In October 1899, Parisians might buy a big color lithograph depicting a grotesque human-pig hybrid, full with spectacles and a curly tail, wielding a paintbrush and smearing a map of France with this brown ‘caca worldwide’ – ‘worldwide poo’. The image was a caricature of the novelist Émile Zola, or ‘Le roi des Porcs’ (the King of Pigs), because the cartoon steered: a author pooping out and spreading filth. Fairly than inventing a brand new insult, the lithograph gave visible kind to a long-standing criticism of Zola’s naturalist fiction, which was typically regarded as morally degenerate. However Zola was now not only a controversial (and enormously well-liked) novelist; he had change into the general public face of the polarizing Dreyfusard trigger after publishing his well-known open letter, ‘J’Accuse…!’ within the newspaper L’Aurore, on January 13, 1898.
The Dreyfus Affair had begun 5 years earlier. In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer within the French military, was falsely convicted of treason and deported to Satan’s Island. By late 1897, new proof of Dreyfus’s innocence, together with more and more intense press campaigns and public interventions, remodeled the Affair right into a nationwide controversy. Zola’s ‘J’Accuse…!’ propelled it onto the worldwide stage. Newspapers, illustrated journals, posters, and postcards turned the Dreyfus Affair into the primary fashionable media occasion of the fin-de-siècle in France. Lengthy earlier than digital social media, these media contributed to political polarization by reinforcing shared convictions as pictures and arguments circulated inside like-minded communities. The postcard’s increase as a mass medium round 1898 occurred at a second when public opinion had already largely crystallized across the Affair.
The ‘Le roi des Porcs’ poster was a part of a a lot bigger visible marketing campaign. It was one in all fifty-one lithographs revealed underneath the title Musée des Horreurs by Victor Lenepveu between October 1899 and December 1900, earlier than the Paris police banned their distribution. Issued weekly, then in bi-monthly installments and bought as a collectible sequence, the Musée des Horreurs turned the Dreyfus Affair’s solid of characters – Zola, Dreyfus himself, the Rothschild household, and the journalist and politician Joseph Reinach amongst them – right into a rotating gallery of hideous figures. Each determine within the sequence was rendered by the identical zoomorphic gadget, fused with an animal to supply a hybrid creature designed to degrade and dehumanize. The sequence prompted viewers to devour political caricature – and to gather it.
No. 4 Le Roi des Porcs, V. Lenepveu, 1899. Picture through Duke College Libraries.
Like quite a few Lenepveu’s pictures, ‘The King of Pigs’ was reproduced as a postcard, turning a big lithograph right into a miniature object that might be mailed, commented on, and picked up. Copies of each the lithograph and its postcard model survive at this time in institutional archives such because the Lorraine Beitler Assortment of the Dreyfus Affair on the College of Pennsylvania.
Greater than a memento or a mere illustrated message, the postcard was already seen as a social know-how by the top of the nineteenth century. First launched within the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1869, postcards had been adopted in France throughout the Franco-Prussian Conflict of 1870 to allow wounded troopers to speak with their households. The popularization of the postcard coincided with the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle, the place Léon-Charles Lebonis’s iconic depiction of the Eiffel Tower turned the primary nice postcard success because of advances in photomechanical printing. With mail deliveries occurring a number of instances a day, the postcard functioned not solely as an occasional type of correspondence but in addition as an extension of on a regular basis sociability. Like household images, postcards had been meant to be stored, whether or not or not the sender added a single phrase of their very own. And like stamps, they had been wanted by rising cartophilist associations, whose members turned home correspondence right into a curatorial observe. Though political postcards existed earlier than the Dreyfus Affair, the controversy helped flip them right into a mass medium of political expression.
It didn’t take lengthy for activists on each side of the Dreyfus Affair to acknowledge the political potential of postcards. The Dreyfusards additionally produced their very own postcards, most notably Edouard Couturier’s well-known illustrated eighteen-card sequence, ‘Histoire d’un harmless’ (The Story of an harmless man), revealed shortly earlier than Dreyfus’s retrial in 1899. Even the Dreyfus household collected postcards in regards to the Affair, as evidenced by the gathering they donated to the Musée de Bretagne in Rennes lengthy after Alfred Dreyfus’s exoneration. In 1899, Emile Straus, founding father of the primary affiliation of postcard collectors, had written, ‘From a political standpoint, the postcard will show to be a robust ally of the satirical and polemical illustrated press. Allow us to welcome it: from the very starting, it has served the reason for legislation, justice, and humanity by scourging the injustice of the Dreyfus trial and the crimes of the navy.’
