Marianne: from Medusa to Messalina

JES 34(4) Kidd
10/4/04
10:40 AM
Page 1
Journal of European Studies
Marianne: from Medusa to Messalina
Psycho-sexual imagery and political propaganda in France
1789–1945
WILLIAM KIDD
University of Stirling
The use of ‘monstrous’, anxiety-generating imagery (tropes of the
mythological Medusa or the Hydra) to demonize opponents was
a marked feature of political caricature and national propaganda on
different points in the ideological spectrum, from the French
revolutionary and counter-revolutionary period, through the ‘Commune’
(1871), to the First and Second World Wars. Using examples from
contemporary lithography, literature, the press and official sources, my
paper argues that this propaganda owed its ubiquity and polyvalence
to the presence of powerful associations, sometimes unstated, sometimes
explicit, between the revolutionary ‘Medusa’ and the guillotine, and
the other supreme socio-medical hantise of the period, the threat of
venereal infection.
Keywords: decadence, ‘la gueuse’, iconography, propaganda, revolution,
syphilis
That in the current Afghan and Iraqi imbroglios both American and
anti-American spokesmen used similar terminology to describe the
global threat posed by their respectively demonized ‘other’ – the
multinational stranglehold of the great ‘Satan’ and the international
terrorist web of Osama bin Laden – testifies to the iconographical
longevity and ideological polyvalence of certain verbal representations.
Such representations are not of course the preserve of politicians or
Journal of European Studies 34(4): 333–348 Copyright © SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks,
CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com [200412] 0047-2441/10.1177/0047244104048702
JES 34(4) Kidd
334
10/4/04
10:40 AM
Page 2
JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 34(4)
official commentators and enjoy a wide familiarity in the press:
witness a recent broadsheet article entitled ‘Hydra-headed movement
at war against the west’ (Milne, 2002). And just as George Bush’s
characterization of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an ‘Axis of evil’
recalls a previous Axis sixty years before, Le Nouvel Observateur’s
caricature of Jean-Marie le Pen in 1996 as tentacular Medusa to evoke
the ramifications of the Front national, or a more recent study of webbased Islamophobia, ‘La Toile de l’araignée noire’ (2003) would have
been familiar to propagandists on both sides in the two great wars of
the twentieth century.
In fact, this imagery has a more venerable historical pedigree,
notably in post-revolutionary France where, for reasons to be
explored in the present study, it acquired considerable socio-cultural
dissemination and legitimization. Indeed its continuing ideological
deployment over two centuries suggests that such iconography
crystallized a more general set of associations, and functioned as a
focal point for the unstated or the repressed. Based on new research
covering the period from the Revolution of 1789 until the Second
World War, and conducted principally on holdings in the Cabinet des
Estampes of the Bibliothèque nationale, this article examines key
manifestations of the phenomenon in a historical and cultural
perspective.
Familiar from legend and abundantly illustrated in classical
engravings, the petrifying Medusa acquired a particular resonance
during the ‘Terror’, when it was used on both sides of the ideological
divide to indicate the avenging justice of the Revolution or its
homicidal tyranny. Thus a cartoon of 10 August 1793 entitled ‘Jeu de
quilles républicain’ depicts Marianne and her companion playing
skittles and rolling balls at reactionary figures – ‘encore un moment et
ils seront abattus’ – ironically unaware of the bloodthirsty hydra
emerging beneath their feet.1 Another cartoon of the same date offers
a more predictable representation of the Republic: a naked female
standing on a rocky outcrop with an axe raised behind her head and
lictors’ rods (the axe case), crushing the monster of aristocracy. But a
wholly different threat is encapsulated in a third piece, also dated 10
August 1793, in which a male figure, Hercules, in exactly the same
stance and with the same attributes, represents ‘le peuple français
terrassant l’Hydre du fédéralisme’. Hercules was briefly promoted by
artists such as J.-L. David and others as a possible male
representation of the Republic, but was quite quickly displaced
in favour of the now familiar female allegories: Marianne and
the ‘Goddess Liberty’ (Solomon-Godeau, 1997: 208–9). An undated
JES 34(4) Kidd
10/4/04
10:40 AM
Page 3
KIDD: MARIANNE: FROM MEDUSA TO MESSALINA
335
lithograph now held at the Musée des Arts décoratifs de Bordeaux
shows Liberty, again holding an axe and a broken yoke, standing
over the decapitated monster of monarchy, with the caption ‘Elle a
renversé l’Hydre de la Tyrannie, et brisé le joug du Despotisme’ (in
Cocula and Hausser, 1991: 8). In a further example from 1793, ‘La
liberté’ stands with club, laurel crown, Phrygian cap in hand, and the
dead serpent of inequity or tyranny at her feet. Although, more
conventionally, the serpent also designated wisdom and medicine, it
commonly functioned as a universal symbol of evil; and when
spiralling around a rod topped with the obligatory Phrygian cap, it
was identified associatively, via the Medusa figure, with the
revolutionary guillotine (Arasse, 1987: 144). Under a Medusa’s head,
an engraving entitled ‘L’Anarchie’ (September 1793) simultaneously
announced and denounced the new bloodletting by listing executions
to come.
