Liberté

At the time of the French Revolution, one attribute of Hercules, the gnarled, tapering club, was often shown with the beaten-down many-headed hydra beneath it so as to stand in for the defeat of despotism, as in this allegory of Liberty by Jean-Guillaume Moitte (1746–1810). Here the personification of the female figure of liberty is endowed with the weapon of Hercules, that principally denoted the hero's strength, and thus acquires additional layers of meaning.

Liberté, print, 44.5 cm x 33.7 cm, 1792, artist: Jean-François Janinet after Jean-Guillaume Moitte; source: © The Trustees of the British Museum, London, https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_2001-0520-58,  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.