Vive le Roi [Long Live the King], after Philibert Louis Debucourt

Responding to the early events of the French Revolution, Louis XVI moved his residence from Versailles to the Tuileries Palace in Paris. Corollary propaganda, Debucourt invented this composition of a cripple unfurling a portrait of the king and describing the scene of his return ––“My people can always count upon my love.” –– to a marveling crowd. Initially (below), Legrand faithfully reproduced the painting. Three years later, after the beheading of the king and Robespierre’s proclamation of “the belief of the French people in a Supreme Being and in the Immortality of the Soul,” Legrand reworked the plate (above), replacing the portrait with the Decree, introducing personifications of Fortitude and Justice, and of course changing the inscription. A decade later, the plate was altered again, with a portrait of Napoleon substituted for the Decret. In 1853, a critic would wryly observe that, “if the plate were to be resurrected, it could serve again to promote the exploits of the French army.” The life of Legrand’s print is a clamorous case of the correlation between political vicissitudes and printmaking.