Tang Xiaoyan: The rise, trend and existing problems of the study of the pictorial history of the French Revolution

Author: Tang Xiaoyan

Source: "Jiangsu Philosophy and Social Science Planning Office" WeChat public account

The original article was published in Theory of Historical Research, No. 4, 2020

In recent years, there has been a new trend in domestic and foreign historiography to gradually expand the scope of historical materials, and more and more historians have used visual materials such as images that were not originally regarded as strict historical materials as entry points for historical analysis, hoping to explore the concepts, mentalities, beliefs and imaginations of people in a specific era in the past from these materials other than texts. The study of Western image history in a broad sense, that is, the work of collecting, collating, and analyzing images, began from the Renaissance. Historical studies with images as the main evidence, i.e. iconographic analyses, may, according to Peter Burke, date back to the investigation of the Bayeux tapestry in the early 18th century. He believes that image history is really to take images as the basic historical materials, with images as the entry point for research, thereby proposing new ideas, rather than using images to support the conclusions reached by the author through other materials. From its definition of image history, Burke believes that the core of image history lies in proposing new ideas from images, and image history must be studied in depth. The author agrees with Burke's definition, but it should be noted that the collection and collation of images itself is an indispensable basic work for image research, and different publications often have a strong tendency, which is also the scope of image history research to some extent. More importantly, many academic works published in the form of picture books and other image collations contain very important research and analysis results, in other words, in other words, in some researchers, there is no clear boundary between the collection and collation of images and the analysis of images. Therefore, while focusing on image research, this paper also examines the collection and collation of images as a prelude to the birth of image history.

The rise of pictorial history has provided new growth points for the development of historiography. But before we can make extensive use of pictorial evidence, we first need to answer the following question: What "deeper lessons" can pictorial data provide for historical research? How can you accurately interpret the image to grasp this information? Is this information enough to ask new questions or give a different interpretation of existing problems? How can an interdisciplinary approach help image history? To answer these questions, this article will focus on the development of image history in the field of French Revolution studies. In recent years, the study of images during the Revolution, as an important part of political and cultural history, has become a topic of concern for many revolutionary historians. This article will summarize the basic situation of image data, the rise and trend of the history of images of the Revolution, and the problems existing in image research, so as to grasp the current situation and future development trend of the history of images of the Revolution as a whole.

1. Distribution, compilation and publication of the Collection of Images of the French Revolution

According to the French revolutionary historian Claude Mazauric, the number of various types of images from the Revolutionary period is about 120,000, including prints, gouache, watercolors, oil paintings, and images on various artifacts. Another French historian, Michel Vauville, preliminarily calculated that 55% of the pictorial materials of the Revolution were collected by the Image Department of the National Library of France, the most famous of which were the collection de Vinck, the collection Hennin and the collection with QB1 as the serial number. The collection of the Carnavalais Museum in Paris accounts for about 20% of the total, including large-scale artifacts from the Revolutionary period, such as busts, porcelain, coats of arms, clocks, jewelry boxes and various weapons. In addition, the Louvre, Versailles and other national museums also have about 10% of the image materials, such as many works of David, a famous official painter during the Revolution, which were collected by the Louvre. There are also special institutions that account for about 10% of the relevant collections. For example, the famous Procopo Café in Paris also has a collection of prints and plates from the Revolutionary period, and the number of ornaments on display is nearly 100. Finally, the Provincial Museum has a collection of about 5% of the pictorial material, of which the Museum of the French Revolution in Vizille is the most abundant.

In short, the image material is mainly preserved in Paris, and the provincial collections are relatively small, and some of the collections are actually from Paris. Among the provincial collections, the real note is some special objects, such as the Porcelain of the Revolution in the Collection of the Neville Museum. During the turbulent years of the revolution, the French porcelain industry, with the aristocratic or upper bourgeoisie as its main customer group, suffered a huge crisis, and many porcelain production areas collapsed, but the porcelain factories in the Neville region survived with cheap products for low-income people, and the images on porcelain that survive today have become very valuable research materials.

However, Lin Hunt pointed out that there are some problems with the statistics of the number of existing revolutionary images by French researchers, first of all, they are only for the French collection; secondly, many of these collections are reproductions; more importantly, there are many kinds of revolutionary images, in addition to the most common prints, large oil paintings, portraits, porcelain, etc., there are also playing cards, game utensils, calendars, maps, various types of clothing, clocks, snuff bottles, letter paper patterns, etc., so she believes that the exact number of images during the Revolution. It's still an unsolved mystery.

Although the total number of images is unknown, the collection and collation of them began shortly after the end of the Revolution in the 19th century. The most famous of these was Baron Eugène de Vinck (1823-1888), a Belgian diplomat in Paris, who collected a wide variety of images, ranging from a large number of satirical prints to portraits and scenes. The original intention of collecting these pictorial materials was to "find the exact characteristics of the characters and times not only in the tendentious narratives of historians, but in the prints of the time, so as to obtain the true philosophy of history"; it is precisely because of the importance of the rich meaning of such images that reflect the characteristics of the times that de Wanko devoted himself to the study of image collection, and his greatest concern was what he believed to be the era that determined the evolution of modern society in French history: the era of the Revolution. Le baron Carl de Vinck de Deux Orp (1859-1931), the son of Devanko, donated a collection of 28,000 images related to French history collected by his father and himself from all over Europe in 1906, totaling 248 volumes, spanning the reign of Louis XVI to the Paris Commune, of which 9,000 were from the French Revolution, and many of the images were most likely orphans. It is precisely because of the collection and collation of devanko's father and son that these extremely precious image materials have been passed down to the present day, otherwise most of them will disappear into the dust of history and will not have the opportunity to meet future generations of researchers.

