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left to discover about the crowd in the French Revolution? Can
we contribute to the issues raised by Rudé, Soboul, and
Andrews over the last 30 years? Is the crowd a new topic for representation
in late eighteenth-century France, and if so, why is that important? |
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question
4 Warren
Roberts, 6-9-03, 9:54 AM |
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RE:
question 4 Jack Censer, 6-12-03, 4:46 PM |
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what
can we learn about the crowd Lynn Hunt, 6-23-03, 11:04
PM |
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RE:
what can we learn about the crowd Barbara Day-Hickman,
7-15-2003,
12:58 PM |
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RE:
what can we learn about the crowd Jack Censer, 7-17-2003,
10:18 AM |
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Response
to Jack Warren Roberts,
7-21-03, 8:03 AM |
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Responses
to Barbara Warren Roberts,
7-19-03, 10:31 AM |
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RE: Response to Warren
and Final Remarks Barbara Day-Hickman,
7-25-03, 1:14 PM
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Response
to Barbara Warren
Roberts, 7-28-03, 10:33 AM |
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| Subject: |
what we can
learn about the crowd |
| Posted
By: |
Lynn Hunt |
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| Date
Posted: |
6-23-03,11:04
PM |
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Warren and Jack raise issues
that beg for more extended analysis. I see two points
at work (the second is one that I harp on, I know, so
apologies to all for that!). 1) The absolutely essential,
groundbreaking work on the crowd by Rudé, Soboul
and Lefebvre was written in reaction to the crowd psychology
of the late 19th century that had been much influenced
by H. Taine. Rudé and company wanted to overturn
the “reactionary” view of the crowd (associated
with Taine and also Gustave LeBon) as hysterical, irrational,
dominated by females out of control. They emphasized
the solidity and respectability of its members, their
maleness, their family orientation, their rationality.
The images—at least some of them—force us to recapture
a side of crowd behavior that the “history from
below” people inevitably downplayed—its
exuberant, sometimes self-conscious, sometimes unconscious
cruelty. Many of the images capture a crowd that is far
from the rational, organized vision of someone such as
Charles Tilly or George Rudé; the images often
capture an almost Freudian, “return of the repressed” vision
of atavistic revenge. 2) On the other hand, as I’ve said
over and over (this is the harping part), the very fact
of sketching and engraving images that have some kind
of status as art entails a certain minimization of these
violent qualities that threaten to dissolve all forms
of order. So what is truly wonderful about the images
is that they often capture, if only inadvertently, the
fundamental ambivalence that many people must
have felt about the crowd as something not entirely rational,
bent
on a form of justice that was not particularly attractive,
and yet a fact of revolutionary politics that simply
could not be wished away. This ambivalence had been lost
in the historiography of the 1960s-1970s which was so
concerned to reassert the rationality of the lower classes
(though Georges Lefebvre certainly did not lose sight
of this ambivalence, and he alone of “history from
below” historians was willing to venture on a more
psychological analysis of crowd behavior). In short,
somehow the images get closer to the psychological questions
raised by crowd violence than does much of the textual
evidence. |
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