Death of the Girondins

This engraving by Auguste Trichon, titled “Death of the Girondins,” depicts the Girondins shortly before their execution during the French Revolution. The scene shows several of them gathered indoors, in a tense composition where gestures, postures, and gazes emphasize the gravity of the moment. As the Wikimedia Commons caption notes, they are still alive in the scene, before the guillotining. Published in 1866 in volume 2 of the Dictionnaire populaire illustré d'histoire, de géographie, de biographie, de technologie, de mythologie, d'antiquités, des beaux-arts et de littérature, this illustration belongs to the nineteenth-century scholarly tradition that sought to give visual form to major political episodes of French history.