Elites, Crowds and Ordinary People

Every revolution involved both leaders and crowds, and historians disagree about which drove events. In America, wealthy planters, merchants and lawyers led the Continental Congress, yet artisans, sailors and farmers filled crowds, militias and committees that enforced boycotts. In France, deputies debated in Versailles, but Parisian crowds stormed the Bastille, and peasants burning manor records in the 'Great Fear' of 1789 pushed the Assembly to abolish feudal privileges on 4 August.

In Saint-Domingue, enslaved people organized the 1791 uprising themselves. Historians such as George Rudé, in The Crowd in History (1964), used police records to show that crowds were usually made up of ordinary working people with clear goals, not criminal mobs. 'History from below' changed revolutionary history by asking what ordinary people wanted and how their actions forced leaders' hands.