In addition to the Devanco family, the French collector Michel Hennin (1777-1863) also made a significant contribution to the collection of revolutionary images. The son of Voltaire's friend collected 169 volumes of French historical imagery, ranging from Clovis to the Second Empire, totaling 14,807. In 1863 he donated the collection to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, with the number Qb201-Qb369. Among them, the number of collections of images from the period of the Revolution reached 4,000. Like Dewanko, Ernan used the convenience of his career as a diplomat to collect a considerable number of prints of France from other European countries at that time, which became a rare pictorial material for studying how France was viewed in other countries in history. At present, these two most important revolutionary image databases belong to the Printmaking Department of the National Library of France, and the online system of the National Library of France, Gallica, can retrieve electronic versions of these two huge database of image materials, as well as the actual size of each image, the age of creation and other related information.

Based on these valuable images, the Printmaking Department of the National Library of France has compiled a number of lists. The Ernan Collection has a five-volume list. With regard to the Dewanko collection, in addition to the Baron's own two-volume catalogue list, the Printmaking Department published nine volumes of the Dewanko collection with detailed descriptions from 1909 to 1955 (originally planned to produce ten volumes, which were not completed). The contents of the list are explained in turn according to the collection number, including the size of the print, the author, the author's relationship, the historical events involved, the historical figures, the original image information on which it is based, the author, the location of the collection and the corresponding number, and even the very specific information such as whether the clothing worn by the characters in the image is the imagination of the creator. This information is of unparalleled importance for the in-depth study of image materials in deVanco's collections.

In the early 19th century, researchers began to use images as illustrations or collations in the history of revolutions. Illustrations and albums are not strictly image studies, but they are indispensable prerequisites for image studies. Moreover, as a complete history of images, the appearance, application and dissemination of illustrations and albums themselves in a specific historical environment are not without research value. Before the images came to the attention of researchers in the history of the Revolution, a large number of pictorial materials appeared only as illustrations in historical works. As early as the first half of the 19th century, Thiers' many reprints of the History of the French Revolution had already appeared a large number of illustrations. At the end of the 1980s, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the Revolution, a number of illustrated editions of the history of the Revolution emerged. For example, Richard Cobb and Colin Jones compiled and published in 1988, The Voices of the French Revolution, which contains 171 images. The New History of Paris: The Great Revolution, edited and published in 1989 by Jean Tilar, is also a chronicle of the history of Paris from 1789 to 1799, with 218 illustrations. The Chronicle of the French Revolution, published in 1988 by the American Chronicles Press, introduced the French Revolution in a unique way in the form of a newspaper collection, containing about 1700 illustrations, and the scope of the selected images in this book is not limited to political events and political figures, but tries to fully show the overall social landscape of the time, from Paris to the provinces, from major political events to anecdotes in journals and magazines. From all angles, it presents the daily life scenes of ordinary people in special periods of history, as well as the large and small events and related figures in the non-political field at that time. These publications are aimed at the general public, and the illustrations provide readers with vivid scenes and intuitive pictures. In addition, as an illustration of popular reading, the heterogeneity of images selected by different authors in different eras has become an angle of image research in the future, in other words, the selection of images with obvious tendencies itself contains research topics that can be analyzed. The French scholar Remy Marais took this as a starting point to conduct a more detailed comparative study of the historical works of the Great Revolution in the first half of the 19th century.

If the image data as illustrations are still in the initial stage of supporting texts, then combing and compiling them and publishing them in the form of albums are indispensable prerequisites for subsequent research and analysis. Editors of 19th-century picture albums already had a sense of seeing images as another kind of historical evidence, and in their writings it is not difficult to see that the author consciously selects the image materials that best reflect his own views. By the 20th century, image researchers, represented by Michel Vauville, had completely regarded images as indispensable and important materials for the study of the Revolution. He believes that there has been considerable progress in image research during the Great Revolution, and the album he edited is a phased summary of image research work.

Notable works on the history of the images of the Revolution are Armand Dayot's French Revolution in 1889, Philippe Sagnac and Jean Robiquet's Revolution of 1789, and Vauville's 1989 Revolution. Dayo's French Revolution, published on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Revolution, contains about 2,000 images, dating from the reign of Louis XVI to the "Coup d'état of the Misty Moon". The album was published by Doyo to introduce the reader to the history of the Revolution recorded in images, another valuable material that differs from written materials that tell the reader that even in turbulent times like the Revolution, painters, sculptors, printmakers, and craftsmen used their talents to truly record and depict the events around them. Sarniak said that every advance in the study of the French Revolution is inseparable from the discovery and application of new historical materials, and there are still many hidden materials waiting to be excavated, and the image materials of the Revolution period are an extremely important part of it.

On the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the Revolution, a large number of commemorative anthologies and albums were published around the world. As Pokkin puts it, "Historians and art scholars are increasingly aware of the importance of visual image to the world in which we live, and they find revolutionary images to be a rich new resource for studying the worldview of that era." The current academic enthusiasm for revolutionary graphic arts is a recent phenomenon." The most important of these is Voville's Images and Narratives. As an important representative of the history of the French Revolution since the 1980s, Voville attached great importance to revolutionary image materials, and he not only wrote the preface to the "Images of the French Revolution", a collection of nearly forty papers on the study of the images of the Great Revolution, but also edited the five-volume "Images and Narratives". This work can be described as the culmination of the Album of the Great Revolution, with a total of 1780 pages, on a time-axis, starting with the "Council of Dignitaries" in 1787 and ending with Napoleon's "Coup d'état of the Misty Moon" in 1799. The book contains about 3,000 images by 120 authors, ranking first in the number of existing albums of the Great Revolution. At the end of the fifth volume, there are also brief biographies of 120 painters or printmakers, which is a valuable source of image research during the Revolution.

