Imaging the French Revolution:
Depictions of the French Revolutionary Crowd
An On-Line Collaboration Organized By
JACK CENSER AND LYNN HUNT
POPULAR VIOLENCE DEFINED the French Revolution. Without crowds of lower-class
people, there would have been no fall of the Bastille, no overthrow of the monarchy,
no arrest of the Girondins, no spectacle of the guillotine. The middle-class deputies
who led the French Revolution depended on popular support, which inevitably
meant popular violence, but they also feared that violence, felt repulsed by it, and
constantly maneuvered to get a handle on it. Popular violence pushed the
Revolution forward, but it also threatened to dissolve it altogether in an acid wash
of blood, political vengeance, and anarchic disorder.
Because of its centrality to events, the crowd drew a lot of attention during the
French Revolution, though revolutionaries themselves did not use the term.
Rather, they referred to the populace as simply /e peup/e, or "the people." This
nomenclature carried through most of the next century as historians still deployed
this general term. Whether on the right like Edmund Burke and Hippolyte Taine
or on the left like Jules Michelet or Alphonse Aulard, scholars saw the actions of
the peup/e as unified, almost mythic. The peup/e "personified good or evil,"
depending on the inclination of the author.!
Twentieth-century historians dismantled the dichotomy of romantic vs. villainous images and replaced them with a sociology. Who were these people? Why did
they act as they did? George Rude used the term "crowd" to break away from the
unidimensional peup/e, from the right wing's terms of denigration (/a canaille or
dregs), and even from "the masses," as Karl Marx had seen them in other contexts.
Rude showed that the French revolutionary crowd was composed of workers and
the bottom rung of the commercial classes-master artisans, shopkeepers, and
wage earners. Its members did not come from the bourgeoisie, which included
Many people contributed to this project, most significantly our collaborators-Vivian Cameron,
Barbara Day-Hickman, Wayne Hanley, Joan Landes, and Warren Roberts-who penned essays,
participated in on-line discussions, and helped shape the final product. In addition, the Center for
History and New Media at George Mason University provided technical support, especially Mark
Jones, Elena Razlogova, and Simon Kornblith. Center director Roy Rosenzweig was a great source of
information, guidance, expertise, and general acumen regarding the marriage of history and media.
Robert Townsend of the American Historical Association suggested this project, and Marjorie Censer
helped in the final stages. Finally the University of California at Los Angeles Department of History
and the Center for History and New Media provided crucial funding.
1 George Rude, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford, 1959). The quotation is on page 4.
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Imaging the French Revolution
major merchants and manufacturers, members of the liberal professions, and the
nobility.2 Later in-depth studies undertaken by Albert Soboul and Richard Andrews
sought to describe the crowd's attitudes, political views, and political structure in
greater detail.3 Even when they disagreed, Rude, Soboul, and Andrews all
participated in "history from below" and demonstrated that a focus on the crowd's
members and their attitudes and political networks could transform the understanding of revolutionary politics. They insisted that the mobilized multitudes of
ordinary people did not act incoherently or hysterically. Even the most horrifying
violence often had some kind of rationale that could be explained by referring to
the composition of crowds.
Although the pendulum has not yet swung all the way in the other direction,
historians have begun to express a certain dissatisfaction with this view of the crowd
as resolutely rational actor. 4 Rituals of violence did not always express, much less
restore, community consensus. Large informal gatherings of people were sometimes mobs. Without returning to the discredited crowd psychology of Gustave
LeBon, in whose view the member of a crowd "descends several rungs on the ladder
of civilization" and becomes like "beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution,"
it is possible to make more of the ambivalence of contemporaries to crowd actions. 5
Colin Lucas took an important step in this direction in his 1988 essay comparing
Old Regime and revolutionary crowds in France. He argued that "the crowd and
the elites coexisted uneasily in the public space of power vacated by the monarchical
state." While unable to do without popular pressure in the form of demonstrations
and even attacks on public buildings (the Bastille and the Tuileries, for example),
the revolutionary authorities nonetheless aimed to channel and eventually subdue
crowd violence. They got control of the original spontaneous celebrations of
revolution by orchestrating a system of coordinated revolutionary festivals, and in
an unplanned but nonetheless significant nationwide movement, local revolutionary
leaders set up a national guard to contain if not suppress crowd formation. 6
We (Jack Censer and Lynn Hunt) propose to examine contemporary attitudes
toward crowd violence in a very different manner. Lucas drew his analysis from the
acts and pronouncements of the revolutionaries, even though as he admits, only the
conservatives were willing to say what they really thought about the crowd. Mallet
du Pan's denunciation of "the Huns, the Harudes, the Vandals, and the Goths ...
