Isidore-Stanislas Helman’s print after Charles Monnet’s drawing of the execution of Louis XVI, Journée du 21 Janvier 1793 [Image 14], is a good example of ritualized violence.48  As Paul Connerton remarked in How Societies Remember,

The ceremony of his [Louis XVI’s] trial and execution was intended to exorcise the memory of a prior ceremony.  The anointed head was decapitated and the rite of coronation ceremonially revoked.  Not simply the natural body of the king but also and above all his political body was killed.  In this the actions of the revolutionaries borrowed from the language of the sacred which for so long the dynastic realm had appropriated as its own.49

This ritual aspect of the royal execution is particularly symbolized by Helman/Monnet in the placement on the right of the empty pedestal that formerly supported Bouchardon’s statue of Louis XV (torn down on August 9, 1792) as a compositional counterbalance to the guillotine and the enacted violence on the left.  Together they become the embodiment of a voided kingship.50

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

The moment represented in Helman’s print, namely, the display of the head—the executioner held it up while he circled the scaffold twice—51 deliberately emphasized the ritual of sacrifice.52  (One cannot help wondering whether the revolutionaries recalled the description in Tacitus’s Annales (I:LXI) when the German [Gallic or Celtic] Arminius destroyed the troops of Varus and displayed the severed Roman heads on trees.)53  Above all, Helman’s print stresses the ritual aspect of this execution by the ordered lines of 80,000 “men, national guards, and policemen” who controlled the space and served as a barrier between the people and the execution in the Place de la Révolution;54 by the absence of women; and by the stern decorum of the crowd, mostly young men, before us but behind the troops, a number of whom appear to shout as they view the severed head. (They are said to have cried, “‘Long live the nation!  Long live the Republic!’”).55

While the authorities wanted the citizens of Paris to act with propriety to prove “that an act of justice in no way resembles vengeance,”56 there were, nevertheless, signs of vengeance at the ceremonial execution itself.  The fédérés of Marseilles, the principal victims of the August 10^th assault on the Tuileries, were placed immediately in front of the scaffold.57  Earlier at the trial of Louis XVI, cries of vengeance had resounded among the deputies, with the Girondins, who considered the execution unnecessary for the establishment of a republic, repudiating the Jacobin exhortations.  One Girondin, Joseph Guiter, viewed regicide as a “misguided form of human sacrifice” to freedom and equality.58  Hence, for contemporary viewers of the print, the troops and the public spectators in the image, that is, those attending and witnessing this spectacle of the display of the severed trophy-head, would have been regarded as complicit in the execution.59   In that, they are little different from those complicit in the murder of Foulon or Berthier de Sauvigny; the revelers returning from Versailles; or even the spectators at the May 6, 1777 execution of the poisoner Antoine-François Derues on the Place de Grève.60 

What was different, however, were the shouts of the crowd after the royal execution (depicted by Helman), symbolizing, to use Susan Dunn’s terms, “the myth of a phoenix-like republic rising from the blood of the dead king.”61  In that sense, Helman’s image incorporates ritualized violence; participatory violence (the three executioners); complicit violence; as well as symbolic violence, the violence of a new government and some of its representatives.62  The definition of “violence,” we must recall, included “violent passion,” something that is transmitted by the printmaker in the connection between the display of the king’s head and the upraised arms and the visible, rather than aural, shouts of the people and the troops.

	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]

Having examining the types of violence represented in these images, as well as the various representational strategies the artists used, we might well ask how these prints contribute to our historical knowledge of specific historical events.  One of the basic problems of visual images is their relationship to the concept of narrative.  Unlike the various written accounts, reports, and memoirs of events which can discuss a series of events over time, the image-makers, despite what Watelet promoted, were reduced to showing a single moment, or several consecutive moments, within one image, such as the fall of the Bastille, and the execution of Louis XVI.  Such a time constraint, with, at best, a compression of several moments into a single visualization, restricts the information that can be conveyed.  Nevertheless, it is clear that images such as the prints by Berthault/Prieur [Images 1, 8, 25 and 26] and Helman [Images 14, 16 and 27], as well as drawings by Prieur [Image 31] provide us with invaluable information about setting, costume, the articles of everyday life, the behavior of the crowd, physiognomy of specific individuals, and the like,63 which is impossible to get from the written accounts of the time, and that knowledge can be supplemented with similar information from other images, for example, Janinet’s prints (see Image 5).  Still other works have to be treated gingerly as a source.  As Claudette Hould has pointed out, one of the first popular prints of the attack on the Bastille was executed by Nicolas Dupin for the Révolution de Paris, which appeared only in October 1789, and which was subsequently adopted as a model by other printmakers for their own images of the event,64 and this, like some memoirs, conveys only a certain amount of information, much of it inaccurate. 

At the same time, the ubiquity of these images offers a different perspective on “historical knowledge”.  For their prevalence tells us not only that the printmakers thought that such images had commercial value and would sell65 but also that their popularity came from their symbolic value, souvenirs or “memory triggers” of a momentous event, which operated to perpetuate symbolic events.66  As in the case of written accounts of these events, these visualizations are constructions, subject to the personal/political interpretations of their authors.  They are subject also to the multiple readings of their audiences, including those in this forum.  Hence, some images may be interpreted as ambiguous (Robert’s Bastille [Image 28]); as possibly ironic (Journée mémorable de Versailles [Image 6]); or even reinterpreted as tragic (Helman’s execution of Louis XVI [Image 14]).  Regardless of the intent of the author, images, just like texts, will always have multiple interpretations, which are affirmed, contested, refined, and refrained.

Notes