Bienheureux martyrs, féroces bourreaux Mises en scène de la violence révolutionnaire dans l’imagerie catholique contemporaine (xix^e-xxi^e siècles)

From 1793 to 1801, resistant clergy distributed in France and across Europe martirologies exalting the sacrifice of Catholic victims of revolutionary justice. From the 1830s, written testimony is replaced by images, reproducing two scenographic archetypes: the martyr facing his judges and the martyr mounting the scaffold. Studying these numerous and diffuse media representations (pious images, peddlar’s books, children’s books, comics, novels, theater, cinema) enables us to understand how they could, from the 1880s to today, sustain some Catholics’ hostility towards the Republic, contributing at the same time to perpetuating a purely victimized memory of the Revolution. The analysis of images produced at the time of Sister Marguerite Rutan’s beatification (June 19, 2011) is an opportunity to understand the current stakes of that sacrificial iconography.