Return to the So-Called Good Old Times

This French steel engraving satirizes nostalgia for pre-revolutionary feudalism. A castle courtyard presents a grotesque pageant: nobility and commoners coexist in hierarchical chaos while figures in military dress and period costume enact the social order's restoration. The dense composition and teeming figures echo Hogarth and Rowlandson's moral narratives, embedding political commentary in visual abundance. The extensive French verse below itemizes the restoration's absurdities—a tradition linking Gillray's captioned prints to later graphic satire. The print mocks both reactionary politics and the romantic medievalism that justified them. As popular print satire spread through Europe, such images became vehicles for political opposition, prefiguring how comics would use sequential visual narrative and accessible humor to critique power.