À la lanterne

Jean-Louis Prieur, a painter of the French Revolution, portrayed the death of public servant Jacques de Flesselles, who was murdered on the steps before the Hôtel de Ville (Paris City Hall) on 14 July 1789, in an unusual way. Apart from other artists depicting the scene, he put a lamp post above the entrance to the Hôtel de Ville. According to Warren Roberts, the author of the book Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Louis Prieur, Revolutionary Artists: The Public, the Populace, and Images of the French Revolution, he pointed to the lantern as to a "symbol of revolutionary justice". An 1804 engraving by Pierre-Gabriel Berthault (after Jean-Louis Prieur).

Two men hang a clergyman from a lamp; a scene from a mezzotint by Richard Earlom (The plundering of the King's cellar, Paris, 10 August 1793), see the middle-right.

"À la lanterne!" (lit. 'To the lamp post!') is a French slogan that gained special meaning and status in Paris and France during the early phase of the French Revolution from the summer of 1789. Lamp posts served as an instrument to mobs to perform extemporised lynchings and executions in the streets of Paris during the revolution when the people of Paris occasionally hanged officials and aristocrats from the lamp posts. Some English equivalents would be "String them up!" or "Hang 'em high!"

The lanterne became a symbol of popular or street justice in revolutionary France. The slogan "À la lanterne!" is referred to in such emblematic songs as Ça ira ("les aristocrates à la lanterne!" means "aristocrats to the lamp-post!" in this context). Journalist Camille Desmoulins, who had earlier practiced law, designated himself "The Lantern Attorney." He wrote a pamphlet entitled (in translation) "The Lamp Post Speaks to Parisians," in which "la lantèrne" tells the people, "I've always been here. You could have been using me all along!" As the revolutionary government became established, lamp posts were no longer needed as execution instruments, being replaced by the guillotine which became infamous in Paris during 1793–1794, though all major French cities had their own.

Hanging people from lamp posts ceased to be a part of Paris rebellions in the nineteenth century. Though the tradition continued in symbolic form up to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, via the ritual hanging in effigy of unpopular political figures during street protests.