CHAPTER XVIII.

FRENCH CARICATURE.

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.

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."

[Footnote 35: "Napoleon at St. Helena," p. 90, by John S. C. Abbott, New York, Harper & Brothers.]

Even he did not care for caricature when he was right. If it can be said that Napoleon Bonaparte conferred upon France one lasting good, it was beet-root sugar; but the satire aimed at that useful article does not appear to have offended him. In a newspaper of June, 1812, we read: "A caricature has been executed at Paris, in which the emperor and the King of Rome are the most prominent characters. The emperor is represented as sitting at the table in the nursery with a cup of coffee before him, into which he is squeezing beet-root. Near to him is seated the young King of Rome, voraciously sucking the beet-root. The nurse, who is steadfastly observing him, is made to say, '_Suck, dear_, suck; your father _says_ it is sugar.'" He did not care, probably, for that. It would have been far otherwise if a draughtsman had touched upon his mad invasion of Russia.

It was not until his power was gone that French satirists tried their pencils upon him, and then with no great success. With the downfall of Napoleon was involved the prostration of France. Humiliation followed humiliation. The spirit of Frenchmen was broken, and their resources were exhausted. In the presence of such events as the Russian catastrophe, the march of the allies upon Paris, Napoleon's banishment to Elba, the Hundred Days, Waterloo, the encampment of foreign armies in the public places of Paris, the flight of the emperor, and his final exile, the satirist was superseded, and burlesque itself was outdone by reality. When at last Paris was restored to herself, and peace again gave play to the human mind, Napoleon was covered with the majesty of what seemed a sublime misfortune. That peerless histrionic genius took the precaution in critical moments to let the world know what character he was enacting, and accordingly, when he stepped on board the English man-of-war, he announced himself to mankind as Themistocles magnanimously seeking an asylum at the hands of the most powerful of his enemies.

The good ruler is he who leaves to his successor, if not an easy task, yet one not too difficult for respectable talents. Napoleon solved none of the menacing problems. He threw no light upon the difficulties with which the modern world finds itself face to face. Every year that he reigned he only heaped up perplexity for his successors, until the mountain mass transcended all human ability, and entailed upon Frenchmen that tumultuous apprenticeship in self-government which is yet far from ending.

The first effort of the caricaturists in Paris after the Restoration was simply to place the figure of a weather-cock after the names of public men who had shown particular alacrity in changing their politics with the changing dynasties. This was soon improved upon by putting weather-cocks enough to denote the precise number of times a personage had veered. Thus Talleyrand, who from being a bishop and a nobleman had become a republican, then a minister under Napoleon, and at last a supporter and servant of the Restoration, besides exhibiting various minor changes, was complimented with as many weather-cocks as the fancy of each writer suggested.

Six appears to have been the favorite number. We find in a previous picture that he is represented as the man with six heads. The public men signalized by this simple device were said to belong to the Order of the Weather-cock; and it was the interest of the reactionists, who urged on the trial and execution of Ney and his comrades, to cover them with odium. To this day much of that odium clings to the name of Talleyrand. A man who keeps a cool head in the midst of madmen is indeed a most offensive person, and Talleyrand committed this enormity more than once in his life. So far as we can yet discern, the only "treason" he ever practiced toward the governments with which he was connected consisted in giving them better advice than they were capable of acting upon. The few words which he uttered on leaving the council-chamber, after vainly advising Marie Louise to remain in her husband's abode and maintain the moral dignity of his administration, show how well he understood the collapse of the "empire" and its cause: "It is difficult to comprehend such weakness in such a man as the emperor. What a fall is his! _To give his name to a series of adventures, instead of bestowing it upon his century!_ When I think of that, I can not help groaning." Then he added the words which gave him his high place in the Order of the Weather-cock: "But now what part to take? It does not suit every body to let himself be overwhelmed in the ruins of this edifice." Particularly it did not suit M. de Talleyrand, and he was not overwhelmed, accordingly. Considering the manner in which France was governed during his career, he might well say, "I have not betrayed governments: governments have betrayed me."

