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A timely post in today's Public Domain Review brings us the storied history of "The Revolutionary Colossus," a recurring image of "a king-eating colossus" that spread widely and in many forms during the French Revolution.
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/revolutionary-colossus
One classic depiction comes from Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin's grampa) in "The Economy of Vegetation" a poem in 1791's "The Botanic Garden."
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Long had the Giant-form on GALLIA’S plains
Inglorious slept, unconscious of his chains;
Round his large limbs were wound a thousand strings
By the weak hands of Confessors and Kings;
O’er his closed eyes a triple veil was bound,
And steely rivets lock’d him to the ground;
While stern Bastile with iron cage inthralls
His folded limbs, and hems in marble walls.
Touch’d by the patriot-flame, he rent amazed
The flimsy bonds, and round and round him gazed;
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Starts up from earth, above the admiring throng
Lifts his Colossal form, and towers along;
High o’er his foes his hundred arms He rears,
Plowshares his swords, and pruning hooks his spears;
Calls to the Good and Brave with voice, that rolls
Like Heaven’s own thunder round the echoing poles;
Gives to the winds his banner broad unfurl’d,
And gathers in its shade the living world!
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Or as Samantha Wesner summarizes it for we poesie-impaired: "Between thick dungeon walls, a giant lies asleep. He’s chained to the ground, large limbs folded, enmeshed in a web of ropes, a blindfold over his closed eyes. Suddenly, as if touched by a flame, he awakes, and gazes around in amazement. He starts up, shreds the ropes entangling him, breaks chains, smashes walls, and rises to his feet. Towering over the world, shadow stretching out below, he calls out with a voice like thunder."
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While the poetic invocations of the colossus are quite stirring, they're not a patch on the imagery, like Villeneuve's 1790 engraving, "The French People Overwhelming the Hydra of Federalism."
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Or 1793's "The People, King-Eater," whose artist is lost to the mists of time:
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84120711?rk=21459;2#
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The Colossus is a lineal descendant of the image of Hobbes's Leviathan, a 1651 image that is so striking it is still widespread today.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leviathan_-_Hobbes%27_Leviathan_(1651),_title_page_-_BL.jpg
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Visually, though, the most contemporary Colossus comes from British caricaturist James Gillray, whose 1794 lampoon of the French Revolution and the Terror is straight out of EC Comics (or vice-versa) (obviously).
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b6948829p?rk=236052;4#
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It wasn't just foreign enemies of the Republic who appropriated the Colossus for political ends: French reactionaries like Poirier de Dunckerque made king-eating into an act of monstrous cannibalism.
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b6950397k/f1.item.r=Les%20Formes%20acerbes.zoom
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The image found its way into the public imagination as a depiction of the doubl-edged sword of revolutions, with a Colossus-descended Frankenstein's monster engraged on the frontispiece of Shelley's MODERN PROMETHEUS in 1831.
https://wellcomecollection.org/works/p67zzz4d?wellcomeImagesUrl=/indexplus/image/L0027125.html
Wesner: "Placing the revolutionary Colossi in a genealogy that stretches from Darwin’s Bastille giant through to Frankenstein’s horrific creature invites us to consider the particular emotional register within which each appears...
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"If for Darwin, revolution could be allegorized to the electrified awakening of an embodied Third Estate, then Frankenstein allegorizes a revolution stripped of both its epic scale and its promise. Our attention shifts from the patriot-flame and the Colossus to the 'modern Prometheus' of Shelley’s subtitle, who gave fire to mankind and lived to regret it."
eof/