The images produced by the French

Revolution do not all fall under the

headings provided by such promi­

nent scholars as Jean 5tarobinski

(1970) or Ernst Gombrich (1985)­

({Les emblemes de la Raison))) {{les blasons

de la liberte ))1 ( Ozouf1978). 50 many of

them, indeed, are scurrilous or scato­

logical, and to such an extent, tllat

they warrant a re-examination of

these scholars' ideas concerning the

pre-eminence of the ideal of

"Reason" in the visual aspects of

Revolutionary manifestations.

My second preliminary remark

concerns the "nature" of the corpus I

use here: the subject of scatology has

been deemed quite unsavory by

researchers in past centuries. 2 Even

in our times ofverbal permissiveness

or, perhaps, freedom, when things

© The AmericanJournal ofSemioticsJ Vol. 6J No. 4

(1989)J 13-31

SCATOLOGICALSEMIOTICS: THEREVOLUTION ASDEFECATORYPROCESS*

CLAUDE GANDELMANHaifa University

This paper deals with a tradition thatrepresents the very opposite of whatone might call the "allegorical" orthe "heroie" tradition. It is devotedto what Mona Ozouf calls "1'autrefete", an episode for which sheherself apparently did not care verymuch, since it occupies barely twopages ofher Fete Revolutionnaire (1978).

*This article is an abridged version ofa chapter from my forthcomingbook, Reading Pictures/Reading Texts(Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress).

13

14 CLAUDE GANDELMAN

sexual can be freely mentioned, anything that pertains to the excre­mental functions of the body is still not welcome. As "offensivesmut", scatology is not even considered by many historians to be aproper subject for research. 3 Nevertheless, this essay will show thatthe scatological organ offlatulation is the most visible bodily organ inthe verbal and graphie productions of revolutionary France.

A corpus of approximately fifteen pictures will serve to illustratemy thesis. There were, of course, many more engravings for sale inthe teeming streets ofParis during the revolutionary years that shookeighteenth-century Europe. However, no statistics are available onthe subject (though there are many statistics concerning the distribu­tion of the regular newspapers). The quantity of scatological printscan, however, be deduced "negatively" from the intensity of effortsmade by the Restauration police to destroy them. 4

One thing is certain: the proliferation of erotic and scatologicalpictures reached its peak between 1790 and 1792. As evidence, onemight quote the notice printed on one of the erotic pamphlets of thistime, the Etrennes aux Fouteurs: the broadsheets ((se trouvent plus qu Jail­leurs dans la poche de ceux qui les condamnent JJ

• It is also likely that thephrase ((Chez tous les libraires JJ

J which was frequently printed on thecover of the pamphlets or at the bottom of the broadsheets, reflectedthe true situation in a city where royalty (still nominally maintainedon the throne with all the usual outward trappings of power) nolonger held any real power-neither the power ofcensorship nor theeven more elementary one of protecting its own privacy and publicImage.

The Impotent penis: an icon of the king

The proliferation of erotic and scatological pictures during thefirst years of the Revolution is further demonstrated by the newscurrilous imagery (on the open market) which represented the Kingas a powerless or impotent male sexualorgan. Two pictures byVivan-Denon (a painter about whom the encyclopedias havepreserved quite a few biographical details) show "the King" as ahuge but limp penis (see figures 1and 2). This "King" is not referredto by name, but the fact that these pictures were etched in 1793 leavesno doubt as to which monarch is being represented. 5

Some of these etchings were published, apparently, in the Etrennesaux Fouteurs in 1790, and one can take these two pictures as being"metonymie" representations of Louis XVI. I shall later describewhat happened to this "king's limp body" in the discourse ofRevolu­tionary journalism.

SCATOLOGICAL SEMIOTICS 15

Figure ,. Vivant-Denon. "A Lilliput" ("In Lilliput"). Personal collection ofthe author. Photo by Emmanuel Gandelman.

Figure 2. Vivant-Denon. "Le Roi des Rois" ("The King of Kings").Personal collection of the author.

The King as stercorous cannon

Concomitant with his representation as an impotent penis, theking becomes a hypostasis of the defecatory organ. The body of theking becomes a sort of scatological canon which bombards thecrowned heads of Europe, as in the caricature in figure 3, whichmakes no claim to being available "chez tous les libraires}} but can befound at least in one specific bookshop, the Soant Club (cercle Soant) inthe rue du Theatre Fran~ais.

