The Prints & Propaganda of James Gillray

     The 18th century's Age of Enlightenment saw the introduction of the political and satirical cartoon.  These hand-coloured etchings or engravings were both highly topical and engaging.  No illustrator played a more important role in the propaganda campaigns of the time than England's James Gillray.  Gillray's grotesque and fiendish depictions of French revolutionaries as dangerous sans-culottes took the stereotype of the revolutionary projected by many anti-radicals across the Channel to the extreme.

     Born in 1757, James Gillray was apprenticed to a letter engraver in London during his youth.  When he began to find the work boring, however, he deserted his master to join a troupe of strolling players.  When that endeavour failed, Gillray returned to London and eventually became a student at the Royal Academy before setting himself up as a portrait painter.  When he received no commissions, he returned to producing engravings for print shops.  While his first prints were devoted to social subjects, in 1782 Gillray began to concentrate on political caricatures.  Party warfare among Whigs and Tories was carried on with great vigor and bitterness during Gillray's time--much as it is today in American politics.  Gillray's wit and humor along with his keen sense of the ludicrous earned him a top place among political caricaturists.  Following the years of the 1789 French Revolution, English satirists, including James Gillray, focused their attention more and more past internal Whig and Torie party disputes and toward the mobs of "mad, bloodthirsty revolutionaries" in France.

The Zenith of French Glory: the Pinnacle of Liberty (1793)

     Following the publication of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), James Gillray produced the piece pictured above.  Influenced by Burke's opposition to the fervour of revolution in France, (Burke's work did much to alter the English conservatives' views of the typical Frenchmen from a "poor, frog-eating laughing-stock", as PT from Propagandatheory.com writes in a post entitled Propaganda of the French Revolution--Satire From England, to that of a dangerous fiend) Gillray set about illustrating his own dismay at the progress of the French Revolution. 
     The Zenith of French Glory's primary figure, the sans-culotte (translated literally as having 'no trousers') is noticeably without the fashionable knee-breeches that characterized the wealthy of England and sits atop a city lamp bracket.  Three members of the clergy are hanging below him, and he rests his foot on one of their heads.  He is wearing a Phrygian cap, or liberty bonnet, and plays a fiddle while Paris burns in the background.  In the middle distance, Louis XVI is facing his execution by guillotine.  The mob gathered to watch the spectacle are differentiated only by the outlines of their red liberty bonnets.  At the bottom of the illustration is scrawled:  "The Zenith of French Glory:  The Pinnacle of Liberty, Religion, Justice, Loyalty & all the Bugbears of Unenlightened Minds, Farewell!"

Un petit souper a la Parisienne:  or A Family of Sans Culottes refreshing after the fatigues of the day (1792)

  Following the September Massacres of 1792, a series of mob violence that overtook Paris and marked the start of the 'radical phase' of the French Revolution, Gillray composed Un petit souper (above).  The piece confirms the widely held English notion of French barbarity.  The sans-culottes are even more grotesque, obscene, and fearsome.  The character at the head of the cannibalistic feast sits atop the "Properite de la Nation", the prosperity of the nation, and eats an eyeball.  Corpses litter the floor.  Young sans-culottes devour intestines while an elderly grandmother roasts an infant's body on a spit.  Gillray's picture of depravity conveys the message that the revolution is to blame for producing such monsters.  In Propaganda of the French Revolution--Satire from England, PT argues that "Most of the 'golden boys' of the Revolution would eventually be devoured by the forces they helped unleash," in the same way that the figures in Un petit souper cannibalize their victims.  At the bottom of the piece appears the following poem:

"Here as you see, and as tis known,

Frenchmen mere cannibals are grown;

On Maigre Days each had his dish,

Of soup, or Sallad, Eggs, or Fish;

But now tis human flesh they gnaw,

and every day is Mardi Gras."

     Analyzed from an historical perspective, James Gillray is among the most popular and prolific print satirists of the golden age of English caricature.  While he is much revered, he is also much reviled for the way he portrayed French Revolutionaries during a time when shock waves of fear and anxiety traveled to England from France.  Like most Englishmen, Gillray believed that life was better in his part of the world and he feared that the Revolution could turn that world upside down.  His prints, along with those of similarly minded artists', heavily influenced his countrymens' ideas about the Revolution and the French people in general.  Sometimes blatant and other times more subtle, James Gillray's techniques are still being employed by satirists today seeking to draw attention to political issues and personalities.

References:

PT, Propagandatheory.com, Propaganda of the French Revolution--Satire from England (2012)

James Gillray www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk Web

Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911) Encyclopedia Britannica (11th ed.) Cambridge University Press