Porn or Politics? Popular Engagement with Revolutionary Discourse in Erotic Prints in Late-Eighteenth Century Libelles

By Tasha Dambacher

Written for HIST 292J: Democracy and the French Revolution

Advised by Professor Isaac Nakhimovsky

Edited by Helena Vargas, Rio Nagao, Alex Geldzahler, Claire Nam, and Baala Shakya

Images of Marie-Antoinette in all manner of compromising positions were not difficult to come by during the early years of the Revolution. Though not as ubiquitous, images of other famous figures, such as the King, Lafayette, and a huge number of others, were also common. Though these depictions are easily dismissed as simple pornography or ridicule, they were in fact part of a wider literature of libelles - popular pamphlets characterised by their use of polemic obscenity and satirical abuse - which developed political ramifications during this period. These images and the messages that they communicated are of particular interest because they were widespread, popular and, in their own ways, revolutionary. As such, they offer insights into more vernacular forms of engagement with political discourse in the nascent years of the Revolution, and about how Enlightenment ideals of public opinion and morality manifested themselves in daily lives. In order to fully explore the success and significance of pornographic libelles in the late 1780s and early 1790s, it is key to consider their development within French culture, as well as the rhetorical and visual tools that they used in order to spread their messages. In addition, it is vital to examine the ways in which they interacted with revolutionary discourse and Enlightenment ideas. In the first section of this paper, I will consider several key examples of Revolutionary pornography; in the latter, I will attempt to grapple with the key questions I have identified. Ultimately, these images were a testament to the dynamism of the Revolution, as well as part of a movement towards destabilising, desacralizing and democratising discourse, which allowed for the crystallisation of collective judgement. In a wider river of revolutionary discourse, the libelles served as eroding particles, scraping away the authority of the ancien regime, cohering a general will, and helping create a popular Enlightenment. 

Pornographic Libelles in Three Examples

The First Source (Fig.1), a color print from Les Fureurs Utérines de Marie-Antoinette, Femme de Louis XVI (1791), depicts Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette in the boudoir. Louis stands in aristocratic finery, with his culottes pulled down to reveal his limp member. Marie-Antoinette, seemingly disgusted, seems to wave him away, though her own skirts are bunched to reveal her genitals, and her neckline pulled down below the breasts. This image was a popular one – another example can be found in La Vie Privee Libertine et Scandaleuse de Marie Antoinette (Fig. 2). The impotence of the king is more than simple abuse – instead, his lack of manly virility represents both his degeneracy and his inability to rule.

The royal body had long been an image of majesty and monarchy, and, as such, had always been a fixture in French political thought. The redirection of this messaging into the pornographic sphere therefore had a specific power borne from a common political tradition. Exposed and vulnerable, the mysticism of the king’s form was coopted and replaced with ridicule. The reframing of the kingly form into the most vulgar of depictions, therefore, amounted to a rejection of his authority. Further, the body of the royals, for so long elevated on a pedestal, became public property to be gawked at by any pamphlet reader, a symbolic of the reclaiming of power from the ancien regime. The private scene of the boudoir, long the locus of libertine prestige, is also brought into the public forum, and denounced in explicit detail. Almost as a public service, what once happened behind closed doors has been brought to light, and the citizens, becoming the voyeurs, are invited to revel in the unmasking of the languid pleasures of the aristocracy. 

Though these images reject the metaphysical aspects of the kingly form, he serves nonetheless as a metaphor for wider issues. The revolutionary pamphleteers, here, have clearly adopted and redirected the symbolic power of the king’s body – his physical impotence is analogous with his political impotence, and his physical degeneration with the moral. When the king’s finery is stripped away, his impotence is revealed. This is emphasized by the incongruity of his small and flaccid organ next to the finery of his garments, symbols of his wealth and power. His ailment is so common, so crude, and so far removed from the power imagery surrounding the royal bloodline and progeny, that it cannot escape ridicule. The message is twofold. The king’s riches cannot hide his ineffectiveness, and, when stripped away, reveal that he is not just equal but lesser than other men, unable to complete even the most basic human task. The reader is encouraged to consider the irony of the king’s abilities, and reject the veneer of power that is projected over an ineffectual system – in itself a form of revolutionary thought. 

