Landes: Representing Women in the Revolutionary Crowd

A comparison of two prints depicting the violence exhibited by the crowd on a royal official in July 1789 offers a closer look at how themes of crowd violence, popular justice, and gender were differently represented. The previously mentioned anonymous print, Punishment of Foulon [Supplice de Foulon] [Image 2] and Punishment of Foulon at the Place de Grève [Supplice de Foulon à la Place de Grève, le 23 Juillet 1789] [Image 25], a 1792 print by Jean-Louis Prieur, both associate the actions of a mixed crowd with the hanging, decapitation, and mutilation of the body of Foulon. Yet there are considerable differences in how these prints portray women's role in and responsibility for the violence. In the anonymous print, the head of Foulon is carried on a pike; while in the foreground, one man points a musket into the chest of the dead man's headless corpse, which is being dragged along the road by members of the crowd. Simultaneously, two other crowd members—one male, one female—are shown raising paving stones above their heads, aimed at the corpse. Yet only the woman is posed frontally, facing toward the print's viewer; in contrast, the male figure is seen entirely from the rear, his facial expressions hidden. This staging calls attention to the woman's overly enthusiastic gestures and grimace: She, rather than the man, represents the crowd at its most irrational. Even the man with the musket seems tame in comparison: he could be interpreted as simply holding down the lifeless body, whereas she threatens to violate further an already torn corpse; to smash it into an indecipherable mess. To an important degree, then, the anonymous artist succeeds in personalizing the crowd's action, attributing individual responsibility where there would otherwise be only collective unreason. Even though the artist portrays more intimately several male figures and at least one other woman in the crowd surrounding the impending stoning of the corpse, the centrality of the stone-lifting woman associates female fanaticism with the most irrational and violent dimension of crowd action. If this is popular justice, the print asks, what are its costs? Does the presence of women contribute to—perhaps, even necessitate—the occurrence of an extra-legal form of justice?

In contrast, Prieur stages the event from a distance (aesthetically and politically), emphasizing the size of the crowd filling the imposing Place de Grève. Carefully recording the architectural aspects of the scene, Prieur chooses not to focus in closely on any particular participants. He resists the temptation to fictionalize for the sake of narrative, the very liberty taken perhaps by the anonymous printmaker. Prieur’s decision, however, raises the question of whether he was consciously trying, as Warren Roberts suggests, to legitimize the people’s role in the Revolution? In other words, what work is done by his apparent decision to distance the observer from a closer look at the awful actions of the crowd, and, again, does the gender composition of the crowd matter?

Indeed, Prieur’s print portrays the revolutionary crowd as overwhelmingly male, though generational differences among the men are noted: there are youths, for example, in the two groups of three in the foreground. Women are not altogether absent, however: A few caps demarcate their scattered presence among the crowd, and they are included among the spectators peering out from the buildings surrounding the square. Given what is known about Prieur’s politics and the strong republican political landscape of 1792, Cameron is not at all surprised to find him including women within a representation of the people. Yet she reads the women as complicit in the surrounding scene of violence. Here, I believe, a comparison of Images 2 and 25 is helpful. Whereas the anonymous artist made a woman out to be the central actor in the troubling episode, Prieur’s attitude is more difficult to discern; suggesting perhaps greater ambivalence on his part about the very act of representation in the manner proposed by Lynn Hunt. In her words, “the very fact of sketching and engraving images [of violence] that have some kind of status as art entails a certain minimization of these violent qualities that threaten to dissolve all forms of order. So what is truly wonderful about the images is that they often capture, if only inadvertently, the fundamental ambivalence that many people must have felt about the crowd as something not entirely rational, bent on a form of justice that was not particularly attractive, and yet a fact of revolutionary politics that simply could not be wished away.”20

I would add, however, that the women in Prieur's print occupy a congruent structural position to the print's implied viewers: Interested but not directly involved in the act of violence. Furthermore, this position is itself one of ambivalence: It returns us to Cameron's question, e.g., how implicated is the spectator? In the anonymous print, Image 2, there is also a female spectator on an adjacent building's balcony: a considerably more respectable and sedate woman than her stone-throwing counterpart. But this onlooker's proximity to the lamppost, where Foulon was hung, underscores two of the print's central motifs, the disturbing association between enthusiasm and fanaticism, and between female enthusiasm and violence or madness.21 Thus, the visual provocation is more direct in the anonymous work than in Prieur's image: If the female bystander's ostensibly dispassionate gaze merely disguises her interested, possibly even sadistic, pleasure in the scene of violence, does that mean that the print's viewers are implicated as well?

The barking dog in the foreground of the anonymous print echoes the woman's fanatic behavior. Her dress, gestures, behavior, and location underscore her place among the common people. So if both artists suggest a class division between those directly at the scene and the more respectable onlookers, the anonymous printmaker emphatically captures the ambivalence that arises when women—and especially women of the popular classes—are directly involved in politics. By following Hunt's point that this print captures much of the ambivalence suppressed in George Rudé's and other historical studies of the crowd, then we need to go further to ask, whose ambivalence is being expressed? Perhaps what seems to be the more direct, spontaneous, and immediate representation of the events is also coded, like Prieur's, with gender as well as class assumptions. To interpret these conventions, we need recourse to recent scholarship on revolutionary women in addition to nineteenth-century arguments about the crowd and their reinterpretation by George Rudé, Albert Soboul, or Charles Tilly, Hunt reminds us.22 Finally, we might ask whether Prieur was trying—in response to what appear to be eighteenth-century versions of Le Bon or Taine's animosity toward popular action—to legitimate the people's role in the Revolution by distancing the viewer from a more direct view of/confrontation with the crowd's actions and excising simultaneously any traces of the crowd's female members and emphasizing its masculine character?

21 On the theme of enthusiasm in philosophy, culture and the visual arts, see Mary Sheriff's important new work, Moved by Love: Inspired Artists and Deviant Women in Eighteenth-Century France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

22 In addition to sources earlier cited, see Albert Soboul, The Sans-Culottes: The Popular Movement and Revolutionary Government, 1793-1794, trans. Rémy Inglis Hall (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972); George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959); Harriet B. Applewhite and Darlene Levy, “Women, Radicalization, and the Fall of the French Monarchy” in their edited collection Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990).