in our midst" would not have been ventured by an ardent supporter of the
Revolution.7 To get beyond this barrier of politically acceptable speech, we asked
a group of specialists in French revolutionary imagery to write about depictions of
Rude, The Crowd, 178-90.
Albert Soboul, The Parisian Sans-Culottes and the French Revolution, 1793-4, trans. Gwynne
Lewis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964); Richard Mowery Andrews, "Social Structures, Political Elites
and Ideology in Revolutionary Paris, 1792-94: A Critical Evaluation of Albert Soboul's Les SansCulottes Parisiens en l'an II," Journal of Social History 19, no. 1 (1985): 71-112.
4 See, for example, Suzanne Desan, "Crowds, Community, and Ritual in the Work of E. P.
Thompson and Natalie Davis," in Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley, Calif., 1989),
47-7l.
5 As quoted in Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century
France (New Haven, Conn., 1981), 169.
6 Colin Lucas, "The Crowd and Politics between 'Ancien Regime' and Revolution in France," The
Journal of Modern History, 60 (September 1988): 421-457, quote p. 45l.
7 Lucas, "The Crowd and Politics," 452.
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crowd violence: Vivian Cameron, Barbara Day-Hickman, Wayne Hanley, Joan
Landes, and Warren Roberts generously agreed to take a leap in the dark and join
us in this experiment. Their essays constitute the heart of this project. The essays
and the images and image tools are located on-line at http://chnm.gmu.edu/
revolution/imaging.
Rather than try to tackle the entire corpus of thousands of known images, most
of them anonymous, many of them undated, and few of them cross-referenced
between collections, we chose an initial group of some thirty prints, which was then
revised to forty-two in consultation with the other authors. The number of prints is
large enough to afford considerable variety of images and small enough to
maximize intersections between the essays. These images do not constitute a
representative sample in any statistical sense. Given the current state of knowledge
about revolutionary visual images, a representative sample would be impossible to
construct. No one knows exactly how many prints are extant. Michel Vovelle
estimated that the Bibliotheque Nationale de France had in its collections
approximately 55 percent of the visual images of the revolutionary period, but he
meant 55 percent of the images available in France. The De Vinck collection of the
Bibliotheque Nationale has 9,000 prints, the Hennin Collection 4,500, and the Qbl
Collection for the History of France 12,500. 8 Many of these are duplicates, but no
one knows just how many. In addition, there are trophies, playing cards, cockades,
calendars, maps, costumes, uniforms, crockery, snuffboxes, and letterheads, not to
mention paintings that are held in various museums.
If the size of the corpus of images is unknown, then it is perhaps not very
surprising that little is known about the audience reception of the images. Scholars
know that the consumers targeted must have been various: prosperous subscribers
to fine art commemorative collections of prints had little in common with artisans
or shopkeepers who might just have afforded a 10 sous print when bread cost 3 sous
a pound and a modest artisan earned 20 to 50 sous a day. Even more people would
have seen engravings available in newspapers or pamphlets that could be purchased
for as little as 2 sous, and no doubt many others still saw cheap woodblock prints
pasted up along the walkways.9 Attaching particular images to specific publics is
very difficult, however, except where the artist, engraver, printmaker, and price are
all known, which is true in very few cases. For the most part, audience has to be
inferred from the medium, artistic quality, and thematic content of the image.
The chosen images come from two main sources: the Musee de la Revolution
fran~aise in Vizille, France and the Library of Congress. lO Without the generous
collaboration of the Musee de la Revolution fran~aise, this study would not have
been possible; they have a much larger collection of prints and other visual objects
than any American institution. Our team picked many colored prints for our
8 Michel Vovelle, ed., La Revolution fram;aise: Images et recit, 1789-1799, 5 vols. (Paris, 1986), 1:
13-14.
