It is inevitable that bad rulers should dread the satiric pencil. Caricature, powerless against an administration that is honest and competent, powerless against a public man who does his duty in his place, is nevertheless a most effective device against arrogance, double-dealing, corruption, cowardice, and iniquity. England, as the French themselves admit, is the native home of political caricature; but not an instance can be named in all its history of caricature injuring a good man or defeating a good measure. A free pencil, too, becomes ever a gayer and a kinder pencil. The measure of freedom which France has occasionally enjoyed during the last ninety years has never lasted long enough to wear off the keen point of the satirist's ridicule; and collectors can tell, by the number and severity of the pictures in a port-folio, just how much freedom Frenchmen possessed when they were produced. It is curious, also, to note that caricatures on the wrong side of great public questions are never excellent. It is doubtful if a bad man with the wealth of an empire at his command could procure the execution of one first-rate caricature hostile to the public good. A despot can never fight this fire with fire, and has no resource but to stamp it out.
Vainly, therefore, will the most vigilant collector search for French caricatures of Napoleon Bonaparte published during his reign. His government was a despotism not tempered by epigrams, and it was controlled by a despot who, though not devoid of a sense of humor, had all a Corsican's mortal hatred of ridicule. No man in France was less French than Napoleon, either in lineage or in character. His moral position in Paris was not unlike that which Othello might have held in Venice, if Othello had been base enough to betray and expel the senate which he had sworn to serve. We can imagine how the shy, proud Moor would have writhed under the pasquinades of the graceful, dissolute Venetian wits whom he despised. So Napoleon, who never ceased to have much in him of the semi-barbarian chief (and always looked like one when he was dressed in imperial robes), shrunk with morbid apprehension from the tongue of Madame De Staël, and wrote autograph notes to Fouché calling his attention to the placards and verses of the street-corners. There is something more than ludicrous in the spectacle of this rude soldier, with a million armed men under his command, and half Europe at his feet, sitting down in rage and affright to order Fouché to send a little woman over the frontiers lest she should say something about him for the drawing-rooms of Paris to laugh at.
Talleyrand—the Man with Six Heads. (Paris, 1817.)
In place of caricature, therefore, we have only allegorical "glory" in the fugitive pictures of his reign, few of which are worthy of remembrance.
English Gillray, on the other side of the Channel, made most ample amends. Modern caricature has not often equaled some of the best of Gillray's upon Napoleon. In 1806, when the conqueror had finally lost his head, dazzled and bewildered by his own victories, and was setting up new kingdoms with a facility which began to be amusing, Gillray produced his masterpiece of the "Great French Gingerbread Baker drawing out a New Batch of Kings." It is full of happy detail. Besides the central figure of Bonaparte himself drawing from the "New French Oven" a fresh batch of monarchs, we see Bishop Talleyrand kneading in the "Political Kneading-trough," into which Poland, Hanover, and Prussia have just been thrown. There is also the "Ash-hole for Broken Gingerbread," into which Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and broad-backed Holland have been swept. On a chest of drawers stand a number of "Dough Viceroys intended for the Next Batch," and the drawers are labeled "Kings and Queens," "Crowns and Sceptres," "Suns and Moons." Gillray burlesqued almost all the history of the gingerbread colossus from the Egyptian expedition onward, but he never surpassed the gayety and aptness of this picture, which was all the more effective in English eyes because gilt gingerbread made into figures of kings, queens, crowns, anchors, and princes' feathers, is a familiar object at English fairs.
Napoleon himself may have laughed at it. We know that at St. Helena he applauded English caricatures of a similar character, notably one which represented George III. as a corpulent old man standing on the English coast, hurling in fury a huge beet at the head of Napoleon on the other side of the Channel, and saying to him, "Go and make yourself some sugar!"[35] We know also that while he relished the satirical pictures aimed at his enemies and rivals, he was very far from enjoying those which reflected disagreeably upon himself. "If caricatures," said he one day at St. Helena, "sometimes avenge misfortune, they form a continual annoyance to power; and how many have been made upon me! I think I have had my share of them."