Thanks partly to the new regime’s vigorous self-propagandizing,
from the visual extravaganzas of the ‘fêtes révolutionnaires’ choreographed by J.-L. David to widely disseminated popular prints and
artefacts, such representations quickly became part of the common
iconographical currency of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary
period. They also found favour in counter-revolutionary circles, in
France itself, in émigré groups beyond her frontiers, and among the
political classes of other European countries opposed to the spread of
revolutionary ideas. By 1815 the blissful Wordsworthian dawn of
1789 had given way to the disillusionment of Shelley’s ‘Oedipus
tyrannus’ (Paulin, 1992: 3) and Hegel’s ‘merveilleux lever du soleil’ in
which human and divine might at last be reconciled to the
revolutionary ‘hydra’ (François, 1995: 98–101). In an image used as
the cover illustration for Daniel Arasse’s La Guillotine et l’imaginaire de
la Terreur (1987), the British caricaturist Gillray personified radical
reform in 1819 as a hermaphroditic ‘Neck or Nothing man’, a
monstrous Phrygian-capped guillotine, blood-soaked and flaming,
advancing towards its prey brandishing a dagger and leaving a trail
of graves in its wake. The restored Bourbons had their own reasons
for recalling the regicide and the dangers of the ‘monstrous’ Republic;
by a familiar appropriation, counter-revolutionary ideology dictated
that the monster of decapitation became the monster to decapitate
(Sosien, 1991: 113–18). In poems written in 1819 and 1820, Victor
Hugo likened the Terror to a ‘hydre rugissante’ (1964: 143) and the
guillotine to a ‘minotaure sanglant, de sa tête fumante effrayant les
cités’ (1964: 233). He compounded the symbolism of the original
Medusan myth when, in the 1832 preface for Le Dernier Jour d’un
JES 34(4) Kidd
336
10/4/04
10:40 AM
Page 4
JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 34(4)
condamné (1829) he called for the abolition of the death penalty, one of
the surviving ‘guenilles’ of the ancien régime, which in a striking
condensation he denounced as ‘cette guenille sanglante’ (in Jean,
1979: 28). As the bloodstained ‘rag’ is in its plural form a synonym for
the female genitalia2 such poetics were consistent with Freud’s interpretation of the ‘Medusa’s head’ (1957: 105–6) as a source of terror for
men (because symbolic of female castration), but, as Marina Warner
has pointed out, Medusa is an ambiguous figure whose petrifying
‘apotropaic’ gaze (1987: 109) functions also as a defence against other
unspoken terrors, eliciting the very angoisse it seeks to deny.
Gericault’s ‘Radeau de la Méduse’ (1819) was both a pictorial testimony
to Restoration corruption and the almost sculptural embodiment of
psycho-social and psycho-sexual angoisse – ‘La tête de Méduse suscite
l’effroi et la terreur . . . l’effroi est de l’ordre du plaisir, la terreur
touche à la jouissance’ (Schneider, 1991: 31), crystallizing the castration
anxiety while inscribing it within the oxymoronic duality of the need
to act, and the helpless, ‘frozen’ contemplation of an event beyond
our control.
Further periods of revolutionary turbulence in 1830 and 1848
prolonged and renewed these ambiguities, with works by Delacroix
and Rude the best known and most aesthetically significant examples
of what had become a substantial iconographical repertoire. With its
rictus, evocative stone ‘chevelure’, griffin-topped helmet and Sphinxlike attributes, Rude’s ‘la Marseillaise’ on the facade of the Arc de
Triomphe (1833–6) materialized the ambiguities of the Medusan ‘rêve
de pierre’ which Baudelaire would subsequently enshrine in a verbal
image in ‘La Beauté’ (1961: 20). An unattributed print celebrating
1848, the ‘year of revolutions’, portrayed the crowned heads of
Europe in a frail craft in danger of being engulfed as the Phrygiancapped hydra emerges from the seas before them: ‘La liberté, ce
serpent de mer, renverse le barque des souverains européens.’3
In 1871 the excesses of the Paris Commune and ‘la semaine
sanglante’ added powerful new dimensions to the image of the
incendiary ‘femme terrible’. Captured for posterity in the drawings of
Steinlen and Vermersch, ‘pétroleuses’ such as Louise Michel, ‘la
vierge rouge’, provided the real-life material from which reactionary
writers such as Flaubert, the Goncourts and Catulle Mendès created
an enduring image of Communard Paris as ‘une Babylone à feu et à
sang’ (Winock and Azéma, 1964: 112). But middle-class anxiety about
the ‘classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses’ (Chevallier, 1958), and
the revolutionary mob as the source of uncontrollable disorder, also
found graphic expression in the works of writers of the ‘left’. Zola’s
JES 34(4) Kidd
10/4/04
10:40 AM
Page 5
KIDD: MARIANNE: FROM MEDUSA TO MESSALINA
337
Germinal (1885) offers a classic example in the emasculation of
Maigrat by the striking miners’ wives, who in Paul Lidsky’s view
‘prennent les traits caractéristiques de la communarde et de la
pétroleuse’ (1970: 114). In Les Désirs de Jean Servien (1882), Anatole
France, intellectual spokesman of secular republicanism, portrayed
the murderous ‘cantinière’ of 1871 baying for the blood of her
captives: ‘Echevelée sous son képi galonné, ample de poitrine,
cambrée des reins, dressée fièrement sur ses jambes fines et fortes,
elle avait la puissance d’une magnifique bête féroce. De sa petite
bouche toute ronde sortaient des menaces obscènes, elle agitait un
révolver’ (in Lidsky, 1970: 112). The centenary of the Revolution in
1889 generated a further crop of republican celebrations and antirepublican caricatures; one of the latter portrayed ‘la république
meurtrière entre l’incendie et la guillotine’ in unambiguously
Medusan terms: ‘la torche d’une main, le poignard de l’autre, la tête
couronnée de serpents, vêtue d’une robe illustrée de têtes de morts,
foulant aux pieds la Croix et l’Évangile, la tiare et la couronne royale’
(Giraud, 1984: 96).