The degeneration of the aristocracy, of which the royal couple is the apex, is further made clear by the red paint on their genitals – a symbol of venereal disease. Other sources, including Suite des delices de Coblentz and Les Fouteries Chantantes, reveal a vocabulary of degeneration surrounding the aristocracy. In these depictions, sexually transmitted diseases are the plague of the wealthy, a physical manifestation of the depravity and moral degeneration of the elite,¹ whose vast corpus of sexual perversions were detailed in dedicated pamphlets, such as Les Plaisirs de l’ancien régime, et de tous les âges. Their decadence rots them from the inside out. In comparison, the revolutionary body is healthy and virile, the antithesis of the lifeless aristocracy. In these images, the moral is made tangible: the corrupted aristocracy placed in direct opposition to the vitality of the republican hero, and the wider conflict is brought to the bedroom. The republican counterpoint can be seen in pamphlets such as Les Travaux de Hercule ou La Rocambole de la Fouterie, in which the titular character’s masculine strength and sexual exploits are characterized as the epitome of revolutionary eroticism, irreconcilable with the effeminate hedonism of the aristocracy.² For example, the pamphlet illustrates a variety of sexual positions for which “to taste the pleasures of this carnal gathering, the man must be endowed with a member of an excessive length”.³ This image is certainly a far cry from the sad and limp phallus of the king in the Uterine Furors. 

The depiction of the queen, meanwhile, can be considered in conjunction with the second source (Fig. 3), taken from La Vie Privee, which depicts Marie Antoinette and her friend, the Duchess of Pequigny, engaged in a sexual affair. Common between them, and in much other revolutionary pornography, is a near obsessive attention paid to the hypersexualized image of queen’s body. In the first, the queen is presented as licentious, her breasts exposed and her legs temptingly open. The sexual nature imprinted onto her by the pamphleteer contrasts with her rejection of the king – raising the question as to who her sexual attentions are turned to, and insinuating that, on top of everything else, the king was a cuckold, a deep humiliation. Depictions exist of the Queen engaged in relations with the King’s brother, the Count d’Artois (Fig. 4) and Lafayette (Fig. 5), among others. The implication of sexual profligacy on her part, combined with accusations of Louis XVI’s impotence, raised questions about the legitimacy of their heirs. An additional interpretation is that as she lifts her skits, Marie-Antoinette reveals herself also to the viewer, cheapening herself to the level of the common people. The popularity of the concept of her body as public property is supported by the common use of the term res publica (literally public thing) to jokingly describe her genitals in multiple pamphlets and other libelous publications.⁴ In a world where female sexual agency was often taboo, this depiction would have been wholly insurgent, and played into encoded moral principles accepted by most of society. This portrayal was also in opposition to previous aristocratic libertine depictions of sexuality, which reveled in the unrestrained freedom of the acts, in which the reader took on a purely voyeuristic role. Instead, these depictions urge the reader to reject these principles, and to reapply their moral principles, championed by the revolutionary faction, to society.

Further, depictions of transgressive sexual behavior were a vital part of the libelous crusade against the Queen (as well as the rest of the aristocracy). At its most basic, lesbian behavior in the heart of the court, as depicted in La Vie Privee, was indicative of the moral rot of the aristocracy. Seen through ‘moral’ eyes, lesbianism was a part of a plethora of sexual sins which all spelled disaster for the aristocracy – pedophilia, bestiality, incest. In fact, the pamphleteers did employ all of these and more against the queen. The power of these narratives is evident, because the queen was specifically accused of “indulging herself with Charles-Louis Capet, her son”⁵ in the Bill of Indictment at her trial. Lynn Hunt discusses the ways in which these pamphlet’s inflammatory fascination with the Queen’s body marshalled particular strength because her “non-mystical body” represented all the “threats, conscious or unconscious” to the republic.⁶ 

