4. Is there anything left to discover about the crowd in the French Revolution? Can we contribute to the issues raised by Rude, Soboul, and Andrews over the last 30 years? Is the crowd a new topic for representation in late eighteenth-century France, and if so, why is that important?
| Subject: | RE: what we can learn about the crowd |
| Posted By: | Jack Censer |
| Date Posted: | July 17, 2003, 10:18 AM |
As I ruminate about Lynn and Barbara's entries here, it occurs to me to add to their general point. Both essentially argue that while images take us into the psychology of the crowd, the images that we have from the French introduce a rationality as well as a passion. As Lynn and I pointed out in our essay, some of the English images, though, manage to transcend the limits of the medium and show real passion. They do this, it seems to me, by close ups of the crowd, by focusing on the individual faces and leaving the body in a position in which its motion is assumed. Had the eighteenth-century English tradition simply taken them closer to the crowd? Or were the French deliberately reluctant?
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