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2. What are the advantages/deficits of visual mediation of events and concepts in this period? Can images provide knowledge that is distinctive and different from textual sources? How do images either correspond with or differ from their textual commentary? What does this reveal about the combination of image and text? Can representations by their nature capture popular attitudes? Are inherent male/female upper class/popular class tensions either captured or effaced in these images?

Jack would like to know how the two images I have analyzed, “The Hanging of Foulon” and “The Intendant Bertier de Sauvigny,” relate to other images by Prieur that show crowds in action. He also asks for further comment on Prieur’s depiction of lampposts, which are central to my analysis. Additionally, he asks about the production of Prieur’s images: when were they made? In addressing these questions I will limit myself to one image, Prieur’s “The Death of de Flesselles,” his illustration of an event that took place on July 14. In this image a crowd dispatches a hated official, the Prévôt des marchands, in front of the Hôtel de Ville. An assailant shoots de Flesselles, whose body recoils from the shot, his right hand raised above his head. That hand is pointed at a lantern that hangs from a lamppost. No other illustration that I have seen shows a lantern above de Flesselles. Why did Prieur put it there, and give it such prominence? While we don’t know precisely when Prieur did his drawings of the dramatic events of July 12-14 and July 22 it can be safely said that he saw “The Death of de Flesselles” through the prism of what transpired eight days later. On these two days, July 14 and July 22, furious crowds in the Place de Grève dispatched hated royal officials, two on each day. In both instances the crowds decapitated the officials and put their heads on pikes, but the killings followed different scripts. On July 14 crowds stabbed and shot de Launay, governor of the Bastille, and then shot another official thought to be his accomplice, de Flesselles. Popular justice was rendered differently on July 22, when both officials were hung from a lamppost. The lantern and lamppost in Prieur’s Death of de Flesselles were put there with the knowledge of what took place eight days later.

How, Jack asks, does the lamppost, a symbol of the crowd and the force it exerts, ebb and with the fortunes of the Terror? The answer, I believe, is that this symbol of popular justice neither ebbs nor flows by the time of the Terror. The lamppost and lantern belonged to a particular stage of the Revolution, one that was congruent with the journées of 1789. After the March to Versailles order was imposed; the goal now was to bring the Revolution to closure. When we come to the Terror the politics are different and the role of the people is different. Justice is dispensed by the Revolutionary Tribunal whose authority is derived from the Convention. The instrument of justice is the guillotine, not the lamppost and lantern. From the lantern to the guillotine: from the popular Revolution to the Jacobin Revolution. To understand how to get from one to the other is to understand much of what the Revolution was about. Or so it seems to me. Careful study of images has given me insights into and some understanding of the forces that were at work---the conflicts, uncertainties, ambiguities, unresolved differences, fears, hatreds, the memories and burdens of the past. Going back and forth between images and texts helped me to navigate a course that took me from the lantern to the guillotine.

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