That such imagery, in contrast to the more positive idealization of
the republican allegory, contributed in the wider public imagination
to what has been called the ‘pathologization’ of women has been
cogently argued by Ruth Harris (1989: 203). And Maurice Agulhon
concludes from a wide-ranging study that ‘la haine de la République
vient en partie de celle de la Révolution française, qui aurait d’entrée
porté au paroxysme l’exhibition maléfique du symbole féminin’
(Agulhon, 1989: 324). Yet it is important also that during the 1880s
and 1890s, thanks in part to the press freedoms introduced by the
Third Republic, both ends of the political spectrum resorted to the
same ‘monstrous’ imagery to attack the enemies of the moderate,
bourgeois centre-right. Under the title ‘L’Opportunisme, voilà l’ennemi!’
(a play on Gambetta’s famously anti-clerical declaration), the cartoonist
Blass depicted General Boulanger stamping out the writhing monster
whose facial features are identifiably those of Jules Ferry, principal
architect of the secular Republic and its ‘mission civilisatrice’ to the
wider world (Le Pilori, 1 September 1889). And few republican
politicians of the period, in reality or official mythology, were less
‘monstrous’ than Ferry, who is recalled in street names in almost
every town and city in France for creating the country’s first national
primary education system. In ‘Le Vomitif’ by ‘Phebus’, Marianne
leans against a wall, ‘soulagée’, having vomited the monster of
opportunism which now lies harmless at her feet; beside her a robust
workman with a flower in his buttonhole holds the salving cup from
JES 34(4) Kidd
338
10/4/04
10:40 AM
Page 6
JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 34(4)
which she drank the emetic (La Jeune Garde, 22 September 1889). In a
series of anti-Dreyfusard, and hence largely anti-Semitic, cartoons
entitled ‘Musée des horreurs’ issued by V. Lenepveu in 1900, the
banker Alphonse de Rothschild was portrayed as a one-eyed octopus,
the anti-clerical radical Arthur Ranc as ‘le Caiman’ and Dreyfus
himself as a combination of hydra and crocodile transfixed by a lance
(TF 598, Nos 2, 13, 6).
‘Slaying the monster’ also underlay the patriotic imagery of wartime.
In the Franco-Prussian conflict of 1870–1, the Gallic cockerel mastering
the Teutonic eagle was amalgamated with the more traditional religious
iconography of Saint Michael slaying the dragon, and acquired almost
serial familiarity in the immense memorial production which followed
the First World War: in 1918 the victorious ‘poilu’ bayonets the German
eagle at his feet. Such iconography was of course common to all the
belligerent countries, and similarly transcended political divides. All
sides resorted to images of Saint Michael or Saint George in their visual
propaganda (Darracott and Loftus, 1981: 39), while a German war loan
poster of 1917 showed the multi-headed Allied monster being
transfixed by the many swords of German patriotic contribution
(Darracott and Loftus, 1981: 69). Similar imagery was used – the point
will assume its full importance shortly – in juxtapositions of the military
and the medical: a French 1914–18 public health poster showed an eagle
transfixed by a sword and the legend ‘L’aigle boche sera vaincu. La
tuberculose doit l’être aussi’ (Darracott and Loftus, 1981: 20). Nor was it
the monopoly of the nationalist, patriotic or proto-fascist right. In
‘Tuons la guerre par le désarmement général’, a pacifist poster
produced by the Socialist Party (SFIO) in 1936, warmongering was
illustrated with a bloody Medusa’s head held trophy-like, 1793-style, by
the executioner (M 127835). Paul Colin’s May 1940 poster ‘Aidons la
Norvège’, issued in the aftermath of the German invasion of Norway,
represented a stylized Marianne in an almost identical pose to that of
the ‘poilu’ twenty years earlier, piercing the hydra-swastika of Nazism
(AA/SNR 95C 211989). Conversely, on a pro-German collaborationist
poster issued after the abortive Anglo-Gaullist expedition to Dakar in
September 1940, Britain, represented by a caricature of Churchill, is the
global hydra whose ‘tentacular’ depred-ations (Dakar, Egypt, South
Africa, Ireland, Mers-el-Kebir, Syria, etc.) are systematically excised by
Axis surgery: ‘Confiance!’ enjoins the text, ‘Ses amputations se
poursuivent méthodiquement’ (M 129503). In ‘Remember Pearl
Harbor’, an American anti-Axis poster of 1942, Hitler, Hirohito and
Mussolini were portrayed as a three-headed snake under the injunction
‘Crush them!’ (in Braverman, 1996: facing p. 98).
