ITP 13: The Blood of the Murdered Crying out for Vengeance by James Gillray
Working less than a month after the event, the artist presented the regicide both as a news story – a shock-horror sensation – and as a modern martyrdom. The features of the king’s severed head seem composed and almost complacent. Gillray had probably read newspaper reports of the resigned and impressively calm speech which Louis XVI – or plain “Citizen Capet” as he was renamed by his accusers – had made from the scaffold. “People, I die innocent of the crimes imputed to me! I pardon the authors of my death, and pray to God that the blood you are about to shed may not fall again on France!” In Gillray’s picture the blood in question miraculously vapourises as it is shed, turning into a cloud of anguished and accusatory words, floating heavenwards: “Whither, o whither shall my blood ascend for justice?” It is a weird and memorable image, suspended uneasily between the grotesque and the high-flown.
Gillray’s print sold in large quantities, marking not just the death of a king but also a decisive shift in English attitudes to the French Revolution. At first, most Englishmen had celebrated the end of Bourbon despotism and the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. To those of the Whiggish persuasion, it seemed that the French were simply carrying out their own version of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688. But the September massacres, the execution of the King and the onset of the Terror proved them wrong. By early 1793 not too many people on this side of the Channel were humming the Marseillaise.
Although Gillray did not actually witness Louis XVI’s beheading at first hand, he was careful to ensure that his portrait of the king was as accurate as possible. He also clearly went to some trouble to obtain reliable drawings of the mechanism used to kill the monarch. An inscription running across the top of the print proudly advertises “this exact representation of that Instrument of French refinement in Assassination, the GUILLOTINE”.
The artist’s depiction of the device is truer than what he says about it. It was originally a Persian invention and before the period during which it became notorious under its present name it had been used in Scotland (where it was called “the maiden”), in England (where it was “the Halifax gibbet”) as well as in various parts of the European mainland. It was taken up in France thanks to one Dr Guillotine, who was elected to the National Assembly in 1789 and who proposed its use on democratic and humanitarian grounds. He believed that the privilege of execution by decapitation, as opposed to much more painful and degrading methods like drawing and quartering, should no longer be solely reserved for the nobility, as it had been in France up until then. To the more idealistic French Revolutionaries the guillotine was an expression of their political principles: technically efficient and humane, it was the perfect killing machine for the Age of the Enlightenment. But Gillray turned their own device against them, making it into a popular symbol of their brutish, insatiable bloodthirstiness.
The most original element of Gillray’s design, the rising red mist of blood becoming words, was inspired by the biblical account of Cain murdering Abel in Genesis 4:10: “the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground. And now art thou cursed from the earth…” The voice of Louis XVI’s blood makes its appeal not to God, however, but to the British people, to “rescue the Kingdom of France, from being the prey of Violence, Usurpation & Cruelty” – a sentiment which would doubtless have met with the approval of the recently formed Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers.
Yet Gillray’s apparent lament for Louis XVI is perhaps not altogether what it seems. The king’s head may be noble but it also curiously resembles a broken piece of statuary, as if to suggest the thought that here lies a man who set himself up on high above his people, only to be revealed as a broken idol. As for that message written in blood, with its suggestion that the British people have a God-like right to judge and rectify the situation in France – “O Britons! Vice-gerents of eternal-Justice! Arbiters of the world! – look down from that height of power to which you are raised…” – does it not, on reflection, seem a little over-inflated, even a little caricatured, in its high-flown rhetoric? After all, it was only 150 years since the English had judicially murdered their ownmonarch.
Born and brought up as a member of the Brethren of Moravians, a particularly dour Protestant sect, Gillray had been raised to believe that man is totally and innately depraved. His was a brilliant but also a profoundly bleak satirical vision and his works almost invariably contain a subtle hit or two even at those whom he seems, at first sight, to be supporting. A merciless lampooner of the English monarchy, he was certainly no believer in the divine right of kings. I suspect that his true message was, as ever, a plague on all your houses. The French Revolutionaries are murderous thugs, the French King an arrogant fool getting his comeuppance, while rabidly anti-Republican British “patriots” – precisely the sort of people likely to have taken his satire at face value - are hypocritical and pompous amnesiacs who have conveniently forgotten their own history. Gillray was doubtless happy enough to sell copies of his print to people who took it as a simple statement of popular, monarchist, anti-French sentiment. But I also think he laughed at them, behind his hand, all the way to the bank.