It is mentioned by M. Champfleury as a thing unprecedented that this weather-cock device did not wholly lose its power to amuse the Parisians for two years. The portly person and ancient court of the king, Louis XVIII., called forth many caricatures at a later period. This king was as good-natured, as well-intentioned, as honorable a Bourbon as could have been found in either hemisphere. It was not he who enriched all languages by the gift of his family name. It was not his obstinate adherence to ancient folly which caused it to be said that the Bourbons had forgotten nothing and learned nothing. Born as long before his accession as 1755, he was an accomplished and popular prince of mature age during the American Revolution and the intellectual ferment which followed it in France. A respectable scholar (for a prince), well versed in literature (for a prince), a good judge of art (for a prince), of liberal politics (for a prince), and not so hopelessly ignorant of state affairs as kings and princes usually were, he watched the progress of the Revolution with some intelligence and, at first, with some sympathy. Both then and in 1815 he appears to have been intelligently willing to accept a constitution that should have left his family on the throne by right divine.

Right divine was his religion, to which he sacrificed much, and, unquestionably, would have sacrificed his life. When he was living in exile upon the bounty of the Emperor of Russia, he said to his nephew, on the wedding-day of that young Bourbon: "If the crown of France were of roses, I would give it to you. It is of thorns; I keep it." And, indeed, a turn in politics expelled him soon after, in the middle of winter, from his abode, and made him again a dependent wanderer. In 1803, too, when there could be descried no ray of hope of the restoration of the old dynasty, and Napoleon, apparently lord of the world, offered him a principality in landed wealth if he would but formally renounce the throne, he replied in a manner which a believer in divine right might think sublime:

"I do not confound M. Bonaparte with those who have preceded him. His valor, his military talents, I esteem; and I am even grateful to him for several measures of his administration, since good done to my people will ever be dear to my heart. But if he thinks to engage me to compromise my rights, he deceives himself. On the contrary, by the very offer he now makes me he would establish them if they could be thought of as doubtful. I do not know what are the designs of God with regard to my house and myself, but I know the obligations imposed upon me by the rank in which it was his pleasure to cause me to be born. A Christian, I shall fulfill those obligations even to my latest breath; a son of St. Louis, I shall know, taught by his example, how even in chains to respect myself; a successor of Francis I., I desire at least to be able to say, like him, 'All is lost but honor!'"

Again, in 1814, when the Emperor Alexander of Russia urged him to concede so much to the popular feeling as to call himself King of the _French_, and to omit from his style the words "_par la grâce de Dieu_" he answered: "Divine right is at once a consequence of religious dogma and the law of the country. By that law for eight centuries the monarchy has been hereditary in my family. Without divine right I am but an infirm old man, long an exile from my country, and reduced to beg an asylum. But by that right, the exile is King of France."

He wrote and said these "neat things" himself, not by a secretary. Among his happy sayings two have remained in the memory of Frenchmen: "Punctuality is the politeness of kings," and "Every French soldier carries a marshal's baton in his knapsack." He was, in short, a genial, witty, polite old gentleman, willing to govern France constitutionally, disposed to forget and forgive, and be the good king of the whole people. But he was sixty years of age, fond of his ease, and extremely desirous, as he often said, of dying in his own bed. He was surrounded by elderly persons who were bigoted to a Past which could not be resuscitated; and his brother, heir presumptive to the throne, was that fatal Comte d'Artois (Charles X.) who aggravated the violence of the Revolution of 1789, and precipitated that of 1830, by his total incapacity to comprehend either. Gradually the gloomy party of reaction and revenge who surrounded the heir presumptive gained the ascendency, and the good-natured old king could only restrain its extravagance enough to accomplish his desire of dying in his own house. Sincerely religious, he was no bigot; and it was not by his wish that the court assumed more and more the sombre aspect of a Jesuit seminary. It is doubtful if there would have been one exception to the amnesty of political offenses if Louis XVIII. had been as firm as he was kind. The reader sees a proof of his good-nature in the picture on the preceding page of Prince Cambacérès, who was Second Consul when Napoleon was First Consul, and Arch-chancellor under the Empire, peacefully walking in the streets of Paris with two of his friends. This caricature has a value in preserving an excellent portrait of a personage noted for twenty years in the history of France.