Up to now, no dependable figures exist relating to the manufacturing and circulation of postcards associated to the Dreyfus Affair. Nevertheless, it’s typically acknowledged that 1000’s of such postcards had been in circulation. On the entrance web page of its October 16, 1899 subject, the anti-Dreyfusard newspaper L’Intransigeant crowed that the primary subject of Musée des Horreurs had bought some 300,000 copies, implying that there have been 300,000 anti-Dreyfusard partisans. This, the newspaper claimed, even supposing the top of the Prefecture, Louis Lépine, had stopped many distributors from promoting the primary problems with the Musée des Horreurs. Though 300,000 copies appears spectacular, the determine is troublesome to confirm and will have been inflated to stimulate demand. Nevertheless, the rise within the subscription worth for the total sequence (from 25 francs at launch to 40 francs beginning in February 1900) means that accumulating pictures had certainly change into a preferred manner of displaying one’s political allegiance.
Fairly than contributing to an open public debate, evidently most postcards circulated by established networks of collectors and sympathizers. However by the point postcards started circulating en masse throughout the Dreyfus Affair, the foremost traces of division between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards had already hardened. Offered in sequence, by subscription, or immediately by publishers, in addition to by newspaper kiosks, the postcards more and more turned objects of assortment that strengthened current political commitments quite than persuading undecided French folks.
Throughout its publication, the Musée des Horreurs modified addresses a number of instances, indicating that its publishers might have encountered rising police scrutiny. If that’s the case, this means that the posters had been acknowledged by Paris authorities as sowing harmful political discord and extremism; it additionally meant that distribution shifted away from atypical newsstands towards extra discreet channels—i.e., they moved farther from their function as objects of public discourse and extra towards in-group affirmations of current beliefs. As soon as reproduced as postcards, these posters underwent miniaturization, turning political propaganda into a conveyable, mass-reproducible kind. Lowered in scale, the pictures might flow into past the personal areas the place they had been initially displayed, permitting folks to share and touch upon them. Miniaturization expanded the attain of political imagery, reaffirming a shared political id. The identical logic utilized throughout your complete political spectrum, as Dreyfusard postcards started circulating by networks of readers and supporters already invested in a single facet of the Dreyfus affair.
Histoire d’un crime, Edouard Couturier, 1871. Picture through Musée de Bretagne.
Maybe the comparability with at this time’s digital world commences right here. Round 1900, no person had the facility to determine what folks ought to learn. Collectors did so, organizing themselves into strain teams that publishers couldn’t ignore, able to shaping which sequence and themes had been illustrated.
Right this moment, Fb feeds and algorithmic suggestions represent what creator and activist Eli Pariser calls a ‘filter bubble’: the invisible personalization of knowledge by web platforms, which means that customers usually tend to encounter affirmations of—quite than challenges to—their current beliefs. The filter bubble is usually pointed to as a key wrongdoer in social polarization. However Dreyfus Affair postcards reveal that the observe of constructing selective data networks is much older than the Web, supporting Cass Sunstein’s notion of the ‘echo chamber’, which describes a phenomenon with deep social roots during which folks are likely to search conversations and sources that affirm views they already maintain.
Individuals themselves made the alternatives. They chose the postcards they purchased, the folks they wrote to, and the pictures they collected. Greater than a century earlier than platforms began automating this course of, political communities had been already creating selective environments of their very own. The postcard of Zola, ‘King of the Pigs’, was a direct response to the information that Dreyfus had been pardoned by French President Emile Loubet. Quite a lot of anti-Dreyfusards with antisemitic views refused to simply accept that the Affair would finish there. Its pot of ‘worldwide poo’, representing abroad assist for Dreyfus, additionally drew on a well-known antisemitic trope that portrayed Jews as a international and corrupting pressure throughout the French nation, and solid Zola as an confederate who had swallowed a Jewish agenda and was now, through his writing, excreting it as ‘caca’. Whereas the anti-Dreyfus political vitriol it portrayed may need been contemporary, the Zola postcard hinged on stereotypes that had been for its viewers, completely correct – and nothing new.
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This text was first revealed by Public Seminar on 15 October 2026.
