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from Part I - The Experience of War
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2022
In 1807, Charles Williams, who, under the pseudonym Ansell, was one of the leading caricaturists of his age, responded to the Battle of Eylau with an unusual satire (Figure 5.1). The composition played on tropes of British caricature with, at its core, a belittled emperor trapped in the clutches of the Russian bear, desperate to save face through propagandist bulletins, yet hardly concealing his ambition to conquer the East. Unusually, his army’s ‘winter quarters’ featured a space rarely represented in caricatures of the period: a prison. This depiction is revealing and raises questions about the significance of captivity during the conflict. Here, the prisoners are not subject to derision. Only the façade of a jail is to be seen. Inscribed ‘Prisoners of War’ and surmounted by a Russian Eagle, the building confines a mass of indistinct faces pressed against heavily barred windows. These are presumably the ‘7,000 Prisoners’ from Napoleon’s legions mentioned in the darkening cloud of news that Talleyrand is muffling with a dispatch trumpeting the Emperor’s victory to Paris.
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