9 Some of the research on audience is summarized in Vincent Milliot, Les Cris de Paris ou Ie peup/e
travesti: Les representations des petits metiers parisiens (XVIle_XVIIle siecles) (Paris, 1995), 322.
10 The Bibliotheque Nationale de France has by far the largest collection of revolutionary prints, but
the cost of reproducing them for our purposes was too high. Anyone wishing to carry out research on
this topic must consult their collections, and we have on many occasions. The Musee Carnavalet in
Paris also has many prints and engravings. These are now in the process of digitization and when
available will be a marvelous on-line resource for researchers.
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"sample" because these have not appeared very often in books and articles on the
French Revolution; unlike illustrations in print forms, on-line reproduction of color
images is no more expensive than black and white. We wanted to give some sense
of the diversity of representations, so we included relatively unschooled black and
white prints as well as more elaborate colored ones, coins and medals, and even a
handful of German and English engravings for the sake of comparison. Some
images do not focus directly on violent crowds, but they do all make some reference
to violence, however oblique.
The usefulness of cd-rom and the World Wide Web for pedagogical and archival
functions is now well established. Historians can find a wealth of digital representations of texts, pictures, film clips, and music for use in their classrooms, and many
use electronic forms of periodicals, on-line text searching tools, or other kinds of
on-line data collections for their research. Yet despite the explosion in these new
electronic sources, scholarship in visual culture has benefited less from electronic
media than scholarship in printed texts. It is much easier, for example to find every
reference to "women" in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract than it is to trace
changes in the representation of women in the work of an eighteenth-century
French painter or engraver; visual images do not break down as nicely into
comparable, searchable, syntactical units. Millions of images from every time and
place have been digitized, but they still must be viewed one by one or at best as a
"sheet" of thumbnail (miniaturized) versions. When images appear in on-line
articles, they are usually called up as individual electronic pages. Comparison
between images is still very undeveloped.
WE HAD THREE AIMS in organizing this on-line experiment: 1) to bring together a
group of researchers for a discussion of images that is designed to advance
scholarship, 2) to offer a new way of viewing and comparing images, and 3) to
provide access to the images and the discussion of them to a much wider audience.
It is already the case in mathematics, for instance, that mathematicians work on
some problems collectively "on-line." Is it possible to go beyond historians' and art
historians' more customary model of the scholar-working-alone? We asked each of
the authors to prepare an essay on depictions of the crowd using the preselected set
of prints. Then we circulated the essays, including one co-authored by us, among
the participants and began an on-line discussion of our separate but related
findings. At the same time, a team of collaborators at George Mason University'S
Center for History and New Media developed a useful method of presentation of
images for this venture.
Although it is ultimately up to our readers to decide how well we have succeeded
in achieving these goals, we do have some reflections to offer on the experiment as
a whole. The last of our goals-wider dissemination of images and discussion of
them-is easiest to evaluate: nothing compares to the resources made possible by
the Internet. The Center for History and New Media had already made accessible
hundreds of revolutionary images at http://www.chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/. Originally the companion to a textbook and cd-rom published by Penn State University
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Jack Censer and Lynn Hunt
Press (co-authored by Censer and Hunt), the web site offers an essay on images for
students and provides explanatory captions as well. l l Although professors and
students might use these images for further study, they would have to seek scholarly
analysis of the images in print sources. In contrast, the essays here do not refer to
as many different images, but they offer a more focused approach to one central
aspect of revolutionary politics, even while emphasizing the variety of scholarly
analyses that might be offered. Thus they disseminate not only the images
themselves but also the scholarship about them.
Our second goal of offering a new way of viewing images is closely related to the
wider dissemination of images and scholarship about them. The image tool offered
on-line makes it possible to view many images side by side, to zoom in and out on
any particular image, and even to drag one image over another for the sake of
comparison. An unprecedented level of interactivity with the images is thus made
possible; rather than the authors determining the order, magnification, or method
of comparison of the images (the numbers assigned the images are merely
cataloging devices), the reader has the capacity to make those decisions as he or she
prefers. Moreover, the linking between image discussions in the different essays
also makes it feasible for a reader to immediately see the points of agreement and
disagreement, some of which the authors themselves might have missed. Theoretically, students and scholars anywhere on the globe can have access to the images
and the scholarly discussion (although at this moment access is restricted to
subscribers or users at subscribing libraries). In this way, a much wider conversation
about history takes place, and the dialogue does not end with publication; it begins
anew with virtually every "hit" on the site.
