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Slide  Death on the Barricades  Rethel  [[right margin]] MMA [[/right margin]]

In the first half of the 19th century we find another period of counter revolution. The French Revolution had run its course & had been transformed into an empire by Napoleon. Beneath the subsequent attempts to reestablish the monarchy with something less than second-rate material, the Republican spirit in France fermented.

Once more the old losers & the new power used suppression to regain what had been lost & to exploit what had been gained. Meanwhile the changevto industrialism had both driven the masses to an even more anonymous serfdom & had awakened them to a sense of mass power. [They were an exploited, uncertain, but not quiescent people. The bourgeoisie was steadily increasing in influence & determination.]

One of the many eruptions of the seething European social & political volcano was the German liberal-nationalist uprising of 1848 & it caused Alfred Rethel to make a series of woodcuts which he called Another Dance of Death. This is plate 5, Death on the Barricades.

In this series of 8 plates Death plays the role of trickster & the people are represented as the deluded. It is a hostile, not a sympathetic interpretation & some of Rethel's mockery is expressed in his title Another Dance of Death. [The 1st plate shows Death getting the sword of Justice from Liberty, Equality & Fraternity. In the 2nd he is on his way disguised as a leader of the people, equipped with a pike & a pair of scales. In the 3rd he uses the scales to show a crowd of peasants that a crown & a peasant's pipe weight the same. In the 4th he gives the sword to the aroused people.]

Here is the 5th. Atop the barricades & holding the banner of freedom,