Taken a step further, these depictions interacted with a larger revolutionary anxiety with gender roles. Rousseau, in his Letter to d’Alembert on the Theatre, decries the movement of women and the domestic into the public sphere, claiming that “every woman in Paris gathers in her apartment a harem of men, more womanish than she”. Rene Girard claims that concern with the collapse of gender norms is a key part of community crisis, and is a way for the community to reestablish boundaries in an unstable world.⁷ Whether or not this holds true in the general case, it is clear that the fear of the masculine woman and effeminate man was a key part of revolutionary discourse.⁸ This can be seen the second source, where Marie-Antoinette, on top, performs the actions of a man and assumes a position of domination. Anther print, later in the pamphlet, depicts Marie-Antoinette taking part in an orgy and assuming the topmost position, again one of authority (Fig. 6). In these images, the Queen is depicted as changing sex, and thus in violation of the “natural order”. The perceived masculinization of women came hand in hand with the feminization of men. Thus, if the queen displayed transgressive tendencies, then the king must have been influenced by feminine aspects – fear of her feminine guiles can be seen on the cover of La Vie Privee, where she is depicted with a phallus, a dagger, and poison (Fig. 7). Anxiety about male feminization can additionally be seen through the depiction of homosexuality in libelles, such as one example labelled “the Resources of the Clergy” (Fig. 8): implicitly, the homosocial bonds between revolutionaries are contrasted with homoerotic scenes of aristocratic and clerical sodomy.⁹

Another one of the queen’s sexual transgressions can be seen later in La Vie Privee, where she is depicted having intimate relations with a member of the clergy, reflecting the Jacobin distrust of the church. Depictions of clergical impropriety were popular – one such example is the third source (Fig. 9). Taken from L’echo foutromane, printed in 1792, the image depicts a dream scene, wherein an Abbot-turned-cherubin is sexually attended to by the three muses. The scene is described within the pamphlet as a “triple infidelity”. The idyllic scene is dominated by a day bed with copious drapery, reminiscent of the boudoir from other scenes. The small and childlike reinterpretation of the Abbot may allude to the common accusations of pedophilia associated with the clergy. The muses are depicted pushing the Abbot, whose holiness is denoted by his cherub wings, onto one of their own, and tying him on her with a garland of flowers. The joke, in part, is that though he is supposedly being forced to abandon his godly celibacy by their actions, his erect phallus and hand positioning suggest otherwise. In this image, therefore, the sacrosanctity of the church is challenged, and its own members are shown falling into sin and corruption, like the rest of the aristocracy. Peter Wagner describes the ways in which the satirists made use of “religious and erotic enthusiasm” to ridicule religion, as seen here.¹⁰ It was not only the moral degeneracy of the church which was denounced, but also their intense hypocrisy.

The abbé was a specifically fraught term as well – Wagner additionally discusses the ways in which the “abbés de cour” did not take their position seriously or respect Christian moral or sexual values, and, as such became a symbol for the corruption of the church.¹¹ This title was the coopted by writers of the era engaging with anticatholic pornography and erotica – including, for one, Voltaire, who sometimes employed the title “Abbé Bazin”. The depictions of the fornicating religious figure was not a new one, but rather drew on a longer literary tradition, in which the figure was a popular archetype. By again drawing on a common vocabulary, the pamphleteers were able to make their points through images alone, though these were of course accompanied by much obscene text. As a result, many of these pamphlets, and their messages, were accessible even to the illiterate.

What these three sources illustrate is a level of sophisticated political messaging that might not have been immediately obvious in preconceived ideas about pornography. Far from being material designed for self-pleasure or other lewd activities, these pamphlets sought to convey key revolutionary talking points through the sphere of the sexual, engaging the masses in their scandalous stories and building for them a narrative of a great moral battle for France. Whether attacking the clergy, the aristocracy, or the Royal family itself, the prints were able to communicate a variety of desacralizing messages to the masses, and had significant political intent. The fact that these images remain easily intelligible to the twenty-first century viewer is a testament to their communicative power, and to the unifying simplicity of their substance.

Evaluating the Libelles

The libelles which emerged in the 1780s and 1790s were not a new phenomenon, but rather part of a far longer tradition of satire in France. Court had long been a locus for intrigue and scandal, and its effects were widely felt in French society – slanderous witticisms emerged from the court of both the Sun King, Louis XIV, and Louis XV, whose official mistress, Mme du Barry, was a constant source of amusement. Writing in his memoirs in 1790, Jean-Charles-Pierre Lenoir, erstwhile lieutenant general of the Paris police, discussed the way in which “bons mots… and satire, have always characterised the Frenchman, especially the Parisian… especially when the satire is aimed at an important personage.” Lenoir, who had been involved in early investigations of the underground book trade between 1774 and 1785, imagined witty slander as a vital part of high society, and of the general chatter of the masses.¹² The slander of the 1780s, however, took on a different tone to its antecedents. According to Lenoir, from 1778 onwards, the libel changed from mere amusement to abuse, focusing on the King’s impotence and the Queen’s licentiousness rather than on general rumours about the frivolity of court mistresses. Vitally, Lenoir noticed a shift in behaviour towards the Queen, with the public becoming increasingly hostile towards her.¹³ It is clear from his account that this new generation of libelles had helped create a consolidated court of public opinion, and thus had a particularly pervasive and unifying power.

