L'Europe Alarmée pour le fils d'un Meunier (Europe Alarmed for the Miller's Son)

This Dutch etching depicts a court scene consumed by panic over a supposed infant heir—a reference to the controversial birth of James Francis Edward Stuart in 1688, which many Protestant Europeans suspected was fraudulent. The print shows nobles and courtiers in elaborate dress gesturing wildly beneath classical arches, their chaos reflecting genuine political anxiety across European powers. The satirical tradition of engraved political commentary—inherited from sixteenth-century broadsheets and perfected by artists like Hogarth—here mobilizes visual exaggeration and crowded composition to ridicule both the French court and dynastic uncertainty. Such copper-plate etchings circulated widely as instruments of propaganda and public opinion, establishing conventions—caricatured facial types, symbolic objects, dense narrative detail—that would shape political comics for centuries.