Landes: Representing Women in the Revolutionary Crowd

The electronic archive prepared for this forum includes several French and one foreign print portraying two critical events where women played a central role: the journées of 5-6 October 1789 and 20 May 1795 (1 Prairial Year III in the revolutionary calendar). In addition, interesting perspectives on revolutionary women appear in two prints addressing the July 1789 events during which the Parisian crowd murdered the king's official Joseph François Foulon. In what follows, I confine my discussion primarily to an analysis of some of the works on display in this archive. I also benefited from the insights of the other participants in determining how images embedded structures of meaning and served as principal communication vehicles for the period.

The Fourth Incident of October 5, 1789 [4e Évenément du 5 Octobre 1789: Les Femmes Parisiennes siegeant à l’Assemblée Nationale parmi leur Députés] [Image 5] is a marvelous representation of the invasion of the National Assembly at Versailles by the market women of Paris. The print captures the stunning role reversals that occurred during this episode when common women usurped men’s privileged place at the bar of the Assembly and crowded onto the floor of the hall. In the process, women upset the proper gender order whereby men take precedence over women. In addition, their actions challenged the newly won political contract, in which representatives took precedence over the governed. As the commotion on the floor of the Assembly demonstrates, for a brief moment the still entrenched class order of privilege, property, wealth, and education was unable to trump the rights of common laborers; masculinity did not outrank femininity. Thus, the print partakes of familiar representations of carnival, in which high and low, sacred and profane exchange positions, with the expectation that ultimately things will return to normal. But the image also communicates how much these circumstances deviate from tradition: This is a deadly serious matter, with enormous consequences for the political fate of the nation.

In numerous details, the political and social stakes of the women's actions are underscored. Leaning on weighty, official volumes, a male speaker at the bar of the Assembly, on the platform to the right, motions at a female orator. To his immediate right, and also before another weighty book signifying the law, his colleague scowls menacingly at the women, while other men at the central podium and in the hall engage in lively discussions with the market women. The female protagonists are distinguished by their dress from the female observers in the galleries, who wear more elaborate, brimmed hats rather than the bonnets of the common people. But even these spectators are stirred by the upheaval on the floor. They are shown straining to see better what is occurring below, while also in debate with their male companions. On the floor, another contrast is emphasized between the law, possessed by men, and the (unauthorized) poissarde speech of the probably illiterate fishwives.10 The woman speaking to the crowd, at the far left of the image but actually located on the Assembly's central axis, is leaning on a large tome, either another law book or, possibly, the records of the Assembly's earlier sessions produced by the seated male secretary to her left. But this closed book has a different signification than the books under the male speaker's hand. Resting his left hand solemnly on a book while raising his right hand, the speaker's gesture recalls the oath-taking ceremony of the deputies of the new nation at the Tennis Courts of Versailles, just months earlier: the dramatic action that inaugurated the new National Assembly. In contrast, the woman speaker seems indifferent to the book, which serves only to prop her up as she leans forward, as if over the counter of a market stall where she regularly hawks her goods. As in the marketplace, her immediate audience is composed of women, the first row of the audience directly to her front. In the foreground, other women talk amongst themselves, and another implores the male speaker on the podium. A third takes on a group of men, one of whom seems almost chivalrously attentive, while her informally seated compatriote listens with interest.

While this scene spells the tumultuous impact of crowd action, there is no hint of the crowd's violent potential; nor does there seem to be a prescribed script. This image carries nothing of the nineteenth-century perspective on la foule or la canaille, nor does it ostensibly manipulate deep-seated suspicions about the violent, inconstant, seditious and credulous nature of le peuple. The women are not portrayed as acting with one mind: contra nineteenth-century renderings, noted by Jack Censer and Lynn Hunt, they are not represented as composing one mythic, unified body.11 Notwithstanding their troubling actions, the print portrays them in a quite sympathetic manner, as self-authorized and self-authorizing individuals, acting on behalf of their own interests, which are at once those of the nation as well. Thus, Image 5 is an excellent example of the manner in which women's protest during the October Days came to be embraced as part of a celebratory narrative of Revolution. The print's non-incendiary title supports this benign reading of the events depicted here. As the title so matter-of-factly states, this is the fourth episode of an unfolding plot, presumably the story of the French nation achieving its freedom. As with any of the prints collected here, additional research might reveal whether the image belonged originally to a bound series and when it was published. It would also be useful to compare this particular print to other representations of the same event in folio editions of “principaux évenéments” or “tableaux historiques” by known artists; and, to investigate whether other series similarly label this moment as the “fourth event.” However, all of these questions are prompted by the visual evidence, which by itself points in the direction of a commemorative work produced to recuperate the crowd's action within an accepted, perhaps even official, version of events.12

