The Place de Grève was a place for public parades, officially ordered and given for state purposes, and it was a place for public executions, where nobles, rebels, traitors, famous brigands, assassins, heretics, and ordinary criminals met their end.  Claude le Petit wrote in his Chronique scandaleuse ou Paris ridicule that the Place de Grève was an “unhappy piece of ground consecrated to the public where they have massacred a hundred times more than in war.”14 He himself was executed at the Place de Grève in 1662 for lèse majesté and  écrits séditieux.  His right hand was amputated, his property confiscated, and his ashes thrown to the wind after he was burned alive.  Executions in the Place de Grève were public for a reason: Justice was to be exemplary.  Jacques-Louis Ménétra wrote, in the aftermath of the 1750 Children's Riot, that “These poor fellows were hanged in the Place de Grève for the sake of the Parisian state of mind.” It was in the Place de Grève that Damiens was executed on 28 March 1757, before an immense crowd. Naked, Damiens lay strapped down as slow torture was applied that began with placing his right hand in burning sulfur, proceeded to the pouring of boiling liquid in holes cut in his flesh, was followed by the removal of entrails, and ended with his being drawn and quartered.  The horses that were to pull his body apart found it unusually resistant, and to facilitate that stage hangmen loosened his joints with knives.  It was only in the last stages of a prolonged execution that Damiens finally expired.  Spies reported street mutterings after Damiens' execution, and police were obliged to remove seditious placards that were posted surreptitiously in the aftermath of the public event.

The physical space within which Prieur's The Hanging of Foulon [Image 25] takes place was heavy with historical memory for the crowd that administered popular justice to a hated official.  In Prieur's illustration of the event the lamppost from which Foulon hangs, and around which the crowd in the Place de Grève gathers, is of central importance.  Someone sits on the lamppost above Foulon, who holds the rope with one hand, trying to ward off the inevitable, and below him there is a circle formed by the crowd, with the hanging figure of Foulon at its center.  By focusing attention on the lamppost in this way, Prieur was embedding the event he depicted in the history it helped define.

As an instrument of popular justice, the lamppost belonged to a particular stage of the French Revolution.  Its use came out of the popular revolution in the summer of 1789, and as such it was an expression of the power exercised by the people.  As the political leadership strove to stabilize the Revolution, and to bring it to closure, proper forms of justice were imposed that emphasized rational, impartial justice, administered by legally constituted authorities.15  Lynching was incompatible with this type of justice.  With the Terror another form of justice was introduced, and the guillotine was its instrument.  Prieur's tableaus discussed in this essay illuminate a stage of the Revolution that began in July 1789 when crowds dispensed popular justice to their enemies by hanging them from lampposts. As for Prieur, he left the Tableaux historiques after the fall of the monarchy, and as a political activist and a member of the Revolutionary Tribunal, whose authority came from the Convention, he helped dispense its type of justice to its victims.  For this, he himself went to the guillotine, along with Fouquier-Tinville, on 7 May 1795.

Jean-Louis Prieur's two illustrations depicting popular violence on July 22, The Hanging of Foulon [Image 25] and The Intendant Bertier de Sauvigny [Image 31], help the historian to understand crowds that in the summer of 1789 acted out anger that was integral to their experience, and punished enemies in their particular way.  Placed in context, these images show that crowds had historical memory; that humor, including gallows humor, was part of their culture; that humor found its way into scenes of popular violence; that Parisians responded furiously to reports that passed with lightning speed through the city; that the violence they carried out had a ritualistic component, also part of their experience; and that the violence that was at the core of popular justice threw up a wall, a barrier, between revolutionary crowds and the bourgeois of Paris.  Prieur's illustrations, and those of other artists, are a body of evidence that can be of real value to historians of the French Revolution.  This evidence can help historians to reconstruct and understand more fully the role of crowds in the Revolution, the acting out and choreography of popular violence, the ritualized forms of popular justice, and how popular violence threatened to dissolve the Revolution in “an acid wash of blood, vengeance, and anarchic disorder.”

Notes