Cameron: Reflections on Violence and the Crowd in the Images of the French Revolution

Complicit Violence


Image 7. La Journée mémorable de Versailles, le lundi 5 Octobre 1789. [A Memorable Day at Versailles]

A print such as La Journée mémorable de Versailles le lundi 5 Octobre 1789 [Image 7] (the date was actually October 6th),38 showing a synecdochical representation of the crowd, a group of eight or nine armed men and a woman returning from Versailles, is an example of complicit violence alone. Whatever violence has happened is referenced by the Swiss Guards’ heads held aloft. The decapitations have occurred “off stage” at Versailles. Impetuosity or “violence of passions” might be applied to this exuberant group, which parades across the print. It is possible that these figures are not those responsible for the actual murders, but the presence of the bloody heads makes the image a celebration of past violent acts, with the revelers complicit in those.

The frieze format of the print suggesting the movement of the crowd from left to right also suggests order. More importantly, by choosing to focus on a fragment of the crowd of women, national guardsmen and ordinary male citizens who marched back to Paris with the king in tow, rather than on the carriage with the royal family within,39 this artist actually presents a re-ordering of the world. Pictured no longer is a hierarchy of groups or individuals, as in earlier prints of city processions or religious pageants.40 The royal family is ignored. Rather this print privileges a group of unknown individuals, citizens and guardsmen alike, who intermingle on their return to Paris. That the role of women, so prominent in the October days, is reduced to a single participant, who turns her back to the viewer, certainly testifies to the printmaker’s own bias, not shared by all who represented the event.41

Anticipatory Violence


	Image 31. Bertier de Sauvignon, l'intendant de Paris est conduite au supplice [Bertier de Sauvignon, Intendant of Paris, is Led to His Punishment]

The category of “anticipatory violence” includes works such as Prieur’s drawing, Bertier de Sauvigny, intendant de Paris, est conduit au supplice, 23 juillet 1789 (Paris, Musée Carnavalet) [Image 31].42 The whole notion of anticipatory violence revolves around the theory that an artist can indicate more than one moment in an image. Repudiating the artistic credo of the single instant promulgated earlier in the century by DuBos: “A painting only represents an instant of a scene” [“Un tableau ne représente même qu’un instant d’une scène”],43 the revolutionary artist accepted the beliefs of contemporary theorists who proposed that several moments could be expressed in a single image.44 Picking up on ideas suggested by Pernety in the 1750s, Watelet, an honorary member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, declared clearly in 1792:

It is that the human spirit which, in a continual movement, passes ceaselessly from past to present, and from the present to future, is not able to fix well the representation of an instantaneous action without mixing previous ideas and especially subsequent ideas into the conception that it focused on. [C’est que l’esprit humain qui, dans un continuel mouvement, passe sans cesse du passé au présent, & du présent à l’avenir, ne peut fixer la représentation bien faite d’une action instantanée, sans mêler à l’idée qu’il prend, des idées antérieures & surtout des idées postérieures.]45

Embedded in any image, according to Watelet, are the past, the present, and the future.

In the Prieur drawing, Foulon’s son-in-law, Bertier de Sauvigny, is paraded through the streets of Paris by a crowd, one of which “offers” him Foulon’s decapitated head.46 While the presence of that head denotes the past, the inexorable movement of the crowd from left to right in the frieze-like arrangement of a pageant; the position of Bertier in the cart towering over his captors but surrounded by the points of bayonets; his ironic (but deliberate) placement between the large wheel of the cart (an allusion to breaking over the wheel) and the sculptural figure of a saint in the niche to his right; and even the head of Foulon again are all signifiers of Bertier’s present and future. Although he fought back, Bertier would eventually be hung, bayoneted, his entrails and heart removed, his head cut off and mutilated.47

38 Parisian women actually departed for Versailles on October 5, 1789 and returned the following day.

39 Berthault/Prieur, for instance, did represent such a scene, which they entitled Le Roi arrivant à Paris le 6 Octobre. For an illustration, see Vovelle, La Révolution française. Images et récit 1789-1799, vol. I, p. 250.

40 See especially Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and other Episodes in French Cultural History, New York: Vintage Books, 1985, chapter 3, “A Bourgeois puts his World in Order: The City as a Text” and his illustrations “A Procession honoring the Spanish Infanta in Paris in 1722,” p. 106 and “A Procession of Dignitaries in Toulouse,” pp. 110-111.

41 See, for instance, the anonymous engraving, Triomphe de l’armée parisienne réunie au peuple le 6 octobre 1789, and the anonymous drawing, Retour de Versailles avec les gardes nationaux, illustrated in Vovelle, LA Révolution française, vol. I, pp. 248-49.

Both Barbara Day-Hickman and Joan Landes in other essays in this forum discuss another print illustrating the return to Paris, [Image 6]. Day-Hickman reads Journée mémorable de Versailles as an ironic commentary deriding the triumphal parade of “public women” while Landes reads this as a glorification of the “modern Amazons.” Years ago in an oral presentation, I agreed with Landes, but reviewing both Day-Hickman and Landes’ accounts, it is evident that the work is ambiguous. It could be read as a sexualization, and thereby trivialization, of the political actions of women during the October days. Yet, given the sans-culotte in the center of the print who enthusiastically waves a branch and spreads out his arms and who visually seems to push away the aristocratic couple witnessing the “triumph,” I am inclined to support my original opinion and view the work positively as the triumph of “nos modernes Amazones.”

42 For an illustration, see La Révolution française. Le premier empire. Dessins du Musée Carnavalet, Paris: Musée Carnavalet, 1982, p. 135, no. 120 and Vovelle, La Revolution française. Images et récit 1789-1799,, vol. I, p. 188. This never became part of the Collection complète des tableaux historiques de la Révolution française. See also Roberts, “The Visual Rhetoric of Jean-Louis Prieur,” pp. 107-109, which I read after reaching my own conclusions. Roberts (p. 109) states that in this work “Prieur has succeeded, as an artist, in capturing the ritualistic dimension of a Paris journée.” Of course, had events been different, had Berthier de Sauvigny not been massacred, a totally new category, something called “arrested violence,” may have been needed to describe the print.

43 Jean-Baptiste Du Bos, Réflexions critiques sur la poesie et sur la peinture, 6th ed., 3 vols., Paris, 1755, vol. I, p. 387.

44 See the Thévenin as well as A Memorable Day at Versailles above.

45 Charles Watelet and Pierre-Charles Levesque, Dictionnaire des arts de peinture, sculpture et gravure, 5 vols., Paris: L.F. Prault, 1788-92, vol. II, p. 223. Dom Antoine-Joseph Pernety, Dictionnaire portatif de peinture, sculpture et gravure; avec un traité pratique des différentes manières de peindre, Paris: Bauche, 1757, p. 77. See also my article, “Approaches to Narrative and History: The Case of the Donation of September 7, 1789 and its Images,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 19, 1989, pp. 413-32, esp. pp. 416-18.

46 On Bertier, see Bruel et al., Collection de Vinck, vol. II, p. 407, no. 2877. Bertier was arrested in the outskirts of Compiegne and brought back to Paris.

47 A drawing attributed to David’s student, Anne-Louis Girodet, Decapitated Heads of marquis Delaunay, Foulon, and Bertier de Sauvigny, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Cabinet des Estampes is illustrated in Thomas Crow, Emulation. Making Artists for revolutionary France, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995, p. 120, pl. 90. This shows not only the defaced head of Bertier de Sauvigny but also his heart on a stick.