Evidence for the consequence of these new libelles can be found particularly in the reaction against them. In September of 1791, one self-professed “active citizen” of Paris complained that about the sale of “books filled with horrors” in the galleries of the Palais-Royal.¹⁴ Police archives from the period are chock full with similar complaints, as well as or reports of the departments’ aggressive stance towards the underground book trade. One example is a thorough hunt through the Palais-Royal between 1790 and 1791, orchestrated by the Mayor of Paris himself.¹⁵ That the police was concerned with censorship is no surprise, but the heavy-handed involvement of higher authorities beginning in the 1790s suggests that these pamphlets represented more than mere pornography. One tally estimates that over 400 works were confiscated in 4 months during this time, though this is likely a low estimate for the number of titles available – letters suggest that pamphleteers were often wily and difficult to catch, and no sooner was one title taken off the shelf, then another would take its place.¹⁶ The police also sought to deal with these cases discretely, perhaps indicating their fear of the incitement of the public by angry pamphleteers spreading their rumours. This atmosphere of fear and suspicion surrounding the libelles speaks to the dual fear of the police and the authorities above them; the dangerous discourse that they encouraged, as well as the public response to both their publication and prohibition. It is additionally clear that these riots had effects outside of the states ideological fear – on multiple occasions in 1791, pamphlets being read aloud by their peddlers and hawkers caused riots in the streets of Paris, and obscenities reported in libelles were even regurgitated in the National Assembly.¹⁷ The sudden virulence of the response to these pamphlets certainly can be attributed to a wider change in the atmosphere of French politics in these years, as discontent and revolutionary sentiment grew, but it appears likely that the reception of these pamphlets also changed as the libellistes found new ways to insert their publications within political discourse. 

What made these new libelles so potent? The change of protagonist identified by Lenoir may provide part of the answer. As discussed, the King’s body held deep political significance, sacred and shrouded in mysticism, while the Queen’s, though decidedly un-mystical, held the all-important power to continue to royal line.¹⁸ An attack on the very person of the monarch, and on the royal couple’s ability to provide a legitimate heir, therefore struck at the heart of the king’s sovereignty. The obscene nature of the pamphlets opened the king’s private life up to an unsophisticated public, and thus had a significant desacralizing effect. No longer hidden within his aura of sanctity, the king was therefore left open to attack, and accountable to every malcontent in the realm. Further, in these pamphlets, the public became witnesses to the inner happenings of a disrobed Versailles, and were free to pass their own judgment on their ‘betters’.¹⁹ The beautiful irony of this position added an element of humour to the libelles, increasing their appeal. Vitally, these new pamphlets, influenced by the long-held tradition of making a metaphor of the king, gained a uniquely allegorical facet which had not been present in the past.

This allegorical tendency contributed to the uniquely democratising nature of these libelles, a vital aspect of their success. The political developments of the period were often complex and inaccessible, but, by sensationalising them and distilling them down into a sexualised clash between the vice-ridden aristocrat and the virile revolutionary, libellistes were able to provide biting commentary on key events to an ever-broadening audience. Further, where earlier satirical forms had been largely confined to the upper echelons of society, requiring close knowledge of the subject and their milieu, these pamphlets appealed to current prejudices and value sets,  as the public were invited to impose their own moral judgments on the material presented to them.²⁰ Further, these pamphlets borrowed from well-established literary motifs – the debauched pope, the noble depraved by languid pleasures, the hapless king – as well as using accessible language and standard rhetorical models. In this way, the pamphlets, with their familiar characters and sense of the dramatic, bore significant similarities to the theatre, which was also a key locus for popular political participation.²¹ Most importantly, the inclusion of pornographic images in these libelles allowed the messages of the pamphlets to be transmitted to the illiterate and semi-literate masses in explicit detail, extending the reach of subversive and desacralizing ideas. Though they may not seem particularly convincing to a contemporary audience, these images appealed to what Rolf Reichardt, a German scholar specialising in the symbols of the French Revolution, termed to be the “popular theatricality” of the French people of the period, characterised by a fascination with the visual.²² 

