Subject: question
4
Posted By: Warren Roberts
Date Posted: June 9, 2003, 9:54 AM
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
Loustalot 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 [Images 25 and 31]
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. In his journalistic account of
the procession that led Bertier to the Hôtel
de Ville, Loustalot comments on the “cruel joy of the people.” 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.
Subject: what we can learn about the crowd
Posted By: Lynn Hunt
Date Posted: June 23, 2003, 11:04 PM
Warren raises 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 et al. wanted
to overturn the “reactionary” view of the crowd (associated
with Taine and also Gustave LeBon) as hysterical, irrational, and
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 that 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.
Subject: RE: what we can learn about the crowd
Posted By: Barbara Day-Hickman
Date Posted: July 15, 2003, 12:58 PM
I would concur with Lynn that most of the
prints in our selection demonstrate ambivalence between the representation
of crowd brutality
and the artist's more subdued or rational interpretation of the
revolutionary narrative. For example, in the “Hanging of
Foulon” [Image
25], Jean-Louis Prieur establishes
a “safe” separation
between the violence of the lynching scene in the background and
the assembling crowd in the foreground. Furthermore, the artist
separates the viewer from the disturbing reenactment of crowd violence
by locating the point of view of the composition somewhat opposite
and above the suspended victim. With a panoramic view of the events
in the square below, Prieur's audience has a privileged perspective
that encompasses the entire scene “at a distance.” Instead
of dramatizing the death scene, the artist reduces the size of
the victim and dancing hangmen to miniscule figures that either
shadow or merge with the mass of figures in the rear. The viewer's
eye is rather drawn to the myriad activities going on in the square,
from the soldiers who are in perpetual motion to the viewers who
wave and witness the event from open windows, to the mass of spectators
that extend up and around the street (rue Mouton?) to a vanishing
point beyond audience purview. Thus, while Prieur achieves a convincing
sort of documentary realism through his skillful rendering of the
event, the complexity of his reportage manages to disengage his
audience from the more disturbing and offensive aspects of Foulon's
torture. Similarly, in terms of affect, ambivalence is apparent.
The artist both invites his viewer to become engaged in the fascination
of the death scene while he concurrently shields his audience from
its impact through the intervention of the surrounding crowd. The
artist thus creates a compelling attraction toward and distraction
from details of the gruesome spectacle portrayed on the distant
street corner.
Subject: Responses to Barbara
Posted By: Warren Roberts
Date Posted: July 19, 2003, 10:31 AM
I have nothing to add to Barbara's
fine reading of Prieur's Hanging of Foulon [Image
25], which brings out most effectively the disengagement
that attends the image. This is in striking contrast, I feel, to
Prieur's Intendant Bertier de Sauvigny [Image
31], which
is the sequel to his Hanging of Foulon. Here, in the sequel, the
perspective is up-close; the macabre scene is viewed at street
level; the violence is, so to speak, in your face. In the Hanging
of Foulon image we see a crowd lynching a hated official at a distance;
the viewer actually has to look carefully at the image, to scrutinize
it, to know what is happening. This is in contrast to the Intendant
Bertier de Sauvigny image, in which the decapitated head of Foulon
is in the center of the work, with straw stuffed in the mouth.
This contrast should be seen within the context of how prints for
the Tableaux historiques were issued for sale to the public: They
were sold in livrets of two, with accompanying texts. Prieur's
drawing, Bertier de Sauvigny, wasn't engraved and offered for sale
to the public, along with the Hanging of Foulon print, which was
to have preceded it. It seems to me that a reading of the first
of these related images should consider the other as well. The
disengagement of one might be seen as a way to set the stage for
the other, and to drive home its point. We should imagine the two
images appearing together, one next to the other. To do this is
to see the disengagement of one image as a foil for the directness
of the other.
Subject: RE:Response to Warren and Final Remarks
Posted By: Barbara Day-Hickman
Date Posted: July 25, 2003, 1:14 PM
May I make one final riposte to Warren regarding his comments about
the relationship between Prieur's “Hanging of Foulon” [Image
25] and the “Bertier de Sauvigny“ engraving
[Image
31].
While Prieur may have constructed an intentional contrast by using
a “distanced” perspective in the former, and a more gruesome “directness” in
the latter, the formality of the visual narrative in both prints
still disengages the viewer from the horror of the recognition
scene. The “Bertier” print, in particular, describes
a relatively orderly procession, much like the classical relief
of a temple frieze. It would thus seem to emphasize the ritualistic
rather than macabre nature of the event. Furthermore, Christian
statues in the background of the Bertier scene plus the gothic
vertical lines on the church wall suggest the sacrificial implications
of the narrative. The juxtaposition of the head of Foulon and the
Christian statues may not necessarily register an ironic contrast
but rather some sort of religious endorsement of the event. In
other words, the backdrop of Saint-Merry could legitimize the sacrifice
of Foulon and Bertier as an expression of the righteous indignation
of the crowd. Prieur reinforces this idea by showing a purposeful
crowd moving in one direction across the middle ground of the print.
He also softens the impact of crowd violence by including (male)
children who endeavor to emulate the bravado and prowess of the
soldiers and citizens in the foreground. Consequently, despite
the magnification of the “Bertier” narrative, Prieur
nevertheless reduces the impact of crowd violence through the elegance
of his style, the orderliness of the narrative, and the classical
format of his “convoi funèbre.” I would therefore
agree with Lynn that accomplished and pro-revolutionary artists,
such as Prieur, muted the threatening nature of crowd violence
with both style and intention.
Subject: Response to Barbara
Posted By: Warren Roberts
Date Posted: July 28, 2003, 10:33 AM
There is much that I agree with in Barbara's
fine and perceptive reading of Prieur's Bertier de Sauvigny image
[Image
31]. I agree
with her and Lynn when they say that trained, skilled illustrators,
such as Prieur, muted crowd violence, in comparison to illustrators
who did cheap and what one might call more popular images of revolutionary
crowds in action. For Prieur, muting of crowd violence was necessary,
I suspect, given the cost of Tableaux historiques prints and the
audience for which they were intended. The question of disengagement
seems to me to be more problematic, insofar as Prieur's Bertier
image is concerned. Yes, Prieur has brought out the ritualistic
dimension of the procession, but not to see Foulon's head stuck
on a pike with straw stuffed in its mouth as macabre is to pass
over something that seems obvious to me. That head is not only
central to the image compositionally but defines what it is about.
This strikes me as macabre. As for the religious statuary behind
the head of Foulon, is there ironic contrast, as I suggest, or
is there religious endorsement of the event, as Barbara suggests?
Did Prieur set the procession against the background of the church
of Saint Merry and its religious statuary to express religious
endorsement of the crowd's murder of its enemies, which included
decapitation and evisceration of dead bodies? Not, I should think,
in any direct way. I still see an ironic contrast between the crowd
and its trophy in the foreground and the church of Saint Merry
in the background. And I continue to be struck between the contrast
between Prieur's two images, those depicting Foulon's hanging and
a crowd escorting Bertier de Sauvigny to the Place de Grève
[Images 25 and 31].
The contrast between these images is the work of a skilled artist,
not only technically but also in the dramatization of popular violence.
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