We see immediately that this picture is also a literaItranslation of theterm "sans-culottes": the sans-culottes, who form the rank and file ofthe National Assembly, have doffed their pants to bombard themonarchs of Europe with their defecations. Similarly, the Republicuses the body of the King as a literal "mouthpiece" for the Repub­lican gun, projecting the vomit of Louis XVI onto the heads of hisfellow European monarchs.

16 CLAUDE GANDELMAN

.• 11..--..'" ·,">........' .,.. ' ......' ~_~'

.i C:"':',-C';:',;:

Figure 3. Anonymous. "L'Assemblie Nationale des Sans-culottesbombarde les tetes couronnees de I'Europe" ("The National Assembly ofSans-Culottes bombards the crowned heads of Europe"). Personalcollection of the author.

This analogy of "body=cannon" is also explicit in a pictureshowing the King ofPrussia aiming his "gun" at the Republic whileLouis XVI shouts to hirn: "I advise you to do what I have been doingfor years: kissing her b. . . ."

Stercorous language made visible

These caricatures are not only visual entertainment or visualprovocations: they also translate the standard phrases ofexecration inpopular language such as 'TemmeTde le Tai, les nables, le cleTge ... " andso forth. Thus a famous print shows a soldier of the revolutionaryarmies "canchie", the clergy and nobility sunk in a cesspool (Collec­tion De Vinck, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris [hereafter BN]). Othercharacters show sans-culattes wiping their bottoms with officialdeclarations by king or clergy (BN). One man (who, incidentally, iswearing the "culatte", the sign ofthe Old Regime, and who is actuallyshown in the process of becoming a sans-culatte) by doffing hisold-fashioned breeches) is wiping his behind with a papal briefcondemning the new constitution. (This brief has probably beenreproduced in the royalist sheetL 'Ami du Rai because the signature ofthe editor of this paper, l'Abbe Royou, is clearly shown in a corner of

SCATOLOGICAL SEMIOTICS 17

the printed sheet.) Again, this picture represents the translation ofh . {{. J h 1 IJJ

({. 1fi I)) dsuc expreSSIons as Je m en tore e eeu J Je me e ous au eu J an so on.To accomplish the Revolution is therefore essentially to translate

into visual terms the language ofpopular derision and popular wrath.Many pictures represent Revolutionary victory in the form of aRepublican spanking his adversary or enemy. This is the case in {{LaCorreetion Republieaine JJ

, in which General Jourdan is showntriumphing over Coburg. Particularly significant is the fact thatCoburg's behind displays the blazon of Austria, the double-headedeagle, so that it is, figuratively, "the face of Austria". UnveilingCoburg's bottom is tantamount to showing the "face of the King"(Collection de Vinck 28, No. 4697, BN).

In the eighteenth century, moreover, there were many pictures ofnuns or monks giving each other erotic fessees (spankings) in theconvents and monasteries of France. Such pictures were circulatedsub rosa by the libertines. This, of course, raises the question of therelation between libertinism and revolutionary scatology which, inany further study, should be examined in greater detail.

There is no doubt that by "spanking" the revolutionaries approp­riated the "gesture of the Father". Political enemies were more thanjust enemies: they were rioting children who had to be ruled. Thistype of image is, in a way, very close to the "upside-do~nworld"iconography of the sixteenth century, when children were shownspanking their fathers (Kunzle 1972: 153-178).

The Birth of the enemy as Ildefecation"

Quite a few etchings show the birth of the enemy through thedigestive apparatus. Such is the case of a picture directed againstAbbe Maury entitled {{Les Deux Diables en fureur JJ (No. 74B64894, BN)and another picture more generally directed against the aristocracyand entitled ({Naissanee des Aristoerates)), which bears the explanatorysubtitle {{Carieature eontre la Noblesse et le elerge{{ (Collection de Vinck,No. 82CI 12461, BN). Clearly the sans-eulottes J representation of thebirth of their adversaries resembles what Freud called the "infantiletheory of birth", a subject Melanie Klein later specialized in.Although this "infantile theory" was not an invention ofsans-eulottepropaganda, there seems to be an iconographic filiation for suchpictorial scatology which stretches across two centuries.