It is vital, also, to remember that the libellistes did not necessarily write their own opinions – instead, they wrote what sold. Perhaps because of the general discontent of the populace, the pornographic gossip-sheets about the king and his retinue flew off the shelves, and a flurry of new ones on the same theme appeared. The result was a vast corpus of literature attacking the royal family, the aristocracy, and the clergy, with each new pamphlet legitimised by all those that came before it.²³ Anecdotes which, in isolation, may have seemed spuriously outlandish, were absorbed into a wider impression of the lecherous tyranny of their subjects, and thus were all the more believable. In the context of such widespread discourse, idle gossip became hard fact, eroding the legitimacy of the ancien regime. Further, the pervasiveness of these pamphlets, and the ideas they espoused, consolidated into a sense of collective judgement, lending them more weight. 

The pornographic nature of libelles, which differentiated them from simple scandal-sheets, was a particularly effective form of political expression because it allowed them to harness the “traditional licentious impulse of French literature”²⁴ in new and more extreme ways, drawing attention. In particular, the voyeuristic aspect of the libelles was combined with journalistic concepts in order to suggest a commitment to complete transparency. This wilful attempt at complete denudement, especially when it came to the most dirty and depraved aspects of noble life, was diametrically opposed to the censorship and royal propaganda of the ancient regime, and thus gave libellous stories a certain level of legitimacy. In addition, this aspect aligned particularly well with the Jacobin emphasis on popular sovereignty and transparency. Paul Friedland, in his discussion of eighteenth century theatre, identifies the revolutionary obsession with dramatic unveiling to be a vital part of the movement towards abstract representations; like theatre, the libelles, with their sensationalised expositions, were both a symptom and a contributor to the republican impulse towards both theatricality and transparency.²⁵

Beyond journalism, the libelles also contained elements of other genres. One example was the way in which libelistes pulled motifs from folklore to create their own mythology of the revolution, with clearly demarcated protagonists and antagonists. Versailles, in their imagination, became a separate, almost absurd, world in which these characters were able to be set.²⁶ Like traditional mythology, these libelles were therefore able to create a common understanding of the life of the nobility, characterised by its difference. As such, the stories they told became a way for common people to make sense of the world, and to more easily perceive the lives of the elite. Further, be engaging with these pamphlets as a moralizing voyeur, or by transmitting the stories and ideas that the pamphlets held, the readers were invited to become active political participants. 

In addition, the libelles drew from certain historiographical approaches, such as the sensationalism and disillusionment of Procopius’ Anecdota, in which personal attacks and stories were a vital aspect. Given political commentary, unfavourable journalism, contemporary history and biography, among other genres, were harshly subdued by the ancient regime, the libelles were in many ways slotted in among their ranks, rather than being viewed as entirely separate propaganda. It is vital not to overstate this, however – it is likely that some more extreme fabrications were viewed as such, but they would have likely been seen as offshoots of true reporting on the licentious behaviour of the debauched upper classes.²⁷  This multi-facetted understanding of libelles does not speak only to their efficacity, but the intrusion of sexual discourse into political commentary to comment on news and turn the revolution into a lustful story also acts as a testament to the polymorphous nature of the revolution itself. 

