ABSTRACT
This chapter examines an unusual moment when the tattoo appeared in the iconography of the French Revolution to attack the traditional European authorities: aristocrats. A caricature, titled Republican Correction (1794), allows us an intimate glimpse into how tattoos were employed to construct and represent new group identities and relationships. The image presents two revolutionary commanders striking the exposed and tattooed backsides of two aristocrats, symbolically re-enacting the military victories featured in the background. The tattoo allows us to scrutinize understandings of tattooing and how it embodied changing concepts of sexuality, masculinity, and violence at the end of the eighteenth century.
