This summarizes a document analyzing different perspectives on the 1791 massacre at the Champ de Mars during the French Revolution. It discusses David Andress arguing the crowd was portrayed as led by foreign subversives to deny social conflict. It also discusses George Rudé arguing the crowd formation was encouraged by the democratic party to gain support for a republic. Finally, it discusses Colin Lucas critiquing these perspectives based on his research on typical crowd behavior before and after the revolution.

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The Massacre at Champs de Mars:
A Critical Analysis of the Discourse Surrounding the French Revolutionary Crowd
Daniel Harris
History 300: French and Haitian Revolutions
Professor Gelbart
4/28/2016

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Scholarship written on the 1791 massacre at the Champ de Mars tends to regard it as an
instance of revolutionary class-conflict. Recent discourse over the origins and behavior of the
crowd, however, offer alternative conclusions. This paper will discuss the conflicting opinions of
David Andress and George Rudé, juxtaposing their respective arguments with the criticisms of
Colin Lucas. Andress and Rudé support their arguments with primary source material, scouring
the municipal and Parisian city records as well as revolutionary journals to infer public and
administrative opinion at the time of the massacre. These journals include ‘Le Moniteur,’ ‘La
Feuille du jour,’ ‘Le patriot francois,’ ‘Le Courier de Paris,’ ‘L’Ami du people,’ and other
popular publications written by figureheads of the revolution. Lucas, however, employs critical
analysis on the works of his scholarly colleagues, parsing out misinformation relating to his field
of study, the French revolutionary crowd. This paper will explore the cause of the crowd
formation on 17 July, 1791, argued by Andress to be the product of manufactured hysteria over
foreign subversive elements undermining the revolution, and asserted by Rudé to be the
culmination of a process by which the democratic party enticed membership of lower classes in
order to promote their policy agenda. While Andress’s conclusions accurately represent
contemporary knowledge of the revolutionary crowd, Lucas’s findings will prove Rudé’s have
since become outdated.
I. Background
A discussion of the crowd formation leading up to of this event cannot properly be
conducted without contextual knowledge of the ‘facts,’ as well as the standard discourse applied.
On the night of 20 June, 1791 King Louis XVI fled his Paris estate in a dash to the town of
Montmédy on the French-Belgian Border. The king planned to rendezvous with an amassed
foreign army and retake his seat of power. Though caught before reaching the French border, the
king’s departure ignited a debate within the National Assembly as to his place within the
governing order. The National Assembly decreed on 15 July, against the wishes of the Jacobins
and revolutionary democrats, to form a constitutional monarchy in Britain’s image.
The Parisian revolutionary leaders and greater populace, supposedly, saw their political
leverage dwindle within the new order and opted to fight for representation.1
A petition
circulated, written by the democratic Club de Cordeliers, demanding a republican government
established in all but name. The ensuing march led the petitioners to the Champ de Mars.
Simultaneously, the National Assembly declared martial law in order to suppress the protest. It
was in the process of the populace advocating for their political rights that they were assaulted by
the National Guard, an historically bourgeoisie agent of the state. Such a background to the
conflict naturally pre-disposes its viewer to expect a class-based struggle. An underprivileged,
politically un-represented mass revolting against the privileged, bourgeoisie forces determined to
retain their grip on power, fits the typical Marxist dialogue applied to so many French
revolutionary conflicts. Both Andress and Rudé, however, offer alternative explanations.
1
David Andress, “The Denial of Social Conflict in the French Revolution: Discourses around the Champ de Mars
Massacre, 17 July 1791.” French Historical Studies 22, no. 2 (Spring 1999), 187.

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II. The Myth of the Foreign Counter-Revolutionary
David Andress argues in The Denial of Social Conflict in the French Revolution:
Discourses around the Champ de Mars Massacre, 17 July 1791 that newspaper editors, the
public voice and champions of the revolution, portrayed protestors at the Champ de Mars as a
murderous lynch mob, led astray from core revolutionary values by foreign subversive elements.
