A statue of Brutus loomed large at the trial of King Louis XVI. Brutus was, after all, a coveted celebrity and his figure commanded a vantage point that looked down upon the revolutionaries and the ruined royal.

It is difficult to say which Brutus: was it Marcus, the legendary assassin of Caesar, immortalized by Plutarch, dramatized by Shakespeare? Or was it Lucius Junius, who not only founded the Roman Republic around 509 BC, but condemned his own sons to death for attempting to overthrow it (a story brought to life spectacularly by Jacobin artist Jacques-Louis David in his 1789 neo-classical masterpiece The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons)?

Both Brutuses of the ancient republican epic were celebrated across the political divide in 1790s France, and it should not be surprising that the cultural landscape of the French Revolution was heavily populated with references to them. These heroic sentinels of Rome were emblems of the republican commitment to liberty, and an overload of catechisms, letters, pamphlets, treatises, and songs waxed lyrical about the example of their luminous virtue.