De Haan Gekortwiekt (The Rooster's Wings Clipped)

This Dutch etching mocks the French Republic during the Terror. Three figures wielding long poles attack a rooster—the traditional symbol of France—plucking its feathers as it flails. Speech balloons carry taunts in Dutch, celebrating the nation's humiliation. The print belongs to the tradition of political caricature inherited from Hogarth and perfected by Gillray and Rowlandson: biting satire expressed through exaggerated action, grotesque figures, and symbolic animals. The rooster, stripped of dignity and power, embodies Dutch Protestant anxieties about French revolutionary ambitions. Such crude imagery—crude by modern standards—was the lingua franca of public political debate, circulated in sheets and broadsides to mock enemies foreign and domestic.