Anger & the Crowd: Emotion, contentious politics & collective action in the age of French Revolution

From the Revolution’s earliest days, crowds were pivotal. A Parisian crowd toppled the symbol of the Old Regime’s despotism: the Bastille. A crowd led by Parisian market women brought the revolutionary National Assembly and the royal family away from the palace at Versailles and into the heart of the capital of Paris. Throughout the decade that followed, the Revolutionary crowd remained a significant political force-one to which the elected leaders in the National Assembly listened.
Understanding the formation, psychology, communication, and political aims of the revolutionary crowd has been a subject of scholarly study for at least fifty years. Recent work has made clear that peaceful collective action was a hallmark of the Revolution. Nevertheless, the specter of political violence remains in the ways that the Revolution is remembered-the linking of political violence and crowds so vividly rendered by early critics, such as Charles Dickens and Edmund Burke, has continued to resonate. Moreover, collective action remains an important locus of political communication and activity today.
The French Revolutionary crowd is an especially rich case for considering up close the connections between collective action, democracy, and the power of emotion.
Featuring David Andress, Principal Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Portsmouth, Katie Jarvis, Carl E. Koch Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, and Moderator Margaret Newell, College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor at Ohio State University.