Popular images of women were everywhere in revolutionary France.
Although women's political participation was curtailed, female
allegories of liberty, justice, and the republic played a crucial
role in the passage from old regime to modern society. In her
lavishly illustrated and gracefully written book, Joan B. Landes
explores this paradox within the workings of revolutionary visual
culture and traces the interaction between pictorial and textual
political arguments.
Landes highlights the widespread circulation of images of the
female body, notwithstanding the political leadership's suspicions
of the dangers of feminine influence and the seductions of visual
imagery. The use of caricatures and allegories contributed to the
destruction of the masculinized images of hierarchic absolutism and
to forging new roles for men and women in both the intimate and
public arenas. Landes tells the fascinating story of how the
depiction of the nation as a desirable female body worked to
eroticize patriotism and to bind male subjects to the nation-state.
Despite their political subordination, women too were invited to
identify with the project of nationalism.
Recent views of the French Revolution have emphasized linguistic
concerns; in contrast, Landes stresses the role of visual cognition
in fashioning ideas of nationalism and citizenship. Her book
demonstrates as well that the image is often a site of
contestation, as individual viewers may respond to it in
unexpected, even subversive, ways.
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