‘Exposé aux regards du peuple’: Sentimental Disciplining in the Print Images of Louis-Marie Prudhomme's Révolutions de Paris

One of the most important radical newspapers of the French Revolution, Louis-Marie Prudhomme’s Révolutions de Paris, included 133 print images over its four-and-a-half-year print run (18 July 1789-28 February 1794). These prints were a medium for visualising the rapidly changing events of the Revolution. This article situates itself in the developing field of histories of emotional experience, where consideration of cheap popular media, such as prints, has largely been missing from the historiography of the French Revolution. Seeking to redress this gap, this article argues that through these prints Prudhomme taught revolutionaries how they were meant to feel towards the represented events. It advances this argument through three distinct, but linked, visual themes: the presentation of crowds, both celebratory and violent, reciprocal surveillance and a pedagogical urban environment, each of which was never stable, but dynamically produced throughout the corpus of 133 prints.