Take away the popular revolution of July 1789 and the French Revolution is no longer the French Revolution.  It was popular uprisings in July that drove the Revolution in directions that no one at the time could have anticipated, and once the people intervened in the Revolution they became part of the revolutionary dynamic.  In that dynamic, popular violence was of crucial importance.  As Lynn Hunt has put it, “Popular violence defined the French Revolution.[It] pushed the Revolution forward, but it also threatened to dissolve it in an acid wash of blood, vengeance, and anarchic disorder.”1

Two illustrations by Jean-Louis Prieur depicting related events that took place in July 1789 suggest possible uses of images for historians who want to understand popular violence in the specific time and place of its initial eruption.2  These images depict the hanging of Foulon de Doué at the Place de Grève on July 22 [Image 25] and a crowd taking Bertier de Sauvigny to the Place de Grève later in the day [Image 31], where he too was hanged.  These events are well known to historians.  Prieur's tableaus add nothing factual to what historians know about the killing of these two royal officials.  The question is, how might these images further understanding of the events they depict, and more largely, what might they say about popular violence in the French Revolution?  In the discussion that follows I will draw from an earlier study in which I examined these images; as in my earlier study I will place the images in the specific context in which the events they depict took place.3

	Image 25. Supplice de Foulon à la Place de Grève, le 23 Juillet 1789. [Punishment of Foulon at the Place de Grève, July 23, 1789]

The first of the images I will consider is Prieur's The Hanging of Foulon de Doué at the Place de Grève [Image 25].  It depicts the lynching by a revolutionary crowd of a hated official who was thought to have said during a famine in 1775 that “If [the people] are hungry let them eat grass.”  Foulon was aware of hostility toward him when he fled the capital during the Paris Insurrection; he spread rumors that he had died, but he was recognized at Viri, a few leagues outside the capital, where he was hiding.  “You want to give us hay, you shall have some yourself.”  With a bale of hay attached to his back Foulon was brought back to Paris, to the Hôtel de Ville, where officials tried to protect him from the crowd.  Too large and unruly for officials to control, the crowd seized Foulon and hanged him from a lamppost at the far side of the Place de Grève, across from the Hôtel de Ville.  The crowd then decapitated Foulon, stuck his head on a pike, and marched up the rue Saint-Martin, brandishing its trophy as it proceeded.  Bizarrely, this crowd encountered another one proceeding in the opposite direction escorting another enemy of the people to the Hôtel de Ville, where he too was subjected to popular justice.  It was the encounter of these two processions that is the subject of the second illustration under consideration in this essay,  The Intendant Bertier de Sauvigny, led to the Hôtel de Ville, recognizes the Head of Foulon. [Image 31].  As it happened, the second official, Bertier de Sauvigny, was the son-in-law of Foulon; he too was a hated official who fled the capital during the Paris Insurrection; he too was recognized and taken to Paris; and he too was hanged from a lamppost in the Place de Grève.  Earlier the crowd had stuffed hay into the mouth of the decapitated head of Foulon; now it ripped the heart from the body of Bertier and stuck it on a pike, as it did with Bertier's head, both trophies of the people. 

Image 31. Bertier de Sauvignon, l'intendant de Paris est conduite au supplice [Bertier de Sauvignon, Intendant of Paris, is Led to His Punishment]

When deputies of the National Assembly at Versailles received news of the killing of Foulon and Bertier, they debated what had happened.  Those on the left defended the popular action, those on the right condemned it.  Just as contemporaries disagreed over the killing of Foulon and Bertier, so too have historians of the French Revolution.  George Rudé's response to these events was to say that reactionary historians have used  the killing of these officials to discredit revolutionary crowds.  In Rudé's socioeconomic analysis, revolutionary crowds were made up of artisans, shopkeepers, and petty tradesmen, law abiding people who were neither unemployed nor criminal, but stable and bent upon preserving their traditional rights.  Rudé explains that “acts of popular vengeance” on July 14, “followed, a week later, by the murder of Foulon and Berthier—have, of course been picked upon to discredit the captors of the Bastille and to represent them as vagabonds, criminals, or a mercenary rabble hired in the wine-shops of the Saint-Antoine quarter.  This is a legend that dies hard; yet there is no evidence to support it, but all the evidence directly refutes it.”4

Notes

1 The quote is from an essay by Lynn Hunt that all members of the website group saw before writing their essays.  My essay is a revised version  of an earlier essay; it draws from exchanges with members of the website group.