Marat and others, Andress postulates, were unable to incorporate a breakout of class-conflict into
their revolutionary rhetoric. The ancien regime had been stripped of its power due to the
cementing of a tentative alliance between French of all classes, uniting to topple the monarchy
and promote enlightenment ideals (e.g. the Rights of Man). Class-conflict would challenge the
staying-power of largely bourgeoisie political and military bodies, the bedrock of the new system
of governance.2
Thus, in the buildup to and aftermath of the massacre, calm and order were
emphasized amidst growing popular turmoil. Andress cites a breadth of evidence to support this
conclusion. Included are excerpts from Le Babillard that discuss the good-nature of the crowds
and their allegiance to the National Assembly, and from Feuille du Jour the calm effacement of
the royal arms in public spaces.3
Unwilling to publicly accept the occurrence of class-conflict, and confident in the
inherent good of the French people, many editors chose to blame violent crowd behavior on
foreign agents. Fear of foreign leaders ‘rescuing’ the monarchy for King Louis XVI was
heightened by his attempted flight to rendezvous with foreign troops. Utilizing the unease,
editors claimed that foreign forces sought to incite a counter-revolution. Subversives were
agitating good, peaceful masses with cries for violence, endangering the stability of the new,
fledgling government. The crowd’s gullibility was assumed, a detail Andress astutely locates in
his research, uncovering published language that refers to crowds being seduced and, in one
instance, acting as the “blind instrument of traitors.”4
The notion that the crowds resembled lynch mobs, led by foreign subversives, was
supported by editors’ referencing acts of ‘popular justice’ and prompted the National Assembly
to declare martial law. One incident, the murders at Gross-Caillou, occurred the same day as
those at Champ de Mars. According to police records referenced both by Andress and Rudé, two
men accused of spying on women’s ankles were “unceremoniously hanged” by a local crowd.5
Editors announced that the killings were the result of the work of “vagabond foreigners, paid to
excite disorder.”6
The ‘rogue danger’ of the crowd promulgated by written editorials was cited
by Lafayette, commander of the National Guard, to convince a frightened National Assembly to
grant him martial law. With the power of legalized violence on their side, Lafayette and his
troops were free to deal with the crowd forming at the Champ de Mars as they saw fit.
As public figures in 1791 had established motives for falsely portraying the nature of the
revolutionary crowd, Colin Lucas’s extensive survey on pre and post-revolutionary crowd
behavior provides less biased insight into the crowd’s role in French society. In The Crowd and
Politics between ‘Ancien Regime’ and Revolution in France, Lucas postulates that the typical
crowd both prior to and following the fall of the monarchy acted as a natural social-regulator.
2
Andress, “The Denial of Social Conflict,” 189.
3
Ibid, 190.
4
Sigismond Lacroix, “Actes de la commune de Paris,” 2d ser., 8 vols. (Paris, 1900-1914), 5:371. As quoted in
Andress, “The Denial of Social Conflict,” 193.
5
George Rudé, “The ‘Massacre’ of the Champ de Mars,” in The Crowd in the French Revolution (London:
University of Oxford Press, 1959), 89.
6
Les Révolutions de Paris, 16-23 July 1791. As quoted in Andress, “The Denial of Social Conflict,” 195.

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Crowds would carry out a parallel form of municipal justice to the state. The state would cede
the judgement of petty thieves, rapists, and unpopular individuals to the Parisian crowd. A
physical migration occurred when the power of law switched hands. The people would take to
the streets, municipal squares, and government spaces, conducting trials and executions in the
open. As the crowds ebbed from the public sphere back to the private, the government would
resume its legal place.7
For the most part, the state tended to accept the crowd as a legitimate institution. The
government would rarely fire on or regulate the crowd’s actions, occasionally prosecuting select
crowd leaders following their group’s dispersal. Lucas argues this occurred because crowds and
the state possessed a mutual agreement on the distribution of power within their relationship.
