Browse Items (78 total)

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…

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.

Across France, the period of the Directory witnessed revenge against those who had carried out revolutionary justice during the Terror. Opponents of the Jacobins forced them from office and sought to prevent them from participating in politics. In…

This engraving focuses on expurgating the clergy, this time with vomiting as the intended method. Here, the cleric spits up the unfair advantages enjoyed in the old regime.

After 14 July, some of the King’s entourage had urged him to flee so that he would not have to approve a new Constitution. Aristocrats such as the Baron de Breteuil and the Marquis de Bouillé, along with the King’s brothers, who had already fled…

Despite a show of support for the Revolution, by the fall of 1790, the royal family and its entourage increasingly felt that the changes of the past eighteenth months had cost them their dignity and power. Unable to stop or even control the changes…

Locked up in the Temple prison, there was little for the family to do but await the likely result. This image shows the grief suffusing the entire situation.

An image produced well after the Revolution shows a Queen, assaulted by the gaze of the people, controlled by the soldier, and tentative in her stance and appearance.

Confined to her cell, the Queen is as dejected as her husband.

An idealized portrait of Marie Antoinette at the moment of death. Unlike the pale, aged woman the contemporaries observed, this later print memorialized a beautiful, absolutely pure, woman. While in life she had been assailed as a lesbian, a…