French Habits: Juge du Tribunal Correctionel

This is the ninth 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. In this print, the former soldier and well-known wit, John Courtenay, is shown as Juge du Tribunal Correctionel.

As with most of Gillray's French Habits, this plate is based upon the prescribed dress for the corresponding position (in this case Juge du Tribunal Correctionel) in the Collection des nouveaux costumes des autorités constituées, civils et militaires. Courtenay is seated facing right in an armchair with his left hand on his knee and his right hand grasping his cloak. The cloak, hat, plumes, and waistcoat are all black. But also, as usual, there are differences. Gillray has put Courtenay on a raised stone dais, added a wall of stone blocks, a background column, and a scarlet and gold drape behind him. More subtly, he has added an ornament suspended from the ribbon across his chest with bundle of rods and an axe that belongs to the prescribed dress for a Criminal judge not a Correctional one. The cockade on his hat is also slightly different.

John Courtenay had been a member of Parliament since 1780 and a member of Brooks's since 1788. Although consistent in his support for Whig causes, his contributions in Parliament seem to have been more satiric than persuasive. His first appearance in a Gillray print was as one of the wits around the table in The Feast of Reason and the Flow of Soul. (1797) Gillray likely makes him a judge of the Tribunal Correctionel, because of Courtenay's criticism of the conditions at the Middlesex House of Corrections, also known as Coldbath Fields Prison, where political prisoners were often held after the suspension of habeas corpus in 1794.

Sources and Reading

• Commentary from the British Museum on French Habits: Juge du Tribunal Correctionel.
• "John Courtenay," The History of Parliament
• Collection des nouveaux costumes des autorités constituées, civils et militaires
• Dresses of the Representatives of the People. . .
• Thomas Wright and R.H. Evans, Historical and Descriptive Account of the Caricatures of James Gillray #193
• 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 10

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