Mr. Thackeray, who was but nineteen when Louis Philippe came to the throne, witnessed much of the famous contest between this knot of caricaturists and the King of the French; and in one of the first articles which he wrote for subsistence, after his father's failure, he gave the world some account of it.[36] At a later period of his life he would probably not have regarded the king as the stronger party. He would probably not have described the contest as one between "half a dozen poor artists on the one side, and His Majesty Louis Philippe, his august family, and the numberless placemen and supporters of the monarchy, on the other." Half a dozen poor artists, with an unscrupulous publisher at their head, who gives them daily access to the eye and ear of a great capital, can array against the object of their satire and abuse the entire unthinking crowd of that capital. A firm, enlightened, and competent king would have united against these a majority of the responsible and the reflecting. Such a king would truly have been, as Mr. Thackeray observed, "an Ajax girded at by a Thersites." But Louis Philippe was no Ajax. He was no hero at all. He had no splendid and no commanding traits. He was merely an overfond father and well-disposed citizen of average talents. He was merely the kind of man which free communities can ordinarily get to serve them, and who will serve them passably well if the task be not made needlessly difficult. Hence Philipon and his "half a dozen poor artists" were very much the stronger party—a fact which the king, in the sight and hearing of all France, confessed and proclaimed by putting them in prison.
It was those prosecutions of Philipon that were fatal to the king. Besides adding emphasis, celebrity, and weight to the sallies of Le Charivari, they presaged the abandonment of the central principle of the movement that made him king—the freedom of utterance. The scenes in court when Philipon, or his artist, Daumier, was arraigned, were most damaging to the king's dignity. One, incorrectly related by Thackeray, may well serve to warn future potentates that of all conceivable expedients for the caricaturist's frustration, the one surest to fail is to summon him to a court of justice.
A favorite device of M. Philipon was to draw the king's face in the form of a huge pear, which it did somewhat resemble. Amateur draughtsmen also chalked the royal pear upon the walls of Paris; and the exaggerated pears with the king's features roughly outlined which everywhere met the eye excited the mocking laughter of the idle Parisian. No jest could have been so harmless if it had been unnoticed by the person at whom it was aimed, or noticed only with a smile. But the Government stooped to the imbecility of arraigning the author of the device. The poire actually became an object of prosecution, and the editor of Le Charivari was summoned before a jury on a charge of inciting to contempt against the person of the king by giving his face a ludicrous resemblance to one of the fruits of the earth. Philipon, when he rose to defend himself, exhibited to the jury a series of four sketches, upon which he commented. The first was a portrait of the king devoid of exaggeration or burlesque. "This sketch," said the draughtsman, "resembles Louis Philippe. Do you condemn it?" He then held up the second picture, which was also a very good portrait of the king; but in this one the toupet and the side-whiskers began to "flow together," as M. Champfleury has it (s'onduler), and the whole to assume a distant resemblance to the outline of a pear. "If you condemn the first sketch," said the imperturbable Philipon, "you must condemn this one which resembles it." He next showed a picture in which the pear was plainly manifest, though it bore an unmistakable likeness to the king. Finally, he held up to the court a figure of a large Burgundy pear, pure and simple, saying, "If you are consistent, gentlemen, you can not acquit this sketch either, for it certainly resembles the other three."
Mr. Thackeray was mistaken in supposing that this impudent defense carried conviction to the minds of the jury. Philipon was condemned and fined. He avenged himself by arranging the court and jury upon a page of Le Charivari in the form of a pear.[37] He and his artists played upon this theme hundreds of variations, until the Government found matter for a prosecution even in a picture of a monkey stealing a pear. The pear became at last too expensive a luxury for the conductor of Le Charivari, and that fruit was "exiled from the empire of caricature."
Before Louis Philippe had been three years upon the throne there was an end of all but the pretense of maintaining the freedom of press or pencil. "The Press," as Mr. Thackeray remarks, "was sent to prison; and as for poor dear Caricature, it was fairly murdered." In Le Charivari for August 30th, 1832, we read that Jean-Baptiste Daumier, for an equally harmless caricature of the king, was arrested in the very presence of his father and mother, of whom he was the sole support, and condemned to six months' imprisonment. It was Daumier, however, as M. Champfleury reveals, who had "served up the pear with the greatest variety of sauces." It was the same Daumier who after his release assailed the advocates and legal system of his country with ceaseless burlesque, and made many a covert lunge at the personage who moved them to the fatal absurdity of imprisoning him.
Driven by violence from the political field, to which it has been permitted to return only at long intervals and for short periods, French caricature has ranged over the scene of human foibles, and attained a varied development. Daumier and Philipon conjointly produced a series of sketches in Le Charivari which had signal and lasting success with the public. The play of "Robert Macaire," after running awhile, was suppressed by the Government, the actor of the principal part having used it as a vehicle of political burlesque. Le Charivari seized the idea of satirizing the follies of the day by means of two characters of the drama—Macaire, a cool, adroit, audacious villain, and Bertrand, his comrade, stupid, servile, and timid.
Robert Macaire fishing for Share-holders. (Daumier, 1833.)
Philipon supplying the words and Daumier executing the pictures, they made Macaire undertake every scheme, practice, and profession which contained the requisite ingredients of the comic and the rascally. The series extended beyond ninety sketches. Macaire founds a joint-stock charity—la morale en action, he explains to gaping Bertrand, each action (share) being placed at two hundred and fifty francs. He becomes a quack-doctor. "Don't trifle with your complaint," he says to a patient, as he gives him two bottles of medicine. "Come to see me often; it won't ruin you, for I make no charge for consultations. You owe me twenty francs for the two bottles." The patient appearing to be startled at the magnitude of this sum, Dr. Macaire blandly says, as he bows him out, "We give two cents for returned bottles." He becomes a private detective. A lady consults him in his office. "Sir," she says, "I have had a thousand-franc note stolen." "Precisely, madame. Consider the business done: the thief is a friend of mine." "But," says the lady, "can I get my note back, and find out who took it?" "Nothing easier. Give me fifteen hundred francs for my expenses, and to-morrow the thief will return the note and send you his card."