Revolutions

Revolution was a pivotal event of the Enlightenment, and it shows perfectly the contradictions of that age. Revolution is at the same time a carnival and a trauma that transforms power and knowledge relations. It is the ferocious and irrational finale to the Age of Reason, and simultaneously, the beginning of a modern, secular understanding of the public sphere. It also serves as an archive for the gestures and imagery that keep resurfacing as a framework for all revolutionary moments.

The Print Room contains a large collection of French Revolutionary caricatures, which were sent to the king from Paris as the actual events unfolded. They were addressed to the uneducated masses so as to radicalise people and shape political positions. They constitute the visual equivalent of protest, an anticlerical Biblia pauperum for the folk who are becoming empowered and self-aware, the voice of the excluded. The emergence of caricature and political satire are also linked to the decline of censure and the birth of the modern press—milestones in the development of freedom of speech and democracy.

Stanisław August's interest in current affairs shows that, as a collector, he was a modern man. In the aesthetically marginalised caricatures he saw a novel medium that ‘encouraged politicisation,’ and a resource for helping to understand the ongoing changes. At the same time, this group of prints remained, for the king, a vision of a possible future and proof of the differences in perspectives between the French bottom-up Enlightenment revolution and the top-down revolution in Poland.