The Vulture. (From La Ménagerie Impériale, 1871.)
The recent events in France, beginning with the outbreak of the war with Prussia, have elicited countless caricatures and series of caricatures. The downfall of the "Empire," as it was called, gave the caricaturists an opportunity of vengeance which they improved. A citizen of New York possesses a collection of one thousand satirical pictures published in Paris during the war and under the Commune. A people who submit to a despised usurper are not likely to be moderate or decent in the expression of their contempt when, at length, the tyrant is no longer to be feared. It was but natural that the French court should insult the remains of Louis XIV., to whom living it had paid honors all but divine; for it is only strength and valor that know how to be either magnanimous or dignified in the moment of deliverance. Many of the people of Paris, when they heard of the ridiculous termination near Sedan of the odious fiction called the Empire, behaved like boys just rid of a school-master whom they have long detested and obeyed. Of course they seized the chalk and covered all the blackboards with monstrous pictures of the tyrant. The flight of his wife soon after called forth many scandalous sketches similar to those which disgraced Paris when Marie Antoinette was in prison awaiting the execution of her husband and her own trial. Many of these burlesques, however, were fair and legitimate. The specimen given on the next page, entitled "Partant pour la Syrie," which appeared soon after the departure of Eugénie and her advisers, was a genuine hit. It was exhibited in every window, and sold wherever in France the victorious Germans were not. A member of the American legation, amidst the rushing tide of exciting events and topics, chanced to save a copy, from which it is here reduced.
Partant pour la Syrie. (Published in Paris after the Flight of Eugénie.)
Among the "albums" of siege sketches, we come upon one executed by the veterans Cham and Daumier, the same Henri Daumier whom Louis Philippe imprisoned, and Thackeray praised, forty years ago. In this collection we see Parisian ladies, in view of the expected bombardment, bundled up in huge bags of cotton, leading lap-dogs protected in the same manner. An ugly Prussian touches off a bomb aimed at the children in the Jardin du Luxembourg. King William decorates crutches and wooden legs as "New-year's presents for his people." An apothecary sells a plaster "warranted to prevent wounds, provided the wearer never leaves his house." A workman goes to church for the first time in his life, and gives as a reason for so unworkman-like a proceeding that "a man don't have to stand in line for the blessed bread." A volunteer goes on a sortie with a pillow under his waistcoat "to show the enemy that we have plenty of provisions." All these are by the festive Cham.
Daumier does not jest. He seems to have felt that Louis Napoleon, like a child-murderer, was a person far beneath caricature—a creature only fit to be destroyed and hurried out of sight and thought forever. Amidst the dreary horrors of the siege, Henri Daumier could only think of its mean and guilty cause. One of his few pictures in this collection is a row of four vaults, the first bearing the inscription, "Died on the Boulevard Montmartre, December 2d, 1851;" the second, "Died at Cayenne;" the third, "Died at Lambessa;" the fourth, "Died at Sedan, 1870." But even then Daumier, true to the vocation of a patriotic artist, dared to remind his countrymen that it was they who had reigned in the guise of the usurper. A wild female figure standing on a field of battle points with one hand to the dead, and with the other to a vase filled with ballots, on which is printed the word Oui. She cries, "These killed those!"
During the Commune the walls of Paris were again covered with drawings and lithographs of the character which Frenchmen produce after long periods of repression: Louis Napoleon crucified between the two thieves, Bismarck and King William; Thiers in the pillory covered and surrounded with opprobrious inscriptions; Thiers, Favre, and M'Mahon placidly looking down from a luxurious upper room upon a slain mother and child ghastly with blood and wounds; landlords, lean and hungry, begging for bread, while fat and rosy laborers bask idly in the sun; little boy Paris smashing his playthings (Trochu, Gambetta, and Rochefort) and crying for the moon; "Paris eating a general a day;" Queen Victoria in consternation trying to stamp out the horrid centipede, International, while "Monsieur John Boule, Esquire," stands near with the habeas-corpus act in his hand; naked France pressing Rochefort to her bosom; and hundreds more, describable and indescribable.