I limit
my comments here to Rudé, since he is the historian
who refers specifically to the events of 22 July 1789
that Prieur depicted in
his illustrations, and which I discussed in my essay. Rudé’s response to the killing of Foulon
and Bertier was to say that historians have used “acts
of vengeance” against these officials to discredit
revolutionary crowds. In his socioeconomic analysis,
revolutionary crowds were made up of artisans, shopkeepers,
and petty tradesmen, law abiding people who were neither
unemployed nor criminal but stable and bent upon preserving
their traditional rights.
This was not how François-Noël
Babeuf regarded the murder of Foulon and Bertier,
which he
witnessed personally. He did not try to explain away
or downplay the violence; he tried to understand it
in its own contemporary context:
“Our punishments of every kind,
quartering, torture, the wheel, the stake, and the
gibbet, and
the multiplicity of executioners on all sides, have
had such a bad effect on our morals! Our masters, instead
of policing us, have made us barbarians, because they
are barbarous themselves. They are reaping and will
reap what they have sown.”
Others who witnessed the killing
of Foulon and Bertier responded much as Babeuf did.
Restif de la Bretonne
felt that these deeds were “worthy of cannibals.” The
journalist Elysée Loustolot felt that the severed
head of Foulon, with hay stuffed in its mouth, “announced
to tyrants the terrible vengeance of a justly angered
people.” He also said that the procession that
led Bertier to the Hôtel de Ville was accompanied
by fifes and drums that declared “the cruel joy
of the people.”
Prieur’s illustrations depicting the events
of July 22 can be compared to the observations of Babeuf,
Restif de la Bretonne, and Loustalot. All of these
contemporary responses to the murder of Foulon and
Bertier emphasized popular vengeance, and cruelty.
This is a dimension of the journée of July 22
that doesn’t come through in Rudé’s
analysis; it is one that comes through vividly in Prieur’s
images. His images, it seems to me, add to our understanding
of revolutionary crowds in action. As with contemporary
textual sources, Prieur’s images are evidence
that historians can use to reconstruct events that
drove the revolution in directions that no one at the
time could have predicted.
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