THE DISASTERS OF WAR

Goya Etching Series

Plate 09
They Do Not Want To

Plate 38
Barbarians!
Barbaros!

Plate 39
Great Deeds - - Against the Dead

Plate 47
And This is How it Happaned

Notes

The Spanish civilians bore the brunt of the worst excesses of the war between France and Spain. Atrocities committed by the occupying French troops were meant to quell resistance, but instead were followed by worse atrocities from Spanish rebels. This cycle broke down even what limited rules policed war in the 1800s, and the anarchy of destruction turned Spain into a land devoid of restraints. The cruelty impacted Goya in such a way that his response - the series of plates which make up the Disasters of War - seem both an indictment and a question, about Spain, the French, and humankind.

"His debt to Christianity of the eighteenth century is contained in the idea that politics was just adopting from the Gospels; the conviction that man has a right to justice. Such a statement would seem utterly conceited to a Roman, who would doubtless have looked upon the Disasters as we look on photographs of the amphitheatre... But if Goya thought that man has not come onto the earth to be cut in pieces he thought that he must have come here for something. "
Page 112, from Andre Malraux's SATURN: AN ESSAY ON GOYA, Phaidon Press 1957