Download Propaganda and the Terror Emma Cronenweth “Ah! How beautiful

Propaganda and the Terror
Emma Cronenweth
“Ah! How beautiful this century where I breathe is!...
This century where my eyes have seen the founding of an empire through liberty, on the rights of
humanity! How it is brilliant! How it is majestic!
How it is rich in virtues, in miracles!
Yes, this century is the happy century that the oracles had predicted for us!
It will create the good fortune of the last of our posterity!”
(Act 1 Scene 1)
Towards the end of the French Revolution, the new government under the National
Convention created propaganda to trick the French people into believing that they had freedoms.
They used pamphlets, newspapers, advertisements, and even plays to convince them of this, but
in reality, the French were not free at all, they were constantly suppressed. The play The Meeting
of August 10 is a perfect example of this use of lies and propaganda during the Reign of Terror.
In this short excerpt above, the character “a female citizen” is expressing her love for the new
French government through song while she works to decorate the ruins of the Bastille for a
festival. One can immediately sense that her views about the National Convention are so
positive that they are unrealistic. In the articles “Engraving the Republic: Prints and Propaganda
in the French Revolution” by Lynn Hunt, “War and Terror: The Law of Nations from Grotius to
the French Revolution” by Dan Edelstein, and “The French Revolution and the Materiality of the
Modern Archive” by Ralph Kingston, the use of propaganda and lies during and after the rise of
the National Convention is discussed. Each author offers his or her own perspective on this
issue, which is greatly affected by gender, age, time period, and publication source among other
things. After having examined the viewpoint of each author, I now realize the amount of work
the French government under the National Convention did to keep its citizens in the dark
regarding its actual actions and policies. Whereas before I simply knew that propaganda was
used to spread the ideals of the Revolution, it was not until I had studied these three articles that I
comprehended the sheer control exerted by the National Convention and the Committee of
Public Safety.
In her article “Engraving the Republic: Prints and Propaganda in the French Revolution,”
Lynn Hunt discusses the use of fine art and imagery as perpetuators of Revolutionary fervor and
ideals. Hunt notes the change in the representation of freedom from the beginning of the
Revolution to the end, especially the new use of women as a symbol for liberty. Hunt’s
discussion of these trends in iconography is really more of a social and cultural history rather
than an artistic one, though. The rapid change in propaganda tools signified the rapid change in
both the beliefs of the government and the willingness of the people to be suppressed. People
went from being outraged about the slightest freedom being changed to practically living under a
dictatorship while calling themselves liberated. According to Hunt, “The projection of the
Republic onto a feminine figure allowed French revolutionaries to idealise and utopianise their
political goals while living in the midst of life-and-death struggles that had nothing pretty about
them. 1” Only qualitative data is used to provide evidence of this new representation of freedom,
since mostly paintings, engravings, and fine art materials are discussed in relation to the
bourgeoisie and middle socioeconomic class. What really grabbed my attention about Hunt’s
discussion of the French Revolution and its propaganda was the examination of sexual imagery
as a part of the representation of liberty. Hunt offers a thoroughly female perspective on the
subject, which relates back to the fact that one of the main forms of propaganda and trickery used
in the play The Meeting of August 10 is the monologues of the female citizen, like the one above.
Taking a similar subject matter and shedding new light on it, author Ralph Kingston
1
Lynn Hunt, “Engraving the Republic: Prints and Propaganda in the French Revolution,”
History Today 30 (1980): 17.
discusses the sudden fervent destruction of nearly every piece of information in the French
archives that occurred during the Reign of Terror. Though his article “The French Revolution
and the Materiality of the Modern Archive” is, in its entirety, about the art of archiving and its
social and cultural influence, I mostly focused on the part discussing the destruction of any
documents that reminded the people of the Old Regime. This included “feudal titles, fruits of
folly and pride.” 2 This demolition of official documents took place over a number of years
surrounding the Reign of Terror and the people not only knew about it but also participated in it.
Public document burnings became practically commonplace after a while. According to
Kingston, the first official annihilation of archival materials took place on October 28, 1790,
when “corporate and religious archives” were seized. 3 Although most of Kingston’s data is
qualitative, he does include some very interesting statistics on the type of documents destroyed,
which gives an insight as to why they were destroyed. Apparently, nine percent of all archival
materials that were burned, seized, etc. were “destroyed as records of former feudal rights or
noble privileges.” 4 The other ninety-one percent were simply deemed useless, though whether or
not they actually were useless is yet to be determined. Though Kingston’s main argument is
basically that the French Revolution had a hand in creating the modern archive, one can sense his
disgust towards the destroyers of the seemingly priceless material and information. As someone
writing for a publication entitled Libraries & the Cultural Record, he clearly cares a great deal
about the documentation of events and the cultural, political, and social importance of said
documentation. Kingston offers a new perspective on the French Revolution: the librarian’s
perspective.
2
Ralph Kingston, “The French Revolution and the Materiality of the Modern Archive,”
Libraries and the Cultural Record 46 (2011): 2.
3
Kingston, “The French Revolution and the Materiality of the Modern Archive,” 5.
4
Kingston, “The French Revolution and the Materiality of the Modern Archive,” 9.
In contrast to both Hunt and Kingston, Dan Edelstein does not actually discuss
propaganda at all in his article “War and Terror: the Law of Nations from Grotius to the French
Revolution.” He instead provides insight as to what things were actually like during the last part
of the French Revolution. If one simply reads The Meeting of August 10 and bases his or her
opinion of the Terror and the National Convention on that, then he or she would be sorely
misinformed. While plays and other forms of propaganda depicted France as utopia filled with
freedoms and dreams, the reality was far more somber. Edelstein argues that the French
population became increasingly militarized as the Revolution wore on, since they were being
forced to live in the midst of conflict, they simply became a violent part of it. Edelstein provides
two pie charts, both of which break down the “legal authority for judging the king.” 5 He actually
throws in many statistics throughout the course of his article, which are also used to show the
justification for the judgment of Louis XVI. Edelstein provides a far more structured, military,
and realistic depiction of the French Revolution compared to those of Hunt and Kingston; he
includes all social classes and genders in his discussion, as the Terror affected all individuals, not
just ones of a certain race, class, or sex.
Edelstein, Kingston, and Hunt all provide wonderfully different perspectives on the same
pressing issue and bring light to the real terrors of the radical part of the French Revolution.
While Hunt shows that images of women were used to make the harsh new policies of the neardictatorship seem softer, Kingston discusses the extreme measures taken to hide all evidence of
any governments before the National Convention, and Edelstein does not mince words in his
description of Terror-era France. He showcases the realities of the French Revolution, while
Hunt and Edelstein talk about the cover-up of the horrors of said reality. Typically when reading
5
Dan Edelstein, “War and Terror: The Law of Nations from Grotius to the French Revolution,”
French Historical Studies 31 (2008): 252.
histories of the French Revolution, the idea of propaganda during the Terror is mentioned, but
fairly minimally. The extreme measures that the government took to suppress and deceive its
people was, in reality, far worse than any single book or article could ever show, but when
looking at multiple articles along with a prime example of said propaganda, one can put together
the puzzle pieces and truly see the Terror for what it was. I now realize that 1792 was not quite
the serene, heroic time that The Meeting of August 10 wrongly showed it to be. While at the time
people thought that they were free under a republican government, they failed to see that they
were actually completely controlled by a near-dictatorship.