The Leader of the Parisian Blood Red Republic, or the Infernal Fiend

George Cruikshank's hand-coloured etching depicts a monstrous demon — goggle-eyed, tusked, cloaked in red — striding through smoke and flames while brandishing a banner proclaiming *Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Atheism, Seizure of All Property, Death to All Who Oppose the Red Republic*. Flanking labels name *Blasphemy*, *Ignorance*, *Folly*, and *Foolery*. The figure represents the Paris Commune as a grotesque embodiment of revolutionary chaos. Cruikshank, son of Isaac Cruikshank and peer of Gillray and Rowlandson, worked in the great British satirical print tradition — the lineage of single-sheet moral spectacle from which sequential comics directly descend. By 1871 he was in his late seventies, his earlier radicalism having given way to temperance moralising and opposition to Continental upheaval.