Anne du Bourg Condemned to Be Hanged and Burned

This print, engraved by François Hogenberg around 1570 after a design by Jacques Tortorel and Jean Perrissin and held at the Musée Carnavalet, depicts the execution of the Protestant councillor Anne du Bourg, hanged and then burned at the Place de Grève on 23 December 1559. A councillor at the Parlement of Paris, du Bourg had been arrested on Henry II's orders after publicly defending Reformed ideas during a mercuriale session; his trial was carried through to its conclusion by the Guises, by then masters of power under the young Francis II. This engraving belongs to a series documenting the beginnings of the Wars of Religion in France, in the tradition of the Tortorel and Perrissin prints that, in the following decades, popularised the iconography of religious persecution. The print's original, enigmatic title alludes to a contemporaneous royal agony whose exact meaning remains uncertain.