Order van Bataille (Battle Order of the Jesuits)

This Dutch broadside satirizes the Society of Jesus through mock-military organization, arranging Jesuit leadership and munitions in battlefield formation. The print responds to the Jesuits' suppression across Europe—Spain expelled them in 1767, Portugal in 1759. Rather than caricaturing individual faces, this typographic satire weaponizes bureaucratic language itself, treating religious hierarchy as combat structure. The work exemplifies Enlightenment-era anti-clerical propaganda distributed as cheap prints to mass audiences. Such political broadsheets continued the tradition of visual argument descended from Reformation pamphlets and Dutch Golden Age satirical prints, directly prefiguring the wood-engraved and lithographed broadsides that would fuel 19th-century mass politics and eventually feed into serialized comic narratives.