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LA PÉTROLEUSE: REPRESENTING REVOLUTION
In 1989 and 1990, the Chinese students who erected a goddess of democracy in Tiananmen Square, the Romanians who cut the Ceau...escu government's seal out of their nation's flag, the Czechoslovakians who jangled keys in demonstrations, and the Germans who cheerfully hacked away at the Berlin wall reminded the world of the power of symbolic action and the frequency with which revolutions generate such activity. Many of the images that emerge from revolutions, like those recently created, carry positive messages, encapsulating or representing the desired political rights or institutions. Others, like the Berlin wall, the guillotine, the swastika, and the burning cross, represent political oppression and violence. Some actions acquire symbolic significance during the period of revolution; others, after the fact, when journalists, political observers, and historians seek ways to represent, encapsulate, and pass moral judgments on the past. This study investigates the creation of one of the nineteenth century's most powerful negative political symbols -- the pétroleuse of the Paris Commune. Largely forgotten today except by students of French history, this representation of the dangerous, unruly woman -- the female incendiary -- became an international symbol, not only of the Commune itself but also of the evils of revolution, and played a pivotal role in creating a long-lasting emotional response to what was a short-lived (ten-week) revolution in France.
Particularly intriguing is the gendered nature of some political symbols. Some of the most lasting and powerful symbols are female allegories whose representative power is derived from complex reversals of gender assumptions and the depiction of an idealized female body rather than of the "imperfect, permeable and changing" bodies of actual women.(1) Thus, political liberty as well as the French Republic and Great Britain were represented in the shape of an idealized female figure (Marianne and Britannia) when individual women had no political rights and little or no liberty.(2)
On the reverse side of these positive representations of nations, governments, and political ideals lies a series of negative female images that represent the violence of revolution. In part, these negative images arise from the tendency of both right-wing and left-wing authoritarian regimes, as Joan Scott has observed, to perceive political threats in gendered terms and to represent "enemies, outsiders, subversives [and]...