Some months after the execution of her husband, Marie Antoinette found herself in the dock of the public prosecutor, Antoine Quentin Fouquier–Tinville. The intervention of the radical journalist Jacques–René Hébert had pushed her case to the top, and…
Nobles had been used to riding in carriages or on horseback. Now, so radicals hoped, they could no longer afford to do so either financially or politically. The imagined response of this social elite reveals clearly to their attackers the…
This Dutch engraving, based on a sketch by Berthault, shows Robespierre laid out on the table where his Committee of Public Safety did its work. It is the morning of 10 Thermidor and having been condemned to death by the Convention the night before,…
The trial of the Queen is here depicted in a tinted engraving by Jean Duplessi–Bertaux as part of his series of Historical Scenes of the French Revolution. Although it refers to her as "Marie Antoinette, the Austrian," the etching portrays her…
A slave inspired by the French Revolution’s egalitarianism, Toussaint saw himself as French and struggled for French control of the island of Saint Domingue. Nonetheless, he had no intention of letting whites rule, for he wanted blacks to control…
This execution simply suspends the French officer in the air, slowly strangling him to death. His struggles, emphasized by the convulsing legs, reveal the hatred visited on opponents, themselves guilty of so many atrocities.
The fighting between the French and the Haitians was very bloody. When the French tried to put down Toussaint in 1802, it took them some five months with an expeditionary force of 23,000. Supplied by locals, the French seized the towns, gradually…
This image reveals grotesque mistreatment of blacks even during training exercises. Here a cavalryman (chasseur) plans to use a black as a live prey for hunting dogs.
In this excerpt, Rainsford continues to exhalt the qualities of L’Ouverture while criticizing French behavior in the attempted reconquest of the island under Napoleon.
Rainsford’s detailed contemporary account of the revolt emphasizes the strenuous yet ultimately unsuccessful mobilization of colonial French resources.
