MALTA IN BRITISH AND FRENCH CARICATURE 1798 – 1815 FOREWORD This work definitely merits praise. It is an achievement of which the authors can be proud. The names of Albert Ganado and Joseph C. Sammut, two leading experts in the history of Maltese graphic art, provide a guarantee from the start that the expectations excited by the title of the book will be satisfied. Their enthusiasm, skill, and dedication, their scholarship and commitment are evident on every page. The book spans seventeen years of spectacular developments in Maltese history. But beneath the rapid, mobile succession of events – the Hospitallers’ humiliating loss of their impregnable fortress, the ephemeral creation of Napoleonic Malta, the general popular insurrection, the defeat and explusion of the French, and the imposing military presence of the British on the island – lay powerful forces of change, the quintessence of all history, the slow insensible and inexcitable process of transformation of Maltese society, imperceptible and permanent. These in part reflected the enormous revolutionary turmoil which, radiating from Paris, swept across France and the rest of Europe in the late eighteenth century, awakening European states and societies to new, enlightened aspirations which no unscrupulous reactionary monarch, once restored, would be able to contain. In part they emerged from the islanders’ own bitter experience of their collective past. The years 1798-1815 were proof of the astonishing vitality of the Maltese, constituting in their essence a double political renunciation: that of the rule of the Order of St. John, and that of Napoleon’s. Driven by the logic of their successful revolution, their loud and clear ‘cry of defiance’ had more than transient consequences. Though far from being ideally positioned to exert any considerable influence on the direction international policy should take with regard to Malta and to determine the course of their island’s political development, the upper bourgeois sectors of Maltese society had, by the dawn of the nineteenth century, become increasingly conscious of the meaning of popular sovereignty. This growing state of awareness, which once attained could not be easily erased from memory, would eventually alter political attitudes and social relations under British rule. Malta in British and French Caricature will be valued for at least two major reasons. In the first place, the authors have now given the solitary archival researcher and the wider reading public access to a special class of reasonably plentiful, non-verbal, historical source-material of great value and which has hardly ever been consulted as historical evidence by either local of foreign students of Maltese history. It has recently been argued in Art and History: Images and their Meaning (edited by Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb, Cambridge, 1986) that “The power that visual evidence possesses, to define what a society considers both normal and eccentric, is an asset that no scholar can ignore”. A caricaturist’s comment on the social scene may be as illuminating to our comprehension of the past, and as rewarding, as the careful perusal of the personal memoirs of a great politician or a diary which was never intended for publication, the accounts of a local cotton merchant or the records of a parliamentary debate. Every caricature, in its unspoken colourful distortion, in its sharp, satirical search for symbolic detail, is a valid contemporary interpretation of history, vivid, entertaining, at times poignantly hilarious. Secondly, this work is a stimulating piece of team work whose approach, handled with steady, professional competence, is one of the very few successful attempts at freeing the history of Malta from its traditional shackles of sterile isolationism. In this book, Malta lies firmly integrated with the wider complex of European politics and diplomacy, and gains, in consequence, a far greater significance. The authors’ notes, rich in varying detail and interpretation, explain the theme of each of the 61 striking caricatures that are being reproduced in this book, and provide their historical context: they, too, contribute greatly to the same effect. Victor Mallia-Milanes Department of History, University of Malta 15 December 1989