JES 34(4) Kidd
10/4/04
10:40 AM
Page 7
KIDD: MARIANNE: FROM MEDUSA TO MESSALINA
339
The historical prevalence and polyvalence of such imagery, and its
availability for ideological deployment on different sides over a
period of a century and a half or more (roughly 1789–1945), suggest
that it resonated with more general public attitudes, beliefs and
mentalities (myths) and was underpinned by associations which
made it a focal point for the unstated or the repressed. The remainder
of this article will argue that if, as Agulhon has claimed, ‘la haine de
la République vient en partie de celle de la Révolution française, qui
aurait d’entrée porté au paroxysme l’exhibition maléfique du
symbole féminin’, a major part of that unstated discourse was the
equation between, on the one hand, emasculating Medusa, symbol of
revolutionary violence, and, on the other, the supposed sexual
voraciousness of the revolutionary female and the dangers of
venereal infection.
To the extent that the guillotine, sometimes referred to as ‘le rasoir
national’ or ‘le triangle égalitaire’, but familiarly gendered as
feminine (‘la veuve’), overlaid the castration anxiety postulated by
Freud, and that syphilis, invasive, tentacular, organic, represented an
equally ‘primal’ source of anxiety whose effects, real and imagined,
influenced individual behaviour and social agendas, such associations
were both understandable and inevitable in the context of the age.
But these associations were also constructed, and whether in the
classical nomenclature of gendered representation – Medusa, Hecate,
Salome, Messalina – distancing and de-historicizing and yet frightening
in its associations, or in more contemporary iconography, gradually
constituted a powerful and pervasive form of socially approved
symbolic discourse.
That discourse need not be explicit; indeed it relied for its effects
on being conveyed indirectly, by projection onto or adjacent to the
familiar iconographical forms. In a standard pictorial antithesis from
the revolutionary period, Jean-Baptiste Regnault’s La Liberté ou la mort
(1795) contrasted light, progress, education, science and the rule of
law, all symbolized by a female allegory with a Phrygian cap,
egalitarian triangle-cum-spirit-level and lictors’ rods (fasces), and the
skeletal grim reaper (Legrand, 1989: 27). Though Regnault’s intended
target may have been the Terror, the spectator did not need much
imagination to identify the grim reaper with the ‘forces of darkness’
of monarchy and religion no less than (real) disease and death. An
unattributed contemporary lithograph portrayed a risky game of
blind man’s buff in which three young women representing the
revolutionary virtues (one holds the egalitarian triangle, another the
Phrygian cap) spin the blindfolded male who is unaware that a
JES 34(4) Kidd
340
10/4/04
10:40 AM
Page 8
JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 34(4)
sinister fourth partner has entered the fray: the black-draped figure
whose name completes the list on a medallion hung between two
trees in the background: ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, la Mort’.
‘Danse macabre’ and Vanity with his scythe are traditional motifs
for human frailty and mortality but by the mid-nineteenth century
they had become unambiguously associated with the venereal peril.
Moreover, as commentators such as Theodore Zeldin (1981) and
Alain Corbin (1991: 126) have shown, the 1850s, marked by the
publication of a number of major medico-scientific works on
venereology and an increasing incidence of infection, was a pivotal
decade in the development of a national ‘hantise’ which found
expression in popular as well as bourgeois art and culture, both
visual and written. The Protean nature of the disease was reflected in
the omnipresence and versatility of its metaphorical incarnations, in
the equivalencies mediated or established in nineteenth-century
literature between syphilis and motifs of ‘petrification’, ‘méduser’
(Lasowski, 1982: 10–11, 72), in the associated symbolism of venomous
snakes (Lasowski, 1982: 27–8) and even its poetic equation with other
contagions such as leprosy (Lasowski, 1982: 38–9). In Les Fleurs du mal
(1857), Baudelaire, poet of the ‘danse macabre’, evoked the deadly
sisterhood of ‘la débauche’ and ‘la mort’ (1961: 108–9). As a cover for
the volume, he had originally intended to use an image from
Eustache-Hyacinthe Langlois’s Essai sur la danse des morts (1851), in
which Adam and Eve take the apple from the serpent in the tree of
knowledge whose trunk and branches are composed of a skeleton.
