The article reflects on the motif of the rape of women as an excuse for the community’ s (political) right to a revolutionary uprising. This is a frequent motif in European Romanticism, and it was embraced by the Croatian Illyrian movement and patriotic literature writers in the theme of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1573 (a tragedy by M. Bogović in 1859 ; a novel by A. Šenoa in 1877 ; a drama by M. Jurić Zagorka in 1903) with obsessive variations of the endangered virginity of the maiden whose abduction and/or rape causes the righteous and pure revolt of the oppressed.
