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This paper deals with a tradition that represents the very opposite of what one might call the "allegorical" or the "heroic" tradition. It is devoted to what Mona Ozouf calls "l'autre fête", an episode for which she herself apparently did not care very much, since it occupies barely two pages of her Fête Révolutionnaire (1978).
The images produced by the French Revolution do not all fall under the headings provided by such prominent scholars as Jean Starobinski (1970) or Ernst Gombrich (1985)-"Les emblèmes de la Raison ", "les blasons de la liberté"1 (Ozouf 1978). So many of them, indeed, are scurrilous or scatological, and to such an extent, that 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 of verbal permissiveness or, perhaps, freedom, when things sexual can be freely mentioned, anything that pertains to the excremental functions of the body is still not welcome. As "offensive smut", scatology is not even considered by many historians to be a proper subject for research.3 Nevertheless, this essay will show that the scatological organ of flatulation is the most visible bodily organ in the verbal and graphic productions of revolutionary France.
A corpus of approximately fifteen pictures will serve to illustrate my thesis. There were, of course, many more engravings for sale in the teeming streets of Paris during the revolutionary years that shook eighteenth-century Europe. However, no statistics are available on the subject (though there are many statistics concerning the distribution of the regular newspapers). The quantity of scatological prints can, however, be deduced "negatively" from the intensity of efforts made by the Restauration police to destroy them.4
One thing is certain: the proliferation of erotic and scatological pictures reached its peak between 1790 and 1792. As evidence, one might quote the notice printed on one of the erotic pamphlets of this time, the Etrennes aux Fouteurs: the broadsheets "se trouvent plus qu'ailleurs dans la poche de ceux qui les condamnent". It is also likely that the phrase "Chez tous...