J. Rambert’s contemporaneous ‘Débauche et luxure’, one of a series
of cautionary engravings published in 1851, including ‘Le Duel’,
‘L’Ivrognerie’ and ‘L’Usure’ in which a huge spider entitled ‘l’intérêt des
intérêts’ sucks the lifeblood from its prey, offered a more realistically
contemporary encapsulation of the same theme (AA PucciniRambert). Centre-stage, a skeletal man resting on a crutch, his sightless
eyes covered by a bandage, seems regretfully to recall the ‘luxure’ of
the past, distant scenes of orgy. Looming larger in the right
foreground is the door of the ‘Hôpital’ with its receding corridors and
a black shadowy figure. A wall-end, blank save for the artist’s name,
suggests a gravestone, while in the lower quarter of the scene a
prostrate child encoiled by a snake denotes the Fall from innocence
and the perennial nature of sin, disease and death. Reflecting the
essentially male-generated discourse of period medical treatises,
the subject is the errant male (victim), and the (absent) agent of
transmission, here as elsewhere, is the woman: usually though not
exclusively the prostitute, the woman of the streets, but, as the
JES 34(4) Kidd
10/4/04
10:40 AM
Page 9
KIDD: MARIANNE: FROM MEDUSA TO MESSALINA
341
century progressed, Marianne herself, the revolutionary republican
‘gueuse’.4
Baudelaire, no stranger to the pathogen, though allergic to democracy,
had asserted the ideological equivalence of Republicanism and sexual
corruption with his celebrated ‘nous avons tous l’esprit républicain
dans les veines, nous sommes démocratisés, syphilisés’ (1961: 1456),
but it was Maxime du Camp who established the iconographical link
in 1855 when he denounced Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People as a
‘drôlesse échappée de Saint-Lazare’, the women’s VD hospital (in
Adhémar, 1954: 92). By the time disillusioned republicans were
nostalgically but ambiguously claiming that ‘la république n’avait
jamais été plus belle que sous l’Empire’, an apocryphal statement
whose sexual connotations have never been adequately highlighted,
Verlaine’s ‘Buste pour mairies’ (1881), poetically equated Marianne’s
egalitarian largesse with promiscuity and infection (1962: 967).
Félicien Rops’ ‘La République aimat’, a bare-breasted allegory in
semi-Phrygian bonnet holding the shield of the constitution, used
traditional iconography to insert the same idea into the repertoire of
the pornographic print (Bory, 1977: 403). ‘Le Peuple’, one of a series
on the theme of sexual initiation variously entitled ‘Derrière le
rideau’, ‘Passé minuit’ or ‘Premiers pas’, portrays a robustly and
lubriciously proletarian wench in stockings, garters and white bonnet
(Bory, 1977: 467, 404, 401, 416). Pastiching Third Republican demagoguery, ‘Appel aux masses’ shows a girl offering her rear. In ‘La
France aux amours’, the same image was used in the portrayal of the
entremetteuse uncovering the girl’s rump with the words ‘A vous
général!’ Another print in which French military virility and its
problematic relationship with the republican regime is both affirmed
and caricatured was entitled ‘Le major est si exigeant’. Since it was
Changarnier who in 1873 had first identified the Republic with ‘la
gueuse’, these works cast an uncannily prospective and unwittingly
prescient light on the events surrounding the Boulanger and Dreyfus
crises of the 1880s and 1890s, whose ‘monstrous’ iconography has
been alluded to, and whose sexual ramifications formed an important
part of the politico-military subtext.5
In Rops’ hands, and in those of his less well-known contemporaries, the fille du peuple offers a debased version of the idealized,
succouring allegory of official republican representation. She has
become a political whore, using and being used, like the well-known
1905 lithograph in the satirical journal L’Assiette au beurre, in which a
coarsely buxom ‘Marianne’ lifts her skirts by the door of the ‘foire du
trône républicain’ (Agulhon and Bonte, 1992: 68). But she also
JES 34(4) Kidd
342
10/4/04
10:40 AM
Page 10
JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 34(4)
represented a popular version of the decadent ‘femme fatale’ common
also in fin-de-siècle bourgeois art. In ‘La Belle et la bête’, Rops
represents the female form cleaving succubus-like to a Sphinx,
another highly sexualized classical trope which offered an associative
surrogate for the Medusa, present in ‘Le Bonheur dans le crime’
whose otherwise enigmatic subject matter is an embracing couple
(Bory, 1977: 44). Rops’ ‘La vengeance d’une femme’, a theme given a
grisly patriotic dimension by Maupassant in ‘Le Lit 29’ whose
heroine dies of syphilis after deliberately infecting members of the
occupying Prussian army of 1871, also illustrated the cover of Barbey
d’Aurevilley’s Les Diaboliques (Bory, 1977: 47). In A rebours (1884)
Huysmans’ hero Des Esseintes has a nightmare in which a staring
‘Syphilis’ ‘aux yeux affreux … d’un bleu clair froid et terrible’, wears
‘un tablier blanc de bonne’ (1975: 173, 169). In Rops’ ‘La Mort qui
danse’, the bonneted skeletal woman raises her skirts in a grisly
invitation; in another, scythe looming in the background, we meet her
cranially explicit sister, ‘Mors syphilitica’ (Bory, 1977: 419–20).
If the impact of these prints was due to their metonymizing a set of
related anxieties whose incidence was socially widespread, the
scythe-syphilis, scythe-guillotine/castration paradigm offered a ‘site’
of particular anxiety for the middle classes, increasingly the beneficiaries
of the moderate pre-1914 Republic, whose fear of socialist or anarchist
revolution underpinned the ambivalent relationship they entertained
with the guillotine. In Forain’s ironically titled ‘Doux pays. Le Bijou
de l’aïeule’ of 1899, a Marianne figure proudly displays a model
guillotine and, in a sideswipe at a new ‘aristocracy’ (the bourgeois
Republic), claims: ‘Si on osait . . . ce serait le clou de l’Exposition’. In a
post-war cartoon, her Phrygian cap metamorphosed into a fashionably
contemporary cloche hat, a scantily clad Marianne sits on the
horizontal track of the guillotine, one hand on the release mechanism,
the other beckoning suggestively. A jerrycan of lubricant marked 1919
and Clemenceau’s moon-face looking down from a darkened sky
confirm that those being invited to sexual gratification and political
decapitation are the forces of the left, defeated by the nationalist ‘Bloc
national’ at the elections of that year.
