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| 2. What are the advantages/deficits of
visual mediation of events and concepts in this period? Can images
provide knowledge that is distinctive and different from textual
sources? How do images either correspond with or differ from their
textual commentary? What does this reveal about the combination of
image and text? Can representations by their nature capture popular
attitudes? Are inherent male/female upper class/popular class tensions
either captured or effaced in these images? |
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question
2 Warren
Roberts, 6-9-03, 9:50 AM |
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RE:
question 2 Jack Censer, 6-10-03, 1:05 AM |
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RE:
question 2 Warren Roberts,
7-2-03,
9:53 AM |
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RE: question
2 Barbara
Day-Hickman, 7-1-2003,
3:17 PM |
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RE: question
2 Warren Roberts, 7-2-03, 12:53 PM |
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RE:
question 2 Jack Censer,
7-26-03,
10:17 PM |
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question
2 Vivian Cameron,
7-6-03, 6:05 PM |
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Final
thoughts Warren
Roberts, 7-18-03, 5:38 AM |
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| Subject: |
RE: question 2 |
| Posted
By: |
Warren Roberts |
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| Date
Posted: |
7-2-03, 9:53
AM |
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Jack
would like to know how the two images I have analyzed, “The Hanging of
Foulon” and “The Intendant Bertier de Sauvigny,” relate
to other images by Prieur that show crowds in action.
He also asks for further comment on Prieur’s depiction
of lampposts, which are central to my analysis. Additionally,
he asks about the production of Prieur’s images:
when were they made? In addressing these questions I
will limit myself to one image, Prieur’s “The
Death of de Flesselles,” his illustration of an
event that took place on July 14. In this image a crowd
dispatches a hated official, the Prévôt
des marchands, in front of the Hôtel de Ville.
An assailant shoots de Flesselles, whose body recoils
from the shot, his right hand raised above his head.
That hand is pointed at a lantern that hangs from a lamppost.
No other illustration that I have seen shows a lantern
above de Flesselles. Why did Prieur put it there, and
give it such prominence? While we don’t know precisely
when Prieur did his drawings of the dramatic events of
July 12-14 and July 22 it can be safely said that he
saw “The Death of de Flesselles” through
the prism of what transpired eight days later. On these
two days, July 14 and July 22, furious crowds in the
Place de Grève dispatched hated royal officials,
two on each day. In both instances the crowds decapitated
the officials and put their heads on pikes, but the killings
followed different scripts. On July 14 crowds stabbed
and shot de Launay, governor of the Bastille, and then
shot another official thought to be his accomplice, de
Flesselles. Popular justice was rendered differently
on July 22, when both officials were hung from a lamppost.
The lantern and lamppost in Prieur’s Death of de
Flesselles were put there with the knowledge of what
took place eight days later. How,
Jack asks, does the lamppost, a symbol of the crowd
and the force it exerts, ebb
and flow with the fortunes
of the Terror? The answer, I believe, is that this
symbol of popular justice neither ebbs nor flows by
the time of the Terror. The lamppost and lantern belonged
to a particular stage of the Revolution, one that was
congruent with the journées of 1789. After the
March to Versailles order was imposed; the goal now
was to bring the Revolution to closure. When we come
to the Terror the politics are different and the role
of the people is different. Justice is dispensed by
the Revolutionary Tribunal whose authority is derived
from the Convention. The instrument of justice is the
guillotine, not the lamppost and lantern. From the
lantern to the guillotine: from the popular Revolution
to the Jacobin Revolution. To understand how to get
from one to the other is to understand much of what
the Revolution was about. Or so it seems to me. Careful
study of images has given me insights into and some
understanding of the forces that were at work—the
conflicts, uncertainties, ambiguities, unresolved differences,
fears, hatreds, the memories and burdens of the past.
Going back and forth between images and texts helped
me to navigate a course that took me from the lantern
to the guillotine. |
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