La Tribulation: Le 1er coup de feu ou les trois cartouches à Anvers

This French lithograph depicts a military execution scene with exaggerated caricature figures. A kneeling victim faces a firing squad of grotesquely drawn soldiers with elongated features and distorted physiognomies typical of 19th-century satirical printmaking. Smoke billows above as officers gesture dramatically. The print targets the Belgian independence campaign and Dutch military response, likely critiquing foreign intervention or revolutionary violence through the tradition established by Gillray and Rowlandson—using physical deformity and comic distortion to convey political outrage. The composition reflects how European political satire inherited from 18th-century masters employed caricature to render both specific events and abstract political positions legible to popular audiences, prefiguring how sequential imagery would later structure narrative in early comics.