In the visual propaganda of the 1920s, the petrifying Medusa and
the scythe and death’s head of contagion of the 1850–1900 period
were partly displaced or reassigned. One can adduce a number of
reasons for this. The first is that in popular as in bourgeois cultures
the high-water mark of republican (and hence anti-republican)
representation occurred in the ‘belle époque’ period before the First
World War. Secondly, with the war and the need for national unity
JES 34(4) Kidd
10/4/04
10:40 AM
Page 11
KIDD: MARIANNE: FROM MEDUSA TO MESSALINA
343
(‘l’union sacrée’), the threat to the republican regime had very largely
receded. Verdun, as some historians have argued, completed the
identification of Patrie and Republic, and except on the extremist
fringes of the anti-republican – in 1920, the Maurrassian – right
‘Marianne’ no longer possessed the power to alarm which had
underpinned the more pathological connotations previously attributed
to her. Moreover the ‘hecatomb’ of the Western Front, and France’s
1.4 million dead, the highest losses, proportionately, of all the
combatants, made the imagery less apposite to venereal contagion,
though the statistics continued to tell a grim story: syphilis still
accounted for 140,000 estimated deaths and some 60,000 stillbirths a
year.
In 1920, legislation prohibited the dissemination or advertising of
birth-control information but contraceptives were produced for
prophylactic purposes. In the mid-1920s anti-venereal propaganda
became more official and changed focus: under the aegis of the
cumbersomely named Ministère du Travail, de l’Hygiène, de
l’Assistance et de la Prévoyance sociales, the Commission de
Prophylaxie contre les maladies vénériennes, and the Ligue Nationale
Française contre le péril vénérien posters and leaflets were less
graphically morbid and more family-centred. In the climate of
increasingly acute demographic concern, perceptible in successive
pre-war censuses in 1901 and 1911 but now dramatically accentuated
by war losses, the emphasis shifted from warning men of the dangers
of the ‘femme fatale’ to urging them to take seriously their responsibilities as husbands, fathers and Frenchmen. A public-health poster
issued in 1925 contrasted the happy, healthy and prosperous famille
nombreuse and the illness-racked, prematurely aged, miserable existence
that awaited those who had failed to seek treatment (WO 2440). An
overarching concern was the loss to the race both from the disease
itself, the primary infection, and from its congenital legacy; deaths in
the womb were as important as deaths of the living. A poster entitled
‘La syphilis maladie héréditaire assassine la Race’ enjoined women to
fight the disease, and, in a intriguing amalgam, portrayed a mother
grieving over a child’s tomb in an idiom that replicated period
features of 1914–18 war memorial iconography (WO 2962).
The old armoury of representations had not, however, totally
outlived its usefulness: the grinning cranial motif formed the
backdrop to the image of a kissing couple in which moral opprobrium,
representationally as well as textually, was equally distributed (WO
0690). In another poster of the same year (1926), a skeletal spectator,
its rump ambiguously covered in a shroud, enjoys a day at the races
JES 34(4) Kidd
344
10/4/04
10:40 AM
Page 12
JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 34(4)
watching the ‘mortality stakes’ (‘la course à la mort’), between
tuberculosis (leading by a short head), syphilis and third-placed
cancer (WO 2441). More traditionally but ingeniously, ‘Défendezvous contre la syphilis’ (1925) stylized government propaganda into a
Medusa’s head in which the snakes represented the spirochete (WO
02789). And mythifying, classical allusion continued to find
expression in literature and in wider parlance. Paul Nizan’s Antoine
Bloyé (1933) evoked the sinister charms of the local ‘Hécate des
carrefours’ (1979: 92), while during the wartime occupation the
rigorous contrôles sanitaires imposed on brothels frequented by
Wehrmacht soldiery were of little help against the threat posed by the
unregulated activities of the freelance ‘Messaline du comptoir’ (Le
Boterf, 1974: 155–6). The coquettishly hatted cranial whore featured
on Second World War posters warning Allied servicemen about VD
descends directly from the ‘grinning demi-mondaine holding a skull
before her loins’ devised by Louis Raemaekers for an international
conference on syphilis half a century earlier (Dijkstra, 1986: 360).
In the same way, the persistence of underlying associations
prolonged the shelf-life of old symbolic and ideological narratives. In
the middle-class imagination, the nineteenth-century revolutionary
hantise was replaced by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. A pamphlet
issued in 1919 by Parisian industrialists entitled ‘comment voter
contre le bolchévisme’, the latter represented by the hirsute and
deranged-looking ‘homme au couteau entre les dents’ (M 127846),6
was not far removed in inspiration and execution from a pre-war
(1910–11) campaign poster against alcoholism, in which ‘derrière
l’ivrogne’ a whole cortege of scourges ‘entrent à la maison: la colère,
la maladie, la ruine, la paresse, le chômage et la mort’ (WO 6747). The
equation established between Bolshevism, war and death, underpinned by the unstated associations of the castrating blade or the
‘Medusa’ of contagion, persisted in anti-communist propaganda of
the 1920s. Joseph Kessel’s La Steppe rouge (1923) echoed contemporary
anxiety about the ‘péril bolchévique … considéré comme une forme
de péril oriental’, and based on the fantasmic image of the Red Army
as the sanguinary ‘Venus rouge’ (Tonnet-Lacroix, 1991: 124–5). It
resurfaced with the Second World War: a grinning death’s head in a
starred Soviet soldier’s cap adorned the poster ‘Le communisme,
c’est la guerre’, issued in autumn 1940.