The Tradition of stercorous iconography

It was the Reformation that first brought to the fore the image ofthe potentate (that is, of the Pope) as the product of a defecation.

18 CLAUDE GANDELMAN

French scurrilous Revolutionary iconography is inscribed in thistradition. It is likely that the scurrilous imagery of the Reformationfound its inspiration largely in the scatology ofits greatest leader andprophet, Martin Luther.

When Luther shouted at the Devil, "Note this down: I have shit inthe pants and you may wear them around your neck and wipe yourmouth with it!" (Erikson 1958: 244), he was convinced that he hadflung at Satan the ultimate insult, the ultimate projectile. Accordingto Luther's psychoanalyst biographer Erik Erikson, the anal insultwas indeed what Luther thought the devil feared the most (1958: 224).Luther believed that "the devil expressed his scorn by exposing hisrear parts: man can beat hirn to it by employing anal weapons and bytelling hirn where his kiss is welcome" (1958: 79).

It is exactly what the sans-culottes are saying in their scurrilousimages, especially in one picture that shows the King of Francekissing the behind of Liberty. However it may be, we see thatrevolutionary images show both the behind of the enemy ("caughtwith his pants down") and, as a metaphor, show the revolutionaries'"behind" to the enemy. In so doing, the revolutionaries aimedperhaps at immobilizing their enemy as depicted in classicalmythology. Rather than showing their foes the head of Medusa, thesans-culottes displaya " face" that these foes were at once unable-and­yet-able to recognize: the uncanny scatological face had a namewhicl1 I shall make clear later.

Concerning the birth of the enemy through the digestive appa­ratus, this too was a favorite insult of Luther's.6 Was it not on hisadvice that young Cranach reproduced the "birth of the Pope" and ofhis prelates as shown in figure 4? Many Protestant artists followedsuite A well-known picture by an anonymous artist, entitled ((DieErschaffung der Moenche)), shows "a brood of monks" being born fromadeviI in a manner similar to that described above. French Revolu­tionary scatology is in the line ofdirect descent from the "anal insult"as it was practiced in the Reformation.

Scatology as body-reversal

We have now reached the end of the "scatological catalogue".What remains to be dealt with is the question of "meaning" orsignification. Several possibilities have already emerged. First, thequestion of the place ofscatology within the Revolutionary Festival) perhapsas ((anti-festival)). Second, we will have to deal with the question of theimage as ((translation)) ofpopular scatologicallanguage into visual images.What was the function of such a translation? Third, we will have to

SCATOLOGICAL SEMIOTICS 19

ORIGO PAP R.

Figure 4. Cranach, "The Birth of the Pope."

20 CLAUDE GANDELMAN

examine ({deeperJ) signification of the scatological} perhaps with referenceto "depth psychology". In particular, what does the "ostention" ofthe human defecatory apparatus really signify?

It seems obvious, at first sight, that hypostasizing the defecatoryorgan of the King is tantamount to destroying the idea of the organicState, aState whose Head is suitably poised on the limbs and organs(the citizens)-the notion ofking and subjects that hand once beenupheld. There is something radically new, on the other had, aboutpresentation of the State-be it king, national assembly, or army-asa defecatory organ. We are still far from knowing exactly what thisemphasis on the excremental functions ofthe political "homunculus"may mean. More exploration is needed.

In asense, scatology and scatological imagery put normal (physio­logical) relations upside down. As in the figures discussed above­and as in the Lutheran pamphlets at the time of the Reformation­there is an inversion between uterus and intestine, a transfer of thefunctions of parturition to the digestive functions. This inversion isespecially striking in a cartoon (by the great painter Jacques-LouisDavid) showing the king of England as a double-faced devil, thesecond face being in the place ofhis behind ({{Gouvernement AnglaisJ)}Collection de Vinck, No. 6ICI76I8, BN).

Such a presentation of the enemy as a "behind-faced" person istantamount to an assertion that he is an "upside-down man", just ashis world was an upside-down world. Here I detect a "translation"phenomenon. In the jokes of the sans-culottes, the nobles were some­times designated as ({ci-derrieresJ) ("those from bellind") rather than({ci-devantJ) ("those from before"). After all, there is a well-knownobscene couplet concerning "Monsieur le Ci-Devant Derriere"­Monsieur de la Villette, known for his lascivious appetites:

Quand Villette apprenait alireJamais un R il ne put direSon yrecepteur fut convaincuQu'i resterait toujours au Q.

