One of the basic problems with all of these prints of events relates to the concept of narrative. Unlike the various written accounts, reports, and memoirs of events which can discuss a series of events over time, the printmakers(medal-makers) were reduced to showing a single moment (or several consecutive moments) within one image, such as the fall of the Bastille, the march to Versailles, or the execution of Foulon. Such a time constraint (with, at best, a compression of several moments into a single visualization) restricts the information that can be conveyed visually. Another problem concerns the date of production of the prints (one of Lynn and Jack’s categories). As Lynn points out in her remarks to question 5 (“the need for more knowledge,”), the prints in the Histoire de France collection at the BN, as well as those in the De Vinck collection, are categorized by the date of the event, not by the date of production. “Pariser Poisarden,” for instance, looks stylistically as though it was produced in the 1830s. Given that as a possible date, how does that affect one’s reading of the image? Thirdly, there is the problem of interpretation. In the case of “Memorable Day at Versailles,” which Joan analyzes, without the text that mentions “our modern Amazons glorious in their victories...,” we might be inclined to read the image as a negative comment about the women who marched to Versailles. While Joan reads the figure of the woman leaning “affectionately against a Guardsman” as “the transgression of moral and political authority unleased by the Revolution,” it could also be read as a sexualization, and thereby trivialization, of the political actions of the women during the October days, hence not as “phallic threat” but as flirtatious dalliance in the rococo sense.

Can images provide knowledge that is distinctive and different from textual sources? In the case of the Prieur/Berthault prints or the Helman/Monnet works, which Joan mentions, far more information about the surroundings, costumes, articles of everyday life, and the like, is available through these images than in anything described verbally by contemporaries. For studying the crowd and its behavior in various revolutionary festivals, for instance, prints convey an enormous amount of information that is unavailable elsewhere, assuming, of course, that there is a visual accuracy in the recording of its behavior. At the same time, we need to ask the question in reverse: what happens when an event of some significance is NOT pictured? Rudé, for instance, has a chapter devoted to the “Massacre” at the Champ de Mars, but the only images we have of that event are a Prieur/Berthault print and two incomplete drawings by Lafitte executed c. 1792-1794 (for the Lafitte, see Michel Vovelle, La Révolution française: Images et récits, 1789-1799, vol. II [Paris: Messidor, 1986]: 288-289 and Philippe Bordes and Régis Michel, eds. Aux armes & aux arts!: Les Arts de la Révolution 1789-1799 [Paris: Biro, 1988], fig. 98, p. ll9). The “Massacre” provided printmakers with the opportunity to create new martyrs out of the petitioners who asked for a new executive and who were shot down by the National Guard, yet only two artists chose to represent the event. Why?

I think that Barbara has done an excellent job at revealing how textual commentary can negate the visual image and vice versa. As I stated above, without a text, an image such as a “Memorable Day at Versailles” can have multiple interpretations, both positive and negative, which may not reflect the attitude of its maker.

Are inherent male/female upper class/popular class tensions either captured or effaced in these images? Yes, in some cases. Look again at this illustration and you’ll notice a male observer, presumably a worker, holding a tree branch, who seems to be marching along with the parade of heroines. As his right arm moves out, he seems to be pushing away the bourgeois/aristocratic couple who stand at the side watching the procession. This deliberate overlap could be read as an indication that this revolution is made by/for another class; or he might simply be clearing the way for the heroines and thereby reinforcing the importance of women at this moment. As this example indicates, care must be exercised in attempting interpretations of images with no guiding text.