A different version of the events at Versailles, at once celebratory and menacing, is offered in A Memorable Day at Versailles, October 5, 1789. [La Journée mémorable de Versailles, le lundi 5 Octobre 1789] [Image 7]. The print’s caption reads: “Dans cette émeute générale plusieurs Gardes du Corps ont été Massacrés, deux d’entre eux furent Décollés et leurs têtes portées en Triomphe par ce même peuple ami de la liberté.” [“In this general riot several body guards were massacred, two among them were decapitated and their heads carved—triumphs by the people, who claim to be friends of liberty.”] And thus, on their return to Paris in October 1789, referred to in the caption as a “general riot” where a “massacre” has occurred at their hands, the triumphant marchers are depicted as holding aloft on pikes the severed heads of two fallen members of the royal guard at Versailles. Like image 5, this print offers viewers a report of the events. Its documentary value consists in the central representation, to which the title and caption also contribute. On the one hand, the print’s title is not particularly revealing: and, as we will see, “journées memorables” were routine descriptors for events throughout the Revolution. On the other hand, adjoined to an image linking violence and triumph, massacre and liberty, the title also triggers memories in viewers of the awful stakes to be suffered by those who intercede against the people’s march toward liberty. While the image celebrates the triumph of the people, it thus invites a certain distance from the bloody acts executed by these friends of liberty. Heads on pikes do warn onlookers that the people’s justice is as awesome as the king’s. The people, too, will not hesitate to sacrifice life for a just cause.

Even before the increased use of the guillotine during the Terror, the severed head (depicted in Image 7) was a widely exploited synecdoche for the threatening possibilities of crowd justice. For example, through a vocabulary of severed body parts, Punishment of Foulon [Supplice de Foulon] [Image 2] records the chilling murders of the king's ministers Foulon and Bertier de Sauvigny.13 To return to Image 7, it is odd that this depiction of the celebrated actions at Versailles in October 1789 includes only one woman, even though women were widely acknowledged to have been the initiators and participants of these events. In place of a head atop a pike, this female figure carries a tree branch, evoking the traditional imagery of the maypole associated with riotous behavior. Significantly, too, she is at the front of the line of marchers, and her leadership works to confirm the crowd's wild nature as well as the topsy-turvy nature of crowd action, where even a woman can be “on top”.14 Attesting to women's taste for violence, moreover, the woman swirls around, her back to the viewer, in order to look again at the men and their horrific trophies. The fact that the liberty tree imagery was not yet fully established at the time of these events, as well as the print's ambivalent attitude toward its subject, suggests that the print may well have been created after the events, perhaps near the time of the 1790 criminal investigation of the October violence by the government's Châtelet Commission.

In yet another representation of these events, Memorable Day at Versailles, Monday, October 5, 1789 [Journée memorable de Versailles, le lundi 5 Octobre] [Image 6], the female marchers are referred to as modern-day Amazons. The caption reads: “Nos Modernes Amazones glorieuses de leurs Victoires revinrent à Cheval sur les Canons, avec plusieurs Messieurs de la Garde Nationale, tenant des branches de Peupliers au bruit des cris réitérés de Vive la Nation, Vive le Roi.” [Our modern Amazons, glorying in their victories, return on horse and with cannons along with the gentleman of the National Guard, hold poplar branches to the sound of repeated cries of Vive la Nation, Vive le Roi.] Not looking anything like the bare-breasted female warriors of ancient lore, these modern Amazonians are depicted happily enjoying their victories, in the company of several National Guardsmen. Their support of the Revolution is evinced in the poplar branches, but any threat they might pose is recuperated in shouts linking the health of the nation with that of the king. In fact, both revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries exploited the Amazonian trope for their own purposes. Among the Revolution’s opponents, women’s martial actions were intimately connected to the crowd’s cannibalism – its taste for violence and its revolting preference for the severed head. In contrast, by conferring honor on the Amazons, the caption embraces the market women’s patriotism and applauds their victorious actions.15

