The Ship of State in Peril—Its Sailors know not to what Saints to commend Themselves.
The People thrown into the Pit held by the Monsters of Various Taxes.
"Once more, Madame, do you wish divorce, or do you not wish divorce? You are perfectly free to choose?"
It was not likely that the part which Louis Philippe played in the revolution of 1789, his share in the republican victories of Jemappes and of Valmy, would be forgotten by those who saw in him only a pseudo-republican, a "citizen king" in name only, and who seized eagerly upon the opportunity of mocking at his youthful espousal of republicanism. The names of these battles recur again and again in the caricature of the period, in the legends, in maps conspicuously hung upon the walls of the background. An anonymous cut represents the public gazing eagerly into a magic lantern, the old "Poire" officiating as showman: "You have before you the conqueror of Jemappes and of Valmy. You see him surrounded by his nobles, his generals, and his family, all ready to die in his defense. See how the jolly rascals fight. They are not the ones to be driven in disgrace from their kingdom. Oh, no!" Of all the cartoons touching upon Louis Philippe's insincerity, probably the most famous is that of Daumier commemorating the death of Lafayette. The persistent popularity of this veteran statesman had steadily become more and more embarrassing to a government whose reactionary doctrines he repudiated, and whose political corruption he despised. "Enfoncé Lafayette!... Attrapé, mon vieux!" is the legend inscribed beneath what is unquestionably one of the most extraordinary of all the caricatures of Honoré Daumier. It represents Louis Philippe watching the funeral cortège of Lafayette, his hands raised to his face in the pretense of grief, but the face behind distorted into a hideous leer of gratification. M. Arsène Alexandre, in his remarkable work on Daumier, describes this splendid drawing in the following terms: "Under a grey sky, against the somber and broken background of a cemetery, rises on a little hillock the fat and black figure of an undertaker's man. Below him on a winding road is proceeding a long funeral procession. It is the crowd that has thronged to the obsequies of the illustrious patriot. Through the leafage of the weeping willows may be seen the white tombstones. The whole scene bears the mark of a profound sadness, in which the principal figure seems to join, if one is to judge by his sorrowful attitude and his clasped hands. But look closer. If this undertaker's man, with the features of Louis Philippe, is clasping his hands, it is simply to rub them together with joy; and through his fingers, half hiding his countenance, one may detect a sly grin." The obsequious attitude of the members of Parliament came in for its share of satirical abuse. "This is not a Chamber, it is a Kennel," is the title of a spirited lithograph by Grandville, representing the French statesmen as a pack of hounds fawning beneath the lash of their imperious keeper, Casimir Périer. Another characteristic cartoon of Grandville's represents the legislature as an "Infernal laboratory for extracting the quintessence of politics"—a composition which, in its crowded detail, its grim and uncanny suggestiveness, and above all its bizarre distortions of the human face and form, shows more plainly than the work of any other French caricaturist the influence of Gillray. A collection of grinning skulls are labeled "Analysis of Human Thought"; state documents of Louis Philippe are being cut and weighed and triturated, while in the foreground a legislator with distended cheeks is wasting an infinite lot of breath upon a blowpipe in his effort to distill the much-sought-for quintessence from a retort filled with fragments of the words "Bonapartism," "anarchy," "equality," "republic," etc. One of the palpable results of the "political quintessence" of Louis Philippe's government took the form of heavy imposts, and these also afforded a subject for Grandville's graphic pencil. "The Public Thrown to the Imposts in the Great Pit of the Budget" first appeared in La Caricature. It represented the various taxes under which France was suffering in the guise of strange and unearthly animals congregated in a sort of bear pit, somewhat similar to the one which attracts the attention of all visitors to the city of Berne. The spectacle is one given by the government in power for the amusement of all those connected in any way with public office: in other words, the salaried officials who draw their livelihood from the taxes imposed upon the people. It is for their entertainment that the tax-paying public is being hurled to the monsters below—monsters more uncouth and fantastic than even Mr. H. G. Wells's fertile brain conceived in his "War of the Worlds," or "First Men in the Moon." Daumier in his turn had to have his fling at the ministerial benches of the government of July—the "prostituted Chamber of 1834." At the present day, when the very names of the men whom he attacked are half forgotten, his famous cartoon, "Le Ventre Législatif," is still interesting; yet it is impossible to realize the impression it must have made in the days when every one of those "ventrigoulus," those rotund, somnolent, inanely smiling old men, with the word "bourgeoisie" plainly written all over them, were familiar figures in the political world, and Daumier's presentment of them, one and all, a masterly indictment of complacent incapacity. As between Daumier and Grandville, the two leading lights of La Caricature, there is little question that the former was the greater. Balzac, who was at one time one of the editors of La Caricature, writing under pseudonym of "Comte Alexandre de B.," and was the source of inspiration of one of its leading features, the curious Etudes de Genre, once said of Daumier: "Ce gaillard-là, mes enfants, a du Michel-Ange sous la peau." Balzac took Daumier under his protection from the beginning. His first counsel to him was: "If you wish to become a great artist, faites des dettes!" Grandville has been defined by later French critics as un névrosé, a bitter and pessimistic soul. It was he who produced the cruelest compositions that ever appeared in La Caricature. He had, however, some admirable pages to his credit, among others his interpretation of Sebastian's famous "L'Ordre règne à Varsovie." Fearfully sinister is the field of carnage, with the Cossack, with bloody pique, mounting guard, smoking his pipe tranquilly, on his face the horrible expression of satisfaction over a work well done. Grandville also conceived the idea, worthy of a great cartoonist, of Processions and Cortèges. These enabled him to have pass before the eye, under costumes, each conveying some subtle irony or allusion, all the political men in favor. Every occasion was good. A religious procession, and the men of the day appeared as choir boys, as acolytes, etc. Un vote de budget, and then it was une marche de bœuf gras, with savages, musketeers, clowns forming the escort of "M. Gros, gras et bête." It is easy to guess who was the personage so designated. Nothing is more amusing than these pages, full of a verve, soutenue de pince sans rire.