The libelles were not simple narrative pornography- as they always had, they relied on humour and satire in order to attract their audience. Their lurid polemics were a vital part of their nature, and it is only through the transgressive possibilities of humour that they were able to maintain their persuasiveness and create a universalising vocabulary of iconography. Satire toes the line between amusement and abuse, and it was this very facet which became a useful tool to reflect the iconoclastic tendencies of the Revolution. The commerce of laughter that these libelles capitalized on had deep roots in France, and had long been a vital part of French culture, particularly in theatre.²⁸ In addition, comedy had significant power in transmitting memorable messages because they prompted a vividness of experience which elicited a far more meaningful response in their audience. Paul Woodruff classifies the sort of humour found in these pamphlets as “hot laughter”, through which a level of distance is placed between the laughers and the laughed at, and which he views as being a precursor to aggression and even violence. He describes the phenomenon as a key tool to “enforce conformity within a group … in the face of deviant behaviour, the group laughs hotly, at the same time excluding the deviate and reenforcing the group's good opinion of itself”.²⁹ This analysis provides insight into several key effects of the libelles, and the power of their polemics. The link between violence and laughter cannot be ignored, and it is clear that the verbal onslaught of humorous anti-monarchical pamphlets increasingly encouraged, or engendered, physical unrest. More importantly, by othering the aristocracy, the libelles consolidated group mentality among the masses, and instituted in them a level of moral superiority which became a key tenet of revolutionary discourse. Though the didactic effects of these libelles were fairly rudimentary, as the morality they encouraged was not the great moral community imagined by Rousseau, they went some way to instilling a sense of a moral popular body. 

Rousseau had a particularly poor view of comedy. In his letter to d’Alembert, he wrote that “since the very pleasure of the comic is founded on the vice of the human heart, . . . the more the comedy is amusing . . ., the more its effect is disastrous for morals." and that the genre encouraged people to "make fun of vices without making virtue loved." Though Rousseau may have been right to be concerned about the moral nature of comedy – in the case of libelles, the viewers were still engaging with pornography, regardless of how imbued with political commentary or anti-aristocratic moralizing it contained – there is no doubting its effectiveness in consolidating pragmatic manifestations of certain Enlightenment ideas. These pamphlets, which appealed to literate and illiterate members of society, had a significant role in controlling the dissemination of political discourse, cohering the revolutionary story and providing “models to guide … reactions to representatives’ discourses”.³⁰ As such, they provided the democratized access to information, education and intelligibility that allowed for the engaged citizenry imagined by the likes of Condorcet and Sieyes, as well as for the consolidation of a clear public opinion. Vitally, this public opinion was ardent, and helped confer legitimacy to the Revolution and to the attempts at new and representative government. 

In addition, the pamphlets served do delineate a clear (if basic) public morality, and provided a way for the masses to orient themselves in this regard. Central to the pamphlets was a message that certain behaviours were wrong, and should be judged, even when they came from the top. Though the unified, democratized and actively engaged masses that these pamphlets produced was not the disciplined, perfectly enlightened citizenry that the philosophes envisaged, it is clear the libelles were nonetheless harbingers of certain form of pragmatic Enlightenment. The pamphlets were not simply the weapon without morality of Rousseau’s criticisms, but instead were a vital part of creating a sense of public morality and allowing public opinion to cohere through ways that were accessible to the masses, though they lacked the polish of the conceptualisations of the philosophes. Though his work often dismisses the effect of cultural changes and popular action in the Enlightenment and the Revolution, Jonathan Israel’s multi-strand analysis is useful here, because it offers an avenue for understanding the Revolution as multiple threads, rather than a homogenous movement towards ‘Enlightenment’.³¹ Though his analysis divides Enlightenment thought along the lines of “radical” and “moderate” (and ‘counter-enlightenment”), it seems that there was also a “popular” Enlightenment, which took on aspects of Enlightenment thought in a way more palatable to the general public. This often fell within the scope of the radical- anti-religious authority and monarchy – but it was based on pragmaticism rather than intellectualism. It is here that these pamphlets did their work. According to Keith Baker, the acceptance of revolutionary ideology and Enlightenment thought outside intellectual circles was the result of the unconscious assembly of notions that would help them make sense of, and solve, real problems.³² By saturating the discourse with simplified versions of events and ideas, the pamphlets provided concrete solutions to these issues, cohering a general will and an acceptance of Enlightenment thought based on the realities of popular politics rather than idealism. Unlike both what both Baker and Israel suggest, however, this process was not brought around by abstract ideas handed down from intellectuals and philosophes, but instead by the creation of a conscious, simplified discourse in libelles and beyond.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the French Revolution was a revolution of ideas: about popular sovereignty, public morality, and the general will. But these concepts could not solely exist in the minds and ideals of philosophers and other great thinkers. By bringing the private into the public, the sexual into the political, and the visual into the intellectual, the libelles democratized political discourse and contributed to the creation of an engaged and informed citizenry that, in many ways, resembled the enlightened republican ideal. Though inherently immoral, the pamphlets were even able to create a sense of republican morality and community that no level of sermonising could achieve, and helped propagate a form of popular Enlightenment outside of the intellectual discourse of the philosophes. In addition, through their use of literary motifs, common iconographic vocabulary, and satire, the pamphlets simplified the revolution in such a way that complex events could be distilled into a cohesive story that echoed around France, and invited popular political engagement. By the time a rabid crowd booed the Queen to her death in 1793, France was a changed nation, and the tales in the libelles had played their part in it. But political satire is a dangerous weapon, and as Jacobin censorship began to tighten its grip on the nation, the revolutionaries found themselves at the butt of lewd political satires. Even today, polemic prints remain a key part of the French journalistic culture. However, the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks serve as a stark reminder that such a business remains a powerful and dangerous one even today. 