When either body over-stepped its traditional authority, the other would regulate it by force.8
Lucas’s findings support the conclusions begot by Andress. The ‘separate but equal’
status quo between the crowd and the state that Lucas describes, bolsters Andress’s assertion that
newspaper editors were misconstruing the dangers of the crowd to fortify support for the new
government. By redirecting public opinion away from concern over class-conflict and to the
fabricated threat of rampant, spontaneous killings, writers crafted the discourse over the
massacre at the Champ de Mars. Thus, a relatively unprovoked shooting which normally would
have violated the unspoken contract between the state and the crowd, became justified. So
steadfast did the editors promulgate this rationale, that some went so far as to blame those who
defended themselves from the National Guard. A true French revolutionary would not have
raised arms to their ‘brother’ but rather died a martyr. Those who fought the guard were,
therefore, the corrupting, foreign agitators.9
Where Andress is critical of the supposed presence of foreign agents leading a gullible
crowd, Lucas outright denies it. The crowd, according to Lucas, generated its own leaders,
whose duration in command “could change as the direction of an event changed.”10
A leader
could not remain so without a constant re-affirmation of credibility within his community, and
rarely could a figure ascend to a leadership position without having been a local. Should an
unknown individual, removed from the community, attempt to lead, he could not, according to
Lucas, simply rely on deference to his social position. As evidence, Lucas describes a crowd
whose actions were temporarily abated by their elected municipal governor. It took the voice of
just one dissenter within the crowd for it to rush on, past the vocal opposition of their leader.11
The fluidity of a crowd’s leadership naturally precluded any one figure, no less one previously
unknown to the community, from pressing views on the mass that they did not agree with.
III. The Political Explanation: A Democratic Agenda
George Rudé, in The Crowd in the French Revolution, offers an alternative understanding
for why masses gathered at the Champs de Mars. Rudé hypothesizes the cause was not due to the
perception of foreign coercion, but rather a coordinated effort by the democratic party to amass
popular support for the formation of a republic. Rudé argues that the massacre was the
7
Colin Lucas, “The Crowd and Politics between ‘Ancien Regime’ and Revolution in France.’” The Journal of
Modern History 60, no. 3 (September 1988), 434-437.
8
Lucas, “The Crowd and Politics in France,” 435.
9
Andress, “The Denial of Social Conflict,” 204.
10
Lucas, “The Crowd and Politics in France,” 431.
11
Ibid

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culmination of a process that began with the demolition of a prison in late February, whereby
Parisian wage-earners, tradesmen, artisans, and unemployed were rallied by bourgeoisie
democrats to demonstrate in support of their policies.12
On 28 February, 1791 a group of wage-
earners amassed and tore down the Chateau de Vincennes, a state prison falsely thought to be a
possible aristocratic fortress. The group’s actions were well intentioned yet misguided, forcing
Lafayette and his National Guard to arrest many of the group’s leaders. Elite members of the
democratic party fought to secure their release, indicating the democratic party’s first attempt to
elicit popular support, according to Rudé.13
To capitalize on their popularity with wage-earners, the Cordeliers Club, one of the
democratic party’s most prominent affiliates, encouraged revolutionary democratic editors to
publish popular complaints in their papers. Many of these ‘letters from the people’ were harshly
worded, antagonist demands for a minimum wage and increased pay.14
Beyond offering wage-
earners a public platform for their complaints, the Cordeliers Club secured a private one by
eliminating its expensive membership fee, previously affordable only to the bourgeoisie, to allow
for participation by lower orders. The incorporation of previously a-political citizens, Rudé
implies, was for these new members to feel their voices were heard, though he notes that the
newly opened societies remained “firmly under bourgeois direction.”15
In order to corral support from the unemployed segments of the populace, democrats
fought to have their demands considered by the National Assembly. Following the closure of
state municipalities (viewed by the National Assembly to be a potential counter-revolutionary
threat) and the corollary spike in unemployment numbers, representatives of both the newly
unemployed and Cordeliers Club presented a series of requests to the Assembly for
consideration. Three petitions were admitted, requesting job re-instatement, job re-allocation,
and finally a desperate plea for “the workers [to] have bread by one means or another.”16
Failure
of any proposal to pass, the outcome expected by democrats, did not lessen the positive
relationship the party had helped forge by advocating on behalf of their new constituency.
