Image 14. Journée du 21 Janvier 1793. [The Execution of Louis XVI]

We use the term “realistic” representation in order to emphasize the difference in aim from caricature, which deliberately exaggerates its effects in order to satirize its subjects.  We call “realistic” an image such as the one titled “Day of the First of Prairial, Year III” [Image 16] because it aims to narrate a particular historical moment by rendering the action in specific detail. Presumably a viewer would recognize the event from the depiction of the action as well as the setting (but also from the information in the caption).  Such images, like the Monnet-Helman “Execution of the King”[Image 14], often appeared in chronological series of prints that were intended to provide a visual narrative and commemoration of the unfolding of the Revolution. Printers began to publish them as early as 1790 under such titles as Principal Days of the French Revolution.7

In producing such prints, the engravers had in mind much more than just faithfulness to the facts.  True, they aimed to show real people engaged in real events, now passed, but each print also communicates a political agenda.8 The Monnet-Helman image of the execution of Louis XVI [Image 14] emphasizes the order of the crowd present and the acclaim the act received from the populace. In contrast, their engraving of the crowd’s attack on the National Convention in 1795 [Image 14] and of the right-wing uprising against the Convention in 1796 [Image 27] both showed the dangers of crowd violence, whether from the sans-culottes who demanded “Bread the Constitution of 1793” or from royalists and right-wingers who opposed the decree guaranteeing two-thirds of the seats in the new legislature to the outgoing deputies of the Convention. The engraving of the 13 Vendémiaire uprising [Image 27] is almost cinematic in its attempt to capture the action: clouds of smoke indicate the exchange of gunfire, dead bodies litter the ground in a way that suggests that they have just been cut down in action. A contorted horse lying dead in the foreground reinforces the impression of horrific carnage. The dog barking in the left foreground shows that the violence has not yet ended.  Although most faces are too small to reveal expressions, several show an evident fear.

Image 27. Journée du XIII Vendémiare, l'an IV, église St. Roch, rue Honoré [The Journée of 13 Vendémaire, Year 4, The St. Roch Church, Honoré Street]

When prints such as “Day of 13 Vendémiaire Year IV” [Image 27] are compared to those of 1789, it is evident that printmakers had become more technically proficient at representing crowd violence.  Yet the artists had hardly embraced that violence. Their task was to bring order to representations of the Revolution, and the disorder of popular violence clearly troubled many of them.  Although they developed skills in creating a kind of reality effect in rendering important scenes of crowd mobilization, they did not dwell on the most horrific and disturbing aspects of popular violence.  The soul-searing, ritualistic, and even cannibalistic faces of popular violence on view in some engravings from the early years of the Revolution, 1789-1792, such as the prints featuring the killing of Foulon and Bertier de Sauvigny or the September massacres, proved to be exceptions to the rule. These more broad-brushed and sometimes vulgar prints, usually turned out very close to the moment of the event, might be considered more “realistic” in the sense that their very simplicity of composition and clear focus on severed heads and dead bodies captured a truth about popular violence that fine art printmakers avoided. 9 Most printmakers, clearly linked to and dependent on the press produced by the educated, could recognize neither the humanity nor the inhumanity of the crowd, and they never celebrated crowd violence.

Notes