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4. Is there anything left to discover about the crowd in the French Revolution? Can we contribute to the issues raised by Rudé, 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?
 
question 4 Warren Roberts, 6-9-03, 9:54 AM
RE: question 4 Jack Censer, 6-12-03, 4:46 PM
    what can we learn about the crowd Lynn Hunt, 6-23-03, 11:04 PM
RE: what can we learn about the crowd Barbara Day-Hickman, 7-15-2003,
12:58 PM
RE: what can we learn about the crowd Jack Censer, 7-17-2003, 10:18 AM
Response to Jack Warren Roberts,
7-21-03, 8:03 AM
Responses to Barbara Warren Roberts,
7-19-03, 10:31 AM

RE: Response to Warren and Final Remarks Barbara Day-Hickman,
7-25-03, 1:14 PM

Response to Barbara Warren Roberts, 7-28-03, 10:33 AM

Subject: RE: question 4
Posted By: Jack Censer
Date Posted: 6-12-03, 4:46 PM
I want to strongly endorse Warren’s comments and even extend them. As he has thoughtfully indicated, images—here coupled to texts—can take up questions that can elude us otherwise. Essentially, the crowd, for us to understand its motives, has to be studied with less evidence than one would want. First, most in this illiterate crowd cannot leave a record. Thus, it is up to police reporting, observers, and image-makers to help us understand the crowd. And these bystanders have their own mental framework as well as the constrictions of a medium that distances us from the crowd. Yet we customarily work through the limits of textual materials to get at our object. Why not images as evidence? I suggest that they have their own problems but that they can furnish vital information. In this area, as Warren implies, we will learn much about the psychology of the crowd as well as the internal dynamics of its behavior if we can examine numerous images of the same event and if we can understand better the conventions of image-makers both individually and collectively.
 
 
 
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