Even the most casual student of the French Revolution cannot fail to be struck by the variety and sheer quantity of political imagery produced during that era. Despite the revolutionaries' explicit distrust of visual images, which they associated with the idolatry of the Old Regime, politically inspired pictorial caricature, satire, and allegory poured forth from the presses, reaching ever-wider audiences, both literate and illiterate. Until twenty years ago, historians tended to dismiss this visual record as a holdover from the era of absolutist monarchy, focusing instead on the “foundational role of language and political discourse in accounting for the demise of the Old Regime” (6). Many of the revolutionary period's most prominent scholars, including Keith Michael Baker, François Furet, and Jürgen Habermas, have, as Joan Landes points out, effectively defined culture as “the sum of so many printed words on a page” (6). Landes does not exempt herself from this critique, confessing that in her earlier work, she too, “described the decisive historical passage from French absolutism to bourgeois society as an opposition ’between the iconic spectacularity of the Old Regime and the textual and legal order of the bourgeois public sphere'” (6). In Visualizing the Nation, Landes now follows in the path of scholars such as Antoine de Baecque, Lynn Hunt, Michel Vovelle, Madelyn Gutwirth, and Mona Ozouf in arguing for the importance of “images as vehicles for the exchange of ideas and the making of political arguments” (3).