"Patri-arse": Revolution as Anality in the Scatological Caricatures of the Reformation and the French Revolution

The imagery used by Hitler to incite Germans to kill Jews was that of the epidemic: many Nazi propaganda films equated the Jews and germ-propagating rats or vermin. Certainly, the threat of an epidemic and the image of diseased rats helped rationalize horrific genocide to the German public. Evidently anality was involved in this preparation for genocide: killing rats and germs was depicted in Nazi language as a process of “Säuberung” (purification), of “Reinigung” (cleansing), and of purgation. Such an obsession with purity usually denotes the repression of strong anal tendencies.

Similarly, Stalinist propaganda—although it did not rest on racial theories—referred to the so-called “enemies of the people” it wanted to “exterminate” in terms of “parasites” and “vicious vipers.” Moreover, in the case of Stalin, the current word used in the thirties to designate the killing off of enemies from within the communist party itself was “purge.” The Communist party was seen as a human body that had to be purged of its internal “worms.”

This expression, “purging,” was used by the French revolutionaries of 1791 to 1793. Indeed, it is probable that the Stalinist ideologues borrowed it from the orators of the French Revolution.

Yet, unlike the modern perpetrators of mass extermination, the revolutionaries of the past did not aim at perpetrating genocides, even though they massacred quite large numbers of those they considered their enemies.

They were also much less repressed than the modern “exterminators” of peoples. Revolutionaries of the past overtly “played with excrements” in deriding their enemies. Thus, caricaturists of both the Reformation and the French Revolution have used scatological, and even stercoral, imagery in their depiction of their enemies. It is this choice of stercoral images which is our subject here, in the case of two great revolutions of the past.

Why this choice of obscene, anal images? Were the revolutions of the past more “anal” than the modern ones in character? This anality was especially visible in the visual productions by revolutionary draftsmen—that is, in their revolutionary caricatures and propaganda “broadsheets,” whether pasted on the walls or sold on market places and streets.

This study will focus on the two specific periods which openly used anality: the Reformation in 16th century Germany, and the great 1789 Revolution in France.

Revolutionary Caricature as “Infantile Birth-Theory”

“Inversed” physiological relations were salient in the images of the Reformation. According to Luther and Cranach, his painter, the Popes were born from the defecatory apparatus of devils.

Figure 1.

“The Rebirth of Catholic Landsknechte.” Sixteenth century, anti-papist image. Author’s collection and photograph.

Similarly, during the same period, the Catholic knights were described by a Protestant caricaturist as being “reborn” from the digestive apparatus of a huge devil [Figure 1]. They are seen first as being “swallowed” as civilians and then reappearing from the devil’s sphincter as fully equipped, armed men.

This bizarre image of “birth through the digestive system” reappeared during the French Revolution. In several popular prints produced by the sansculottes both the clergy and the aristocracy were depicted as being spawned from the digestive apparatus of huge devils. Such a representation of birth resembles Freud’s “infantile theory on birth” but—as we shall see later—this does not mean at all that the sansculottes (or Luther, for that matter) were infantile or directed their propaganda to an infantile audience.

Quite a few prints show this birth of the enemy through the digestive apparatus. Thus a picture directed against the royalist Abbé Maury bears the caption:

On the tenth of April 1790 two flying devils Made a wager, who would defecate the most stinking {being} In human nature One defecated the vicar M. . .y The other became livid (with envy) And let us have d’Ep. . .y And his bunch ¹

The full names are obviously those of Abbé Maury and the bishop d’Epinay, royalist conservatives who were specially hated by the sansculottes.

Another picture entitled “Birth of the Aristocrats” shows both clergymen and noblemen...