Browse Items (1079 total)

The Terror, which many justified then as now as an unfortunate necessity, raised enormous anxieties. A hostile cartoon equates the Revolution with severed heads.

This engraving depicts a revolutionary club as a circus act complete with dancing dogs and clowns, all celebrating "the law and the King." This image might have been visual propaganda on behalf of clubs, suggesting that they could bring different…

A common complaint of rural petitions was the abuse of seigneurial dues owed by peasants to lords supposedly in exchange for protection and supervision. This image demonstrates the view that peasants envisioned their lords not as protectors, but as…

Cartoonists extrapolated more and more on a new Louis as the Revolution went along. Here, a rather rumpled King, dressed more like a shopkeeper than a monarch, opens a cage to let liberty out. Many scholars argue that the King was already…

This image shows the three orders unified by religion. The Virgin standing at right in a cloud holds a cross from which rays emanate to three figures representing the clergy, nobility, and Third Estate. A hooded figure with a serpent’s tail,…

Class solidarity was never universal, as this print celebrates the victory of the peasantry over the nobility and clergy. The two defeated orders, linked together to create a horse, support the peasant who with his newly-won freedom, carries the…

This hand–colored engraving equates the taking of the Bastille with the rise of the Third Estate against the clergy and nobility. A commoner in a black hat sporting a tricolor cockade plays the bagpipe triumphantly over the fallen lion of the…

Here, as in the preceding image, Lafayette’s role is praised. A warlike liberty stands with him over a defeated despotism at his feet. Revolutionaries often represented despotism as a multiheaded monster.

Although 14 July 1790 was a high point in the aspiration for unity, the preparation for the Estates–General set the stage for later problems. In this image, representatives of each of the three orders depart together in a cart for the 1789 meeting of…

With the Bastille being destroyed in the background, a member of the Third Estate breaks his shackles. Here, the clergy and nobility recoil in fear, thereby emphasizing the conflict between the estates.