The Inequalities of Infamy

The contribution has for focus the etching by Isaak Cruikshank, entitled The Martyr of Equality: Behold the Progress of our System. The critical analysis of the caricature conjoins the figurative forms of the visual imagery with its words investigating, in the process, several of the interdependent layers of meaning that can be imputed therefrom. Produced in the days after the execution of the French King Louis XVI, which had taken place on 21 January 1793, this satirical view of the beheading of the monarch shows off the mechanism of the guillotine as a bloody, equalising, killing machine. The central figure of Philippe Égalité, the King’s distant cousin who had voted for the death of the King, is in the guise of the executioner here, but he, too, would be sent to the guillotine on 6 November of the same year.