Between Art and Journalism. The importance of the artist’s self-image in the French illustrated press, 1881-1914.

This dissertation addresses how graphic satirists between 1881 and 1914 used posters and press illustrations to build up and project a propaganda campaign centred on their public persona as artists engaged for a specific political cause. At the turn of the 20th century, artists working as press illustrators identified themselves as belonging to a growing movement of intellectuals who were taking active roles in politics. Among these artists, however, were several who identified with a specific political organisation, such as anarcho-communism or revolutionary syndicalism and so used their visually available work to support the propaganda movement of the cause for which they held sympathies. Visual imagery was held to be directly accessible by the working classes whose attention the anarchists were hoping to capture. Visual satire, long censored for its dangerous potential to incite the working classes against the government, was a privileged medium because of its versatility in creating a language based on shared irony and cultural references between the artist and the readers. It was hoped that artists could better communicate abstract ideas to their readers like a vision of an anarchist utopia or, in campaigns launched by the artist, a vision of ideal masculinity. This study uses analysis of original illustrations and posters made by the artists, supplemented by any journal articles, novels, memoirs and personal letters written by, to or about the artists, to investigate how the artists aimed to project the role of the artiste engagé through a constructed public persona. This study will contribute the theory that artists used themselves as models, through self-portraits, to show to the reader how to interact with the abstract ideas in their political campaign.