Publisher Ambroise Vollard originally commissioned "Miserere et Guerre" to be about 100 images, but then backed off. Rouault worked the plates between 1916 and 1927. He recovered the plates from Vollard in 1947 and published "Miserere" with 58 plates and without André Suarès text. They were issued loose, in a cloth case. Many plates were worked as many as 15 times.
The title roughly translates to: "The more noble the heart, the less stiff the neck" and is a comment on the Prussian (German) military, whose stiff-necked, ignoble leaders were unable to see what was really happening. The subject might well be a satire of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, wearing a "pickelhaube", a spiked helmet, a stiffened collar and sporting a large mustache.