Ink and blood: Dutch engravings of the torture of Huguenots during the reign of Louis XIV

By virtue of a constant growth of the European press and an increase in the publication of polemical texts, the violence suffered by the Huguenots in France during the 1680s benefited from international media coverage. In parallel with these reports, series of engravings showed the unbearable conditions under which Calvinists under Louis XIV lived. Mutilated, violated, and burnt bodies, tormented and wounded souls, and people forced into exile present so many tableaus of the ills suffered by French Protestants of the period. With their visual opulence and their commercial success, the etchings of Jan Luyken and Romeyn de Hooghe deserve particular attention. In this paper, we seek to confront these harrowing figurations so as to better apprehend the imaginary developed in these images, in order to reveal the underlying religious and political intentions of the two artists.