Assassination of the French deputies at Ratstadt, April 1799

This engraving, titled “Assassination of the French deputies at Ratstadt, April 1799,” depicts the deadly attack against the French plenipotentiaries as they were leaving the Congress of Rastadt in April 1799, in the context of the War of the Second Coalition. The scene shows a brutal ambush in a wooded setting, with horsemen, soldiers, and fallen victims, in a composition that emphasizes the suddenness of the assault and the political violence of the event. This episode, which occurred at the moment when negotiations between Revolutionary France and its opponents were collapsing, deeply shocked contemporaries. Created in the nineteenth century and published in Histoire de France en cent tableaux, the illustration belongs to the tradition of French historical imagery, which sought to give dramatic form to major diplomatic and military episodes of the national past.