The Zenith of French Glory; The Pinnacle of Liberty.

Size 25cm x 36cm

Originally published by Hannah Humphrey etched by James Gillray from 'The Genuine Works of James Gillray, engraved by himself. Thomas McLean edition on heavy rag-paper from the original copper plates printed 1830.

On 21 January 1793, Louis the XVI of France was guillotined, and less than two weeks later, France declared war on Great Britain and the Dutch Republic. Whatever sympathies, Gillray may have had for the French revolutionists, those sympathies were now effectively withdrawn owing to the growing brutality reported in Paris and by the threat perceived to the British homeland. Gillray produced one of the most famous of his anti-revolutionary prints, prominently featuring the execution of the French King.

Following the practice he had begun in 1792, Gillray portrayed the revolutionary sans-culottes not in their preferred working class pantaloons but literally sans culottes without breeches at all. And given the prominence of the clergymen and judge hanging from the lantern posts inThe Zenith of French Glory it is likely that he had heard the revolutionary anthem Ca ira in its more radical form which contained lines like the following:

All will be well, all will be well!
We'll have no more nobles or priests.
The aristocrats will swing from the posts.
And equality will reign in the streets.

The sans-culotte fiddler with his bloody daggers in Zenith may be playing the Ca ira, but with the burning church in the background, it's hard not to associate this image of heartless barbarity with the infamous cruelty of Nero who supposedly fiddled while Rome burned. The church has been identified by Draper Hill as the Eglise Notre-Dame-de l'Assomption which stands near to the Place de la Revolution where Louis was executed. But Gillray has, I believe, purposely drawn the church with a taller lantern like that of St. Paul's which would have made the threat to Britain just that much more real. (www.james-gillray.org)