Henri Monnier in the Rôle of Joseph Prudhomme.
"Never shall my daughter become the wife of a scribbler."
By Daumier
Not only are most of the accepted symbolic figures—John Bull, Uncle Sam, and the rest—what they are because they meet with popular approval, but no cartoonist to-day could venture upon any radical departure from the established type—a bearded John Bull, a smooth-shaven Uncle Sam—without calling down public disfavor upon his head. If one stops to think of it, our own accepted national type, the tall, lank, awkward figure, the thin, angular Yankee face with a shrewd and kindly twinkle in the eye, is even less representative of the average American than John Bull is of the average Briton. It is interesting to recall that before the Civil War our national type frequently took the form of a Southerner—regularly in the pages of Punch. To-day, in England and in America, there is but one type of Uncle Sam, and we would not tolerate a change. It may be that in the gaunt, loose-knit frame, the strong and rugged features we recognize a kinship to that sterling and essentially American type of man which found its best exponent in Lincoln, and that this is the reason why Uncle Sam has become the most universally accepted and the best beloved of all our conventional types.
CHAPTER XIV
'48 AND THE COUP D'ÉTAT
It was only natural that caricature, like every other form of free expression of opinion, should feel the consequences of the general political upheaval of 1848; and these consequences differed widely in the different countries of Europe, according to the degree of civic liberty which that revolutionary movement had effected. In Germany, for example, it resulted in the establishment of a whole group of comic weeklies, with a license for touching upon political topics quite unprecedented in that land of imperialism and censorship. In France, on the contrary, political caricature came to an abrupt close just at a time when it had begun to give promise of exceptional interest. Louis Napoleon, who owed his elevation to the presidency of the republic chiefly to the popular belief in his absolute harmlessness, developed a most unexpected and disconcerting strength of character. His capacity for cunning and unscrupulousness was yet to be learned; but a feeling of distrust was already in the air, and the caricaturists were quick to reflect it. Louis Napoleon, however, was keenly alive to the deadly harm wrought to his predecessor by Philipon's pictorial sharp-shooters, and he did not propose to let history repeat itself by holding him up to public ridicule, after the fashion of the poor old "Poire," the citizen king. Accordingly the coup d'état was hardly an accomplished fact when press laws were passed of such a stringent nature that the public press, and pictorial satire along with it, was reduced to a state of vassalage, dependent upon the imperial caprice, a condition that lasted upward of fifteen years. Consequently, the few cartoons satirizing Napoleon III., that emanate from French sources, either belong to the closing years of his reign or else antedate the law of 1851, which denied trial by jury to all cases of infringement of the press laws. The latter cartoons, however, are of special interest, for they serve to throw important light upon the popular state of mind just prior to the famous coup d'état.
"The only Lamps authorized to light the Path of the Government."