(quoted in Bertaud n.d.: 98-99)

The Rocambole des Journaux} a sort of {{Officiel des Spectacles}} of theperiod, announced the first night opening ofLes Sans Devant Derriere}opera amachine}}.

Through the foregrounding of his defecating functions, the ci­devant is a ci-derriere} a "rnachine" which functions ({a l}enversJ). He isessentially a fabricator of garbage, the inverse physiognomy of aworker or (producteurJ). This is the meaning of an extremely obscene

SCATOLOGICAL SEMIOTICS 21

"Vanitas" (figure 5), probably published in 1794, showing the kings ofEurope and General Wellington engaged in stercorous practices. Amotto, culled from the Book ofJob, exposes the essential corruptionof the aristocrats: "Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?"(14: 4)·

Figure5. E.G. Langlois, "Vanitas Vanitatem et Omnia Vanitas." Personalcollection of the author.

Such scatology can also be construed as an attempt to set upside­down the reign of upside-down sociopolitical relations which stillcharacterized post-revolutionary France in the eyes ofcertain revolu­tionaries. The moral conveyed by the scatological imagery at its mostextreme, left-wing, form is that power, albeit revolutionary, is essen­tially a pollution, a defecation. This corresponds, at the least, to theideology of Hebert's paper, Pere Duchesne, whose first issue contains astory about the invitation ofPere Duchesne (the actual character, notthe paper) to Versailles as a sort of "voyage au bout de la m. ".8

A "ludic impulse" comes to the fore in this bandying about ofexcrements: scatology is an outburst ofrevolutionary rejoicing. It hasto do with "la vraie fete revolutionnaire", not with the "allegorical" one.On the other had, it is a well-known fact that revolutionaries lackhumor. One might even speak ofa "constitutional" humorlessness ofrevolutionaries: one does not joke about the new society one hashelped to create, and whose midwife (as it were) one has been.

As a matter of fact, at the Revolutionary Festival one does notlaugh very much. As 1 noted above, Mona Ozouf devotes only onepage to a description of "l'autre fete" (the festival with a trulycarnivalesque character); the officially organized festival is serious,deals exclusively with the glorification of the Republic, claiming toreproduce the earnestness of the "virtuous" Roman Republic whichit sees as its ancestor.

22 CLAUDE GANDELMAN

Better yet, it could be claimed that the official festival is essentiallyallegorical and (even) Neoclassical in character. Over and beyond itscharacter as a "representation" that revives aperiod long past (i.e.,that of the Roman Republic), one can claim that the RevolutionaryFeast signifies a sort of triumph of Neoclassicism and allegory per se.

In this way the scatological is a sort of return of the carnivalesquespirit, with its glorification of the "upside-down", one that is almostcompletely absent from allegorical rejoicing. In this sense, scatolog­ical imagery is, indeed, an upside-down structure inside an upside­down structure. This is a pure dialectic: the Old Regime was anupside-down world which has now been set right, but neoclassicalallegory (which represents this "setting-right") must now, in itsturn, be "upturned" to make room for the laughter of the people.Thus the return of the carnivalesque comes about through the agency of thescatological} not through the activity of the neoclassical organizers ofthe official celebration.

Scatology provides an outlet for humor as against neoclassicalseriousness. It is also an outlet for language at its most base: it is theprojection into visuality of the language of the people.

Scatology as translation: the visualization 01 the language 01the people

As I have already mentioned several times: there is a close relation­ship between scatological imagery and the language of the populace.The French "of the people" was fraught-as it still is-with such

o {{ f:' h' JJ {{ }J JJ d h lOk AexpreSSIons as tu me Jals c ler} tu m emmerae } an tel e.popular song dating further back (I think) than even the Revolutioncontains the lines {J}emmerde les gendarmes/Et la marechaussee JJ

•

What the people saw in the profusion of these scatological imageswas their own language in visual form. Being projected into themedium of the visual, language-the coarse, base language of thepeople-was accessible to everyone: there was no need to be literateto know what was being said about power and the exponents ofpower.8

In many ways, the printed images circulated or sold on the streetsmust have played the role that is played today by the visual media andespecially television. Today, petit bourgeois ideology keepscomplaining that "pop culture" is a culture for the illiterate. Thesame claim could probably be made about the broadsheet pictures onthe Paris streets at the time of the Revolution.

