L’allegoria dell’Occidente

The unsigned polychrome print Les mortels sont égaux, most probably engraved in 1791, may be considered one of the numerous pieces of visual and textual propaganda disseminated during the days of the French Revolution. This paper argues that the print nevertheless stands out for an unequaled capacity to condense the core meanings of secularized eschatology and the West’s self-attributed apostolate, in a single allegory. The iconological analysis focuses on the divinized figures of Nature and Reason, and the attributes of the white man and the black man that the image contains. The author also focuses on the analysis of the text placed under the image, in particular on Voltaire’s distich, which gave the image its title.