Caricature as censorship: incroyables and merveilleuses between stereotypes, custom and social control

Abstract

The attention of historiography and sociology to the censorship of costume has mainly focused on the contemporary age, where the political value of the dress has emerged in authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. Less attention has been dedicated to its symbolic and political implications in the modern age, yet the French Revolution highlighted the use of dress as an instrument of expression of republican symbolism and imagery that the ruling class intended to settle in the population. In the directorial period, tension between three poles emerges the will to confirm the abandonment of the class formalism and imagery of the old regime, the need to impose a costume that reflects the new values, and the will to leave room for individual expression to compensate for Jacobin fundamentalism. To investigate this triangulation the caricatures of members of the "Thermidorian youth" - Incroyables and Merveilleuses - are paramount, since the Directory built with them an ambivalent relationship of apparent acceptance and surveillance, on the one hand, and of public marginalization and ridicule, on the other. The imagological analysis of such outcomes of the French and English visual culture brings out a multifaceted practice of censorship functional to a disciplinary power.