Maleficos non patieris vivere (Expulsion of the Brabant Theocrats from Brussels)

This engraved print depicts the expulsion of Catholic clergy and aristocratic collaborators from Brussels during the Brabant Revolution. Figures identified by letter—including Cardinal, bishops, and nobles—are driven from a fortified tower into a river by armed civilians and soldiers. The composition balances political allegory with direct reportage: the brick tower anchors the composition while the water becomes a boundary between old authority and revolutionary change.

Produced in the etching tradition inherited from Hogarth and developed through Gillray and Rowlandson, the print uses labeled protagonists and symbolic landscape to argue for the removal of theocratic power. The cartographic precision of the setting grounds satire in documentary urgency. Such prints circulated as portable political argument, establishing conventions the comic press would inherit: serial character types, moral clarity through visual hierarchy, and the marriage of text and image as propaganda.