In addition to traditional prints, oil paintings, portraits, and gouache paintings, the editors of Images and Narratives also included other types of images that appeared in large numbers from 1790 to 1793, such as badges, jewelry, porcelain, fans, etc., as well as special chapters depicting the "Golden Age of Revolutionary Ceramics". In addition to the breathtaking number and variety, the biggest difference from the traditional path of histoires illustrées, that is, images are only annotations and explanations of historical narratives, is that the editors want to "let the images speak for themselves", not only important images are accompanied by detailed background introductions, but also important historical events or historical figures, the editors are displayed in different images, so that readers can appreciate the different perspectives of people at that time. For example, the images representing the League Festival are not selected from an aesthetic point of view or a typical starting point, but try to show the cross perspective of the whole, as close as possible to even reconstruct the horizon of the people at that time.

It is also worth mentioning the simultaneous publication of Antoine DeBac's Revolutionary Cartoons and Claude Langlois's Counter-Revolutionary Cartoons, which were published as two volumes of a set of books. The two authors not only introduce the usual methods and significance of satirical cartoons in the revolutionary era, but also focus on the complex relationship between satirical cartoons, a cultural product with great characteristics of the times, and the mentality of the people. They believe that political cartoons are not a simple projection of ideas or the embodiment of popular attitudes, but a carefully encoded allegorical expression of the political imagination of the times. This set of works makes up for the fact that previous researchers paid more attention to revolutionary satirical cartoons and ignored the large number of counter-revolutionary images during the Revolution. In this book, the reader will see that not only did the royalists lag far behind the revolutionaries in terms of image propaganda, but their works tended to focus on specific individuals, while revolutionary cartoons focused on social groups, and the two propaganda methods were very different.

Many of the albums published during the 200th anniversary of the Revolution relied on various exhibitions held at the time. Such exhibitions take place not only in France, but also on the other side of the Channel de La Manche. For example, the British Museum held an exhibition in 1989, and the album published accordingly, The French Revolution: A British Perspective, became an important reference for studying how images depicted this major historical event in other countries during the Revolution. It can be seen that the image collection published around the 200th anniversary of the Revolution still seems to follow the arrangement form of the Covenant 100 years ago, but in terms of content, the editors-in-chief are no longer satisfied with just collecting and arranging images and arranging them in chronological order, and they use images to show a new perspective on the Revolution. And it is worth noting that the identity of the compiler has also changed significantly, from art historian to revolutionary historian, which undoubtedly means that the formal study of the image itself has begun.

Second, the rise of the study of the pictorial history of the Great Revolution

The study of the history of the Revolution in the 19th century was dominated by Thiers, Kizo, Michelet and others, and social and economic history in the 20th century also emerged, but the history of the pictorial history of the Revolution did not begin until the 1980s. The real history of images in the field of French Revolution studies, that is, the study of the confrontation of different forces in the revolutionary period, the tension of different groups, and thus the exploration of the mentality and intention of various classes or groups at that time, need to wait for the rise of cultural history.

The first representatives of the pictorial history of the Revolution were the French historians Maurice Aguiron and Lin Hunt. In 1979, Aguilon published Mariana in Battle: Images and Symbols of the Republic from 1789 to 1880. Although the book revolves primarily around the 19th century, the first chapter focuses on the image of Mariana from 1789 to 1830, and the author details how the revolutionaries used symbols and pictures as an important means of disseminating political values. This book shows that the pictorial history of the French Revolution has officially entered the research stage, and at a time when cultural history has not yet become popular, Aguiron's image research has opened up a unique path for political and cultural history. Sudi Hazarisinger calls this path the "history of the system of political symbols," classifying it as one of the five broad categories of political and cultural history. The famous revolutionary historian Alain Cobain also spoke highly of Aguilon's pictorial research, saying that while historians of the 19th century were increasingly imprisoned by archival materials such as administration, litigation and justice, Aguiron's research opened up a previously neglected field. From "Why is the french republican symbol a woman?" Starting with this seemingly simple but difficult question, Aguiron carefully analyzes how Mariana, as a symbol of the republic, gradually emerged from the original representative freedom to become a symbol of the republic. Starting from the analysis of pictorial materials, combined with a large number of written historical materials, the author analyzes in detail how a specific female image is connected with a series of abstract concepts, showing the reader how a particular image and the symbolic meaning it carries under the shape of social and political forces and political events have undergone many changes before finally being determined. As soon as the book was published, it attracted a lot of attention, and many commentators, like Cobain, believed that Aguilon had ushered in a new era of study of cultural and political relations. Subsequent research on pictorial history mushroomed, especially around the time of the 200th anniversary of the Revolution, a large number of related works or papers appeared, and it has remained hot ever since. For example, even with the image of "Mariana" in which Aguiron has published long works and several papers, scholars still find new research topics in it. In 2012, the French scholar Eva Barlow discussed the image of heroines on the stage of the theatrical drama during the Revolution, arguing that these heroines are the figurative representations of abstract Mariana on the stage.

