Siège de Rouen

This historicizing illustration, published in Jules Janin’s book « La Normandie », depicts the Siege of Rouen of 1418–1419, a major episode in the English conquest of Normandy during the Hundred Years’ War. The scene shows inhabitants leaving or fleeing the city with their children, focusing less on combat than on the human consequences of the siege. The image evokes the pressure placed on the people of Rouen, hunger, forced displacement, and the collapse of urban security in a context of prolonged war. Like many nineteenth-century historical illustrations, it is not a contemporary witness to the event, but a later dramatic reconstruction intended to preserve its memory through a narrative and emotional staging.