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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: what we can learn about the crowd
Posted By: Lynn Hunt
Date Posted: 6-23-03,11:04 PM

Warren and Jack raise issues that beg for more extended analysis. I see two points at work (the second is one that I harp on, I know, so apologies to all for that!). 1) The absolutely essential, groundbreaking work on the crowd by Rudé, Soboul and Lefebvre was written in reaction to the crowd psychology of the late 19th century that had been much influenced by H. Taine. Rudé and company wanted to overturn the “reactionary” view of the crowd (associated with Taine and also Gustave LeBon) as hysterical, irrational, dominated by females out of control. They emphasized the solidity and respectability of its members, their maleness, their family orientation, their rationality. The imagesat least some of themforce us to recapture a side of crowd behavior that the “history from below” people inevitably downplayedits exuberant, sometimes self-conscious, sometimes unconscious cruelty. Many of the images capture a crowd that is far from the rational, organized vision of someone such as Charles Tilly or George Rudé; the images often capture an almost Freudian, “return of the repressed” vision of atavistic revenge. 2) On the other hand, as I’ve said over and over (this is the harping part), the very fact of sketching and engraving images that have some kind of status as art entails a certain minimization of these violent qualities that threaten to dissolve all forms of order. So what is truly wonderful about the images is that they often capture, if only inadvertently, the fundamental ambivalence that many people must have felt about the crowd as something not entirely rational, bent on a form of justice that was not particularly attractive, and yet a fact of revolutionary politics that simply could not be wished away. This ambivalence had been lost in the historiography of the 1960s-1970s which was so concerned to reassert the rationality of the lower classes (though Georges Lefebvre certainly did not lose sight of this ambivalence, and he alone of “history from below” historians was willing to venture on a more psychological analysis of crowd behavior). In short, somehow the images get closer to the psychological questions raised by crowd violence than does much of the textual evidence.
 
 
 
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