| Abstract | Just after Auguste Vaillant hurled a homemade bomb into the French Chamber of
Deputies, Peter Kropotkin pointed out that “a structure based on centuries of history
cannot be destroyed with a few kilos of dynamite”. In the debates that ensued over
Anarcho
-
C
ommunist strategies of terrorism, Kropotkin argued that to penetrate all
utterances of life
–
social and political, domestic and artistic, educational and recreational –
“propaganda of the deed” needed to embrace word and image “on the platform and in
the
press, as much as on the street corner as in the workshop, the salon and the
domestic circle.” Instead of resorting to acts of violence, Kropotkin urged artists to
pursue “propaganda of the deed” through a defiant dialectical art practice able to reveal
on
the one hand, oppression and, on the other, an Anarcho
-
Communist utopia of free
association. “Narrate for us in your vivid style or in your fervent pictures the titanic
struggle of the masses against their oppressors”, he wrote. “Show the people the
uglin
ess of contemporary life and make them see the cause of this ugliness. Tell us what
a rational life would have been had it not been blocked at each step by the ineptness and
ignominies of the present order.”
!
!
Putting his pen, paintbrush and burin at th
e service of Anarcho
-
Communism from
formation of the French Radical Republic, Franti
š
ek Kupka pursued this dialectical art
praxis to become what Kropotkin called “a comrade in arms”. Although better know for
his paintings of Anarcho
-
Communist utopia, Kupka
continually created bitingly satirical
cartoons informed by Kropotkin, Élisée Reclus, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels for
L’Assiette au Beurre, L’Anarchie, Les Temps Nouveaux and Cocorico, in order to expose
estrangement, exploitation and false consciousne
ss. In his savage indictments of
industrial capitalism, Kupka drew upon Marx on profit and Georg Simmel on money to
caricature the capitalist as an insatiable tyrant engorged with gold coins and bloated with
profits while his workers were left penniless an
d powerless. Appalled by the brutal racism
of colonial imperialism, Kupka caricatured colonizers as slave drivers, sexual exploiters
and annihilators of indigenous people. Abhorring the hypocrisy of Catholicism, Kupka
cynically caricatured its priests and
prelates as financially and sexually rampant,
especially in the year of Separation of Church and State, to expose how this religion was
corrupted by capitalism and sadomasochistic fetishism. By focusing upon ways in which
these publications functioned as K
ropotkin’s “propaganda of the deed” and as
controversial antecedents to Charlie Hebdo, this paper will explore how Kupka’s
deployment of deadly irony, irreverent travesty, polemical parody and ridiculous
exaggeration gave his cartoons the force of satirica
l dynamite. |
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