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L'Esprit Créateur Joan B. Landes. Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation and the Revolution in Eighteenth -Century France. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001. Pp. xiii + 254. $36. In her latest book, Joan Landes takes as her point of departure a set of paradoxes. First, while actual women were deprived of political rights and excluded from political participation in Revolutionary France, their printed images were omnipresent. Moreover, these images of women represented both the ideals of the Republic and the threat of chaos and intrigue attributed to women's presence in the public sphere. In her discussion of these paradoxes, Landes offers a fascinating analysis of how gender issues influenced political representation between 1789 and 1795. By arguing for the crucial importance of imagery in the development of French national identity and democratic culture, she sets herself apart from historians who focus more exclusively on discourse in their interpretation of revolutionary history (including Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault , François Furet, and Keith Michael Baker). She incorporates the theoretical perspectives of scholars who have pioneered the study of revolutionary images, such as Maurice Agulhon. Michelle Vovelle, Antoine de Baecque, Madelyn Gutwirth, and Lynn Hunt, to demonstrate how female allegories and caricatures were used in the construction of a nation that had to transfer its allegiance from the absolutist king to the new republican nation and fashion new roles for its citizens in the private realm. She shows that the Republic's grounding both in universal equality and women's political exclusion is reflected in the ways in which representations of the female body vacillated between allegory (of the regenerated nation) and caricature (of disorderly women). She arrives at the compelling conclusion that representations of the nation as a seductive, maternal female body elicited in (male) citizens feelings of possession, longing, and the desire to protect. Thus Landes argues that heterosexual erotic desire encouraged male citizens' attachment both to the home and to the homeland, thereby adding to the arguments of Carol Pateman and Lynn Hunt that homosocial bonds were at the heart of republicanism. Landes does not attempt to analyze systematically all the political imagery of the time, but selects sixty political allegories and caricatures that allow her to construct her argument. Although she acknowledges that the meanings of these images are difficult to control and that viewers do not always respond to the images in predictable ways, her readings overwhelmingly favor the interpretation that these images had an erotic appeal. Although this might be convincing for the majority of heterosexual male viewers, it is less so for a female public, especially the female public that Landes recognizes had been repressed by the Revolution. Undoubtedly, some women would have seen in these images a validation of their roles as virtuous wives and mothers . But what about some politically active or artistically creative women who believed that the Revolution held promises of autonomy and freedom for them; would they have recognized a role for themselves in the nation by viewing these prints? As convincing as Landes' theoretical analysis of these images is, we are left wondering how actual men and women interpreted them and how they influence their lives. Having noted the paucity of such evidence, particularly concerning women's relation to these images (not just as spectators but also as creators), Landes herself expresses the hope that future scholars will take up this challenge. Jacqueline Letzter University of Maryland, College Park 102 Fall 2003 ...

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