As we have seen, Image 7, A Memorable Day at Versailles, is an ambivalent representation: While seeming to affirm the Revolution, especially at the level of the caption, Image 7 is haunted by the negative connection between cannibalism and amazonianism, and it taps into deep-seated fears of uncontrolled women. But the transgression of moral law and political authority unleashed by the Revolution is also presented visually in the more positive Image 6, where one of the glorious Amazons leans affectionately against a Guardsman, while another is depicted seated upon a cannon barrel. These compositional details appear as nothing more than an accidental association between sexual and political license, or, as Vivian Cameron suggested, “as a sexualization, and thereby trivialization, of the political actions of the women during the October days … as flirtatious dalliance in the rococo sense.” 16 However, from another perspective, the connection is far less casual, given the frequent charge by the opposition that among the marchers were loose women, prostitutes.17 Also, the woman astride the cannon suggests the threatening usurpation of male power so routinely attributed to Amazonian femmes-hommes: monstrous, unnatural women who have stepped outside of their proper place. Viewed this way, the skirts and modest attire of these women only partially conceal their phallic threat.

In contrast, there is no question about the respectability of the well-dressed female figure standing on the left. An observer, not a direct participant, she is accompanied by a man of her own class. In fact, he seems to be pulling her backwards, away from too intimate an association with the parading women. This onlooker complements the modern Amazons. Whether supporter or just interested bystander, she bespeaks the reassuring possibility that Revolution and female virtue can coexist and female deference to male authority can be preserved. More ambivalent is the enthusiastic male sans-culotte, shown prancing happily alongside the central figures. Indeed, his exuberant gestures appear to block the woman's view and her closer approach to the returning marchers.

A foreign print devoted to the October Days unabashedly points to the disturbing implications of women’s political action – not only for the French, but potentially for Germans as well. In Parisian Fishwives [Pariser Poisarden sonst Fisch Weiber] [Image 19], the youthful figure of Liberty is grouped with her martial Others – an older woman, with hag-like features, dressed for combat like Minerva in a feathered helmet, with pitch-fork, and a second market woman, carrying a pike, who helped bring the king and the government back to Paris.18 Both of these fishwives have rather stern, if not downright mean, expressions on their faces. Equally disturbing, their gaze is focused squarely on the innocent-appearing and beautiful young Liberty. In the background, old fishwives dance as if possessed, calling to mind not so remote ideas about women’s diabolical nature.

Several of the print's features suggest that the dream of freedom is being held hostage to darker, unsettling forces: the menacing clouds, the over-looming size of the main figures against the diminished buildings, the contrast between Liberty's white dress and the darker garb of the two other central protagonists, as well as the disparity between youth and old age. What is worse, Liberty's hand is grasped firmly by her more martial companion, suggesting Liberty's captivity or domination by the old hag. In striking contrast to the French print, Image 7, A Memorable Day at Versailles, where women are surprisingly few in number, here it is the men that are altogether absent. No National Guardsmen accompany these women or interfere with the print's central message concerning the danger posed by women acting alone in public space. As Suzanne Zantop revealed, “A close reading of newspaper reports of both popular and ‘high’ literature indicates that many German intellectuals, irrespective of their political bent, feared that the bare-breasted [sic.] ‘Liberty’ - in whom the images of fury and antique goddesses are fused with that of the New World warrior woman - would not only walk over dead bodies, but cross the borders, literally and metaphorically.”19 Shrewdly, the printmaker appears to side with liberty, and asks the viewer to do so as well, while simultaneously repudiating liberty's French translation. The figure Liberty's innocence allows her to stand before the German public as a woman; but once the allegory of liberty is taken up and enacted by women of the popular classes, she is portrayed as a sinister, coarse-looking fishwife. For German onlookers, then, Liberty is both endangered and dangerous.

A post-Thermidorian French engraving also expresses ambivalence toward the crowd of women, workers, and unemployed men who stormed the National Convention in May 1795 (1 Prairial Year III), demanding bread and the return to the Constitution of 1793. Executed by the skilled engraver Isidore Helman after the accomplished artist Charles Monnet, Day of 1 Prairial, Year III [Journée du1er Prairial de l’an IIIe] [Image 16] captures the second and last of these events, during which time the Parisian poor—including very large numbers of women—protested their loss of political power and demanded redress from market speculators, inadequate food supplies, and price controls, which together constituted the increasingly harsh economic circumstances of this period. Following the two insurrections of Germinal and Prairial, women’s political rights were further circumscribed by the authorities: women were now banned even from attending the galleries of political assemblies, thus compounding restrictions on their right to vote, stand for election, or participate in political clubs or societies, previously implemented during the constitutional monarchy and the early republic. Remonstrating alongside men of the popular classes for economic justice and political equality, this portrayal of Parisian women bears witness to the impact on popular consciousness of five years of Revolution, and commemorates what turned out to be perhaps the last intervention by women in national politics until the middle of the next century as well as a climactic moment for working class intervention during the Revolution. Through the raised hands of participants and the crush of countless bodies, the scene simultaneously evokes the people’s jubilant spirit and its impending defeat.