The language of scatological pictures can be instantaneouslyapprehended, giving the lower strata of the people a feeling of

SCATOLOGICAL SEMIOTICS 23

immediacy, of being understood by the "media". This is never thecase with the written language of the newspapers, even when thislanguage was translated into orality by a public reading. I am alsoconvinced that the decipherability and success of the often highlycomplex images I have presented was due largely to a phenomenon ofcollective recognition: the masses recognized in them fragments oftheir own language, their own expressions, but in another form, inanother medium, which made it even more potent.

Visibility, in those days, was power-and potency. 9

Potency, now "of the people"

The language of the Pere Duchesne is somewhat different from thescatologicallanguage connected with excrement. Except for a fewissues where real scatology plays apart, the emphasis is rather oncopulation and fornication. 10 Almost every line of the Pere Duchesnecontains the expressions (joutre JJ and ((bougre JJ

• One of the issues of thepaper is even entitled I(Lettre bougrement patriotique JJ to the sans-culottes.

((e JJ f "fi k" d Hf. JJ. h d b' Iroutre J 0 course, means uc , an Joutrement IS t e a ver laL' ((B JJ "fi k" "h I fi k" d'Iorm. ougre means uc er or omosexua uc er ,an ItSetymology can be traced to "Bulgare" (land of the "Bogomil") byway of the language used by Churchmen in the twelfth centuryagainst the Catharian heretics. The poor "buggers" were accused notonly ofbeing Manichean "Bogomils" but also ofbeing advocates ofsexuallicense and indulging in orgies. There is no doubt that (joutre­ment)) and ((bougrement JJ are the most frequent adverbs in Hebert'spaper. This fact in itself must be significant. Indeed, I would like tosuggest that this inflation of(joutre JJ and ((bougre JJ has to be related tothe imagery of royal impotency presented at the beginning of thispaper (figures land 2). The language of the Pere Duchesne signifiesthat the king-penis is an impotent king, and that his (joutre JJ and((bougre JJ activity is recuperated by the people, or at least by the"people" as the Hebertists defined it. In the obscene language of theHebertists the historian must, then, see a phenomenon of appropria­tion: the populist revolutionaries signified that they appropriated the"penis of the king", that is the "potency" that used to belong to theking.

The Face of the King as "behind", and the King as "fekes"

A historian planning to treat material of a scatological or ster­corous nature cannot help seeing his material through the eyes ofcertain other "historians", those specialists who have already

24 CLAUDE GANDELMAN

attempted to make sense of this type of material. These "special"historians are the psychopathologists (such as Krafft-Ebing) or theanthropologists (such as Bourke) as weIl as the psychopathologistsspecialized in "in-depth meaning", that is, psychoanalysts.

Even Mona Ozouf-a superb historian of French Revolutionaryspectacles-could not escape Freudian influence. Neither can 1. 11 Theanalogy between the face and the behind has already been noted:Coburg (or Austria) is primarily a "behind" spanked byJourdan. Thecaricature by David mentioned above is even more explicit: the({Explieation)J below the caption makes it very clear that the King ofEngland's behind is also his "face" or one of his "faces".

It is Freud, I think, who gives us the key to this enigma, in a shortessay-actually a case-study-called "A Mythological Parallel to aVisual Obsession" (Freud 1913: 399). His patient, a neurotic youngman, was hounded by the vision of his father's face as a "behind".Analysis revealed that he thought ofhim as the "Patriarch". "Arch",in German slang, means "bum"; his father was therefore a({Vater-Areh )J.

Similarly, what the Revolutionaries were saying, was that the"Archfather of the people", the King, was in reality the Father-Areh)the Father-Ass, or "Father-Asshole". They, of course, did not thinkin German, yet the idea of the King-Father as Behind was, as we haveseen, a "visual obsession" in their imagery. It is the "setting upsidedown" of the King and the nobles (the idea of "revolution" at itsmost concrete) that led them to this type of representation.

