Introduction. Political caricature in Europe

The articles here collected use a multi-disciplinary approach to investigate not only the importance of caricatures and satirical cartoons in public discourse - as a weapon of propaganda, an expression of dissent and opposition, a tool of communication crucial for the construction of identity and belonging - from the Napoleonic age to the post-second-war period but also the specific features of visual satire, its circuits of publication and its readers, its language as well as its content, its registers and strategies of derision, without forgetting the social, technical and professional conditions of the production of the images.