Browse Items (1079 total)

This engraving, based on a color portrait by Beys, depicts the death of Robespierre on the guillotine. The executioners wear not the traditional hangman’s hood but red bonnets representing liberty. This judgment notes Robespierre’s failure to the…

Even in death Napoleon was controversial. Many questions surrounded his death: Was he poisoned? His hair had high levels of arsenic in it. Did he have stomach cancer? He certainly had stomach ulcers and suffered from severe intestinal pain and…

This famous depiction of Marat’s assassination (1793) is by the unofficial (and sometimes official) artist of the French Revolution, Jacques–Louis David, a leading exponent of the neoclassical style. Scholars have seen this vision as a revolutionary…

Even though popular action had unseated the Legislative Assembly and replaced it with the Convention, the elections that followed had not satisfied the radicals of Paris and their artisanal followers. From 31 May to 2 June 1793, these Parisians…

More common than clashes by workers against employers were protests over the rising price of bread. This color drawing depicts events at the City Hall of Strasbourg on 21 July 1789. Notice that the protesters are tearing up the roof and throwing the…

Thousands died or were wounded in the fighting that began 15 June and ended at a series of farmhouses at Waterloo on 18 June 1815.

This image uses the classical figures of an angel and a cherub to celebrate the achievements of Louis XVI on the base of a statue. The words state that he has destroyed the "aristocracy" and established the liberty of the French people. The monarch’s…

This cartoon mocks all the leading figures of the "Counterrevolution," including the former royal family and its blood relatives, plus the clergy, the nobility, and specific individuals, such as Mirabeau, who had supported the monarchy in the early…

The Council of Five–Hundred, the lower house of the legislature under the Directory’s constitution, put up only token resistance to the coup of 18 Brumaire [9 November 1799]. By the following day, this body—in principle, made up of the…