Even the most casual student of the French Revolution cannot fail to be struck by the variety and sheer quantity of political imagery produced during that era. Despite the revolutionaries' explicit distrust of visual images, which they associated with the idolatry of the Old Regime, politically inspired pictorial caricature, satire, and allegory poured forth from the presses, reaching ever-wider audiences, both literate and illiterate. Until twenty years ago, historians tended to dismiss this visual record as a holdover from the era of absolutist monarchy, focusing instead on the “foundational role of language and political discourse in accounting for the demise of the Old Regime” (6). Many of the revolutionary period's most prominent scholars, including Keith Michael Baker, François Furet, and Jürgen Habermas, have, as Joan Landes points out, effectively defined culture as “the sum of so many printed words on a page” (6). Landes does not exempt herself from this critique, confessing that in her earlier work, she too, “described the decisive historical passage from French absolutism to bourgeois society as an opposition ’between the iconic spectacularity of the Old Regime and the textual and legal order of the bourgeois public sphere'” (6). In Visualizing the Nation, Landes now follows in the path of scholars such as Antoine de Baecque, Lynn Hunt, Michel Vovelle, Madelyn Gutwirth, and Mona Ozouf in arguing for the importance of “images as vehicles for the exchange of ideas and the making of political arguments” (3).

Landes' primary concern here is not with the cultural function of visual representation in general but rather with the significance of the striking profusion of images of women. At the center of Landes' study lies a historical contradiction: While the visual record of the revolutionary period is dominated by female imagery (including the ubiquitous female allegories of the Republic and Liberty), republicans consistently denied real women access to full citizenship rights and explicitly confined their political role to that of mothers of future French citizens. If women had such a limited role to play in the Revolution, Landes asks, then why were “women's bodies everywhere to be found in public imagery?” (6). In more politically abstract terms, how can we account for “the surprising feminine face of the aggressively masculine version of revolutionary French nationalism?” (18). The predominance of feminine imagery is made all the more striking, she notes, in the context of revolutionaries' incessant condemnation of “the excessively feminized and feminizing dimension of the old body politic,” (73) a campaign documented most graphically in the torrent of pornographic images of Marie Antoinette. In Visualizing the Nation, Landes seeks to explain both “the power of gendered imagery in helping (negatively) to destroy the icons and symbols of Old Regime state and society and (affirmatively) to create a new citizen body within a republican nation-state” (3).

On the most pragmatic level, the embodiment of the republic as abstract female enabled revolutionaries to draw a graphic distinction between the revolutionary nation and the absolutist state represented by the body of the king. The female form, in this interpretation, was made to embody the people's sovereignty as a replacement for the male body that was too closely associated with the Old Regime. More importantly, however, the abstract women of republican iconography amounted to a reclaiming, a redemption, of the corrupted female body of the Old Regime. In the female-embodied republic, Landes maintains, “the sinful female body ( . . . ) is made over into a virtuous (and virginal) republican body” (73). This redemption served the dual function of excising the old (male) gendered political allegory and setting up a new one in which the female nation “seems almost to call out for the protection of virile republican men” (73). The iconic feminine figure of La République thus at once banished the corrupted symbols of the Old Regime and offered a new embodiment of the nation for the masculine citizenry.

Landes' explanation for the paradox of feminine revolutionary iconography goes beyond the political benefits garnered by Republicans by breaking with the past. Like Lynn Hunt, whose work she liberally credits, Landes argues that the apparent contradiction between women's symbolic and actual political roles was not a contradiction at all but rather a crucial source of the female images' political effectiveness. “The exclusion of women from the practice of revolution and their inclusion in representation,” Landes insists, “reaffirmed the masquerade of equality within the masculine republic” (22). The perpetuation of this “myth of full equality” in turn “facilitated, as much as it exposed, the denial to women of the full exercise of equal rights within the democratic republic,” (22) thus closing the circle of logic. The very denial of political rights to women freed female images to serve the abstract political purpose of embodying popular sovereignty and the abstract nation. It is ironic but hardly inexplicable that “the more women were deprived of an individual presence in the public arena, the more likely those faceless women could stand in for a range of political values or positions” (127).

Landes' most original contribution to the burgeoning literature on revolutionary images comes in her final chapter where she considers “the female body of France” as a “sexualized body” rather than simply an abstract symbol (145). Pointing to numerous images of a voluptuous République, often coyly semi-clothed with exposed breasts, Landes argues that patriotic passion and sexual passion are closely linked in several ways. On the one hand, the sexualized figure of La Patrie or La République, “invites the embrace of her male suitors,” the citizenry of the nation (153). On the other hand, the female-bodied nation invokes the mother and wife whom the citizen “pledged to protect and honor, under the aegis of the nation” (137). One need not accept Landes' Freudian proposal that “by yoking man's repressed love for his mother to the abstract nation, men are bound together as citizen-subjects,” (165) to appreciate the overtly sexualized meaning behind the numerous images of the virile rescue of virginal France.

Landes begins and ends her book with a plea for the multivalent potential of images, an instability of meaning that troubled revolutionaries as much as it stimulates modern historians. “Images,” Landes asserts, “disrupt as well as secure desired identifications” (1). Did the female images of France, the Republic, or Liberty have their makers' desired effect of binding men to the nation and women to the home? Or was that interpretation “subverted in a resistant reading” (171) that perceived the “real social and political inequality” so artfully disguised by “women's lofty place in the order of representation?” (82). Landes provides no answers to these important, but perhaps unanswerable questions. Still, in Visualizing the Nation Landes offers readers a useful synthesis of the rich literature on revolutionary images, bringing to the subject a sharp eye for visual analysis and an unflinching insistence that the gendered forms that they assumed were neither accidental nor innocent. Building on her seminal work in Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (1988), Landes demonstrates convincingly that gender lay at the very heart of the revolutionary political order.