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1. Are images vital sources of historical knowledge that have been insufficiently exploited?

If what is meant by "historical knowledge," the knowledge of a specific historical event, then some prints, particularly those of Prieur/Berthault, provide us with visual details about the site of action, some monuments, as well as the physiognomy of certain principal actors, such as Bertier de Sauvigny.

But what sort of "historical knowledge" do we acquire from the more generalized visual accounts of an event, as is the case in many of the images picturing the attack on the Bastille as well as the demolition of the Bastille? As Claudette Hould has pointed out, one of the first popular prints of the attack on the Bastille was executed by Nicolas Dupin for the Révolutions de Paris, which appeared only in October 1789, and which was subsequently adopted as a model by other printmakers for their own images of the event. Like written memoirs of the period, these more generalized prints, such as Dupin's "Attack on the Bastille" or our number 3, "Demolition of the Bastille," convey only a certain amount of information--much of it inaccurate. At the same time, the ubiquity of these prints offers a different perspective on "historical knowledge." For their prevalence tells us not only that the printmakers thought that such images had commercial value and would sell but also that their popularity came from their symbolic value, souvenirs or "memory triggers" of a momentous event, which operated to perpetuate those symbolic events. The knowledge we acquire in these cases is about the symbolics of the event (as Lüsebrink/Reichardt have studied) in these particular visualizations.

Claudette Hould, ed., La Révolution par la gravure: Les Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française, une entreprise éditoriale d'information et sa diffusion en Europe, 1791-1817 (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux ; Vizille : Musée de la révolution française, 2002).

Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Rolf Reichardt, The Bastille: A History of a Symbol of Despotism and Freedom, translated by Norbert Schürer (Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press, 1997).

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