The audience and the image: the politics of Jacques Callot's Les Misères et les malheurs de la guerre

Abstract

In 1633, Jacques Callot etched and published a suite of eighteen small prints titled Les Misères et les malheurs de la guerre or The Miseries and Misfortunes of War. A poetic prose inscription attributed to the abbé Michel de Marolles accompanies each of the seventeen scenes following the frontispiece. Importantly, Marolles was not only the author of the inscriptions for The Miseries but a collector of Callot as well. The collectors of Callot around the time The Miseries were published were primarily aristocratic or wealthy individuals which suggests that the series was created partially by and for its aristocratic audience. It is with this knowledge and Callot’s previous employment in projects of monarchical propaganda, that this thesis offers a counterpoint to previous scholarship that has consistently emphasized a humanitarian reading of Callot’s Les Misères et les malheurs de la guerre. Rather than merely examining the human experience of seventeenth-century warfare, Callot’s Miseries reveal how war was conceived of and practiced by its aristocratic audience to maintain their social standing.