The Capture and Sack of Arras by the Ratz, 1640

This engraving depicts French forces under François, Duke of Lorraine, attacking the city of Arras during the Thirty Years' War. The print employs the vocabulary of Northern European political satire: dense compositional chaos, caricatured soldiers, and moralizing verse beneath the image. The "Ratz" (rats) pun reduces enemy combatants to vermin, a crude device common to period propaganda. Executed as an engraving with fine crosshatching, the work belongs to the tradition of illustrated broadsides and protest prints that preceded modern comics—visual narratives combining image and text to shape public opinion through exaggeration, ridicule, and dehumanization of opponents.