The Smiling Face of Terror

Perhaps the most persistent trope of the history of the French Revolution has been its irresolvable bifurcation along political lines. It makes sense to consider Étienne Béricourt's work alongside a broader corpus of caricatures, genre scenes, and didactic or emblematic images that populate revolutionary print culture. The characters, events, and social rituals Béricourt's art recounts are mostly those of the Years II and III: sans-culottes clad in bonnet rouges and striped trousers, trees of liberty, and the bodies of the victims of revolutionary violence. This is the smiling face of Terror. Béricourt represents the Revolution as all-pervasive, traumatic, but also fun. Béricourt made several images that reference carnival events in and around Paris. Some of them merge with legitimized forms of revolutionary ritual.