To the Order of the Weather-cock succeeded, in 1819, when priestly ascendency at court was but too manifest, the Family of the Extinguishers. In the picture given below, the reader has the pleasure of viewing some of the family portraits, and in another he sees members of the family at work, rekindling the fire and extinguishing the lights. The fire was to consume the charter of French liberty and the records of science; the lights are the men to whom France felt herself indebted for liberty and knowledge--Buffon, Franklin, D'Alembert, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Montaigne, Fénélon, Condorcet, and their friends. Above is the personified Church, with sword uplifted, menacing mankind with new St. Bartholomews and Sicilian Vespers. Underneath this elaborate and ingenious work was the refrain of Béranger's song of 1819, entitled "Les Missionnaires," which was almost enough of itself to expel the Bourbons:

"Vite soufflons, soufflons, morbleu! Éteignons les lumières Et rallumons le feu."

The historian of that period will not omit to examine the songs which the incomparable Béranger wrote during the reign of the two kings of the Restoration. "Le peuple, c'est ma Muse," the poet wrote many years after, when reviewing this period. The people were his Muse. He studied the people, he adds, "with religious care," and always found their deepest convictions in harmony with his own. He had been completely fascinated by the "genius of Napoleon," never suspecting that it was Napoleon's lamentable _want_ of ability which had devolved upon the respectable Louis XVIII. an impossible task. But he perceived that the task _was_ impossible. There were two impossibilities, he thought, in the way of a stable government. It was impossible for the Bourbons, while they remained Bourbons, to govern France, and it was impossible for France to make them any thing but Bourbons. Hence, in lending his exquisite gift to the popular cause, he had no scruples and no reserves; and he freely poured forth those wonderful songs which became immediately part and parcel of the familiar speech of his countrymen. Alas for a Bourbon when there is a Béranger loose in his capital! Charles X. attempted the Bourbon policy of repression, and had the poet twice imprisoned. But he could not imprison his songs, nor prevent his writing new ones in prison, which sung themselves over France in a week. Caricature, too, was severely repressed--the usual precursor of collapse in a French government.

The end of the Restoration, in 1830, occurred with a sudden and spontaneous facility, which showed, among other things, how effectively Béranger had sung from his garret and his prison. The old king in 1824 had his wish of dying in his own bed, and is said to have told his successor, with his dying breath, that he owed this privilege to the policy of tacking ship rather than allowing a contrary wind to drive her upon the rocks. He advised "Monsieur" to pursue the same "tacking policy." But Monsieur was Comte d'Artois, that entire and perfect Bourbon, crusted by his sixty-seven years, a willing victim in the hands of Jesuit priests. In six years the ship of state was evidently driving full upon the rocks; but, instead of tacking, he put on all sail, and let her drive. At a moment when France was in the last extremity of alarm for the portion of liberty which her constitution secured her, this unhappy king signed a decree which put the press under the control of the Minister of Police, and the rest of the people of France under Marshal Marmont. Twenty-one days after, August 16th, 1830, the king and his suite were received on board of two American vessels, the _Charles Carroll_ and the _Great Britain_, by which they were conveyed from Cherbourg to Portsmouth. "This," said the king to his first English visitors, "is the reward of my efforts to render France happy. I wished to make one last attempt to restore order and tranquillity. The factions have overturned me." The old gentleman resumed his daily mass, and found much consolation for the loss of a crown in the slaughter of beasts and birds. Louis Philippe was King of the _French_, by the grace of Lafayette and the acquiescence of a majority of the French people.

Caricature, almost interdicted during the last years of the Restoration, pursued the fugitive king and his family with avenging ridicule. Gavarni, then an unknown artist of twenty-six, employed by Émile de Girardin to draw the fashion plates of his new periodical, _La Mode_, gave Paris, in those wild July days of 1830, the only political caricatures he ever published. One represented the king as an old-clothes man, bawling, "Old coats! old lace!" In another he appeared astride of a lance, in full flight, in a costume composed of a priest's black robe and the glittering uniform of a general; white bands at his neck, the broad red ribbon of the Legion of Honor across his breast, one arm loaded with mitres, relics, and chaplets, with the scissors of the censer on the thumb, on the other side the end of a sabre, and the meagre legs encompassed by a pair of huge jack-boots. Another picture, called the "Lost Balloon," exhibited the king in the car of a balloon, with the same preposterous boots hanging down, along with the Duc d'Angoulême clinging to the sides, and the duchess crushing the king by her weight. The royal banner, white, and sown with fleurs-de-lis, streamed out behind as the balloon disappeared in the clouds.

