18 The Massacres
Pierre Gabriel
Berthault (1748 – 1819) after Jacques François José Swebach-Desfontaines (1769
– 1823)
Massacres des 2, 3, 4,
5 et 6 Septembre 1792 (Massacres of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th September
1792) , 1794
Etching and Engraving
Published in the
series Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française, 1791-1817 (first
included in the edition of 1794)
Swebach-Desfontaines’ tableau, (the 72nd in the series),
depicts the first of the massacres that took place in Parisian prisons between
the 2nd and the 5th September 1792 (not, as the print suggests, between the 2nd
and the 6th). The killing spree had been sparked off by the fear of the
Austrian army’s impending arrival in
Swebach-Desfontaines has depicted the massacre at the Abbey
prison: a few sans-culottes armed with clubs can be seen beating their victims;
bodies lie scattered in the foreground; a decapitated head, mounted on a pike,
is paraded amongst the crowd. Certainly he has not shied away from the grisly
facts of the episode. Yet the drama remains understated and the representation
toned-down: there is little sense of revolutionary frenzy, and as Warren
Roberts has noted, should the bodies be removed from the composition, all that
one would be left with is a crowd idly milling around. [1]
Given the anxieties that surrounded the power of the people, which had on this
occasion escaped the control of the revolutionary authorities and manifested
itself in the most alarming way possible, it is little wonder that
Swebach-Desfontaines created what is a cool, dispassionate representation of
events. Above all the Tableaux historiques was a commercial project: an image
depicting the reality of a ragged and enraged crowd might easily have alienated
subscribers reluctant to be reminded of the bloody excesses inspired by the
Revolution.
[1] Warren Roberts, Jacques-Louis David
and Jean-Louis Prieur: Revolutionary Artists,
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