Another pioneer in the study of Revolutionary imagery was Lin Hunt, a well-known American expert on the history of the Great Revolution, who published an article in 1982 entitled "Hercules and radical images during the French Revolution". If Aguilon studied the most important female figure of the Revolution, the Mariana symbolizing the Republic, then Lin Hunt's article focuses on the most important male figure of the Revolution, that is, the Symbol of the People' Hercules. Through his analysis of the image of Hercules, the author makes a very important political and cultural point, namely that all political authority needs a "cultural framework", and all cultural frameworks need a "sacred center". Lynn Hunt said that the king's body under the old system was a manifestation of this center. Revolutionaries who challenged this system, while politically relentless, hesitated in the face of the "traditional" cultural framework. If a symbolic system is to be completely linked to the elimination of the old system, is there an urgent need for a completely new cultural system? What should this cultural system look like? Is there a need for personified statues or images to embody the spirit and virtues of the Republic? Around these questions, the revolutionary deputies were unable to reach agreement. Lin Hunt notes that in the early days of the revolution, there was a view that "a new regime based on reason and nature does not need to be metaphorically pictorial, but that clear textual exposition and public discussion are the appropriate way to do it." Since both the monarchy and the Catholic Church have a long history of image systems to carry and disseminate corresponding political, religious and hierarchical concepts, the new system is not willing to inherit this cultural framework system, and the revolutionaries hope to completely break the cultural framework of using pictorial metaphors to describe political authority, and construct a new logic of political authority based on reason and nature, and the new logic of political authority relies on clear and clear language (words and speeches) rather than vague images. In other words, images, as a cultural framework model for political expression, were in crisis at one point in the early days of the revolution. This is also in line with the anti-religious and anti-idolatry ideas of the Enlightenment, which became an extreme anti-iconatic trend after the outbreak of the revolution. This also directly led to the destruction of countless church statues and the demolition of statues of kings during the Revolution. However, as the revolution progressed, most revolutionaries soon realized that the revolutionary idea of image dissemination was far more rapid and effective than the text, whether in terms of recognition, popularity, and persistence. As a result, the image model in the original cultural framework was still inherited by the revolutionaries, and the core of the problem turned to the need to replace the monarchical narrative mode of the old system with a new system of metaphors. The revolutionaries eventually chose hercules, the unruly God of Hercules in ancient Greek mythology, to represent the people, and the powerful Hercules held a mace and stepped on a chain, symbolizing the people who broke through the shackles of the old system.

In addition to Lin Hunt, the figure of Hercules was followed by the French scholar Jean Bezac. He found that this image had subtle differences in the early revolutionary period, the most radical years of the revolution, and the post-revolutionary period, which made the meaning of the image very different. In the early years of the revolution, Hercules is depicted tearing down a bundle of sticks. The stick, borrowed from ancient Rome, was a common symbol of the Revolution and meant law and order. Hercules, who was tearing down the bundle, was clearly the antithesis of law and order, a destructive and barbaric force. At the height of the revolution, the image of Hercules changed to wearing a freedom hat and stepping on a sea monster, or holding a mace with a mace and stepping on chains. At this time, Hercules was a symbol of the power of the people, and in the name of freedom, he broke the shackles of the old system and knocked the evil monarchy (the sea monster) to the ground. This period was the period when the images of Hercules were most widely circulated and numerous. By the time of the Governorate and the reign of Napoleon, the image of Hercules, a symbol of popular power at the bottom, was fading, and the era of restoring order no longer favored uncontrollable wild horse-like popular power. Combined with the analysis of time course and political events, the author sees that the same image has evolved into multiple variants under different political needs, adding or subtracting the details of symbolic elements in order to emphasize or weaken certain ideas, until the meaning of the symbolic image has been completely changed, and the driving force behind this is the close correlation between the production and dissemination of images during the revolutionary period and the change of political power and the corresponding required political propaganda.

Both Aguilon and Lynn Hunt's research shows that the revolutionaries of the time were very clearly aware of the important role of images, and in connection with the literacy rate of the people at that time and the importance of images and symbols in the French cultural tradition, the revolutionaries obviously could not ignore the advantages of images over words in shaping and disseminating new values. The first stage of the study of the images of the Great Revolution showed the important role of images in the revolutionary period that had been ignored by previous studies, and their changes at different stages were related to different characteristics of the revolutionary process. Moreover, this stage of research has clearly demonstrated that image research must be based on a corresponding specific analysis of the mentality and emotions of different social groups in 18th-century France. However, at this stage of research, more attention was paid to the images produced by the elite, Mariana and Hercules were both personified and figurative of abstract allegories, and a large number of low-cost images circulating among ordinary people at that time had not attracted enough attention from researchers.

After the publication of the first works or articles on pictorial history in the 1980s, pictorial history became an indispensable and important part of the study of the Revolution. After 20 years of exploration and cultivation by scholars from all over the world, the history of the pictorial history of the Great Revolution entered the second stage of development in the early 21st century, and a number of high-quality masterpieces emerged.

In 2001, the American scholar Joan Landers published his seminal book, The Visualization of the State: Gender, Representation, and the Revolution in 18th-Century France. Landers sought to solve the paradox of why revolutionaries argued for the confinement of women to the private domain of the family, while at the same time there were large numbers of metaphorical images of women standing for the highest forms of public life, the state and its institutions. By analyzing nearly a hundred images of the time used to shape the idea of the state, the authors show the important role that specific female figures played in establishing an abstract concept of the state. Landers draws heavily on the theories of art history, from the composition and content of the images to the types of prints they appear. She is committed to exploring the interaction between visual culture and politics, arguing that images are like words, have their own political positions, and have the ability to persuade people. In addition, she stressed in particular that when using pictorial materials, they are not seen as explanations of ideas or as supplements to printed materials, but as their own logic, mode of operation and ability to influence. Landers criticized the revisionists of the French Revolution for placing too much emphasis on the authority of text and rhetoric and ignoring the influence and effects of images and viewing.

