A parade of anti-capitalist infographics
Les Trusts contre la France from 1937.
I’ve been wanting Les Trust contre la France, published in 1937 by the French leftist newspaper L’Humanité for a long time, and a few weeks ago I managed to order it from a secondhand bookstore in Lyon for an affordable price in good condition. As I wrote before, I’d like to collect the complete infographic works of Hungarian Communist-Marxists graphic artist, journalist, and self-made geographer György Markos. It looks like with this album, the collection can now be considered almost complete, except his Berlin years (see below). This album represents the absolute pinnacle of Markos’s graphic art.
Five years ago, I wrote an article about Markos’s life and pictorial data graphics for Nightingale, the journal of the Data Visualization Society. At that time, I wrote the following:
According to Markos, his first significant graphic work was the Les Trusts contre La France (Trusts Against France). In the epilogue of his Hungarian booklet, 50 Families and their Servants, from 1947, he writes that “this work is based on my pre-war work in France about the role in the society of the two hundred French families (Les Trusts contre La France — Trösztök Franciaország ellen. — L’Humanité-kiadás.).” Zoltán Tatai, in his biographical summary of the literary and ideological oeuvre of Markos, writes that his 200 families booklet on the French financial capital was published in 1937 (Tatai 1984), and the Hungarian Telegraph Agency’s biography also gives the 1937 date for the publication. But Markos tells — in the aforementioned interview — that the booklet was published in 1936 and it was a joint work with Pierre Lenoir (Sükösd 1975: 54). The contemporary French reviews put the date 1937 for the publication, but I can’t find Markos’ name amongst the contributors. The authors were the union leader, later Nobel Prize-winner, and labour activist Léon Jouhaux, the Sorbonne-professor Marcel Prenant, the Hungarian-born, Marxist philosopher, Georges Politzer, and the Communist politician, Jacques Duclos. The graphic work was organized by the Swiss engineer, Georges Baehler alias Pierre Lenoir, secretary of the Maison de la Technique of the French Communist Party. The illustrators were the caricaturist Raoul Cabrol and René Dubosc, and we know the pseudonyms of two designers, May and Lépine. Since we don’t know whether Markos used any alias in his emigration, we can’t preclude the possibility that May or Lépine could be Markos. Finally, it is worth noting, in 1946, Baehler published a book on the Swiss cement industry (Zement und Baumaterialen Trust) under the pseudonym Pollux with a series of complex, but non-figurative, network diagrams (Nichols 2018).1
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The newspaper L’Humanité published a coloured advertising poster showing the networked connections between French millionaires, right-wing parties, and corporations in 1936 to promote the booklet. This design is similar to the design Markos used in his Hungarian booklet in 1947. At this point, it’s not clear the extent to which, if at all, Markos contributed to the Les Trusts.
Since our knowledge of Markos’s adventurous life comes almost exclusively from his autobiography (Vándorló fegyház, The Wandering Prison, 1971) and a 1975 interview with him, I was skeptical from the start. Unfortunately, five years ago I didn’t know that Markos’s pseudonym while in exile was May. I only found this out later, when I read the posthumous tribute written by his former fellow émigré, Iván Boldizsár, on the occasion of Markos’s eightieth birthday (Markos died at his 73 in 1976). The article also reveals that Markos had been using the pseudonym “May” since 1931, starting with his years in Berlin, and according to Boldizsár, “Germany knows him as May, because he signed his magnificent political illustrations, caricatures, and charts with the pseudonym May”. It’s a side plot for now, but none of these illustrations have yet been identified. But based on this “May” information, I have since been able to identify many of his graphics that appeared in the French newspaper Régards and the weekly Monde (the literature has often confused it with Le Monde, as I have as well).
Les Trusts contre la France
Of course, I am not the first one to notice this graphic album. The great Steven Heller had already written a brief piece about it in 2014 as part of his Daily Heller series in Print Magazine. He described the album as French Communist Party infographics on steroids, and concludes the article by writing that:
“Almost 90 years since they were produced, the imagery is still useable in contemporary contexts. Progressive reform is just words. Whether Democrat or Republican, these images not only speak truth to power, they speak of many affiliations that are still maintained by the same players.”
In his article, Heller includes a few small size scans from the album, but they may not fully convey the power of Markos’s artwork.
The first thing that surprised me was the album’s relatively large size. For several reasons. Based on the images I found earlier online on various secondhand bookstore websites, I had the impression that this was a publication about the size of an average book. The other thing that might have misled me is that Markos’s graphic works in Hungary are generally small in size.
