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Picturing Violence: Limitations of the
Medium and the Makers
Jack Censer & Lynn Hunt |
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From the very beginning,
then, the crowd had to figure in some fashion in representations
of revolutionary events, especially since “the people” or “the
Nation” was
not posited as the fount of sovereignty. Printmakers faced a
tremendous
challenge trying to capture cascading events while working to
meet publishing deadlines. Little in the
traditional practice of French printmaking prepared them for the task. Unlike
English engravers, who, following William Hogarth, frequently depicted working people, eighteenth-century
French printmakers preferred fine art engraving. French working people appeared
in the paintings of eighteenth-century artists such as Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and
Jean-Baptiste Greuze [see, for example, The Laundress, 1761 at http://www.getty.edu/art/collections/objects/o843.html]
and therefore in prints made of their works, but French art had no eighteenth-century
equivalent to Hogarth who worked as both painter
and engraver and provided narratives of ordinary people in series of interconnected
prints [see, for example, Beer Street and Gin Lane, 1751, at http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu The most widely produced genre of popular prints before the Revolution was known as the “cries of Paris” [http://gallica.bnf.fr/anthologie/notices/00071.htm].2 Dating back to the fourteenth century and updated repeatedly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the “cries” portrayed the dizzying variety of tradesmen and women who hawked their services in the streets of the capital. From knife sharpener to singer and flowerseller, the portrayals were often vivid but changed little over time and consisted mainly of archetypes, omitting customers or other people in the street. Emphasizing the traditional, identifying costumes of each trade, the “cries” almost never depicted action or motion of any kind. No particular emotion, except acceptance of one's lot in life, and of the powers that be, was implied, perhaps because impassivity made the figures less threatening and thus more acceptable to middle class, noble, and clerical purchasers. As idealized and stylized portraits, the cries could not serve as models for the representation of crowd violence after 1789.3 Although such stereotypes had some influence on the depiction of individual members of the lower classes in some prints of the revolutionary epoch, perhaps especially satirical, counterrevolutionary ones, the cries themselves disappeared as a genre during the Revolution, to reappear once again in the early years of the nineteenth century as a version of increasingly nostalgic Parisian folklore.4 In general, the French working classes aroused little interest among writers before the Revolution of 1789. While the English press spilled considerable ink vilifying the “dangerous” classes, French periodicals generally ignored the lower orders. Despite the efforts of Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, and others who penned important memoirs and books about their own experiences of poverty, the eighteenth-century French novel generally focused either on the middling sorts or the aristocracy. Enlightenment writers had looked askance at the lower orders, hoping that their own words about equality would not encourage them. On occasion the peuple did nudge their way into the mental world of the written works that comprised the “public sphere. ” Want ads offered work to domestics and others, but these advertisements sought limited skills, emphasizing deference and good references. Workers also sought job placement through the press. Their tendency to emphasize their laboring skills provided a fleeting profile of their self-image, underlining their irrelevance in the intellectual world created by published works.5
Printmakers could not ignore the laboring classes after 1789. Artisans, shopkeepers, and wage-laborers and their wives, sisters, and daughters powered all the grandes journées: by arming themselves and attacking the Bastille, they forced the king to accommodate the demands of the new National Assembly in July 1789; by marching to Versailles, disrupting the National Assembly, and breaking into the king’s private apartments, they forced the king and the National Assembly to return to Paris in October 1789; by organizing an armed assault on the Tuileries palace in Paris, they insisted that the Legislative Assembly suspend the king in August 1792 and so on. Like journalists, engravers and etchers had to come to terms with the sans-culottes, that is, those who wore the clothing of working people rather than the attire of the upper classes [see, for example, Image 18, “Madame Sans-Culotte,” an image that does show the influence of the traditional cries genre—that influence may be part of what Barbara Day-Hickman identifies as its satirical intent]. Although artists might have lacked for variety and nuance in the tradition of depicting lower class life in motion, they did have clear antecedents for depicting the worst version of mass violence, massacres. Precedents for newspaper illustrations of the September massacres [Image 12] can be found in similar images from the French Wars of Religion of the sixteenth century, such as this depiction of a massacre of Catholics. More than two centuries apart, the images are remarkably similar and tell us something about the representation of extreme violence. In both cases, there is nothing at all symbolic, abstract, or oblique about the delineation of violence. The moment chosen is one of almost complete mayhem, in which bodies, daggers, and swords seem as one in a flailing maelstrom of directly physical attack in which people are hacked and stabbed to death. The handcoloring of swaths of blood in the earlier image only heightens the disturbing physical effect. Both images imply, moreover, that the violence is ongoing, as new victims await their fate as they enter, are pulled, or are chased into the killing courtyard. Neither of these images is meant to be positive about this kind of crowd behavior. This is mob rule at its worst, revealing the potential behind crowd action for the breakdown of all social bonds. Notes 1 For instance, Jean-François Janinet, one of the best-known engravers in color, had previously engraved paintings of Hubert Robert and also produced series of prints of famous actors and actresses playing noted roles in the theater. He also engraved a portrait of Benjamin Franklin. Charles Monnet and Isidore-Stanislas Helman, whose prints are discussed below, both began in the fine arts. Monnet drew erotic mythology, allegories and vignettes before 1789, and Helman worked as an engraver for the duc de Chartres. Some of Helman’s pre-1789 work can be seen in Graveurs français de la seconde moitié du XVIIIeme siècle (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1985), e.g., pp. 62, 66, 67, 68 and 77. 2 On the cries, see (no first name) Massin, Les Cris de la ville. Commerces ambulants et petit metiers de la rue (Paris: Gallimard, 1978). For comparison with England, see Sean Shesgreen, Images of the Outcast:The Urban Poor in the Cries of London (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2002). 3 For the English version of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Panorama of Paris of 1933, the translator had to turn to a series of engravings produced by a German in order to match the rich verbal descriptions of those toiling in Old Regime Paris. In Helen De Guerry Simpson, The Waiting City (1933), most of the images come from engravings by Balthasar Anton Dunker, originally published as Costumes des moeurs de l’esprit francois (1787). 4 Vincent
Milliot, Les Cris de
Paris ou le peuple travesti: Les représentations
des petits métiers parisiens (XVIe -XVIIIe siècles)
(Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1995), especially
pp. 315-327. Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | ||||
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A project of the Center for History & New Media, George Mason University and the Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles for the American Historical Review. |
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