The Execution at Amboise, 15 March 1560

This engraving by Jacques Tortorel and Jean Perrissin, produced after 1560 and held at the Musée Carnavalet, depicts the repression of the Amboise conspiracy, carried out on 15 March 1560 around the château. Led by the lord of La Renaudie to remove the young Francis II from the influence of the Guises, this attempted Protestant coup ended in repression of extreme severity: captured rebels were hanged from the château's balustrades, drowned in the Loire, or killed by the mob, leaving between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred dead according to estimates. This print is among the first in a series that Tortorel and Perrissin devoted to the Wars of Religion, which would durably fix, in French collective memory, the image of sixteenth-century confessional violence.