These were the only political caricatures ever published by the man whom Frenchmen regard as the greatest of their recent satirical artists. He cared nothing for politics, and had the usual attachment of artists and poets to the Established Order. Having aimed these light shafts at the flying king in mere gayety of heart, because every one else was doing the same, he soon remembered that the king was an old man, past seventy-three, as old as his own father, and flying in alarm from his home and country. He was conscience-stricken. Reading aloud one day a poem in which allusion was made to a white-haired old man going into exile with slow, reluctant steps, his voice broke, and he could scarcely utter the lines:

"Pas d'outrage au vieillard qui s'exile à pas lents. C'est une piété d'épargner les ruines. Je n'enfoncerai pas la couronne d'épines Que la main du malheur met sur ses cheveux blancs."

As he spoke these words the image of his old father rose vividly before his mind, and he could read no more. "I felt," said he, "as if I had been struck in the face;" and ever after he held political caricature in horror.

This feeling is one with which the reader will often find himself sympathizing while examining some of the heartless and thoughtless pictures which exasperated the elderly paterfamilias who was now called to preside over demoralized France. Louis Philippe was another good-natured Louis XVIII., _minus_ divine right, _plus_ a large family. With all the domestic virtues, somewhat too anxious to push his children on in the world, a good citizen, a good patriot, an unostentatious gentleman, he was totally destitute of those picturesque and captivating qualities which adventurers and banditti often possess, but which wise and trustworthy men seldom do. In looking back now upon that eighteen years' struggle between this respectable father of a family and anarchy, it seems as if France should have rallied more loyally and more considerately round him, and given him too the privilege, so dear to elderly gentlemen, of dying in his own bed. One-tenth of his virtue and one-half his intellect had sufficed under the old _régime_.

But since that lamentable and fatal day when the priests wrought upon Louis XIV. to decree the expulsion of the Huguenots, who were the _élite_ of his kingdom, France had been undergoing a course of political demoralization, which had made a constitutional government of the country almost impossible. Recent events had exaggerated the criminal class. Twenty years of intoxicating victory had made all moderate success, all gradual prosperity, seem tame and flat; and the reduction of the army had set afloat great numbers of people indisposed to peaceful industry. Under the Restoration, we may almost say, political conspiracy had become a recognized profession. The new king, pledged to make the freedom of the press "a reality," soon found himself face to face with difficulties which Bourbons had invariably met by mere repression. Republicans and Legitimists were equally dissatisfied. Legitimists could only wait and plot; but Republicans could write, speak, and draw. A considerable proportion of the young, irresponsible, and adventurous talent was republican, and there was a great deal of Bohemian character available for that side. It was a time when a Louis Napoleon could belong to a democratic club.

Caricature speedily marked the "citizen king" for her own. Napoleon had employed all his subtlest tact during the last ten years of his reign in keeping alive in French minds the base feudal feeling, so congenial to human indolence and vanity, that it is nobler to be a soldier than to rear a family and keep a shop. In his bulletins we find this false sentiment adroitly insinuated in a hundred ways. He loved to stigmatize the English as a nation of shop-keepers. He displayed infinite art in exalting the qualities which render men willing to destroy one another without asking why, and in casting contempt on the arts and virtues by which the waste of war is repaired. The homely habits, the plain dress, the methodical ways, of Louis Philippe were, therefore, easily made to seem ridiculous. He was styled the first _bourgeois_ of his kingdom--as he was--but the French people had been taught to regard the word as a term of contempt.

Unfortunately he abandoned the policy of letting the caricaturists alone. Several French rulers have adopted the principle of not regarding satire, but not one has had the courage to adhere to it long. Sooner or later all the world will come into the "American system," and all the world will at length discover the utter impotence of the keenest ridicule and the most persistent abuse against public men who do right and let their assailants alone. The chief harm done by the abuse of public men in free countries is in making it too difficult to expose their real faults. How would it be possible, for example, to make the people of the United States believe ill of a President in vilifying whom ingenious men and powerful journals had exhausted themselves daily for years? Nothing short of _testimony_, abundant and indisputable, such as would convince an honest jury, could procure serious attention. From President Washington to President Grant the history of American politics is one continuous proof of Mr. Jefferson's remark, that "an administration which has nothing to conceal has nothing to fear from the press."