In this case study, Freud teIls us something of the nature of"symbolic efficacity"-to use Levi-Strauss's famous concept-ofthe "ostention" of the hind parts of the body to the enemy.12

The idea is to show hirn his "father's face".Revolutionary images show, as it were, the father's hind parts to

the world in order to stun it, to fascinate it and finally to immobilizeit. 13 The analogy suggested here is the "face ofMedusa" which Freudrevealed as a displaced presentation of the sex of the mother.

Bataille insisted upon it: man cannot look sex, the genitalia, "in theeye" (so to speak). Similarly, "Noble" man (or Counter-revolu­tionary man) cannot look his father "in the eye", cannot bear toglance at the "uncanny face" that is at once so "strange" and sofamiliar.

But the King, always associated with defecating, was also meant tobe seen, hirnself, as a kakon. Many of the pictures were intended for"internal consumption". Here, the scatology in the imagery of theFrench Revolution can be seen as a justification of revolutionaryviolence. Ifscatological imagery corresponds to the infantile theories

SCATOLOGICAL SEMIOTICS 25

ofbirth througll the digestive apparatus, and if the enemy is shown asbeing born tllrough the sphincter, it is because he has to be exposedas a kakon. Psychoanalysis has shown that the phantasm of the enemyas kakon is at the root of the aggressive and sadistic tendencies ofpsychopaths. The idea of the enemy as kakon corresponds to anideology ofviolence, to an ideology that demands the exterminationof the other seen as an "absolute Other". In the final analysis, it canbe said that it was to "purge" this human excrenlent, the kakon-Kingand the kakon-aristocrat) that the guillotine was needed.

The Scatological-stercorous tradition after the Revolution

The stercorous body also appears in the work ofa contemporary ofthe French Revolution, Goya. It is to be seen in the form of flatulentwitches in his Caprichos) especially in one of the illustrations entitledEI Soplon) The Flat??? It is probably the "flatulent voice" ofsupersti­tion that Goya intended to represent here. His Capricho No. 25, Sequebro el cantaro) also shows the behind ofa young boy ready to receivea spanking. After Goya, the vision of the excremental body disap­pears for almost a century. It reappears during the European literary"Decadence" movement. Is not Baudelaire's famous poem "LaCharogne" ("The Corpse") a sort of stercorous product? The workofBaudelaire 's illustrator, Felicien Rops, also offers a new version ofthe Revolutionary Vanitas depicted above: two bourgeois who seemto defecate over the whole world and thus to signify their contemptfor all that is not basely material. A few decades after Rops, Ensor(another Belgian) represents magistrates engaged in stercorousactivity. In his case, the implication is quite similar to that ofthe sans­culotte images: the bad judges represented by Ensor have no qualmsabout sending criminals to the gallows, just as one gets rid of feces.

As to the face of the king as "behind", it reappears also at about thetime of"Decadence", during the quarrels among European imper­ialist powers. Thus the stigmatizers of the ((perfide Albion )) in Francerepresent the face of Edward VII as a behind.

It seems to me that the last appearance of the stercorous body onthe French scene occurs during the "Student Revolution" in May1968. A caricature by the popular Sine shows de Gaulle as he flusheshimself down his own toilet.

A IIBakhtinian" model for scatology

It is perhaps too simplistic to say that all great upheavals, allrevolutions, have their "oral" and then their "anal" phases. I would

26 CLAUDE GANDELMAN

,,

fI

J

Figure 6. Jean Veber, "La Perfide Albion" ("The PerfidiousAlbion")fromL'Assiette au beurre. Personal collection of the author.

like to propose another explanation, one of a "Bakhtinian" nature,and to posit that behind any political philosophy or any politicalaction, the image of a huge human body (or of organs belonging tosuch a body) appears as a sort ofwatermark. The pictorial and verbal

::sCATOLOGICAL SEMIOTICS 27

productions ofpropaganda (and even ofhistorico-political discourse)seem to be superimposed over the image of this huge human body orover the images of some of its organs amplified and "hypostasized".

Historical discourse, among other things, is thus also a body image.One might perhaps want to compare this image to the grotesquephrenological homunculus which is inscribed as a sort of"watermark"on the human cortex (I am alluding here to the well-knowndiscovery of Penfield and Rassmussen during the fifties). Just as thehuman cortex contains its own body-image (the imprint of adistorted homunculus), and just as "there is" body-representationwithin the human cortex (Gorman 1969: 17-21), so, too, historicalideologies and the discourse of these ideologies contain the vision ofadistorted human body that is always present behind discourse itself.

