The popular violence of July 1789 made a spectacle of victims, whose decapitated and, in some cases eviscerated bodies were dragged through the streets as grim trophies of victory over the people's enemies.  The typical course of events was for crowds, stirred by rumors, to seize a hated official or someone suspected of treachery and threaten him with popular justice.  Someone tried to reason with the crowd, usually an official of some type, but he was ignored or shouted down.  The crowd then made good its threat.  In one of several scenarios, the victim was put to death, his head was separated from the body, which was eviscerated, and both the body and  various organs were put on pikes.  Then there was a macabre procession of the body and its removed parts through the streets, with special visits to places that were of particular significance to the victim.11  These visits revealed a macabre humor that gave the spectacle an element of festivity.  In a July 13 entry in his Journal Sébastien Hardy wrote, in the full heat of the Paris Insurrection, that “One was surprised to see that a day that should have been a day of public mourning seemed to be a day of rejoicing, judging by the shouts and indecent laughter on every side, and by the shenanigans people were performing in the street, as if it were a day of carnival.”  The chant of the crowd to Bertier de Sauvigny on July 22 to “Kiss papa! Kiss papa!” was a perfect example of that humor.  The spectacle of violence in the summer of 1789 was an acting out of an ancient popular culture on a new historical stage.  Even as the Paris insurrection drove the Revolution into the uncharted waters of modernity, it did so by acting out a symbolic system that was buried in the past.

I should now like to return to Prieur's The Hanging of Foulon [Image 25], and place it within a sequence of three images, all by Prieur and all of which show lampposts.12  First is The Death of de Flesselles (tableau 15 in the Tableaux historiques), which shows a crowd shooting a hated official in front of the Hôtel de Ville on July 14.  As de Flesselles' body recoils from the shot, his right arm is raised upward, pointing at a lamp above him.  The second and central image is The Hanging of Foulon [Image 25], which shows another hated official hanging from a lamppost in the Place de Grève.  The third image is Prieur's The King and Royal Family led to Paris by the People (tableau 31 in the Tableaux historiques), which shows a man on a lamppost at the right-hand side of the tableau pointing at the lamp as he looks down on the carriage that conveys the King and Queen to Paris after women who were unable to feed their children marched on Versailles.

It was in the summer of 1789 that the lamppost became an instrument of popular justice, and it was at this time that Camille Desmoulins wrote his Discours de la lanterne aux Parisiens.  “À la lanterne!” meant “To the lamppost!“ “Lynch him!” “Hang him!”  Insofar as I have been able to determine, Prieur's The Hanging of Foulon [Image 25] depicts the first time a Parisian crowd administered this type of justice.  When a crowd dispatched de Flesselles eight days earlier it did so by shooting him, as seen in Prieur's tableau depicting that event.  Other prints showing the death of de Flesselles do not show him pointing at a lamp.  It would seem that Prieur's inclusion of a lamp was gratuitous and inaccurate, and therein lies its significance.  Prieur saw the killing of de Flesselles through the prism of the hanging of Foulon eight days later.  The lamp in the first of these images connects it to the lamppost in the second image.  While we do not know precisely when Prieur did these tableaus, it was after the lamppost had become an instrument and symbol of popular justice, as seen in Desmoulins' Discours de la lanterne aux Parisiens.  Prieur's third image that shows a lantern, The King and Royal Family led to Paris by the People (tableau 31 in the Tableaux historiques), is a depiction of the final stage of the last Paris uprising in 1789.  Not only was the Paris Insurrection an irreversible fact, but power had passed to the people, so much so that on October 5-6 a crowd of women marched to Versailles, followed by the National Guard, and forced the King and Queen to accompany them back to Paris, where, living in the Tuileries, they were subject to the scrutiny of the people.13  This, at any rate, is the message embedded in Prieur's tableau, in which a Parisian sits on a lamppost that he points at as he looks down at the King and Queen inside the carriage.  The King and Queen were entering a city that now imposed its will and dispensed its justice, as represented by the lamppost; either the King and Queen would accept the will of the people or there would be consequences.  The street leading into Paris, along which the King and Queen pass in their carriage, is lined with people who brandish guns and pikes, objects of popular militancy, and they hold aloft tree branches and bonnets rouges, symbols of liberty.  Seen against the royal carriage is a man who holds an ax and a woman who waves her fist, presumably at Marie-Antoinette.  Heavily scripted, this tableau is another commentary on a Paris uprising by Prieur; the inclusion of a lamppost in the image links it to two earlier tableaus, both of which depicted the dispensing of popular justice in the Place de Grève, the most ancient of Paris's public squares.

Notes