 |
| James Gillray The Blood of the Murdered crying for Vengeance (Head of Louis XVI at foot of guillotine) 1793 hand-colored etching and engraving British Museum |
"Crazed Blood and Sealed Blood – Indeed, blood is a witness-substance, before which all History comes to judgment. Whatever does not participate in its redeeming quality, which is rhythm, lapses into a discredited history (i.e., nausea). Sanguinary efflorescence is constantly threatened by all the possible forms of disorder or decomposition. Contrasting with the hardened or engorged bloods are the furious, arhythmic, chaotic bloods, swept toward madness or corruption. Whole centuries collapse into the avatars of an unstable blood: the thirteenth into leprosy, the fourteenth into the black plague, the sixteenth into syphilis, the nineteenth into cancers of the womb. Louis XIV, paragon of monarchy, is wholly discredited by his black blood. One can say, moreover, that the kings and queens are abhorred by Michelet to the degree that their blood, sealed, is by definition motionless. Heredity in a closed circuit produces a kind of sanguinary stasis that is particularly noxious; there is a correspondence between the political malfeasance of the "family conspiracy" and the malignity of royal blood decomposed by its closure."
– Roland Barthes, from his study of the French historian Michelet (1954), translated by Richard Howard (1987)
 |
| James Gillray The heroic Charlotte La Corde upon her trial (representation of Charlotte Corday with corpse of Marat) 1793 hand-colored etching British Museum |
 |
| James Gillray A Paris Beau 1794 hand-colored etching British Museum |
 |
| James Gillray A Paris Belle 1794 hand-colored etching British Museum |
 |
| James Gillray Extirpation of the Plagues of Egypt - Destruction of Revolutionary Crocodiles or, The British Hero cleansing ye Mouth of ye Nile (Admiral Nelson victorious against the French at the Battle of the Nile) 1798 hand-colored etching British Museum |
 |
| James Gillray Destruction of the French Collossus (celebrating Nelson's victory at the Battle of the Nile) 1798 hand-colored etching British Museum |
 |
| James Gillray The Hero of the Nile (Admiral Nelson in newly-awarded Peer's Robes over uniform) 1798 hand-colored etching British Museum |
 |
| James Gillray Buonaparte leaving Egypt (caricature of Napoleon's abandonment of his army in Egypt) 1800 hand-colored etching British Museum |
 |
| James Gillray A Peep into the Cave of Jacobinism (figure of Truth revealing Jacobin monster) 1798 hand-colored etching British Museum |
"The Jacobins carried pride to the second power; they worshipped their wisdom. They made frequent appeals to the violence of the people, to the force of their arms. They bought the people, drove the people, but did not consult the people. They made no effort to discover the nature of the popular instincts which were being expressed among the masses against their barbarous system. All that their men were voting in the clubs of '93, in every department, was voted on a watch-word from the Holy of Holies in the rue Saint Honoré. By imperceptible minorities they boldly settled national questions, showed the cruelest disdain for the majority, and believed so fiercely in their own infallibility that, without remorse, they sacrificed to it a world of living men. And this is more or less what they said: We are the wise ones, the strong ones: the rest are fools, children, old women. Our doctrine is the true one, even if our number is minimal. Let us save this cattle in spite of itself. What is the difference, if a few more or a few less are killed? Are such creatures sufficiently alive to complain of their deaths? The earth itself will gain by it."
– Jules Michelet, from History of the Revolution (1847), quoted by Roland Barthes in his study, Michelet (1954), translated by Richard Howard (1987)
 |
| James Gillray A French Gentleman of the Court of Louis XVI ('I am your humble servant') and, A French Gentleman of the Court of Égalité ('Kiss my arse') 1799 hand-colored engraving British Museum |
 |
| James Gillray The First Kiss this Ten Years! or, The Meeting of Britannia & Citizen François (marking the short-lasting Peace of Amiens) 1803 hand-colored etching British Museum |
 |
| James Gillray Boney & Talley - the Corsican carcase-butcher's reckoning day (Talleyrand restraining Bonaparte's eagerness to invade England) 1803 hand-colored etching British Museum |
 |
| James Gillray Apotheosis of the Corsican Phoenix (satire on Napoleon's Spanish Venture) 1808 hand-colored etching British Museum |
 |
| James Gillray St George and the Dragon (George III on horseback, with Napoleon as Dragon) 1805 hand-colored etching British Museum |