Although Landers attaches so much importance to the role of images, she does not focus only on the analysis of image content like previous image researchers, and the first part of the book not only deals with the discussion of image concepts in the French Enlightenment era before the Revolution, but also specifically analyzes the production and circulation of image products in this period, which means that image history researchers have begun to consciously combine image studies with intellectual history and socio-economic history. Some commentators have pointed out that Landers used a large number of written materials to support the analysis of images, which just shows that the analysis and interpretation of the former cannot be separated from the support of the latter. Of course, there is room for further discussion on the thrust of the book, namely, the extent to which the images of the revolutionary period affected the formation of the revolutionary masses and whether they formed the core of the political polemic.

Women's history and pictorial history began to emerge in the 1980s. Image studies have a special significance for women's history, because women's history researchers have long been confined to the lack of written materials, and the use of pictorial materials has undoubtedly injected new vitality into this field, and Lin Hunt's pictorial interpretation of Marie Antoinette, queen of Louis XVI during the Revolution, is a model. In her Family Romance of the French Revolution, Lin Hunt details various folk images of the destruction of the queen's image that had already appeared in the last years of the old system and reached its peak during the revolutionary period. In these images, the queen is portrayed as a foreign woman who deceives the king, is greedy, absurd, pompous, extravagant. The author's intention is not to explore the veracity of these accusations, but to analyze the people's serious hostility to the queen and contempt for the king conveyed from them. This reveals the collective mentality of the monarchy in the last years of the old system, the disappearance of royal authority, the popular opposition to the royal family, and the misogynistic involvement of women in the public sphere. Images not only became a way to study and analyze the changes in socio-political concepts at that time, but also became the key to interpreting the French people's concept of gender order in the second half of the 18th century, explaining the relationship between politics and gender from a new perspective.

The American scholar Elizabeth Kindleberg also analyzed the image of Marat's assassin, Charlotte Corday, from the perspective of images and texts, during the Revolution. She found that as the murderer of Mara, known as the "Friend of the People", Ke Dai was not portrayed in the media reports at the time as a fierce god, and the image of Ke Dai presented to the public was mostly emphasized to portray beauty and perseverance. The author believes that such an image shows that the attitude of the people towards the revolution at that time has changed, from the initial national celebration to become more complicated; it also shows that although women are excluded from the actual revolutionary action, in the field of cultural production, women's attitudes and emotions are not missing, and Ke Dai is undoubtedly the embodiment of women's participation in the revolution, from bystanders to "participants" and "actors", which is the projection of their collective self-imagination.

While women historians use pictorial material to analyze the complex relationship between socio-political power and gender in a given era, other researchers continue to combine images with concrete historical events. One of the representative figures is the American scholar Richard Wrigley. In 2002 he published The Politics of Appearance: The Appearance of Clothing in Revolutionary France. Through the analysis of specific events, many "cliché" misunderstandings about the costumes of the Great Revolution were revealed, and the misunderstanding of people's understanding of the costumes of the Great Revolution was corrected for a long time. Revolutionary dress, he said, was far less widespread than usually assumed, but was strictly limited to special occasions, such as meetings of political clubs or festive ceremonies, which were more like ritual objects. Rigley's research is based on a large number of images, meeting records, memoirs, and the research results of others, from the individual and the collective level, to explore in detail how the individual's clothing has become a symbol of the revolution of the masses, and at the same time involves various events and discussions in the process of this transformation, in order to fully explain how the political culture of the revolution is expressed in daily experience through rhetoric and legalization. Compared with the previous relevant results, Wrigley's research is more solid and rich, which not only makes up for the shortcomings of the previous costume historians who focused on historical facts and ignored cultural analysis, but also made up for the slightly thin historical materials on which Lin Hunt's explanation relied.

However, as image research progressed into the second stage, first-generation image historians such as Lin Hunt also began to pay attention to the image data involving the people at the bottom, closely combining the analysis of specific group images with specific political events and changes in political forces. Hunter's 2005 essay was a study of how people viewed people during the Revolution, starting with pictorial materials. As she points out, colin Lucas, a British historian who specializes in the masses of the Revolution, analyzes their views on the populace and their violence in terms of the actions of the revolutionaries and their public statements, but Lucas himself has to admit that only conservatives can truthfully express their true views of the populace. To unravel the fog of political discourse, Lin Hunt's research team carefully analyzed 42 images depicting violence and the populace during the Revolution to explore whether new discoveries could be made from an image perspective. The research of the art historian Vivian Cameron on the team is very representative. By examining how the author of the image presents the expression of violence, Cameron found that the violence expressed in the image can be specifically divided into five types: symbolic violence, participatory violence, collusive violence, precursor violence and ritualized violence, and behind these manifestations are undoubtedly the author's different attitudes towards popular violence. Seiser and Lin Hunt's article also supports this conclusion, because violence is expressed through a variety of visual means, so how images portray the tendency of violence becomes important. They found that the prints of the fall of the Bastille rarely directly depicted scenes of violence, and the authors of various prints rarely used bloody scenes to show this scene, indicating that the creators' attitude towards violence was very restrained and cautious. And when scenes depicting popular violence, such as in images of Furlong and his son-in-law killed, the "cruel" and "brutal" sides of popular violence are emphasized. And Cameron noticed that French printmakers did not have the tradition of showing the actions of the people at the bottom, as their British counterparts did, and in 18th-century French prints, the people often appeared only as still images of street vendors. Thus, when printmakers had to portray the actions of the people, the latter's image often appeared vague and stylized. This treatment of the people and their violence in the image shows the sense of alienation and strangeness of the printmakers to the people who have acted, and the wariness of revolutionary violence.