To employ another terminology, that of Fredric Jameson, onemight say that the "political unconscious" in which ideologies origi­nate, contains its own homunculus or body-image around whichideology produces its organic growth. The "political unconscious"rests on the basis of the "body unconscious".

Thus, it could be maintained that the famous "double-bodied"king in Ernst Kantorowicz's classic work The King)s Two Bodies (1957)represents a map of the kingdom shaped like a huge human body, themap of the kingdom being the "other body" of the king. Thistradition of the kingdom as anthropomorphic map has been exploredin recent years by several researchers (Gandelman 1987: 19-25;Lestringuant 1985: 9-25). Anthropomorphic maps continued to beweIl represented in cartography as late as the end of the eighteenthcentury-and the interruption of the production of "geographicalbodies" at exactly this date may in itself be of significant value inlight ofwhat happened to "the body of the King" during the FrenchRevolution.

In order to trace further developments in the representation of thehomunculus, one would have to explore the so-called "organic"tradition, which dates from classical times. This tradition representsthe king as the "head" of the nation, and the various institutions ofthe kingdom as its organs and members. 14 Yet another traditionderived from the "classical" one foregrounds one single part of thebody. This was the Hobbesian tradition, with its concept of the kingas the sort of "devouring stornach" constituted of the bodies of hissubjects (represented by the famous torso of the "Leviathan"). Thisbody of the Leviathan-king as a sort of "digestive apparatus" iscrystallized in an etching published as the frontispiece of the firstedition of Hobbes's work (1651). This torso, incidentally, recentlyserved also as frontispiece for a publication sponsored by the journal

28 CLAUDE GANDELMAN

Representation. It presents the person of the monarch as a demoborosbasileus) a "people-digesting" giant. 15

Still another tradition-(non-Western this time) the Aztec­foregrounded the image of the monarch as a "heart" torn out andbleeding in order to nourish the perishing world. This is the image ofQuetzalcoatl. This same tradition also made use of a flayed body asthe sign of the deity: the image of the Xipe-Totec, ({nuestro Senor eldesollado))) who was a god of the spring "revolution" (in the first,etymological, acceptation of the word "revolution"), that is, a godwho renewed the crops and the flowers.

This idea of the ancient flayed body as god also pervaded themodern Mexican Revolution during the 1920S. The heroes in themurals painted by ürozco, Rivera, and Frida Kahlo-and by thecontemporary Mexican artist Arnold Belkin-are often presented asecorches))) persons flayed alive (Gandelman 1986: chapter 3).

To reprise the French Revolution ... The new imagery developedin the prints and broadsheets of the French imprimeurs after 1789forgrounded yet one more organ of the human body, the scatologicalapparatus and its stercorous functions. The French revolutionaries sawtheir collective body as a huge defecating organ, perhaps as a sort ofgun that could be trained on the enemy.16

In the preceding, I have attempted to delineate the "revolutionaryhomunculus))) the "body vision" which "obtains" from the corpus ofthe scatologic caricatures produced by the French Revolutionists. 17 Itis a grotesque figure, certainly more grotesque or disgusting than theHobbesian Leviathan. Still, I believe that no complete picture of thegrandiose and terrible period in the years between 1789 and 1799 canbe complete without it. 18 It was during those years that a "terrible,scurrilous, and even revolting beauty was born". Nothing evenremotely similar to it has since appeared in the press.

NOTES

1 See especially the chapter entitled "Les emblemes de la Raison" in Starobinski.I could find only the Italian version of Gombrich's original English text (1985).

2 One exception, ofcourse, is the famous Krafft-Ebing. Among his followers, inour time, Gershon Legman produced a monumental book, Rationale of the Dirty loke(1968). The work of both men, however, came after the doctoral dissertation of anAmerican anthropologist and former cavalry officer, John G. Bourke'sScatologic Rites ofAll Nations (1891).

3 I amjudging here from the far from enthusiastic "reception" for my illustra­tions during arecent conference on the Revolutionary Press in France ..

