Rated
Nov 25
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1 review
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art history, english, prints, satire
• cam.ac.uk
In the 1790s Gillray picks up the simian qualities of the older representations of Frenchmen, but makes them more grotesque and fiendish. The events of the French Revolution were recognised as momentous even at the time, although for the most part news was followed on this side of the Channel with a curiosity born of self interest. From the outset until 1792 there was a marked optimism about the Revolution, although Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France of 1790 caused many people to change their minds. After the execution of Louis XVI the stereotype of the Frenchman was no longer a laughing matter. They were no longer portrayed as foppish and generally harmless fools, but as dangerous sans-culottes, appearing in swarms as a grotesque, undifferentiated mass, or becoming diabolical or mad, devoid of humanity and behaving like wild beasts.
from Vive la difference!
The English and French stereotype in satirical prints, 1720-1815
'The view from England'
James Gillray 1757-1815
The Zenith of French Glory: the Pinnacle of Liberty
Etching with hand colouring, 1793
This image echoes Burke's statement in Reflections (1790) where he writes of the cry to hang bishops from the lampposts. A terrifying sans-culotte sits up high on a lamp bracket, resting a foot on the neck of one of the clergymen who are strung up below him. The scene the revolutionary fiddler is watching is the guillotining of Louis XVI. The execution platform is surrounded by a swarm of fellow revolutionaries, eerily denoted solely by their bonnets rouges. In the background a church dome is aflame, and the liberty cap and stick on the right make an inverted crucifix.
"the first person to be beheaded by the Halifax Gibbet was one John of Dalton in 1286"
The Scottish Maiden was introduced to Scotland 'during the minority of James VI (sometime between 1572 - 1578) by James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton - who later suffered the irony of being beheaded by it in 1581
The first execution-by-Guillotine was performed on highwayman Nicolas Jacques Pelletier on April 25, 1792. The last public guillotining was of Eugen Weidmann, who was convicted of six murders. He was beheaded on 17 June 1939. The last guillotining in France was that of torture-murderer Hamida Djandoubi on 10 September 1977.
