Politics, Emotions and the Rites of Violence

It is important to emphasise that these social and cultural approaches do not rid revolutionary violence of its political agenda. Instead they reveal the complex ways in which political action could be articulated.

Revolutionary crowds likewise often established makeshift courts to judge their victims - even if they were almost always already guilty in the eyes of their captors, such as those who ‘tried' Foulon in the hotel-de-ville in 1789 or the refractory priests in Paris's prisons in September 1792. So too did the perpetrators of collective violence when on trial - from the cook Desnot, who decapitated the governor of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, to those at Hautefaye - often refuse to recognise that they had committed a wrong, at times even framing their crimes as patriotic acts.

Military situations could create an environment particularly conducive to such attitudes, stirred by fears of defeat or counter-revolution. Hautefaye was one example, as Corbin has charted, with the rise of regional ‘anxiety and rumour'.^[607] A representative to Soissons's electoral assembly, Nicolas-Joseph Grain, recorded another in his memoirs upon a particularly brutal death there in September 1792. As volunteers arrived at a military camp stationed near Soissons, a group of soldiers seized one accused of treason; crying ‘Death to the traitor [Meure le traitre]!’, they jabbed him with their bayonets as they ‘dragged him from the city to the camp'. Surrounded by a circle of soldiers, he was forced on to his knees and made to ‘beg pardon of the Nation' before being ordered to lower his head. Once executed, his remains were cut into pieces and paraded around ‘at the tip of a bayonet' - in perhaps the military equivalent of the Parisian crowds' pikes - to celebratory cries of ‘Vive la Nation!'^[608]

Yet popular violence cannot be elided with sovereign punishment alone. In the search for the logic of political crowds, the more experiential interplay between brutal acts and their actors can often be overlooked. In this sense, the emotional currents of violence have remained relatively under-appreciated. In July 1789 cultural and political dimensions were also welded with an emotional agenda: Berthier was forced to kiss the ‘pale and bleeding head' of his father-in-law as it was flaunted in front of him. William Beik, among others, has advanced us in this direction by outlining how crowds in the ancien regime played more broadly into a ‘culture of retribution'.

If there is a limitation to this more recent focus on the affective dimension of punitive anger, it is that this remains largely one-dimensional in addressing only perpetrator emotions. Understandably, modern scholarship has sought both to escape the emphasis of traditional histories on elites and to repudiate the reductive ‘crowd psychology' of nineteenth-century theorists.^[610] Yet a closer look reveals that the revolutionary crowds drew on encoded rituals to wield emotional power that also inherently involved their victims. The deaths of Foulon and Berthier were notably punctuated by inflictions of humiliation, which, as a ‘self-conscious' emotion, requires a corresponding response from its targets.^[611] The actors central to emotional transactions in violent acts - that is, the victims themselves - should not be overlooked. From the perspective of Foulon and Berthier, the crowd's violence was clearly not sovereign, but politically and judicially illegitimate, and above all emotionally transgressive. Humiliation had a dual function here, each integral to the broader social and political meanings of its violence. On the one hand, it was a violent supplement to the retributive nature of popular punishment; on the other, it formed a critical component of an enacted judicial and hence sovereign rite.

To this end, these punishments were explicitly structured along a mimetic logic that drew upon the spectacular configuration of ancien regime public executions, including a shaming procession that culminated in the punitive site of the Place de Greve.^[612] As both men were captured outside Paris and escorted that morning back into the city, onlookers made clear to stress the emotional spectacle of their journey.

Just as these acts had relied on the crowd's knowledge of their familial ties, the Princess de Lamballe's own head was similarly paraded outside the Temple in September 1792 before the eyes of her confidante Marie- Antoinette. This use of close relationships to intensify psychological torture, one might argue, suggests much about the need for different kinds of spectatorship - not just the legitimising eyes of the crowd, as Lucas and Viola have rightly signalled, but also a more intimate and vengeful exhibi­tionism, grounded on an acute social awareness of the relationships between victims. To recognise these emotional associations in acts of intimidation and aggression is not to reduce the symbolic force of other cultural codes, but merely to add further dimensions to understand violence within each poli­tical space.