The History of a Reign.
By Daumier in "Charivari."
"This has killed That."
By Daumier in "Charivari."
French caricature during "the terrible year" which saw Gravelotte, Sedan, and the downfall of the Empire was necessarily somber and utterly lacking in French gayety. It was not until the tragic days of the Siege and the Commune that the former strict censorship of the French press was relaxed, and the floodgates were suddenly opened for a veritable inundation of cartoons. M. Armand Dayot, in his admirable pictorial history of this epoch, which has already been frequently cited in the present volume, says in this connection: "It has been said with infinite justice that when art is absent from caricature nothing remains but vulgarity." In proof of this, one needs only to glance through the albums containing the countless cartoons that appeared during the Siege, and more especially during the Commune. Aside from those signed by Daumier, Cham, André Gill, and a few other less famous artists, they are unclean compositions, without design or wit, odious in color, the gross stupidity of their legends rivaling their lamentable poverty of execution. But under the leadership of Daumier, the small group of artists who infused their genius into the weekly pages of Charivari, made these tragic months one of the famous periods in the annals of French caricature. Of the earlier generation, the irrepressible group whose mordant irony had hastened the down fall of Louis Philippe, Daumier alone survived to chronicle by his pencil the disasters which befell France, with a talent as great as he had possessed thirty-odd years before, when engaged in his light-hearted and malicious campaign against the august person of Louis Philippe. Then there were the illustrious "Cham" (Comte de Noë), and André Gill (a caricaturist of striking wit), Hadol, De Bertall, De Pilopel, Faustin, Draner, and a number of others not so well known. But, above all, it was Daumier who, after twenty years of the Empire, during which his pencil had been politically idle, returned in his old age to the fray with all the vigor of the best days of La Caricature.
