French Habits: Le Boureau

This is the sixth in a series of twelve plates in which Gillray portrays members of the Whig opposition wearing the new ceremonial robes designed by Jacques-Louis David for the prominent public officials of the French Directorate. Here George Tierney is shown as Le Boureau, the Executioner.

In the two sources Gillray used to inform his French Habits there is no official dress or position listed for executioner. Indeed in France the executioner was a hereditary position belonging to the Sanson family before, during, and after the revolutionary period. But I think it's likely that Gillray used the illustration for the Secretaire du Directoire Executif from the English Dresses of the Representatives of the People. . . at least as a starting point. Not only are the black, knee-length robe, the white collar, the red plume all similar to the English illustration, but also the stance of the executioner with his feet apart, left hand on his hip and right hand resting on the desk/guillotine seems to have been derived from the English source.

George Tierney had first appeared as the hypocritical "Friend of Humanity" in the 1797 print by Gillray of the same name. But in French Habits he now assumes the evil glowering expression that Gillray subsequently uses over and over again to portray him. Tierney's growing prominence among Whigs as Fox retreated to St. Anne's Hill may somewhat help to explain Gillray's hostility. But in positioning Tierney next to a guillotine with its knife still dripping with blood, Gillray goes well beyond his typical opposition to Whigs. He has created an image of cruelty that can only be matched by his portrait of Charles James Fox in A Democrat, or Reason & Philosophy (1793). It is then hardly surprsing when Tierney next appears in a print by Gillray, Doublures of Characters (1798), Tierney's doublure is "The Lowest Spirit in Hell."

Sources and Reading

• Commentary from the British Museum on French Habits: Le Boureau.
• "George Tierney," Wikipedia
• Dresses of the Representatives of the People. . .
• Thomas Wright and R.H. Evans, Historical and Descriptive Account of the Caricatures of James Gillray #190
• Thomas Wright and Joseph Grego, The Works of James Gillray, the Caricaturist; With the History of His Life and Times pp. 239-240.

NEXT: French Habits 7

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