The effects of democratic lobbying, Rudé argues, were self-evident. Leading up to 17
July, the populace had grown vocal. Crowds formed often, demanding all be granted the right to
vote (previously barred from the ‘passive’ citizen), enlist in the National Guard (closed to
manual laborers), and petition.17
Furthermore, the majority of arrests carried out following the
massacre were of lower classes for criticisms against the National Guard and the National
Assembly, evidence of which both Rudé and Andress amply supply.
The demands and criticisms being voiced, Rudé concludes, were the same as those held
by the democrats. In an informative, albeit relatively isolated, piece of evidence, Rudé offers
support to his claims. As word of the massacre spread on 17 July, a cook, and wife of one of the
victims, assaulted the wife of a National Guardsman involved in the killings. During her cross-
examination by police, she admitted to having attended public meetings, being a member of the
Club de Cordeliers, and reading revolutionary papers, among other indicators of her close
experience with democratic politics.18
The cook also confessed to signing a petition circulated at
the time of the massacre. The cook’s political activism, as well as the many others of low social
12
Rudé, “The ‘Massacre’ of the Champ de Mars,” 80.
13
Rudé, “The ‘Massacre’ of the Champ de Mars,” 81.
14
Ibid, 85.
15
Ibid, 86.
16
Ibid, 83.
17
Ibid, 86.
18
Ibid, 86-87.

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class who signed the petition, convinces Rudé of the validity of his argument. The fact that a
majority of the signatories on the Champ de Mars petition were citizens of lower orders
exemplifies to Rudé how the democrats had been successful, not only imparting their rhetoric,
but also their revolutionary fervor, onto their new followers.
Before discussing the critiques made by Lucas of Rudé’s argument, it is first important to
notice several faulty assumptions made by Rudé in his depiction of the crowd’s composition.
Rudé equates those who signed the petition to be representative of the total crowd present at the
time of the massacre. Such an assumption is perhaps probabilistic, yet also problematic and
characteristic of Rudé’s greater attention to detail rather than the larger picture. Six thousand
signatures were recorded on the formal petition, yet the crowd amassed nearly fifty thousand.19
While Rudé’s analysis of the socio-economic composition of the signatories is thorough, a
majority of the crowd remains unaccounted for. Furthermore, Rudé references a police report
describing the clothing worn by nine of the victims. Rudé infers that because all were dressed in
a style indicative of their low class, the majority who perished may have been of similar socio-
economic stature.20
Again, Rudé bets on uncertain probabilities. The total number killed is
unknown, but estimated close to fifty. Thus, a description of nine of the dead serves as an
adequate sample proportion yet falls short of an accurate representation of the total. Rudé briefly
touches on the guess-work involved in this portion of his research by admitting the existence of
“considerable gaps in the records, which may produce a false picture,” mentioned in his
discussion of ill-preserved police records.21
Yet, despite his brief aside, Rudé relies heavily on
the evidence cited to conclude that the crowd was solidly of low income and class.
Lucas’s analysis of crowd cohesion serves as a damaging critique to the foundation of
Rudé’s argument. The Cordeliers Club, and more generally the democrats, could not have rallied
such a massive, diverse crowd under one petition. According to Lucas, crowds tended not only to
pick their leaders locally but also to form and disband as a distinct community, separate from
others.22
French revolutionary crowds, according to Lucas, were conglomerations of smaller
municipalities. This ‘localism,’ as Lucas coins it, meant that while all municipalities composing
the crowd rallied for similar goals, each tended to act separately from others. Lucas cites a
variety of evidence to support this claim, from the act of penetration by one municipality into the
collective crowd through regional song, to the tendency for popular justice to be administered
solely from within a community, as well as the localized composition of the revolution’s most
destructive crowds (such as the assaulting force on the Bastille which, Lucas notes, was 70%
composed of residents of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine district).23
The lack of crowd cohesion
meant that the Cordeliers Club could not unite all of its new constituency under one banner.
