Mind-Munitions

148
Propaganda in the Age of Revolutionary Warfare
The French revolutionaries were not just crude mob orators.
They were great believers in the use of symbols as a means of transmitting
complicated ideas in a simple form; one symbol was capable
of arousing passions and loyalties that needed no explanation, just
obedience. The red, white, and blue tricolour came to represent the
various revolutionary factions and was also worn as a sash, while
other garments and symbols came to represent the calls for ‘Liberty,
Equality, and Fraternity’. Right from the start, the revolutionaries
recognized the importance of symbols as propaganda: the Phrygian
cup was worn as a symbol of equality, the Fasces emerged as a
symbol of fraternity, and the female figure of Marianne as a
symbol of liberty. A female figure was chosen partly to reflect the
growing role of women in politics and partly to represent an idea
to be nurtured and protected, the mother of a new kind of political
child. The Bastille became a symbol of monarchical oppression,
while its storming in 1789 became a symbolic gesture of defiance –
even though it was largely empty of prisoners. Professor Rudé has
examined the way in which crowds were manipulated by the revolutionaries
with orchestrated demonstrations, fireworks, burning of
effigies, and mob orators chanting ‘Long Live the Third Estate!’
As revolutionary change gathered momentum the crowds got
out of hand. One orator tried to reinject an element of reason:
Frenchmen, you destroy tyrants; your hate is frightening; it is
shocking…like you, I am seized to the quick by such events; but think
how ignominious it is to live and be a slave; think with what torments
one should punish crimes against humanity; think finally of what
good, what satisfaction, what happiness awaits you, you and your
children and your descendants, when august and blessed liberty will
have set its temple amongst you! Yet do not forget that these
proscriptions outrage humanity and make nature tremble.
It proved difficult for the revolutionaries to regain control of the
crowd, drunk with its own success as an instrument of change.
However, gradually, after the Declaration of the Rights of Man
was proclaimed in October 1789, after the three Estates merged
into one under the Constituent Assembly, as aristocrats and clergy
fled with the establishment of the Constitution in 1791 and,
finally, after Louis XVI was arrested, the revolutionaries were able
to restore a measure of law and order, although they remained
vulnerable to the whims of the mob.