In her latest book, Joan B. Landes tackles one of the French Revolution’s most recalcitrant iconographic paradoxes. How is it, she asks, that popular prints relied so heavily on female figures to embody notions of liberty, justice, and the French Republic at a time when the flesh-and-blood women of France were decisively drummed out of public political activity? She finds her answer in a deeply divided realm that she terms “graphic politics,” where visual and political rhetoric interacted to produce citizens of the newly imagined French republic.

Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France grows out of, and develops from, Landes’s previous work. In 1988, Landes joined the debate on the role of gender in the emergence of the “bourgeois public sphere” that Jürgen Habermas had famously described. Landes’s Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988) argues “that the exclusion of women from the bourgeois public was not incidental but central to its incarnation” (7). Visualizing the Nation explores some of the mechanisms that enabled the public sphere to emerge as a masculine entity.

Turning for the first time to images rather than texts, Landes proves to be an astute observer of the political and economic contexts in which popular prints were produced, disseminated, and consumed from 1789 to 1795. Following an introductory chapter that thoroughly grounds her methodology in the relevant scholarship, Landes delves into the arguments that swirled around the very notion of imagery in Revolutionary thought and life. Tremendously influential yet notoriously open to differing interpretations, images played a contested role in forming public opinion. Yet this is not a top-down study of the varying “official” takes on imagery, for Landes also explores the practical commercial necessities that compelled engravers to produce pictures that would sell, and not merely instruct.

In particular, Landes focuses on two different strains of female representation that dominated the print culture of the day: allegory and caricature. Allegory, the more elevated genre, often built upon iconographic traditions codified in sources like Cesare Ripa’s 1593 Iconologia. Landes notes that the graphic artists of the Revolution especially welcomed emblems of “female goddesses in antique costume” that could stand for a host of civic virtues (such as liberty, fraternity, and equality) while also wedding “humanistic tradition to a popular republican project” (39). Caricature, in contrast, offered unparalleled opportunities for cultural criticism through exaggerated or grotesque depictions of women’s bodies. Together, caricature and allegory “worked to construct a new female subject” (130), offering examples of virtuous republican femininity and warnings against the corrupt abuses of the old regime, now cast in a feminine guise.

Landes outlines an intricate process of give and take between visual and political rhetoric. Thus, in a tumultuous era when the emergence of an explicitly masculine republic was still very far from certain, a 1790 caricature could represent the bad old days as “The Aristocratic Body with the Face of a Woman Dying in the Arms of the Nobility” (fig. 2.10). Through an implied contrast with this feminized and enfeebled depiction of the aristocracy, the emerging state defined itself as strong, masculine, and bourgeois. At the same time, the exclusion of women from the actual citizenry made the female body a perfect figure of the new republic. Because an engraved woman could not, by definition, represent a citizen, she “stands as a metaphor—not a metonym—for the whole social community, free from any and all division” (75).

More specifically, Landes proposes that the tendency to depict Liberty as a woman “was instrumental in the constitution of the myth of universal equality that marked the shift to a new social order” (132). Situating Liberty in a male body, she argues, would have come too close to admitting that the much-lauded freedom of the Revolution applied only to a subset of the male populace. Furthermore, Landes observes that all of the legislation in France had not succeeded, indeed could not succeed, in banishing women completely from the public realm. Only in an image could women’s presence be “registered in the public sphere in a manageable way—trapped within a picture” (133).

The book’s most original and thought-provoking thesis is fleshed out in Chapter 4, “Possessing La Patrie: Nationalism and Sexuality in Revolutionary Culture.” Here, Landes considers the erotic possibilities unleashed by “the nation’s incorporation in the body of an exceptionally alluring woman” (139). In a nation composed exclusively of men, who could arouse passionate, self-sacrificing devotion better than a woman? Cast in the multiple roles of nurturing mother, demanding mistress, and damsel in distress, La Patrie had every claim to her citizens’ attentions. Landes takes a Freudian turn when she considers the link between these heterosexual fantasies and the homosocial bonds that united the male citizenry. Though construed as rival suitors, patriots would always remain equal. For La Patrie withheld her favors from one and all.

With its sophisticated analysis of the gender politics of popular prints, Visualizing the Nation takes its place in the growing body of literature on women and the visual culture of the French Revolution. Landes enters into a complex discussion with feminist historians of the Revolution, such as Lynn Hunt and Dena Goodman, and with historians of Revolutionary imagery, including Maurice Agulhon and Antoine de Baecque. Scholars in both fields, and even their introductory students, should benefit greatly from Landes’s important new contribution.