Instead, trades remained distinct within the masses, not falling into a broader ‘democratic
movement’ but marching of their own volition with their own demands.24
An interpretation of
Lucas reveals that one petition did not fit all.
Lucas levies similar accusations against Rudé as Andress does of the revolutionary
editors, namely the misguided assumption of crowd gullibility. Rudé fashions for his readers a
simplistic domino-style timeline, where certain party actions catalyzed great swaths of the
19
Rudé, “The ‘Massacre’ of the Champ de Mars,” 88-89.
20
Ibid, 90-91.
21
Ibid, 93.
22
Lucas, “The Crowd and Politics in France,” 427-429.
23
Ibid, 427-428.
24
Ibid, 429.

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populace to join and petition on their behalf. Yet, Lucas notes, the crowd could never have been
lulled by party rhetoric without having motives of their own. Lucas concedes it may appear as if
the populace is following its party leaders, but the crowd is truly in control of the discourse.25
Lucas argues that to understand why, we must separate the crowd’s motives from the political
outcomes. The crowd that formed on 17 July was reactive in nature, demonstrating against
immediate oppressions. A spontaneous protest was used, clearly, by the democrats to push their
republican policy preference, yet the crowd itself never had those ends in mind. The difference is
subtle yet crucial, for a mass of people to have truly been indoctrinated by the democrats they
would have had to possess the same political aspirations, yet Lucas concludes they did not.26
IV. Conclusion
The juxtaposition of the writings of David Andress, George Rudé, and Colin Lucas
provide the reader a near-complete image of an event that occurred centuries before their eldest
relatives were born. Andress and Rudé combed the records of popular French editorials, at times
translating personal journals and official reports, to gain a first-hand perspective on events as
they unfolded. Their work provides the foundation for modern discourse, yet also has the
possibility to define and hinder it. Depending upon the types of documents the authors choose to
analyze, the way each interprets it, and the data deemed informative or representative enough to
publish, much can be lost in translation. A selective reading of Andress would have one believe
the voices of Marat and Maret spoke for all French revolutionary democrats, of Rudé that official
police records represented popular opinion. The use of primary source documentation is crucial
to understanding public attitudes at the onset of an historical event, yet total reliance on it is
foolhardy. The numerous opinions and immense complexities surrounding an event or action
must be weighed in order for a less selective understanding to foment, indicating the worth of
secondary source scholars. Lucas collapses a treasure trove of data analyses, incorporating the
conclusions of those in the field, to cobble together a fuller picture from the multiple
perspectives one event elicited. The tremendous task of compiling and assessing subjective
accounts is how historiographical reviews are crafted. No objective ‘truth’ exists to explain an
event, so argues Keith Jenkins, “the past and history [how historians describe the past] are
different things.”27
Multiple subjective interpretations garner an understanding closer to, yet
never achieving, the ‘truth’ of an event. In this paper I discussed the works of Andress, Rudé,
and Lucas on the French revolutionary crowd and its role in the Champ de Mars massacre in an
attempt to get closer to the truth behind what motivated its formation.
25
Ibid, 443.
26
Ibid.
27
Keith Jenkins, Re-Thinking History, (London: Routledge Classics, 1991), 7.

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Sources Cited
Andress, David. "The Denial of Social Conflict in the French Revolution: Discourses around the
Champ de Mars Massacre, 17 July, 1791." French Historical Studies 22, no. 2 (Spring 1999):
183-209. Accessed April 4, 2016. Jstor.
Jenkins, Keith. Re-Thinking History. London: Routledge Classics, 1991.
Lucas, Colin. "The Crowd and Politics between "Ancien Regime" and Revolution in France."
The Journal of Modern History 60, no. 3 (September 1988): 421-57. Accessed April 12, 2016.
Jstor.
Rudé, George. "The 'Massacre' of the Champ de Mars." In The Crowd in the French Revolution,
80-94. London: Oxford University Press, 1959.