"Poor France! The Branches are broken, but the Trunk still holds."
By Daumier in "Charivari."
It is not strange that during these years American cartoonists concerned themselves but little with matters outside of their own country. For more than a decade after the close of the Franco-Prussian War there were very few episodes which assumed international importance, and still fewer in which the United States had any personal interest. France was amply occupied in recovering from the effects of her exhaustive struggle; United Germany was undergoing the process of crystallizing into definite form. Europe, as a whole, had no more energy than was needed to attend to domestic affairs and to keeping a jealous eye upon English ambition in Egypt and Russian aggression in the Balkan States. For some little time after the French Commune echoes of that internecine struggle were still to be found in the work of caricaturists, both in France and Germany. Before taking final leave of that veteran French artist, Honoré Daumier, it seems necessary to allude briefly to a few of the cartoons of that splendidly tragic series of his old age dealing with the France which, having undergone the horrors of the Germanic invasion and of the Commune, is shattered but not broken, and begins to look forward with wistful eyes to a time when she shall have recovered her strength and her prosperity. One of the most striking of these cartoons represents France as a deep-rooted tree which has been bent and rent by the passing whirlwind. "Poor France! The branches are broken, but the trunk holds always." Simple as the design is, the artist by countless touches of light and of shadow has given it a somber significance which long remains in the memory. It was to Napoleon that Daumier bitterly ascribed the misfortunes of La Patrie, and in these cartoons he lost no opportunity of attacking Napoleonic legend. Stark and dead, nailed to the Book of History is the Imperial eagle. "You will remain outside, nailed fast on the cover, a hideous warning to future generations of Frenchmen," is Daumier's moral. Of brighter nature is the cartoon called "The New Year." It represents the dawning of 1872, and portrays France sweeping away the last broken relics of her period of disaster.
"You shall stay there, nailed to the Cover, a Warning to Future Generations of Frenchmen."
By Daumier in "Charivari."
In Germany, also, one finds a few tardy cartoons bearing upon Napoleon III. Even in the Fliegende Blätter, a periodical which throughout its history has confined itself, with few exceptions, to social satire, perennial skits upon the dignified Herr Professor, the self-important young lieutenant, the punctilious university student, one famous cartoon appeared late in the year 1871, entitled "The Root of All Evil." It portrayed Napoleon III., as a gigantic, distorted vegetable of the carrot or turnip order, his flabby features distended into tuberous rotundity, the familiar hall-mark of his sweeping mustache and imperial lengthened grotesquely into the semblance of a threefold root. Still better known is a series of cartoons which ran through half a dozen numbers of the Fliegende Blätter, entitled "The Franco-Prussian War: A Tragedy in Five Acts," in which the captions are all clever applications of lines from Schiller's "Maid of Orleans". As compared with the work of really great cartoonists, this series has little to make it memorable. But as an expression of a victorious nation's good-natured contempt, its tendency to view the whole fierce struggle of 1870-71 as an amusing farce enacted by a company of grotesque marionettes, it is not without significance and interest.