Describing the differences in the overall effects of mass violence and their links to competing political positions certainly provides researchers with a new way to better grasp the wavering and ambiguous attitudes of the revolutionary elite toward popular violence. This kind of subtlety may be rarely seen in traditional written material, but it can be seen in the image. The introduction of specific historical events into image analysis, and the careful observation of how the facts described by the text material are presented in the scene depiction of the visual image, make the intention of the image author more clearly displayed, and the image becomes another expression of attitude different from the text material.

In the study of the images of the Great Revolution, in addition to the above-mentioned path of using image data as a means of analysis or cutting into the perspective, another scholar is committed to examining how people at that time viewed the image as a special cultural product. Because only by accurately grasping the basic attitude of people in a specific society in a specific era to images can we discuss and analyze the relationship between image products and political events and people's mentality in that historical environment, and the attitude of people in a certain era to view the image works themselves can also clearly reflect the branding of the ideas of the times. In this research direction, DeBac is one of the representatives. He spoke in detail about the issue in an interview published in 2003. De Bac argues that the French have been concerned with the socio-political and religious functions of images since the early modern period, and that during the Reformation there was a fierce debate over icons, and that the French elite was unable to agree on a range of issues such as the space, location, and practice of images. And the issue at stake in this debate is actually politics. In response to the images of the Revolution, DeBac argues that the Controversy over Images in French culture was perpetuated by some radical revolutionaries who believed that not only should the pictorial works used to promote monarchical ideas be destroyed, but that images could easily arouse the emotions of ordinary people, especially those irrational masses who had no education, and that the symbols and rhetoric of emotions were contrary to the simple and clear pure style promoted by the Revolution. Other revolutionaries, such as David and others, were convinced that the revolution ultimately depended on appearances, that is, by truly establishing itself in meaning, and that the revolution itself had to expand the influence of revolutionary ideas by means of propaganda as easy to understand and easily disseminated, such as images. Thus, revolutionaries "not only use images, but also regulate, guide, and reproduce them to make them more effective." The French scholar Édouard Baumier was equally concerned with the relationship between revolution and art, and his book The Art of Freedom: The Doctrine and Controversy of the French Revolution revolved around the discussion of icon destroyers and patriots that began in 1790. What is the rationale for this? Repeated arguments just prove people's confusion and entanglement about this. Examining the overall trend of artists, works of art and art culture in special historical periods may only be a branch of the pictorial history of the French Revolution, but it is undoubtedly the only way to conduct cross-research between cultural history, political history and art history, so as to more accurately grasp the relationship between the logic of art development and the historical background, and explore the key question of whether political and social changes will affect or even change the trend of art.

The history of the pictorial history of the Revolution has now entered its third stage of development. Michel Biar, a famous French historian of the Revolution, is one of the representative figures. In 2017 and 2018, he published two books, Hell in Fantasy and the French Revolution, and Crucifixion and Glory. In both books, Biyal takes the study of images from the period of the Revolution to a deeper level. Compared with previous pictorial studies, while analyzing the political implications of the images themselves in detail and closely related to the changes in the actual situation, Biar placed the images of the Revolutionary period into the genealogy of the relevant images in French history. In other words, rather than viewing images of the Revolutionary period as a series of isolated visual representations in a particular time and space, Biyal sees them as a segment in the context of historical images. For example, when the author examines the scenes of hell and heaven during the Revolution, he goes back to the expression of similar scenes in the pictorial art of the Enlightenment and even the 17th century, and compares them with the images of the Revolution, so that the reader can clearly see how the same pictorial elements have changed in the context of the Revolution. In Biar's view, only by meticulously capturing the specific changes in these image symbols, combined with textual materials and related socio-political historical facts, can it be possible to more accurately grasp how revolutionary ideas are embodied in images, how people can reorganize and even change traditional meaning symbols and images through images. More importantly, Biyal's research also highlights the fact that the discursive system of expression formed by the images of the Revolutionary period has had the same profound influence on future generations as other political cultures. The second half of The Passion and glory analyzes images of a large number of wounded soldiers during the Revolution who did not care about their own safety, and the heroic image of heroic warriors continued until the Second World War, becoming a very important part of modern French political culture.

III. Problems and Prospects in the Study of the Pictorial History of the Great Revolution

The study of the images of the Great Revolution lasted for nearly forty years, and the results of the research results were abundant, but in the process of rapid development, the shortcomings of the history of the images of the Great Revolution itself were gradually revealed. Some of the flaws may be weaknesses common to all pictorial histories, while others are related to the specific historical circumstances of the Revolution. In a 2005 article, Lin Hunt pointed out several key problems in the study of revolutionary imagery and proposed countermeasures accordingly. I discuss these flaws in conjunction with the main points of her article.

First, the question of sample size is involved. As mentioned above, the existing number of revolutionary images is huge, and scattered in various libraries, museums, and private collections, and it is difficult to accurately organize and count, which leads to researchers choosing a certain type or theme of images for related research, and will be questioned whether the sample size is appropriate. For example, in the study of images of the people conducted by Lin Hunt and others, scholars have selected thirty or forty more typical images from thousands of images for careful analysis, so how can researchers ensure that the images they select are typical? Can it represent images that are not being noticed?

Second, current research has done very little with regard to the receptive level of images, i.e. the audience. It can be determined that the target consumer group of the image is complex and diverse, and all kinds of beautifully printed images are oriented to the higher income class; the cheapest inferior printing map asks for only 10 Su, and the daily income of the low-level craftsmen is 20-50 Su, which shows the low price of such prints. But low-priced images were not necessarily aimed at the bottom, because newspapers at the time were even more expensive, requiring only 2 sus per copy. So Lin Hunt believes that it is not easy to connect the audience of a certain type of image with a specific group. In addition, only a few of the surviving images are signed, and even cases of craftsmen or printers were disinformation in the tense political situation of the time. These problems still need to be further excavated and reliable historical materials to be demonstrated.

