Image 9. French Democrats surprizing the Royal Runaways. Published June 27, 1791

Those opposed to the French Revolution felt more comfortable depicting crowd violence because its very portrayal served as a form of condemnation. English, German, and Dutch engravers produced anti-revolutionary imagery of great variety, and the English, in particular, excelled at caricatures, or political cartoons.10 In “French Democrats Surprizing the Royal Runaways” [Image 9], English satirist James Gillray clearly aimed to castigate the revolutionaries. In the scene depicted, revolutionaries barge into the room in the village of Varennes in northeastern France where the royal couple is being held in custody. Louis XVI had fled in disguise on June 21, 1791, seeking to reach the border and a friendly army. Apprehended only a few miles away from safety, the print shows the king awaiting his fate. In actuality, the local authorities treated the royal family with respect, but outside the room threatening crowds gathered. The print brings this tense situation into sharp relief with the revolutionaries pointing muskets, a sword, a dagger, a hammer and even a broom at them. Most expressive of royal vulnerability is the dauphin, who lying with his rear in the air, resembles a pig about to be stuck by a bayonet thrust toward him. The members of the crowd, in typical cartoon fashion, appear as stereotypes, but they are still individualized. And the whole scene depicts motion. The king and queen seem startled, uncertain of what to do, as they tentatively raise their hands. In short, this caricature gives individuality, power, and initiative to the crowd, even while portraying them as enraged.

	Image 21. Président d'un Comité Révolutionnaire, après la levée d'un sceau [President of a Revolutionary Committee after the Seals are Removed]

Far less biting is the French print of “The President of a Revolutionary Committee after the Seals are Removed” [Image 21]. The printmaker focuses on the moment after the act has occurred. The revolutionary official is shown leaving a sequestered residence with his booty, resembling a common thief. The menace of violence depicted by Gillray is only implied here. The official appears to be taking very measured steps away from the victim's house. In fact, the print image, in its simple lines and focus on just one person, reminds one of the “cries” genre. The “president” looks very much like a tradesman. Instead of the tools of a trade, his pockets are stuffed with stolen silverware, while one hand holds more of the same and the other grasps a bowl or plate. The scene contains no background and no other person. Contemporaries must have seen it as a stinging commentary on current (or just past) politics using a very old tradition of representation.

Caricature could only have a paradoxical role in the French Revolution. Although at heart a “popular” genre in its gestures toward vulgarity, it was employed with most success by anti-revolutionary printmakers who wanted to call attention to the dangers inherent in crowds and popular participation in politics. Caricature was best suited to oppositional politics and was virtually incompatible with any kind of commemorative intent. During the first three years of the French Revolution, pro-revolutionary printmakers produced startling caricatures of nobles, monks and nuns, courtiers and the royal family. After the fall of Robespierre, caricature revived as a genre in France, now deployed to criticize the nouveaux riches and others who had seized the occasion offered by constant warfare and political turbulence to rise to the top of society. But in 1793-1794, at the zenith of the Terror as a form of government, caricature disappeared in France, the victim along with novels and many newspapers, of the fear, if not the reality, of political censorship.11 Only the rather ponderous “realistic” and commemorative images of printmakers such as Helman [Image 14] gained official favor. Until the 1830s, consequently, French caricaturists never really challenged their English rivals for mastery in the field.

Even this brief analysis of images of crowd violence shows that the conflicts over political meaning took place in the arena of visual culture as much as in the printed word. It is impossible to read printed images as simply “illustrations” of events known primarily through verbal description. Prints had their own political grammar, syntax, and rhetoric that require as much study as verbal political discourse. As we have seen in the essays here, historians now treat images seriously as sources in their own right. They have learned many of the methods necessary to analyzing them and now include them more systematically in interpretations and explanations of the French Revolution. Things could be “said” in the visual media that could not be expressed verbally. Foremost among these things was the deep ambivalence of the educated classes about the revolutionary crowd. The crowd's participation was critical to both the success and the failure of the Revolution; without the crowd, there would not have been a revolution, but containing the crowd's violence also provided a major justification for the Terror. The crowd had to appear therefore in prints of important revolutionary events, but the crowd also had to be tamed in the very process of its representation.

Notes