Endnotes

1.  A. de Baecque, “The “Livres Remplis d’horreur”: Pornographic Literature and Politics at the Beginning of the French Revolution” in Erotica and the Enlightenment, ed. Peter Wagner (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1991), p. 160.

2.  C. Forthe. and B. Taith, French Masculinities (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 27.

3.  Anonymous, Les Traveaux d’Hercule, ou, La Rocambule de la Fouterie (Paris: 1790), p.18.

4.  J. Landes, Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and revolution in Eighteenth Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 65.

5.  Moniteur Universel, October 16, 1793, p. 145-6.

6.  L. Hunt, “The Many Bodies of Marie Antoinette: Political Pornography and the Problem of the Feminine in the French Revolution” in Eroticism and the Body Politic, ed. Lynn Hunt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 110.

7.  R. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. P. Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 141.

8.  Binhammer, Katherine. “The Sex Panic of the 1790s” in Journal of the History of Sexuality, 6, no. 3, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 409.

9.  Hunt (1991), p. 126.

10.  P. Wagner, “Anticatholic Erotica in Eighteenth Century England” in Erotica and the Enlightenment, ed. P. Wagner (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1991), p. 168.

11.  Wagner (1991), p. 171.

12.  R. Darnton, “The Memoirs of Lenoir, Lieutenant de Police of Paris, 1774-1785”, English Historical Review 85 (1970), p. 541.

13.  ibid. 546.

14.  de Baecque (1991), p. 123.

15.  ibid. 125.

16.  ibid. 138

17.  Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers Of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), p. 21.

18.  V. Cameron. “Political Exposures: Sexuality and Caricature in the French Revolution” in Eroticism and the Body Politic, ed. Lynn Hunt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 105.

19.  Fleischmann, Hector. Les Pamphlets Libertins Contre Marie-Antoinette (Paris: Slatkine, 1908), p. 31.

20.  S. Genand, “Éros politique. Idéologies du corps à la fin de l’Ancien Régime”, Dixhuitième Siècle, 37(1) (2005), p.587.

21.  S. Maslan, Revolutionary Acts: Theater ; Democracy ; and the French Revolution (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p. 24.

22.  R. Reichardt. “The Heroic Deeds of the New Hercules: The Politicization of Popular Prints in the French Revolution” in Symbols, Myths and Images of the French Revolution, ed. Ian Germani & Robin Swales (Winnipeg: Hignell Printing LTD, 1998), p. 32.

23.  De Baecque, 144

24.  R. Darnton, The Devil in the Holy water or the Art of slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), p. 107.

25.  P. Friedland, Political Actors : Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 39.

26.  Colwill, Elizabeth, “Pass as a Woman, Act Like a Man: Marie-Antoinette as Tribadein the Pornography of the French Revolution” in Marie-Antoinette: Writings on the Body of a Queen, ed. Dena Goodman (London: Routledge, 2003), 156.

27.  C. Trevein, “Satire, Prints and Theatricality in the French Revolution”, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment (2016), p. 264.

28.  D. Outram, Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class, and Political Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 32. 

29.  Woodruff, Paul. "Rousseau, Molière, and the Ethics of Laughter." Philosophy and Literature 1, no. 3 (1977): 329.

30.  J, Popkin. “Pamphlet Journalism at the End of the Old Regime.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 22, no. 3 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,1989): 358.

31.  J. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p.22.

32.  K. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 19.

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