Marianne: from Medusa to Messalina

The use of ‘monstrous’, anxiety-generating imagery (tropes of the mythological Medusa or the Hydra) to demonize opponents was a marked feature of political caricature and national propaganda on different points in the ideological spectrum, from the French revolutionary and counter-revolutionary period, through the ‘Commune’ (1871), to the First and Second World Wars. Using examples from contemporary lithography, literature, the press and official sources, my paper argues that this propaganda owed its ubiquity and polyvalence to the presence of powerful associations, sometimes unstated, sometimes explicit, between the revolutionary ‘Medusa’ and the guillotine, and the other supreme socio-medical hantise of the period, the threat of venereal infection.