Playing Cards is Revolutionnary

June 28, 2009 in Funny, Gundam
Tags: Char Aznable, Communism, Comte de St. Simon, Francisco Franco, Franco-Prussian war, French Revolution, Gundam, Politics, Propaganda, Revolutionary, Second Spanish Republic, Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, Zeon

Via AIRMAIL from NAGASAKI@06/25/09, Gundam Cards !!!

This deck of cards, featuring original watercolor artwork of characters from Mobile Suit Gundam and Zeta Gundam by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, was an insert in the April 1985 issue of Animage.

The Politics of Playing-cards

As one collector pointed out, “Playing cards were sometimes used for political and propaganda purposes, to promote the causes that the owners espoused.

The complete book of paper antiques, Adelaide Hechtlinger, Wilbur Cross 1972‎

Of the subjects internationally approved for presentation on playing-cards, political and social issues figured among the earliest. In England in particular, their prevalence in the seventeenth century displayed an exuberance rarely matched since. In Spain, in 1931, the hijos de Simeon Dura of Valencia issued, in the professional style which had become characteristic of the firm, a pack to mark the etablishment of the nation’s Second Republic. Regal symbolism was discarded, crown becoming coronas murales or crown-shaped castles and the kings replaced by sober portraits of the political architects of the movement. A couple of more satirical packs had accompanied the first Republic in 1875 and other mementoes of that period survive referring to the revolution of 1868 and the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. In more recent years, when democratic government was restored en 1977 after General Franco’s death, political caricature afain flourished and reappeared in packs of cards.

The playing-cards of Spain, Trevor Denning, 1996

The proximity between allegory’s palpable shapes and real or material detail is especially telling in French revolutionary propaganda. In the early years of the Revolution, writers and festival organizers freely used allegorical images to promote revolutionary ideas. For a brief time Liberty was a woman; cheap pamphlets, broadsides, and jacobin almanacs extolled pro-revolutionary allegorical virtues; and one remarkable deck of playing cards replaced the traditional images of kings, queens, and jacks with allegorical virtues and identities that foster a pro-revolutionary view of culture and class. The advertisement that was sold with the deck explains that it includes no aces because “the law is now supreme”. Instead of kings, each of the four suits presents a specific talent and an emblematic figure with props. Each figure has two allegorical names, one across the bottom of the card and another along the upper right border. The king of hearts is now the Genie of War (as in Richard the Lion-hearted); the “Genius” of clubs is Peace; the other two are Arts and Commerce. Instead of queens, each suit offers an allegorical dame who represents a designated liberty : the “lady” of hearts stands for freedom of religion (Cultes); she of clubs, freedom of marriage; she of spades, freedom of the press; she of diamonds, choice of professions. The jacks, now called “equalities”, include the egalite of rank or power and color or courage. The figure on this last card is a black man who has been, the advertisement explains, relieved of his chains and given arms.

Designed by the revolutionary aristocrat the Comte de St. Simon, hand-colored and published in 1793-94, the deck illustratres the radically reinventive logic of some revolutionary allegory.

Reinventing allegory, Theresa M. Kelley, 1997