The Age of the Revolver

Newspaper readers in the 1910s felt they were living in an “age of the revolver”. According to historian Dominique Kalifa, the modernity associated with revolvers transformed the public’s perception of crime. Unlike knives evocative of bloodshed and combative masculinity, firearms distanced violence from hand-to-hand confrontation (D. Kalifa, 1995). One of the aims of the EU-GUNS project is to study “the age of the revolver” and what it meant to live in a society in which guns were ubiquitous.

[Source for the photo: Le Rappel, 6 May 1912]