If what is meant by “historical knowledge,” the
knowledge of a specific historical event, then some prints,
particularly those of Prieur/Berthault, provide us with
visual details about the site of action, some monuments,
as well as the physiognomy of certain principal actors,
such as Bertier de Sauvigny.
But what sort of “historical knowledge” do
we acquire from the more generalized visual accounts
of an event, as is the case in many of the images picturing
the attack on the Bastille as well as the demolition
of the Bastille? As Claudette Hould has pointed out,
one of the first popular prints of the attack on the
Bastille was executed by Nicolas Dupin for the Révolutions
de Paris, which appeared only in October 1789, and
which was subsequently adopted as a model by other
printmakers for their own images of the event. Like
written memoirs of the period, these more generalized
prints, such as Dupin’s “Attack
on the Bastille” or
“Demolition
of the Bastille,” convey
only a certain amount of information—much of it inaccurate.
At the same time, the ubiquity of these prints offers
a different perspective on “historical knowledge.” For
their prevalence tells us not only that the printmakers
thought that such images had commercial value and would
sell but also that their popularity came from their
symbolic value, souvenirs or “memory triggers” of
a momentous event, which operated to perpetuate those
symbolic events. The knowledge we acquire in these
cases is about the symbolics of the event (as Lusebrink/Reichardt
have studied) in these particular visualizations.
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