Participatory Violence

Image 29. Prise de la Bastille, le 14 Juillet 1789 [Seizure of the Bastille, July 14, 1789]

The rubric of “participatory violence” applies to numerous revolutionary images, including many of those dealing with the July 14^th attack on the Bastille.24  In participatory violence, people are shown in acts of violence against other persons and/or against property.  Of those works depicting the actual attack on the Bastille, Charles Thévenin’s etching, Prise de la Bastille le 14 Juillet 1789 (Paris, Musée Carnavalet),25 completed in 1790—the painting [Image 29], which reverses the print, was exhibited Salon 1795—is unquestionably the most powerful, in large part because the violent action is privileged over the rendering of the building itself, an example of the centripetal focus on figural action.  As in the case of so many history paintings produced by the artists of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, it is the human figures that engage our attention.  Against a background of armed insurgents marching into the courtyard of the Bastille, a succession of violent acts are performed.  In the painting, a cannon explodes on the right (a threat to property and man); a soldier is about to have his throat pierced by the bayonet of an insurrectionary; the marquis de Launay, governor of the Bastille, is pulled and menaced by several men, identified as the grenadier Arné and the clock-maker Humbert.26  These episodes are balanced on the left by the effects of violence: a dying officer, posed like Benjamin West’s Wolfe, slumped over a sprawling corpse.27  Behind two standing officers who urge restraint is a wounded, disheveled man, assisted by another officer. Rather than focusing on a single confrontation with de Launay, as might have been the case in an academic history painting, Thévenin chose to combine multiple incidents to suggest the tumult of the attack on the Bastille.

Through the powerful corporeality of the insurgents’ figures, their menacing expressions, and their decisive movements, the twenty-six-year-old Thévenin, a student of the academician François-André Vincent and a future winner of the Prix de Rome in 1791, was able to convey the sense of urgency, of force, and of the action of the crowd, as well as the sense of time: past, present, and future.28  According to the Moniteur of March 7, 1790, “the terrible and true expression which reigns throughout” [“l’expression terrible et vraie qui règne partout”] convinced the viewer that the artist was a “witness and actor in this scene” [“témoin et acteur dans cette scène”].29  But it is not only through terrible expressions that the artist suggested that he was a first-hand viewer of the struggle within the Bastille, it is the very composition itself with its shallow foreground that stresses the proximity of the scene to us as beholders and thereby makes us close witnesses to the action in the second courtyard of the fortress.30  A review that appeared in the Journal de Paris on March 1, 1790 gives us some idea of the contemporary reception of the work: “it appears to us to merit esteem both from the point of view of art and that of the subject it represents” [“elle nous paroît mériter de l’estime du côté de l’art & du sujet qu’elle représente”].31  In appreciating the print for both its artistic merit as well as its subject, this reviewer clearly understood how Thévenin adapted academic principles to elevate the action of a contemporary event.  When the painting was exhibited at the 1795 Salon, one critic lauded the work for possessing “the merit of great picturesque machines” [“le mérite des grandes machines pittoresques”], the term “grandes machines” referring to the large-scale history paintings that usually adorned the walls of the Salon.32  And we note that in keeping with academic decorum, blood has no place in either the print or painting.

	Image 2. Supplice du Sieur Foulon. [Punishment of Foulon]

That sense of proximity to the action is equally present in the print entitled Torture of Foulon [Image 2] by an unidentified artist.  The execution of Joseph-François Foulon, the recently created Finance Minister, who was unsympathetic to the financial burden that the increased bread prices had placed on the people, occurred on July 22, 1789.33  Dragged to the place de Grève and the rue Mouton, Foulon was beheaded, after three failed attempts to hang him.  The crowd then paraded the head on a pike with the mouth stuffed with hay (an allusion to Foulon’s own declaration about making the people eat hay).

The moderately skillful, anonymous printmaker had some familiarity with academic compositional practices34 but went beyond academic decorum by showing the beheaded body with its bloody neck facing the viewer. (In fact, an Academy artist would probably have selected the moment before Foulon’s death.)  This engraving, as well as Pierre-Gabriel Berthault’s print after the drawing by Jean-Louis Prieur of the same subject [Image 25],35 is a good illustration of both participatory and complicit violence.  While some members of the crowd, both male and female, are actually performing the stoning and the dragging, others remain passive observers, followers, or simply supporters of these gruesome activities.  In the anonymously-executed print, the stoning of that degraded body, while real, also alludes to the stoning of St. Stephen, and as such, may well indicate disapproval of this execution.  The politics of the printmaker is presently unknown but potentially could be recovered since the small print (0.144m x 0.087m) displays a “No.2” in the left corner and “page 20” in the right suggesting that it was one of several illustrations to a pamphlet or a book, as yet unidentified.

Image 26. Pillage de la Maison de St. Lazare, le lundi 13 Juillet 1789 [Pillage of the St. Lazare House, Monday July 13, 1789]

Similar combinations of active and passive actors can be found in any number of images, including several other Berthault/Prieur prints, such as Pillage de la Maison de St. Lazare [Image 26]36 which depicts the crowd who invaded that religious establishment on July 13th, ostensibly for grain.  But the activity has extended beyond securing the bags of grain, visible on the right in the street.  Men and women within the building throw out mattresses, tables, and other furnishings, which are being removed by some people in the street below, while others, on the left, simply observe the destruction.  Indeed, they seem to be awaiting their turn to share in the spoils. That combination of participatory and complicit actors is equally visible in the print by Isidore-Stanislas Helman after Charles Monnet’s drawing entitled Journée du Ier Prairial de l’an III [Image 16], originally plate number 12 of a series entitled Principales journées.  With the viewers on the second floor of the National Convention observing the tumult below, the ground floor is invaded by a crowd of men and women demanding “bread and the constitution,” their threats punctuated by the gesture of one holding up the dismembered head of deputy Féraud to the Convention president, Boissy d’Anglas.37

Notes