meanings, but scholars get those meanings wrong if they fail to learn the languages in which they speak. Historians may never find sufficient information about authorship or audience, but they can learn the collective codes that shape artistic representation, whether in a crude woodcut made for plastering on a wall or a fine line engraving sold by subscription to the well off. Without claiming to have a last word, we do believe that these essays advance scholarship on the critical issue of crowd violence in the French Revolution. Studying images comparatively allowed our group of authors to "envision" the actions of crowds during memorable events, such as the fall of the Bastille. Though at times effaced by the artist or engraver, the emotions as well as the motions of the crowd become more evident in visual imagery. Even stylized images, particularly of women, tell us what contemporary image makers believed were recognizable roles in revolutionary society. Although perhaps more unstable in their meaning than texts, images give us a glimpse into states of consciousness that can be approached in no better way. But readers need not depend on our rendering of what this site

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2005 Imaging the French Revolution 45 includes and ascertains; the essays, a conclusion that encapsulates the on-line discussion, and the visual images may all be consulted directly on the Web.

Jack R. Censer is professor of history and chair of the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. This study emerged from a previous collaboration with Lynn Hunt and George Mason's Center for History and New Media (Liberty, Equality and Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolu­ tion [2001 D. Censer has mainly written on the history of the press of the Old Regime and the French Revolution, including Prelude to Power (1976) and The

Press in the Age of Enlightenment (1994). He has currently taken his interest in Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/110/1/38/12636 by guest on 01 October 2021 the press to recent U.S. history and is working on the media and Washington sniper case of October 2002.

Lynn Hunt is Eugen Weber professor of modern European history at the University of California, Los Angeles. With Jack Censer she published Liberty, Equality and Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution (2001), which included a cd-rom of images and documents and is linked to a website (www.chnm.gmu. edu/revolutionl). Her previous works on the French Revolution include Revolution and Urban Politics in Provincial France: Troyes and Reims, 1786- 1790 (1978), Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (1984, 20th anniversary edition 2004), and The Family Romance of the French Revolution (1992). She was president of the American Historical Association in 2002 and is now working on the eighteenth-century origins of human rights.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2005