The Monnet/Helman print walks a fine line between, on the one hand, reporting on women's prominence in this explosive journée, and, on the other hand, underscoring the disturbing consequences of their actions. The engraving describes the day in an almost journalistic manner. By use of architectural elements and a wide perspective, the print succeeds in impressing viewers with the vast size of the crowd. Necessarily a snapshot view of just one moment within one episode, the image nonetheless conveys a sense of movement: Beginning from the right side of the print where the crowd is immense, but its members indistinguishable, the people flood into the foreground and left side of the print, where a host of identifiable subjects emerge. There is no mistaking the fact that the crowd that captured the Convention on 1 Prairial was exceedingly large and extremely forceful. Also, even at its least intelligible, the crowd is presented as being less inchoate than articulated—moving as a body to produce the individual actors who command center-stage at the Convention.

The print’s caption directs the viewer’s attention to the violent side of popular action, specifically, the crowd’s assassination of the deputy Ferraud who had opposed their invasion of the Convention. In fact, the caption functions to draw the viewer into the game of closer examination to find evidence in the print of the assassination; thereby skillfully orienting the viewer’s attention to the issue of violence rather than politics. But what viewer is implied by this game? The relative expense of this fine engraving by established artists, as well as the caption’s address to a literate audience, suggests a great deal about the people for whom it was intended. A collectible print designed for moderate republicans of some means, this representation could then serve the collector as a commemoration within a larger story.

Thus, in this retrospective image from a published series, a raucous moment of popular insurrection is tamed: framed as one of many historical episodes in the emerging narrative of an achieved Revolution. The print's perspective distances the viewer from the scene. The setting of political upheaval and violence, and the link between women and the crowd, reinforces inherited notions of unruliness attributed to the people and women. While documenting a chaotic moment of democratic upheaval, during which the people briefly took back the assembly from their representatives, the print strikes a discordant note: In the right foreground, a woman (her back to the viewer) bends forward, straining to see or hear the commotion in the distance (center image), where one man holds upside down by a foot what appears to be the dead body of Ferraud. In the left foreground, a distraught couple makes its way out of the Convention, the man's head bowed and eyes covered at the horrible scene they have apparently just witnessed. There are multiple points of view within the image, just as the print affords the viewer numerous points of identification. Even so, the print effectively invites a sense of quiet to silence the noisy madness, a desire to restore what has been disrupted, to remember without moving backward, to honor the Revolution without embracing too closely its least defensible acts. And to the extent that pandemonium is associated with women's presence in the crowd, then perhaps it is not too far-fetched to conclude that a more rational, calm, and measured revolution might exclude women from such a central role.

10 On poissarde speech as a literary and theatrical tradition, see Carla Hesse, The Other Enlightenment, ch. 1.

11 Jack Censer and Lynn Hunt, “Imaging the French Revolution: Depictions of the French Revolutionary Crowd,” above.

12 I use the word “official” advisedly, given the rapidly changing, complex political alignments and circumstances during the revolutionary decades. What was “official” in 1792 was not the same as in 1798 or 1812, the publication dates of some of the best known collections of “tableaux.”

13 In my current studies of eighteenth-century French artificial life, I address further many issues concerning the body part. For a preview, see my unpublished “Presidential Lecture,” American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies, Boston, 2004. For an influential perspective on the body in French revolutionary studies, see Dorinda Outram, The Body in the French Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

14 For the classic statement of this aspect of carnival, see Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women on Top” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975).

15 On the Amazon, see my Visualizing the Nation, pp. 91-98, 151.

17 And, indeed, much was made in the counterrevolutionary press of Théroigne de Méricourt's previous life as a courtesan. See the account of her life by Elisabeth Roudinesco, Théroigne de Méricourt (Paris: Seuil, 1989).

18 I agree with Vivian Cameron's suspicion that stylistically this anonymous German image is more reminiscent of nineteenth-century works, and may well have been produced in the 1830s. “Discussion,” question 2 www.chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/ imaging/discussion/archived/q2/
cameron0706.html

19 Suzanne Zantop, “Crossing the Border: The French Revolution in the German Literary Imagination,” in Representing the French Revolution: Literature, Historiography, and Art, ed. James A. W. Heffernan (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1992), p. 214.