The Gaze of All and the Blood of One : The Crowds of Public Executions in the Historical Novel of the First 19th Century
In the historical novel of the first half of the 19th century, the description of a public execution is a paradigmatic temporal marker that creates an effective “effect of past.” However, drawing upon a corpus composed of two canonical novels, Cinq-Mars (1826) by Alfred de Vigny and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) by Victor Hugo, and two novels whose success did not go beyond the 19th century, Raoul (1826) by G. de la Baume and La Cour des miracles (1832) by Théophile Dinocourt, this article shows that such scenes also confront the reader with contemporary issues : aesthetic issues of the representation of crowds attending executions (representing simultaneously the multiplicity of individuals and the uniqueness of the crowd, making singular or collective voices heard, etc.) imply an ambiguous discourse on the link between crowds and violence, as well as a reflection on the mechanisms of formation and action of crowds, that anticipates in its own way the shaping of the “psychology of the crowds” at the end of the century.