Third, there are still problems with timeliness in images from the era of the Revolution. The political changes and social upheavals of the revolutionary era are often rapidly changing, and it is difficult to avoid the lag of cultural and artistic works that require creation and production time. Because of this, the number of traditional works of art such as large-scale oil paintings was small at that time, and a considerable number of works had become out of place in the process of creation, so they had to abandon or change the original creative ideas halfway; on the other hand, even if they were sold to lower classes of image products, such as household ceramics and low-cost prints, they still took a long time from engraving, production to sales, and could not be seen in just a few days after the event, as in printed text. If it is hastily studied and analyzed from the perspective of the age of the marker of the image, it may lead to erroneous conclusions. There does not appear to be a proper solution to this.

Finally, the use of image data, in addition to the large volume, scattered data, relevant authors and audiences and other important information lack of problems, it also puts forward other knowledge and skills requirements for historical researchers. According to Lin Hunt, reading images requires the same skills as reading texts, including discerning common types and techniques, familiarity with the widely accepted symbolism of that era, the visual expressions of a printmaker or painter and their variations, and in particular, the political tendencies of individuals and the overall situation at play a role in the production of images. Many researchers are aware of these intractable questions: how can the imagination of Parisians at the end of the 18th century be reconstructed without distortion? How to accurately distinguish the subtle changes between narrative images and images with pejorative meanings from the image detail processing that the mind understands? These problems in the image data have not been overcome or crossed, and may only be temporarily bypassed.

In response to these problems, Lin Hunt proposed some solutions. First of all, in today's large-scale electronic and networked image data, retrieving and selecting suitable research images, especially comparing and analyzing approximate images, requires researchers to cooperate as a team, and it is difficult for individuals to complete this massive work. Hunter's research on images of the people is a group collaboration. Second, the discussion of image studies should be opened up so that more people have access to these images and related studies, beyond the traditional model of historians or art historians working alone. The purpose of image research is not only to introduce and disseminate images, but also to provide a path to the core direction of the political core of the Revolution through their analysis and research, as well as to emphasize the diversity of academic analysis. When it comes to the retrieval and comparison of images, Hunter believes that the electronicization of images makes it possible to put images in different time and space together for research, and because of the role of the network, more people can participate in discussions and even find problems or clues that professional researchers ignore.

The author believes that hunter's proposed response plan is slightly itchy. On the one hand, although the networking of image materials can brainstorm and bring more space and participants to the discussion, it cannot make up for the lack of basic information of the original materials; on the other hand, it is debatable to what extent the discussion open to the public can promote the progress of professional research work. Because the study of revolutionary images requires a considerable degree of understanding of the historical events, political figures, the overall situation of society and various symbolic images at that time, which requires years of accumulation for professional scholars.

In addition to the problems of the above four pictorial histories mentioned by Lin Hunt, I believe that there are two flaws that need to be pointed out, which both present the characteristics of the era of the Revolutionary image and the inevitable weakness of almost all the image data.

The first problem is that the content involved in the image material is more selective than that of the written material. Many political events occurred during the Revolution, and newspapers and periodicals may report on most of them individually, but the surviving image data show that only a small number of events are depicted intensively. In any era before people were surrounded by film and television works, the volume of text materials that survived was always much larger than that of image materials, so the content covered by image materials and the information conveyed inevitably presented a "more one-sided" situation. For example, the League Festival during the Revolution and the assassination of Mara are depicted in detail in a large number of different images; the remaining events are hardly depicted in the images, such as the "Great Panic" circulating in rural areas during the Revolution. What's more, images depicting scenes of historical events during the Revolution were often not faithful to events, and printmakers sometimes arbitrarily added characters who were not actually present at all, or depicted situations that did not occur in reality. If the images are regarded as material that truthfully reports the historical events that took place at that time, it is obvious that serious errors will occur. To study the images of the revolutionary period, it is necessary to have basic knowledge of the specific details such as events and characters in the revolutionary era, in order to distinguish the mixed information of the virtual and real in the images, so as to accurately understand what is the facts, which are the imagination of the painter, and understand the motivation behind the relationship between the virtual and the real is the key to truly interpreting the image. As Lin Hunt points out when studying popular images, although we don't know who the author of the image is, and even if we know his name, it is difficult to understand his true intention to paint a certain work and whether that intention actually came from him. However, in many prints with popular events as the main body, the people can be seen being portrayed in completely different images; the author's expression is sometimes symbolic, sometimes ironic, sometimes realistic. Therefore, for the portrayal of the people, the tension between intentional and unintentional is the most important.

The second problem exists outside the history of images. The first is how to bridge the gap with art history. Art historians often deny that printed images or satirical cartoons from the Revolutionary period are works of art, and many art historians regard the Revolution period as a period of rupture in art history caused by political turmoil and civil war. This may explain why images of the revolutionary period of such a large volume did not enter the field of study for a long time. At the same time, historians have long been immersed in written materials, ignoring the existence of pictorial materials, even though there are many research results worthy of attention, but their progress and other fields of revolutionary research obviously have huge room for development. The second is how to combine the history of images with the traditional political, social and economic history. The previous criticism of the political culture of the Revolution by starting with images is that it is limited to the closed loop of "image to speech", ignoring the actual world of action outside the construction of this system of image metaphors, "isolating political struggles from economic and social changes, and failing to link the Revolution itself with the problem of public identity that the middle class had encountered before the revolution." Such criticism is not nitpicking. The evidence used by Lin Hunt's study of the graphics of costumes during the Revolutionary Period, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution is indeed limited to materials about the images themselves, such as david's interpretation of their own design concepts and official announcements, rather than ignoring changes in the external situation. Cultural products may indeed have their own ways and logics of generation and dissemination, but they are not born and operate in an environment isolated from external changes in events and actual actions.

