La grande Allemagne: Miss Edith Cavell

This French propaganda print by Abel Faivre depicts a German military officer pointing a pistol at a kneeling woman draped in black—representing Miss Edith Cavell, the British nurse executed by German forces in October 1914. The work belongs to a long European tradition of political caricature descending from Gillray and Daumier: graphic argument rendered through figure and symbol rather than text alone. Here, the exaggerated German uniform and imperious gesture function as visual shorthand for imperial aggression. The print exemplifies how comic and satirical illustration served as mass propaganda during the First World War, foreshadowing the role sequential and political imagery would play in twentieth-century print culture.