Date: 16-07-2000
Owning Institution: The British Museum, London
Publication:
Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”
Subject:
18th Century
Friday was Bastille Day so the theme of this week’s picture is the French Revolution. James Gillray’s gory hand-coloured etching, The Blood of the Murdered Crying out for Vengeance, commemorates the execution of Louis XVI in the Place de la Revolution (now Place de la Concorde) in early 1793.
Working less than a month after the event, the artist presented the regicide both as a news story – a shock-horror sensation – and as a modern martyrdom. The features of the king’s severed head seem composed and almost complacent. Gillray had probably read newspaper reports of the resigned and impressively calm speech which Louis XVI – or plain “Citizen Capet” as he was renamed by his accusers – had made from the scaffold. “People, I die innocent of the crimes imputed to me! I pardon the authors of my death, and pray to God that the blood you are about to shed may not fall again on France!” In Gillray’s picture the blood in question miraculously vapourises as it is shed, turning into a cloud of anguished and accusatory words, floating heavenwards: “Whither, o whither shall my blood ascend for justice?” It is a weird and memorable image, suspended uneasily between the grotesque and the high-flown.
Gillray’s print sold in large quantities, marking not just the death of a king but also a decisive shift in English attitudes to the French Revolution. At first, most Englishmen had celebrated the end of Bourbon despotism and the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. To those of the Whiggish persuasion, it seemed that the French were simply carrying out their own version of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688. But the September massacres, the execution of the King and the onset of the Terror proved them wrong. By early 1793 not too many people on this side of the Channel were humming the Marseillaise.
Although Gillray did not actually witness Louis XVI’s beheading at first hand, he was careful to ensure that his portrait of the king was as accurate as possible. He also clearly went to some trouble to obtain reliable drawings of the mechanism used to kill the monarch. An inscription running across the top of the print proudly advertises “this exact representation of that Instrument of French refinement in Assassination, the GUILLOTINE”.
The artist’s depiction of the device is truer than what he says about it. It was originally a Persian invention and before the period during which it became notorious under its present name it had been used in Scotland (where it was called “the maiden”), in England (where it was “the Halifax gibbet”) as well as in various parts of the European mainland. It was taken up in France thanks to one Dr Guillotine, who was elected to the National Assembly in 1789 and who proposed its use on democratic and humanitarian grounds. He believed that the privilege of execution by decapitation, as opposed to much more painful and degrading methods like drawing and quartering, should no longer be solely reserved for the nobility, as it had been in France up until then. To the more idealistic French Revolutionaries the guillotine was an expression of their political principles: technically efficient and humane, it was the perfect killing machine for the Age of the Enlightenment. But Gillray turned their own device against them, making it into a popular symbol of their brutish, insatiable bloodthirstiness.
The most original element of Gillray’s design, the rising red mist of blood becoming words, was inspired by the biblical account of Cain murdering Abel in Genesis 4:10: “the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground. And now art thou cursed from the earth…” The voice of Louis XVI’s blood makes its appeal not to God, however, but to the British people, to “rescue the Kingdom of France, from being the prey of Violence, Usurpation & Cruelty” – a sentiment which would doubtless have met with the approval of the recently formed Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers.
Yet Gillray’s apparent lament for Louis XVI is perhaps not altogether what it seems. The king’s head may be noble but it also curiously resembles a broken piece of statuary, as if to suggest the thought that here lies a man who set himself up on high above his people, only to be revealed as a broken idol. As for that message written in blood, with its suggestion that the British people have a God-like right to judge and rectify the situation in France – “O Britons! Vice-gerents of eternal-Justice! Arbiters of the world! – look down from that height of power to which you are raised…” – does it not, on reflection, seem a little over-inflated, even a little caricatured, in its high-flown rhetoric? After all, it was only 150 years since the English had judicially murdered their ownmonarch.
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