On-line presentation of images is not without its problems, however. Information that would be available to a researcher who saw the images in person is
available only in captions: the size, the material or paper type, and the technique
used (woodblock, etching, engraving, aquatint, mezzotint, gouache, to cite just
some possible examples). Reading dimensions or names of techniques is very
different from seeing them in person. Web presentation therefore tends to efface
crucial differences between images even as it facilitates other kinds of comparisons.
The Internet can serve as a gathering place for discussion and debate, but it cannot
instantly remedy the defects in the sources. Much remains to be done in dating,
describing, comparing, and interpreting the thousands of extant images from the
French Revolution. The Bibliotheque Nationale de France has developed massive
collections of prints and cartoons over the years, and some serious cataloguing was
undertaken at the beginning of the twentieth century.12 But the "History of France"
collection, for example, has never been systematically catalogued, and prints are
often categorized according to the date of the event depicted rather than the date
of the print itself. The celebration of the bicentennial of the French Revolution
gave rise to a useful videodisk and many new scholarly works about revolutionary
11 Jack R. Censer and Lynn Hunt, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution
(University Park, Penn., 2001).
12 The best known of these catalogues is Bibliotheque nationale (France). Departement des
estampes. Collection de Vinck, Un siecle d'histoire de France par l'estampe, 1770-1871; Collection de
Vinck; inventaire analytique, 8 vols. (Paris, 1909- ).
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prints and cartoons. 13 Yet no one has undertaken to compare prints across
collections or to gather crucial information in one central place. Presumably the
World Wide Web makes this dream a distinct possibility for the future.
THE WORLD OF SCHOLARSHIP does not usually move at a lightning pace, but the study
of French revolutionary imagery may prove to be an exception to that rule. It is only
in the last twenty years that scholars have shown much interest in the cartoons and
political prints of the French Revolution. Most art historians considered politicization, terror, and constant warfare incompatible with the production of great art,
and in any case, they did not consider prints or cartoons as fine art. 14 Historians
rarely considered visual culture part of their regular repertoire of possible sources;
at best, paintings or prints served as illustrations of points established through
text-based research. In the last twenty years, this situation has changed dramatically. The fact that we could find so many collaborators already distinguished for
their contributions to this field is a sign of how remarkable the change has been. But
historians and art historians have all been laboring in our individual vineyards in
isolation from each other.
What we as a group have gained from the scholarly collaboration is not so much
definitive answers as newly pertinent questions. From the start we all agreed that
prints and engravings could be considered just as significant sources of information
as newspaper accounts or police archives. But the rules of interpretation of visual
evidence are much less well developed, at least among historians. How, for
example, did the tension between aesthetic and political concerns work in different
media? Can political biases be deduced from aesthetic styles? Are engravings like
paintings in this regard or very different because of their different audiences? In
our on-line discussion, we spent considerable time (one cannot really speak of
"spilling ink" on-line) going back and forth on interpretive issues: How important
is determining authorial intent, even if you happen to know the name of the
engraver or designer? How can we get at audience reaction in the absence of figures
about print runs or text sources recounting reactions to the images, especially since
such sources are virtually nonexistent? Does the very act of framing an event by
depicting it somehow reduce both its immediacy and its threatening quality, or does
it enhance these by fixing the event in memory? Readers will find different, if rarely
entirely contradictory, answers to these questions in the essays.
Without anticipating the rich arguments of the essays available on-line, and
endeavoring not to impose a Censer-Hunt line on all the others, we can offer a few
preliminary conclusions. Artists and engravers, even those who had worked for the
lUXUry market under the Old Regime, had no choice but to depict crowds in action
once the Revolution began; the phenomenon simply could not be ignored, at least
not before 1799 and the coming of Napoleon Bonaparte to power. Artists did have
The videodisk accompanies Images de la Revolution frant;aise (Paris, 1990).