Of course, the pictorial history of the Revolution is not the only area in which the above criticism has been met; cultural history has been saddled with skepticism from social reality since its inception, and cultural historians may be able to justify themselves within their own logic, but their conclusions do not convince their peers who pay attention to traditional historiography. For example, Furé believed that the Revolution was actually a struggle for political discourse, and the importance of rhetoric was raised to an unprecedented height in his research, but both Furé and foucault's theories he borrowed were questioned because they lacked sufficiently strong historical support at the social or economic level. The illusory and deceptive nature of the political language of the public sphere is already a fact that needs no proof, so the use of published speech as a starting point for research, without considering the context of its birth, examines the distance between the behavior of the speaker and the discourse, and tracks the actual impact of speech at the practical level, and connects these elements with the socio-economic reality in the larger context, it does have a certain sense of castle in the air.

However, this does not mean that cultural history, including the history of images, is thus insurmountable. It is precisely the proposal and discussion of these issues that provide a broad space for image history to make up for its original deficiencies in the future while giving full play to its own strengths. As Peter Burke points out, for image studies, the history of images cannot be replaced by methods of psychoanalysis, structuralism and semiotic linguistics, and the social history of art. Because although the image is an art about space, time seems to be solidified in the image, but in today's historical research dedicated to alleviating the tension between long time and events, historicity and synchronicity, depicting images in specific historical situations, especially in the case of a large number of images expressing the mentality of the group during the Revolution, special image data is just an effective way to solve the above tension.

Scholars of cultural history after Lin Hunt have taken note of this problem. The research of Landers, Wrigley and others has tried to better combine pictorial history with political history and social history, while continuing to play to the advantages of pictorial history to get rid of the "reality-culture" mapping model. The path of image history explores and analyzes the motives and operating mechanisms behind this by analyzing the complex relationship between images in group activities and a series of social, political and cultural elements such as speech, appearance and thought, symbolism and action, because it borrows the research methods and theories of literature, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, art history and other disciplines, so as to establish interdisciplinary communication and interaction.

Therefore, interdisciplinary cooperation is the only way for image history, which can be in the practical sense, such as carrying out cooperative projects, co-writing monographs, etc.; it can also be theoretical and methodical, that is, historians learn from art history art analysis techniques, grasp the usual symbols and stereotyped expressions of specific eras, understand the evolutionary rhythm of art development itself, so as to more deeply understand the interaction between cultural products and social politics, and art historians can not only analyze the art works themselves like historians. More in combination with the ideological context of the times and the specific political situation, the production and dissemination of works are placed in a broader historical dimension to investigate. In addition, image history should not only draw on the visual material analysis methods of art history, but also introduce traditional text archives as mutually corroborating materials. As Annie Duprat put it, images of the Revolution were political speech, both propaganda and weapons. For each image that needs to be analyzed, it should be described, positioned or new or old image elements, the internal analysis of the image, and at the same time in connection with the textual material at the time, to find out why a certain image scene made this arrangement and the meaning of those image elements. As a new source of historical materials, researchers' interpretation of images cannot be limited to a single image, but needs to discover its content and techniques as well as the inheritance and evolution of the allegorical elements of the image like art history. At the same time, we still have to pay attention to the importance of text materials, the meaning of images conveyed has its own limitations, a clear understanding of the meaning of the image, the background and the impact it brings can not be separated from the text material, the two types of related materials or mutual reflection or divergence, no matter what kind of association is the meaning of the image history research topic, but also to understand the subtle relationship between culture and politics at that time. The activity and prosperity of the pictorial history of the Great Revolution not only expands the scope of revolutionary history research, but also brings the possibility of new interpretations of traditional political and social issues in this field, which can deepen or even update our understanding of the mentality and emotions, demands and aspirations of different groups in that era.

Although there are many problems, the image data cannot be ignored. Because at that time, compared with written materials, they were a more wide-ranging and involving a larger number of propaganda methods, they could also convey the emotions and emotions of the people at the time, providing a key key for future generations to interpret the relationship between the mentality of different groups in society and the overall political culture, "There is no better moment to the state of consciousness than the image can provide." Comic book collector Bouyer Denim proposed more than two hundred years ago that the history of comics is the history of public opinion. However, if it is considered that a certain tendency of image content or its visual expression strategy points to the overall mentality or consensus of the society at that time, it is obviously quite dangerous, because the political positions and emotional attitudes of different groups determine different image publicity strategies, and the complex background of image production and sales links plus the author's different creative methods and performance intentions all exacerbate the complexity of the relationship between visual representation and the motivation behind it. However, the sometimes solid and sometimes free state between images and allegories and symbols reveals in a special way the relationship between political culture and ideas that traditional political history and social history cannot explore. "The battle of images constitutes a dramatic chapter in the history of art and ideas, a process that in turn means the triumph of some attitudes and concepts and the defeat of others, as well as the taking place of important changes and transformations."

The author is Tang Xiaoyan, Associate Professor of the Department of History, Zhejiang University

Comments from omitted, the full version please refer to the original text.

Editor: Xiang Yu

Proofreader: Water Life

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