Censer & Hunt: Reflections on Violence and the Crowd in the Images of the French Revolution

Picturing Violence: Limitations of the Medium and the Makers
Jack Censer & Lynn Hunt

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Image 17. Medal: Vivre libre ou mourir [Live Free or Die]

Whether found in paintings, prints, letterhead vignettes, medals, money or on the face of crockery, images of the French Revolution, like all such visual depictions, were meant by their very nature to have some kind of aesthetic value. They could not be sold or widely circulated otherwise. The aesthetics of the image therefore creates inevitable problems for the depiction of crowd violence. Can violence itself be directly represented? Its essential horror seems incompatible with most of the conventions of visual representation, though it could be argued that the images of the September massacres of 1792 [Image 12], published in the newspaper Révolutions de Paris, come close to capturing that horror.

Violence can be suggested by various visual means, and even the obliqueness of its portrayal can be instructive. The medal, Vivre libre ou mourir [Live free or die, Image 17], for instance, evokes the desperate fervor of the revolutionaries with the symbols of popular force, the Roman fasces and the Roman liberty cap, but these are abstract symbols and not depictions of real people, much less of death. Like many revolutionary images, this medal aims to incorporate and obliterate simultaneously the reference to violence; by incorporating that threat it both reproduces the emotion it evokes and softens it by framing it in aesthetic terms.

Prints of the fall of the Bastille, though more direct in their representation of violence, still expressed considerable ambiguity about that violence. Engravers and painters apparently did not want to sully this foundational moment with too much blood and gore. The images often emphasize the hugeness of the prison-fortress [see, for example, Image 28]. Images produced in the immediate aftermath of the attack typically rendered violence in stylized fashion; men are shown carrying pikes, muskets, shovels, and scythes and dead bodies litter the ground but the actual killing takes place either elsewhere or earlier [Image 13]. The attack occurs largely out of sight. Gun smoke emerges in the foreground but mainly on the other side of a building on a distant rooftop. The figures are stick-like, seeming only to walk toward the action. The only activity in this rather still panorama comes from a soldier leaning on a cannon and another individual, likely a noncombatant, ready to embrace other happy spectators. These are the only emotions apparent. The Bastille seems to be falling to a largely immobile and disengaged mass. Clearly artists envisioned the event as momentous, but they did not dwell on the violence of the event.

Popular violence and death appear in more explicit form in the images of the killings of Foulon de Doué and Bertier de Sauvigny. A little more than a week after the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 an angry Parisian crowd massacred both Joseph-François Foulon de Doué and his son-in-law, Louis-Jean Bertier de Sauvigny. As prominent officials in the king’s government, they were rumored to be plotting the starvation of Paris. In his essay in this collection, Warren Roberts discusses two of these prints [Images 25 and 31], both of them drawn by Jean-Louis Prieur. We focus instead on Image 2, an anonymous print that has none of the architectural framing so noticeable in Prieur’s work. It may well be that the second of the Prieur prints [Image 31] did not make it into the Tableaux historiques series, as Roberts notes, because it was too forthright in its depiction of violence. It captures the terrible moment when Bertier is presented with the decapitated head of his father-in-law, its mouth stuffed with straw. After hanging Foulon from a lamp-post, the crowd cut off his head and stuffed straw in his mouth because, in a previous famine, Foulon had reportedly said that the people could always eat grass.


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

“Le Supplice du Sieur Foulon” [Punishment of Foulon, Image 2] depicts the mob dragging the dead body of Foulon through the streets while exhibiting his head on a pike. The moment of death itself is not depicted, but the violence is still far from over. The men at the front visibly strain to pull the body along the cobblestone street. Blood appears to be still flowing from the severed neck and also from the head on the pike. A woman and a man raise stones in the air, no doubt with the aim of further mutilating the body. A dog leans toward the corpse, perhaps indirectly suggesting a kind of cannibalism. But individual faces are difficult to discern, and the crowd melds into a seemingly immobile mass. Strangely, onlookers from a nearby building appear disproportionately large and totally passive. Is their presence meant to render the scene a curiosity rather than an act of revolutionary retribution? Or is their disproportionate size merely an indication of the haste with which the image was likely produced?

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