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Depictions of the French Revolutionary Crowd 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.
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