[Fatal Effects of the French Defeat] Hanging. Drowning.

This print was prompted by the news of the Coalition victory led by General Count Clairfayt over the French Army of the Sambre and Meuse led by Generals Jean-Charles Pichegru and Jean-Baptiste Jourdan.

Since the first notice of the victory only began appearing on November 7, the two-panel caricature was obviously created quickly (and somewhat crudely) to seize the moment by portraying, side-by-side, the very different reactions to the news by a Whig and a Tory. In keeping with his repeated depictions of the Whigs and their leader, Charles James Fox, as French revolutionaries, Gillray here shows Fox hanging himself in despair at the "Account of the Republican Overthrow."

This was neither the first nor the last time Gillray portrayed a desperate Fox choosing suicide by hanging. In 1782 Gillray had identified Fox with the traitorous Ahithophel who hung himself after betraying King David. A few months after Fatal Effects Gillray would show Fox once again hanging himself in the ironically titled Nelson's Victory, or Good-News Operating upon Loyal Feelings (1795). The method of hanging may have suggested itself to Gillray as appropriate for Fox (even if self-inflicted), because it was part of the standard punishment for treason.

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In the second panel of the print, in an image recalling the disarray of Hogarth's A Midnight Modern Conversation (1733) Gillray portrays another very different effect of the news. In that panel we see Prime Minister William Pitt and his Secretary of State for War, Henry Dundas, "drowning" themselves in drink, overjoyed to gain a rare allied victory. In doing so, Gillray was returning to a theme he had used several months earlier in God Save the King in a Bumper where he suggested that the drunken celebrations of both Pitt and Dundas needed scarcely any pretext at all.

In spite of evidences of haste in the reuse of old themes, there is, as usual, Gillray's innate artistry in the parallels of the two central figures of this comparison/contrast. Fox and Pitt both lean back and to the left. Both raise their left arms above their heads in a gentle arc as their right arms reach out to a paper with the latest news. Both lift their left legs with a bend at the knee.

Sources and Reading

• Commentary from the British Museum on [Fatal Effects of the French Defeat] Hanging. Drowning..
• Tim Clayton, James Gillray: A Revolution in Satire, p.255.
• "Charles James Fox," Wikipedia
• "William Pitt the Younger," Wikipedia
• "Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville," Wikipedia
• "Jean-Charles Pichegru," Wikipedia
• "Jean-Baptiste Jourdan," Wikipedia
• Thomas Wright and R.H. Evans, Historical and Descriptive Account of the Caricatures of James Gillray #138.
• Thomas Wright and Joseph Grego, The Works of James Gillray, the Caricaturist; With the History of His Life and Times, p. 191.