"When the guillotine operates, when cannons and rifles talk, it is rare that art flourishes." Jean
Tulard, Jean-Fran<;ois Fayard, and Alfred Fierro, Histoire et dictionnaire de la Revolution frant;aise,
1789-1799 (Paris, 1987), the article Beaux-arts, p. 572 as quoted in Claudette Hould, "La Gravure
revolutionnaire et son impact sur les consciences," in Michel Grenon, ed., L'lmage de la Revolution
frant;aise iiu Quebec, 1789-1989 (Ville LaSalle, Quebec, 1989), 173-82, quote p. 173.
13
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considerable choice, however, in how they represented those crowds: at the moment
of violence, before, or, more often, just after; as unruly savages or the well-ordered
people; allegorically, satirically, or "realistically"; as commemoration or cautionary
tale. Sometimes authorial intent mattered; other times, artists conveyed meanings
almost inadvertently. The tension between intent and inadvertence is perhaps
especially salient in depictions of women and lower-class men, since such representations had long been subject to stereotypes in popular prints. Could such
stereotypes continue to exercise their power as the political landscape altered out
of all recognition?
We see this collaborative experiment as part of a broader effort to expand the
meaning of politics. Artistic representation of events and people was integral to the
conflict over the meaning of the French Revolution. Political leaders in Paris or
other cities did not just react to the individual artisans and shopkeepers making up
the crowd or to the appearance and actions of large groups of people, especially
when they turned violent. They also reacted to the celebrations, commemorations,
and satires of them in visual images. Those images served as memory triggers and
also helped build up competing narratives of the revolutionary process. Can anyone
even now think of the French Revolution without recalling the guillotine, the
women's march to Versailles, or the Festival of Reason? These are not speeches or
documents; they are actions immortalized in print and in printed images.
But we and our collaborators also learned some harder lessons in this process.
Although students, and dare we say historians, sometimes like to think that they can
read any visual image without help, in fact our exchanges forcefully reminded us
that reading images is a skill much like reading texts. Individual political inclinations and general circumstances play a role. Convincing reading depends on
knowing the codes of artistic representation in the late eighteenth century: the
significant differences between genres and techniques, the generally accepted
meanings of allegorical symbols, and even the specific visual rhetoric developed by
individual artists and engravers. A woman is sometimes not just a woman but rather
a Roman deity transformed into revolutionary symbol. Prints may communicate
inadvertent and multivariate meanings, but scholars get those meanings wrong if
they fail to learn the languages in which they speak. Historians may never find
sufficient information about authorship or audience, but they can learn the
collective codes that shape artistic representation, whether in a crude woodcut
made for plastering on a wall or a fine line engraving sold by subscription to the well
off.
Without claiming to have a last word, we do believe that these essays advance
scholarship on the critical issue of crowd violence in the French Revolution.
Studying images comparatively allowed our group of authors to "envision" the
actions of crowds during memorable events, such as the fall of the Bastille. Though
at times effaced by the artist or engraver, the emotions as well as the motions of the
crowd become more evident in visual imagery. Even stylized images, particularly of
women, tell us what contemporary image makers believed were recognizable roles
in revolutionary society. Although perhaps more unstable in their meaning than
texts, images give us a glimpse into states of consciousness that can be approached
in no better way. But readers need not depend on our rendering of what this site
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includes and ascertains; the essays, a conclusion that encapsulates the on-line
discussion, and the visual images may all be consulted directly on the Web.
Jack R. Censer is professor of history and chair of the Department of History
and Art History at George Mason University. This study emerged from a
previous collaboration with Lynn Hunt and George Mason's Center for History
and New Media (Liberty, Equality and Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution [2001 D. Censer has mainly written on the history of the press of the Old
Regime and the French Revolution, including Prelude to Power (1976) and The
Press in the Age of Enlightenment (1994). He has currently taken his interest in
the press to recent U.S. history and is working on the media and Washington
sniper case of October 2002.
Lynn Hunt is Eugen Weber professor of modern European history at the
University of California, Los Angeles. With Jack Censer she published Liberty,
Equality and Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution (2001), which included
a cd-rom of images and documents and is linked to a website (www.chnm.gmu.
edu/revolutionl). Her previous works on the French Revolution include
Revolution and Urban Politics in Provincial France: Troyes and Reims, 17861790 (1978), Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (1984, 20th
anniversary edition 2004), and The Family Romance of the French Revolution
(1992). She was president of the American Historical Association in 2002 and
is now working on the eighteenth-century origins of human rights.
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