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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: Response to Jack
Posted By: Warren Roberts
Date Posted: 7-21-03, 8:03 AM

I can’t comment on Jack’s observations on the depiction of crowds, and faces in crowds, in British images because I have don’t have any of those images in front of me. What I do have is a memory of British (and other foreign) images that are on the BN Videodisk. What I remember most vividly is British images depicting the Storming of the Tuileries and the September Massacres, I believe some of them by Gillray. The political satire in these images is most distinctive, and informed, I suspect, by a Hogarthian current of caricature. Images depict orgies with sans culottes eating the eyes, hearts, and arms of the decapitated bodies they sit on, children eating human entrails from a pail, and a crowd dragging a decapitated and eviscerated body of a female. Contextualizing these images could be instructive. Initial British responses to the French Revolution were positive, and when Edmund Burke published his Reflections in l790 he appeared to many of his contemporaries to have gone around the bend. By contrast, responses to Paine’s Rights of Man were highly favorable, to the extent that copies sold is an index of British opinion. The authorities became uneasy about the spread of Jacobinism in Britain and repressive legislation was passed; having responded favorably to the Revolution initially, Britain became the leading bastion of opposition to the Revolution, a position it was to retain all the way down to 1815. A study of British images of the Revolution could be instructive within this framework. Were image makers in the pay of the government? What role do images play in the war of ideas within Britainand elsewhere?
 
 
 
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