1.6.2022
Gonzalo Capellán de Miguel, professor at the University of La Rioja, speaker of the International Congress “The Liberal Triennium two hundred years later”
- Intervenes in the congress with a presentation on the caricature as a means of political action, a subject that maintains its current relevance…
- Sure, we live in a world of image. Historians are more accustomed to working with textual sources, with documents, with the press, however, when we go to the sources of the time we realize the power of communication that the image and visual culture had, which on the other hand had been the popular culture that everyone understood and read. Sometimes we use the image only as a nice illustration to the text, but at the time it was a mechanism of social mobilization, to reach broad layers of the population and make a visual discourse. The political caricature is a discourse of counterpower. Satire is a discourse against power, critical of power, and therefore also persecuted. The cartoons that I am going to show have to be done in exile in London, they arrive in Spain clandestinely, they are 'stopped' by the police in France so that they do not arrive, because they know the ability they had to criticize Fernando VII in a line that neither made official propaganda nor allowed the freedoms of the time.
- Was and is the caricature and the illustration a really more effective tool than the word?
- In many cases yes, because of how it circulated, it is also a more universal language. These cartoons are produced in London, they circulate in Spain, they arrive in Latin America, they are published in Mexico, they are readapted to the contexts. General Narváez will say years later that he fears more the pencil of cartoonists and cartoons than the weapons of the military... so that we can see the power they had to bring subversive ideas to the social imaginary, against power. We find many documents in the entire 19th century press in which the cartoon is censored, the accompanying article is allowed to be published, but the images are not allowed to be published, because the visual ridicules more, is understood more and is considered much more effective and offensive.
- The debate about the limits of humor and freedom of expression comes from afar.
- In this we are surprised by the things we see in the nineteenth century, even mocking the freedom of printing, the criticism of a monarch like King Ferdinand VII, who is shown as the tyrant, with donkey ears, buffoonized, ridiculed. That mood effectiveness gave people a derisory image of an entire absolute monarch. We’ve seen contemporary episodes like Charlie Hebdo. Today we understand more what is the power of the image, but it is not something new, but a communication strategy that already circulated at a popular and social level in the 19th century. Historians should pay more attention to image culture and these kinds of sources.
