The Birth of Modern Political Satire

Abstract

Abstract This book documents one of the most important moments in the history of printed political imagery, when the political print became what we would recognize as modern political satire. Contrary to conventional historical and art-historical narratives, which place the emergence of political satire in the news-driven coffee-house culture of eighteenth-century London, this study locates the birth of the genre in the late seventeenth-century Netherlands in the contentious political milieu surrounding William III’s invasion of England known as the ‘Glorious Revolution’. The satires produced between 1688 and 1690 by the Dutch printmaker Romeyn de Hooghe (1645–1708) on the events surrounding William III’s campaigns against James II and Louis XIV establish many of the qualities that define the genre to this day: the transgression of bodily boundaries; the interdependence of text and image; the centrality of dialogic text to the generation of meaning; serialized production; and the emergence of the satirist as a primary participant in political discourse. This study, the first in-depth analysis of De Hooghe’s satires since the nineteenth century, considers these prints as sites of cultural influence and negotiation, works that both reflected and helped to construct a new relationship between the government and the governed.