Another Vichy poster series showed the choice for ‘futurs chefs de
famille’ between the scythe of plentiful harvests (a metaphorical
combination of food and progeny) or the more traditional figure of
the grim reaper (M 129615) whose sexual subtext predictably also
JES 34(4) Kidd
10/4/04
10:40 AM
Page 13
KIDD: MARIANNE: FROM MEDUSA TO MESSALINA
345
found its way into anti-Semitic propaganda issued by the Institut
d’Étude des Questions Juives. On one poster, under the scientist’s
microscope, a crab-like parasite with a beak attacks France; the text
proclaims that ‘Tuberculose, Syphilis, Cancer, sont guérissables . . . Il
faut en finir avec le plus grand des fléaux: le Juif!’ In ‘Français! Au
secours!’, a bird of prey with hooked beak bends over the prostrate,
bare-chested female victim, a tricolour suggestively draped across her
lower trunk.
It is true that with specifically anti-Semitic discourse we are
dealing with an alternative and less ‘classical’ set of images and with a
different bestiaire, with the repertoire of vampirism and predatory birds
of prey or rats. But, here again, there are certain constants and even a
certain ideological polyvalence. Before 1914 the image of the
bloodsucking vampire was found in Jewish iconography to denote the
sweatshop owner, as evidenced in the illustration by Ephraim Moses
Lilien for the German edition (1906) of Morris Rosenfeld’s Lider fun geto
(1902), though in this case, as the capitalist employer was himself
Jewish, the factor of social class comes into play. Rats, teeming,
promiscuous and unseen, were also responsible for transmitting
pestilence, and thereby associated in popular and middle-class
mythology with other forms of contagion: the Vichy milicien oath which
contained a commitment to fight against ‘la lèpre juive’ is evidence
enough, as is the more general association between Judaism and ‘la
pourriture’, an established synomym for venereal deliquescence
(Lasowski, 1982: 10–11). This composite image was evoked long after
the event in Patrick Modiano’s imaginative reconstruction of wartime
propaganda: ‘ce monstre imaginaire, fantasmatique, dont l’ombre
menaçante courait sur les murs, avec son nez crochu et ses mains de
rapace, cette créature pourrie par tous les vices, responsable de tous les
maux et coupable de tous les crimes’ (Modiano, 1999: 70).
In exploiting popular anxieties, while simultaneously attempting to
reduce the incidence of venereal infection and protect the unborn by
introducing pre-nuptial blood tests and reinforcing the anti-abortion
legislation, the Vichy regime underlined its ambiguous ideological
credentials. It also provided further evidence of the fact that in certain
central representational respects, as in much else, far from constituting
an exception, it belonged to the iconographical mainstream.
Conclusion
Until the widespread availability of penicillin in the mid-1940s finally
eradicated the threat of syphilis (though not, absolutely, its incidence),
JES 34(4) Kidd
10/4/04
346
10:40 AM
Page 14
JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 34(4)
the psycho-sexual imagery we have examined here retained its
associative force of morbidity. Progressively thereafter the Hydras and
Medusas of propaganda reverted to their ‘classical’ role as signifiers of
preternatural and pre-historic dread, still residually available for the
kind of ideological appropriation with which we began this paper, but
reliant for their mobilizing power on other kinds of culturally
mediated material. Significantly but for reasons which are outwith
the scope of the present study, the old psycho-sexual imagery has not
found a new lease of life in the socio-cultural inscription of the late
twentieth century’s own sexual ‘fléau’, AIDS.
Notes
1. Bibliothèque nationale, Cabinet des Estampes, Series Qb1 Histoire de France,
1793, Coll. Venick. Unless otherwise indicated, examples are taken from the
same Qb series, including the subset ‘M’, or from Folio series AA and series
WO. Not all items have a dedicated catalogue number.
2. See Le Grand Robert (1989: vol. 5, 31). There are further semantic overlaps
(‘loque’, haillon’, with ‘gueux’/’gueuse’ and ‘courir la gueuse’ (see below, n. 4).
3. See Toute une histoire. 1848–1914, CD-Rom produced by the Musée d’Orsay.
4. For the successive meanings of the term, including notably ‘femme de
mauvaise vie’ (‘courir la gueuse’) and its use by the extreme right to
characterize the Republic, see Le Grand Robert (1989: vol. 5, 44).
5. Dreyfus was both considered suspect as an ‘apatride’, and therefore by
definition of doubtful moral character, and disliked as a happily married
officer with no interests beyond family and work. Colonel Sandherr, head of
military intelligence in 1894, was in the terminal phase of syphilis (he died in
1897) and the real traitor, Walsin-Esterhazy, whose Frenchness was of more
recent origin than Dreyfus’, was a gambler, a womanizer and a crook.