Another thing that surprised me was that I had previously thought this was a book with pages of illustrations, not an actual graphic album printed on paper that’s almost as thick as cardboard. In contrast, the album contains 24 single-page spreads, 1 double-page spread, and 8 large-format fold-out pages.
The third surprise is related to the previous one. A few low-quality photos and scans had already appeared online in some places, and based on those, I never would have dreamed that they would have scanned in what are practically the least interesting and least visually striking pages. As you start flipping through the album, you’ll be amazed at every turn.
Most of the graphic works by Markos that I was familiar with were in black and white, grayscale, or black and red (Hundred years of the Hungarian industry, 1942). He merely co-edited the only Hungarian publication printed in full colour: Hungary’s economy and the three years plan in 1948. for the graphic design work, Markos commissioned well-known Hungarian graphic artists of the time.
Chronologically speaking, then, the earlier Les Trusts is Markos’s most important, ambitious and bombastic graphic project. I don’t want to keep the reader in suspense any longer; let’s take a look at some pages of Les Trusts. Be prepared!
The above accounts for only about two-thirds of the album’s illustrations, and I haven’t even taken Cabrol’s and Dubosc’s caricatures into account. It is worth comparing these network diagrams with those Markos published ten years later, adapted to Hungarian conditions, which appeared in the 1947 propaganda pamphlet 50 Families and Their Servants. As we can see, many of Markos’s earlier pictograms—such as the bank vault, the factory, and the top-hatted, cigar-smoking capitalist—make a comeback.
In Hungarian-language literature, it has become widely accepted that Markos wrote the entire work, and Markos himself referred to it as if the entire album were his own creation. This is clearly not the case. The caricatures are signed, so it is possible to tell which ones were created by Cabrol and which by Dubosc. In the case of the diagrams, it is difficult to determine what role Georges Baehler alias “Pierre Lenoir” (Black Peter) played in the artistic direction and what contribution the graphic artist named “Lépine” (The Thorn - this nickname was often given to soldiers and people with difficult personalities) made.
Like Heller, I, too, cannot decide to what extent—despite the propagandistic and activist nature of the graphics—the intertwining of these families, banks, trusts, corporations, and political parties is the result of communist conspirationalist thinking. In any case, looking at these diagrams in retrospect, Mark Lombardi’s Narrative Structures diagrams, or Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et. al. conceptual work inevitably came to mind. As Sebastian Giessmann writes in The Connectivity of Things analyzing Baehler’s and Lombardi’s networks:
“From this perspective, conspiracy theories turn out not to be a crude simplification so much as a paranoiac-critical method of network analysis. They bring a fundamental property of the network as a cultural technique to light: both legitimate and illegitimate forms of knowledge foreground connections, whether public or secret. Anyone who maps political and economic entanglements as networks of power walks a fine line between analysis and conspiratorial speculation, although the paranoid character of such knowledge is almost completely purged from academic accounts. In the figures in this chapter, by contrast, it is present and pressing. Charting the economic order and all its transactions quickly leads to paranoia…”
Cited works:
Benedek, István Gábor 1976. Búcsú Markos Györgytől. (Farewell from Markos György). In Magyar Hírlap, 16th July 1976, p. 5
Giessmann, Sebastian 2024. The Connectivity of Things. Network Cultures since 1832. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. OA.
Heller, Steven 2014. That Pesky 1 Percent. Daily Heller, Printmag, October 21. 2014.
Nichols, Sarah 2018. Pollux’s Spears. In “The Costs of Architecture”, special issue, Grey Room 71 (spring 2018), pp. 141–155.
Sükösd, Mihály 1975. Markos György. In Valóság Vol. XVIII. №4, pp. 51–62.
Tatai, Zoltán 1984: Markos György, a szocialista tervgazdaság szervezője és propagandistája. (Markos György, the organizer and propagandist of the Socialist planned economy) In Egyetemi Szemle Vol. VI , №1, pp. 131–135.
About Baehler’s (Pollux) network diagrams see: Sarah Nichols: Pollux’s Spears. Grey Room No. 71 (spring 2018), pp. 141–155. and Sebastian Giessmann: A Visual History of the Network Diagram (III): Economic Entanglements and the Mediology of Conspiracy. In Sebastian Giessmann: The Connectivity of Things. Network Cultures Since 1832. Cambridge, MA, 2024. pp. 239–271.