4 This is what Eduard Fuchs, a German researcher active before and after WorldWar I, has to say on the subject:

SCATOLOGICAL SEMIOTICS 29

The hunt that was organized without pause at the Restauration against this sort ofpictures created enormous gaps. Everything assaulting [the sexual life of] the Royalty[the police] could lay their hands on whether in archives, private cabinets and the likewas destroyed without hesitation. The justification for preserving "historical docu­ments" was ignored by the Restauration. The broadsheets were put under theheading of "upshots of subversion", and as it was feared that they would cause aproliferation of horrors of this selfsame type, they were destroyed as soon as theywere sighted and in whatever place they were found. (1904)

5 According to Theme-Becker (1928): "Als Denons graphische Hauptwerkenennen wir L'Oeuvre Priapique", 23 Radierungen, Paris 1793.

6 Erikson (195 8: 246) notes that "he [Luther] had woodcuts made representing theChurch as a whore giving rectal birth to a brood of devils".

7 As a sampIe of the ((conchiement)} ofPere Duchesne, the following passage maybe quoted: "Les valets du Prince de Conty ... chiaient a ma porte ... ne v'la t-il pasbien qu'ils m'en foutent par ci, qu'ils m'en foutent par la, qu'ils me foutent le nezdedans.... " (Pere Duchesne no. 84. Collection of the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.Reproduced in the unpublished thesis of O. Itsikowitch-Eliada, Manipulation etTheatralite: ((Le Pere Duchesne)}} 1788-1 791} vol. 2, 552.

8 It has been estimated that the Pere Duchesne had a maximum circulation ofbetween 2000 and 2500 copies, but since it was read publicly everywhere, the public itactually reached must have been at least ten times as large. On this subject, see alsoItsikowitch-Eliada 's thesis (150).

9 I would not hesitate to place the beginnings ofwhat MartinJay calls "oculocen­trism"-a characteristic, in his view, of the modern political world-at the end of theeighteenth century and perhaps at the beginning of the French Revolution.

10 See my previous reference to the "Voyage du Pere Duchesne a Versailles".

11 She notes the frequent animalization of the figure of the King during specificallegorical fetes and poses the following question: "Freud ... suggere que les deplace­ments de la figure du pere vers la figure animale est un des themes de la nevroseinfantiler;] conviendrait-il aussi que l'expression de l'image royale ou papale par lafigure animale peut-etre le theme de la nevrose collective?" (Ozouf 104)

12 Here I am using a term made famous by Wittgenstein in the first page of hisPhilosophicallnvestigations (1945) but which really sterns from Saint Augustine's Confes­sions (I, 8), where the saint tells about the way his elders taught hirn language bypointing toward an object (ostendere).

13 It is, perhaps, this "face of God" defecating fire and brimstone over the city ofSodom that Lot's wife must not see.

14 At the time of the French Revolution, one finds a late version of this classicalmyth in L }Ami du Roi} the royalist paper. On this subject, see Jean-Paul Bertaud, LesAmis du Roi: Journaux et Journalistes en France} de 1789 Cl 1790 (1984: 132). The idea of thesans-culotte as a substi tute for the king in the same type of"organic" body can also befound in the Pere Duchesne.

15 On the "King as devourer and digester of people", especially in the politicalphilosophy of Lorenzo Valla, see Mario Fois (1969).

16 A passage from the story entitled "The goose I killed"-in Isaac Babel's KonArmia (The Red Cavalry)-depicts this analogy between the body and ordnance. Thenarrator, Babel, has been assigned as war correspondent to a newly formed regiment ofrevolutionary Cossaks in the 1917 Russian revolution:

A young fellow, ... beautiful as only those of Riazan can be, stepped toward mysuitcase, which he sent Bying in the air through the porch. Thereafter, training hishind parts toward me, he emitted with great skill aseries of unmentionable sounds.

"To your ordnance! Number two-zero-zero: running fire!" shouted laughing oneof his elders .... (88, my translation from the French edition)

1922.

FOIS, Mario.1969.

30 CLAUDE GANDELMAN

17 After finishing this article, presented in reduced form as a paper during the firstIsrael Conference in honor of the bicentennial of the French Revolution, I discoveredthat another researcher, David Boime (1988), had written on almost the same subject,though not on exactly the same corpus.

18 These are the dates between which Ozouf locates her Fete Revolutionnaire.

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