Engraving the Republic: Prints and Propaganda in the French Revolution

Propaganda first became associated with politics during the French Revolution. The revolutionaries had propaganda, propagandists, and even propagandism, which one dictionary of the time defined as a ‘new political malady’, which consists of ‘wanting to propagate the system of equality of liberty’. This, as in so many other things, the French revolutionaries were replacing religion with politics. Propaganda had a religious origin in the propaganda fide , a special religious congregation established in Rome in the seventeenth century to oversee missionary work. In 1792, French radicals began to call for 'Apostles' and 'Propagators' of Reason, who would form the cadres of 'la propagande revolutionnaire'. Propaganda in this new political sense was part of an ambitious programme of public instruction that aimed at nothing less than the total regeneration of the French people. The Revolution required a new man, republican man.