6. See also Becker and Berstein (1987: 29–49). A German poster of 1918 entitled
‘Elend und Untergang folgen der Anarchie’ (‘Distress and Ruin follow
Anarchy’) portrayed Bolshevism as a fang-toothed, ape-like revolutionary
carrying a smoking bomb in one hand and a vicious-looking oriental curved
knife in the other.
References
Adhémar, H. (1954) ‘La Liberté sur les Barricades de Delacroix étudiée d’après
des documents inédits’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 43: 83–92.
Agulhon, M. (1989) Marianne au pouvoir. L’Imagerie et la symbolique républicaines de
1880 à 1914. Paris: Flammarion.
Agulhon, M. and D. Bonte (1992) Marianne. Les Visages de la République. Paris:
Gallimard, ‘Découvertes’.
Arasse, D. (1987) La Guillotine et l’imaginaire de la Terreur. Paris: Flammarion.
Baudelaire, C. (1961) Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la
Pléiade.
JES 34(4) Kidd
10/4/04
10:40 AM
Page 15
KIDD: MARIANNE: FROM MEDUSA TO MESSALINA
347
Becker, J.-J. and S. Berstein (1987) Histoire de l’anticommunisme. Paris: Olivier
Orban.
Bory, J.-F. (1977) Félicien Rops, l’oeuvre graphique complète. Paris: Arthur
Hutschmid.
Braverman, Jordan (1996) To Hasten the Homecoming. How Americans Fought World
War II through the Media. Lanham, New York and London: Madison Books.
Chevallier, J. (1958) Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la
première moitié du XIXe siècle. Paris: Plon.
Cocula, B. and M. Hausser (1991) Écrire la liberté. Bordeaux: L’Horizon
chimérique.
Corbin, A. (1991) ‘Les Prostituées du XIXe siècle’, in Le Temps, le désir et l’horreur.
Paris: Flammarion.
Darracott, J. and B. Loftus (1981) First World War Posters. London: Imperial War
Museum.
Dijkstra, B. (1986) Idols of Perversity. Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle
Culture. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
François, E. (1995) ‘L’Allemagne et la Révolution Française’, in J. Morizet and H.
Möller, Allemagne–France: Lieux et mémoire d’une histoire commune. Paris: Albin
Michel, pp. 98–101.
Freud, S. (1957) [1922] ‘Medusa’s Head’, in Collected Papers, vol. V. London:
Hogarth Press.
Giraud, M. (1984) Raconte-moi Marianne. Ce qu’a fait la République. Paris: J. C.
Lattès.
Le Grand Robert de la langue française (1989), 9 vols. Paris: Le Robert.
Harris, R. (1989) Murders and Madness. Medicine, Law and Society in the ‘Fin de
Siècle’. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hugo, V. (1964) Oeuvres poétiques, 1801–1851. Paris: Gallimard.
Huysmans, J.-K. (1975) A rebours. Le Drageoir aux épices. Paris: Union Générale
d’Édition (série 10/18).
Jean, R. (1979) Écrits de Victor Hugo sur la peine de mort. Paris: Éditions Actes/Sud.
Lasowski, P. W. (1982) Syphilis. Essai sur la littérature française du XIXe siècle. Paris:
Gallimard.
Le Boterf, H. (1974) La Vie parisienne sous l’Occupation 1940–1944. Paris: Éditions
France-Empire.
Legrand, G. (1989) L’Art romantique. L’Age des révolutions. Paris: Bordas.
Lidsky, P. L. (1970) Les Écrivains contre la commune. Paris: Maspéro.
Milne, Kirsty (2002) The Scotsman, 16 October.
Modiano, P. (1999) Dora Bruder. Paris: Gallimard (folio edn).
Nizan, Paul [1933] (1979) Antoine Bloyé. Paris: Livre de Poche.
Le Nouvel Observateur (1996) ‘Enquête sur les réseaux le Pen’, 31 October – 6
November.
Le Nouvel Observateur (2003) ‘La Toile de l’araignée noire’, 17–23 July.
Paulin, T. (1992) Minotaur and the Nation State. London: Faber and Faber.
Schneider, M. (1991) Un rêve de Pierre. Le Radeau de la Méduse. Géricault. Paris:
Gallimard.
Solomon-Godeau, A. (1997) Male Trouble. A Crisis in Representation. London:
Thames and Hudson.
Sosien, B. (1991) ‘Détruire pour construire: le thème obsédant du régicide’, in
JES 34(4) Kidd
348
10/4/04
10:40 AM
Page 16
JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 34(4)
Écrire la liberté, textes réunis par B. Cocula and M. Hausser. Bordeaux:
L’Horizon chimérique, pp. 113–18.
Tonnet-Lacroix, E. (1991) Après-Guerre et sensibilités littéraires, 1919–1924. Paris:
Publications de la Sorbonne.
Verlaine, P. (1962) Oeuvres poétiques complètes. Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
Warner, M. (1987) Monuments and Maidens. The Allegory of the Female Form.
London: Picador.
Winock, M. and J.-P. Azéma (1964) Les Communards. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Zeldin, T. (1981) France 1848–1945: Anxiety and Hypocrisy. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
William Kidd is Reader in French at the University of Stirling.
Address: School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of
Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, Scotland [email: [email protected]]