Visualizing the Revolution: Politics and Pictorial Arts in Late Eighteenth-Century France (review)

In this admirable study Reichardt and Kohle examine prints, paintings, architecture and sculpture of the French Revolution, materials that they see as ‘diverse, hybrid [and] multifarious’. They maintain that historians have hitherto studied these materials ‘only spasmodically’; with a ‘new perspective’ they examine selected late eighteenth-century images that they place within the context of their chosen themes: prints, widely distributed and posted in public places, that became a much contested visual discourse, and as such fed into the dynamics and conflicts of the French Revolution; images depicting public spaces that tell us much about the exercise of power during the Revolution, as do designs for public buildings that were never constructed; allegorical images that shed light on the stages through which the Revolution passed; Revolutionary imagery that reveals efforts to create a New Man, one of the loftiest goals of the Jacobin leadership. Reichardt and Kohle show how images tell us much about the Terror, and the logic that drove it forward. They also show how images reveal the decompression that followed the fall of Robespierre, and the political and cultural cross-currents within France after 9 Thermidor. This and far more Reichardt and Kohle discuss with magisterial authority in their outstanding book. Yet, there are problems. For them, the Revolution is ‘bourgeois’, a point that they make several times, although not always in the same sense of the word. This is one way to interpret the Revolution, although it is not one that is universally agreed upon by today’s historians. At any rate, this perspective is important to Reichardt and Kohle’s interpretation of the French Revolution, as seen in their discussion of the Storming of the Bastille. By seeing the ‘vainqueurs’ of 14 July as petit-bourgeois, Reichardt and Kohle align themselves with one school of revolutionary historiography. This would seem to have influenced their selection of images depicting the popular revolution of July 1789. None of the images in Visualizing the Revolution show the unleashed anger that erupted on July 14 and again on July 22. Had the authors chosen different images the popular revolution could have had a different character, carried out not by a petite bourgeoisie but by an angry populace, embittered over centuries of oppression. It is useful in this context to consider the last image in Visualizing the Revolution, August Desperret’s The Third Eruption of the Volcano of 1789, a lithograph from 1833. This print is a visual commentary on the French Revolution decades after it ended: explosive forces are seen breaking through the crust of the earth in 1789, throwing debris into the air from which people below are in flight. To understand the meaning of this image, the historian must give full consideration to the eruption of popular anger in July 1789, with attendant cruelty and violence.