Napoleon Bonaparte Ordering the Poisoning of the Plague Victims at Jaffa, 1799

Cruikshank's aquatint stages a ward of dying French soldiers at Jaffa, their bodies pale and slumped on cots behind a green curtain, while a figure in elaborate military dress — Napoleon, identifiable by his characteristic posture of command — gestures imperiously toward an elderly, cringing apothecary holding a vial. The caption reads Poisoning the Sick at Jaffa, referencing the still-disputed 1799 incident in which Bonaparte allegedly ordered opium administered to plague-stricken troops to prevent their capture. Aquatint's soft tonal washes gave caricaturists like Cruikshank, Gillray, and Rowlandson a cinematic range impossible in woodcut; this sequential, scene-setting visual rhetoric fed directly into the comic strip's grammar of moral tableau.