View images / 6 questions: Click on the question to view and add comments.

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

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?

3. Can imagery be addressed in new ways with on-line methods? Can a collective discussion of imagery produce more scholarly knowledge than just an individual analysis? Is it possible to analyze electronic images in a scholarly manner without examining the material object? texture of the paper? printing technique? style? color?

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?

5. How would our analyses change if we knew more about the date, engravers, designers, producers, merchants and distribution of the images in question? What do the images reveal about class or gender? What can the style and rendering of an image disclose about the political ideology or psychological predisposition of the engraver, printer, or patron? How might one get at the intent of the image makers compatered to the reading produced by contemporary viewers.

6. What difference does it make that we know the "author" of one and not the other? (given that "authorship" is a somewhat vexed notion in regard to printmaking) b) Can we say that these prints represent the same ideas/ideals/notions/presumptions about crowd violence? How would we unpack the differences in representation (the choice of perspective, for instance -- the one telescoped, the other wide angle)? Are these differences the result of differences in the purpose of the prints (Prieur's is part of a series, for instance). c) In regard to Wayne's interests, does this kind of event ever appear on a medal or is the level of violence somehow incompatible with that kind of representation (in metal as opposed to on paper, more sculptural than pictorial, etc.) d) Is gender more of an issue when the action is viewed up close?