The representation of collective actors

It is one of the principles of our moral nature, wrote Lamartine in his Cours familier de littérature (1856-69), that ‘interest never attaches itself to abstractions, but always to persons. The human mind wants to give a face to ideas, a name, a heart, a soul, a personality to things’ (II:53). Now, novelists have traditionally organised their work around a limited number of individual figures, whose recurrence across the narrative syntagm provides the ground against which the continuities and the transformations in the represented world can be measured, and whose hopes and fears provide the basis upon which any such changes can be evaluated. The historian-narrator of the French Revolution, however, does not immediately enjoy the facility of a unifying figurative focus, to the extent that he is dealing with collective events which involved the direct and indirect participation of a huge number of persons, acting alone or as members of a group