A voice from the past

The ghost of Louis XVI of France warns Nicholas II of Russia to not make a hasty decision regarding the “Petition” presented by a crowd at the Winter Palace, which was met by police gunfire and the deaths of many in what became known as Bloody Sunday. Caption: Shade of Louis. — Warily, Brother.

comments and context

Comments and Context

Frank Nankivell’s front-cover cartoon on the February 8, 1905 issue of Puck was remarkably prescient in its portrayal of a current event in the news, and coldly prophetic — it was printed a dozen years before the ultimate revolution and murder of Czar Nicolas II.

The cartoon’s focus followed closely on the massacre of petitioners on Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg, leading to the Winter Palace. Groups of dissidents, lead by Father Georgi Gapon, joined forces to present a written petition to the Czar. Its proposed reforms were mild in tone and radical in particulars — for instance, demanding land reforms and a representative assembly — but not revolutionary; not asking for the Czar’s abdication or similar platforms of Communists, Mensheviks, etc. In fact the petition praised the Czar and acknowledged him as ordained by God. The petition was regarded as much religious as it was political.

Nevertheless, the massed police and military forces of the Czar fired upon the groups as they approached, in different parts of the city. Estimates of deaths ranged as high as the tens of thousands, and even considering hyperbolic reactions, Russian intellectuals and much of the church, and nations around the world, were horror-struck at the brutality.

The Czar was relatively calm about the incident, which further enraged disaffected Russians, and his eventual response, for instance, creating the Duma, a representative assembly, seemed “too little, too late.”

Father Gapon escaped injury himself, and soon thereafter hid in the apartments of the increasingly radicalized writer Maxim Gorky. Gapon held expansive and conciliatory views, honoring the Czar but also desperate for reform, serving for a time as a police informant, and even accepting advice and perhaps financial support from a member of the Japanese military (this was while Russia and Japan were at war in the Far East). He eventually was murdered, not by Czarist forces, but by members of the shifting alliance of rebels he worked with.

Nankivell’s cartoon, and its oddly stiff caricature of the Czar — perhaps attempting the similitude of a Russian Orthodox icon — is a starkly direct presentation of the deadly stakes at play, at the time of the cartoon’s creation, and the ultimate consequences. Louis XVI of France, the only French monarch to be deposed, was beheaded in 1892, that grim warning depicted in the cartoon’s guillotine.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1905-02-08

Creator(s)

Nankivell, Frank A. (Frank Arthur), 1869-1959

Period

U.S. President – 1st Term (September 1901-February 1905)

Repository

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Page Count

1

Record Type

Image

Resource Type

Cartoon

Rights

These images are presented through a cooperative effort between the Library of Congress and Dickinson State University. No known restrictions on publication.

Citation