This was not how François-Noel Babeuf regarded the murder of Foulon and Bertier, which he witnessed personally.  Babeuf did not try to explain away or downplay the violence; he tried to understand it in its own contemporary context.  “Our punishments of every kind, quartering, torture, the wheel, the stake, and the gibbet, and the multiplicity of executioners on all sides, have had such a bad effect on our morals!  Our masters, instead of policing us, have made us barbarians, because they are barbarians themselves.  They are reaping and will reap what they have sown.”5 Others who witnessed the killing of Foulon and Bertier responded much as Babeuf did.  Restif de la Bretonne felt that these deeds were “worthy of cannibals.”6 The journalist Elysée Loustalot felt that the severed head of Foulon, with hay stuffed in its mouth, “announced to tyrants the terrible vengeance of a justly angered people.”7  Loustalot wrote of the just wrath of the “barbarian” who tore  the palpitating heart from the “monster” Bertier de Sauvigny.  Like Babeuf, he considered the killing and eviscerating of Bertier savage, but it was a just savagery.  Prieur's illustrations depicting the events of July 22 can be compared to the comments of Babeuf, Restif, and Loustalot.  All of these contemporary responses to the murder of Foulon and Bertier emphasized vengeance and cruelty.

To read Prieur's tableaus depicting the events of July 22, one must understand how the artist conceived them.  As illustrator for the Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française, Prieur provided finished drawings of events that were engraved and offered for sale to the public in sets of two.  His tableaus depicting the hanging of Foulon, and a crowd escorting Bertier to the Place de Grève, were to be issued as a set of two prints.  Only the first of Prieur's illustrations depicting revolutionary crowds in action on July 22, The Hanging of Foulon [Image 25], was engraved and included in the Tableaux historiques; the second, The Intendant Bertier de Sauvigny [Image 31], one of Prieur's  finest illustrations, was not engraved and offered for sale to the public.  Why the second of these illustrations was not included among the published tableaus is not known, but its exclusion deprives the first image of its effect, which was to set the stage for the second tableau.8  Prieur's intent was clearly for the two images to be seen together. His perspective in The Hanging of Foulon [Image 25] is from a distance; literally, he distanced himself from the lynching of a hated official in the Place de Grève.  The body of Foulon can be seen hanging from a lamppost, but it is far from conspicuous. The focus is on the crowd in the Place de Grève and the architecture that frames it, not the body of Foulon.  In the sequel to this illustration [Image 31], the severed head of Foulon, seen with hay stuffed in its mouth, is the focal point of a carefully composed and scripted image.  The up-close perspective gives immediacy to the head of Foulon, which is stuck on a pike and raised above Bertier, the son-in-law who turns away in horror.  In the strictest sense of the word, this image is a depiction of in-your-face violence.

Prieur's scripting of these images underscored and dramatized the popular anger and vengeance that also comes through in the contemporary written responses of Babeuf, Restif, and Loustalot to the killing of Foulon and Bertier.  Texts agree with images, images agree with texts.  Read together, these bodies of evidence enable historians to restore meaning to deeds of popular violence that the socioeconomic analysis of Rudé drained away.9  Prieur's depiction of a crowd taking Bertier to the Hôtel de Ville also brings out a dimension of crowd behavior that comes through in contemporary descriptions of popular violence but is missing from Rudé's socioeconomic analysis.  Describing the festive character of the procession that led Bertier to the Hôtel de Ville, Loustalot said it was accompanied by fifes and drums that declared the “cruel joy of the people.”  In a discussion of Prieur's depiction of that procession Robert Darnton explains that the crowd chanted “Kiss papa! Kiss papa!” as Bertier turned away from the decapitated head of his father-in-law stuck on a pike and with hay stuffed in its mouth.10  The grotesque humor that sometimes accompanied deeds of popular vengeance was part of a popular culture that was far removed from the more civilized forms of elite culture in pre-Revolutionary France.  That division never broke down during the French Revolution.

Notes