Sexing Political Culture in the History of France By Alison M. M ...

Delacroix’s tableaux and of the 1848 revolutions;⁸ defended, as in Alfred Le Petit’s illustrations of La Charge during the Franco-Prussian war;⁹ or decried, as in the 1933 cover of the conservative financial journal Commentaires which is reproduced on the cover of this volume. That trend is not only a past one either—a 2003 socialist poster campaign showed seductive black and Arab-French figures of feminine beauty wearing the Phrygian bonnet révolutionnaire, as the new symbols of an ideal nonracist, nonviolent, culturally inclusive republic.¹⁰ And of course, Marianne's head remains enshrined as an official symbol of the French state—dainty and pretty, her hair streaming behind her, perhaps blowing in the winds of progress as she stares down the future resolutely.¹¹

The intense concentration of scholarly work on gender and national imagery in French historiography in recent years is a measure of the exceptionally rich tradition of that variety of political signification in the French past and present. In eighteenth-century historiography, the work of Lynn Hunt and Robert Darnton has been influential in showing how political satire against the Ancien Régime targeted sexual rumors about Marie Antoinette, and how revolutionary and republican pornography represented a decrepit and libertine clergy and aristocracy in opposition to a virile and sexually robust disenfranchised laboring class.¹² Other historians have shown the even more ubiquitous tradition of representations of the Republic as a female body across the long history of the French nation. Joan B. Landes’s Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France traces the emergence and proliferation of gender imagery in early republican political discourse;¹³ and Maurice Agulhon’s series, Marianne au combat, Marianne au pouvoir, and les Métamorphoses de Marianne, traces the use of feminine iconography in public sculpture and state-sponsored visual art from the eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries.¹⁴ Françine Muel-Dreyfus showed how central the pious ideals of both virginal and maternal femininity were in the culture of the Vichy state.¹⁵ These influential studies created a strong tradition of gender and sexual historicization of French politics. More recent studies, such as the chapters