Caricature textuelle et visuelle française du XIXe siècle. Enjeux sémiologiques d’une analyse icono-textuelle
French visual and textual caricature of the 19th century. Semiological issues in an icono-textual analysis

Summary/Abstract: This article considers caricature as an icono-verbal tool that mobilizes shared cultural codes. It shows that in the 19th century, both visual (in this case, Daumier and Gavarni) and textual caricature (in this case, Balzac, Baudelaire, Stendhal, Musset, Flaubert, Huysmans) were designed based on the model of a theatrical scene which plays on the rich possibilities offered by the combination of text and image at the heart of comical mechanisms.Indeed, invalidating the observation of the primacy of image over text (Charles Baudelaire's stance) or vice versa: of text over image (represented by Roland Barthes), this article posits that the visual and the textual take on fluid roles and complement each other. As such, the consonance or dissonance between the image and its title/legend are two types of relationships that contribute to the birth of laughter as well as to the semantic richness of a caricature.This vision of laughter proceeding above all from formal mechanisms could lead one to believe that the evaluation of the adopted value systems is superfluous. The important thing would be to understand and analyze, not to judge. Against such a claim, this article supports the need to add to the formal analysis of a work in its historical context, its ethical positioning in the face of its explicit and implicit ideological implications.

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