The enthusiastically gesturing woman occupies center stage in the anonymous print. She is positioned between Foulon’s severed corpse and his head, which is raised aloft on a pike. Indeed, a quick glance suggests that the woman’s outstretched hand is balancing the pike. The barking dog in the foreground echoes the woman’s wild enthusiasm. Her dress, gestures, behavior and location underscore her place among the common people. So, if both artists suggest a class division between those directly at the scene and the more respectable onlookers above, the anonymous printmaker emphatically captures the ambivalence that arises when women – and especially women of the popular classes – are directly involved in politics.Thus, following Lynn’s point that this print recaptures much of the ambivalence suppressed by Rudé’s account of the crowd, we need to go further and ask whose ambivalence is being expressed? Perhaps the image that seems to be a more direct, spontaneous, and immediate impression of the event is just as heavily coded by gender and class conventions as the image by Prieur. Consequently, along with an appreciation of Lynn’s point about George Rudé’s and Charles Tilly’s revision of prevailing nineteenth- century depiction of the crowd , a more complete interpretation of these images requires an recognition of the full extent and character of women’s participation in the revolutionary crowd, as has been undertaken by Albert Soboul, Dominique Godineau, Harriet Applewhite and Darline Gay Levy, among others.2 Finally, we might ask whether Prieur is trying to legitimate the people’s role in the Revolution in a manner not unlike Rudé and perhaps also in response to eighteenth-century precursors of Le Bon or Taine . If so, this places in a new light, first, his effort to distance the viewer from a more direct view of/confrontation with the crowd’s actions, and second, his decision to excise any trace of the crowd’s female members and to emphasize its masculine character.

1 On the theme of enthusiasm in philosophy, culture and the visual arts, see Mary Sheriff’s important new work, Moved by Love: Inspired Artists and Deviant Women in Eighteenth-Century France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2003).

2 See Albert Soboul, The Sans-Culottes: The Popular Movement and Revolutionary Government, 1793-1794, trans. Rémy Inglis Hall (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972); Dominique Godineau, The Women of Paris and their French Revolution, trans. Katherine Streip (Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 1988); and Harriet B. Applewhite and Darlene Levy, “Women, Radicalization, and the Fall of the French Monarchy” in their edited collection Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1990).