When Louis Philippe had been a year upon the throne appeared the first number of _Le Charivari_, a daily paper of four small pages, conducted by an unknown, inferior artist--Charles Philipon. Around him gathered a number of Bohemian draughtsmen and writers, not one of whom appears then to have shared in the social or political life of the country, or to have had the faintest conception of the consideration due to a fellow-citizen in a place of such extreme difficulty as the head of a government. They assailed the king, his person, his policy, his family, his habits, his history, with thoughtless and merciless ridicule. A periodical which has undertaken to supply a cloyed, fastidious public with three hundred and sixty-five ludicrous pictures per annum must often be in desperation for subjects, and there was no resource to Philipon so obvious or so sure as the helpless family imprisoned in the splendors and etiquette of royalty. Unfortunately for modern governments, the people of Europe were for so many centuries preyed upon and oppressed by kings that vast numbers of people, even in free countries, still regard the head of a government as a kind of natural enemy, to assail whom is among the rights of a citizen. And, moreover, the king, the president, the minister, is unseen by those who hurl the barbed and poisoned javelin. They do not see him shrink and writhe. To many an anonymous coward it is a potent consideration, also, that the head of a constitutional government can not usually strike back.

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.

[Footnote 36: In the _London and Westminster Review_ for April, 1839, Article II.]

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."

[Footnote 37: "Histoire de la Caricature Moderne," p. 100, par Champfleury.]

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.

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."

Every resource being exhausted, Macaire astounds the despairing Bertrand by saying, "Come, the time for mundane things is past; let us attend now to eternal interests. Suppose we found a religion?" "A religion!" cries Bertrand; "that is not so easy." To this Macaire replies by alluding to the recent proceedings of a certain Abbé Châtel, in Paris. "One makes a pontiff of himself, hires a shop, borrows some chairs, preaches sermons upon the death of Napoleon, upon Voltaire, upon the discovery of America, upon any thing, no matter what. There's a religion for you; it's no more difficult than that." On one occasion Macaire himself is a little troubled in mind, and Bertrand remarks the unusual circumstance. "You seem anxious," says Bertrand. "Yes," replies Macaire, "I _am_ in bad humor. Those scoundrels of bond-holders have bothered me to such a point that I have actually paid them a dividend!" "What!" exclaims Bertrand, aghast, "a _bona-fide_ dividend?" "Yes, positively." "What are you going to do about it?" "I am going to get it back again."

The reader will, of course, infer that each of these pictures was a hit at some scoundrelly exploit of the day, the public knowledge of which gave effect to the caricature. In many instances the event is forgotten, but the picture retains a portion of its interest. One of Macaire's professions was that of cramming students for their bachelor's degree. A student enters. "There are two ways in which we can put you through," says Macaire: "one, to make you pass your examination by a substitute; the other, to enable you to pass it yourself." "I prefer to pass it myself," says the young man. "Very well. Do you know Greek?" "No." "Latin?" "No." "All right. You know mathematics?" "Not the least in the world." "What do you know, then?" "Nothing at all." "But you have two hundred francs?" "Certainly." "Just the thing! You will get your degree next Thursday." We may find comfort in this series, for we learn from it that in every infamy which we now deplore among ourselves we were anticipated by the French forty years ago. Macaire even goes into the mining business, at least so far as to sell shares. "We have made our million," says the melancholy Bertrand; "but we have engaged to produce gold, and we find nothing but sand." "No matter; utilize your capital; haven't you got a gold mine?" "Yes--but afterward?" "Afterward you will simply say to the share-holders, 'I was mistaken; we must try again.' You will then form a company for the utilization of the sand." Bertrand, still anxious, ventures to remark that there _are_ such people as policemen in the country. "Policemen!" cries Macaire, gayly. "So much the better: they will take shares." One of his circular letters was a masterpiece:

"SIR,--I regret to say that your application for shares in the Consolidated European Incombustible Blacking Association can not be complied with, as all the shares of the C. E. I. B. A. were disposed of on the day they were issued. I have nevertheless registered your name, and in case a second series should be put forth I shall have the honor of immediately giving you notice.

"I am, sir, etc. ROBERT MACAIRE, Director."

"Print three hundred thousand of these," says the director, "and poison all France with them." "But," says Bertrand, "we haven't sold a single share; you haven't a sou in your pocket, and--" "Bertrand, you are an ass. Do as I tell you."

Thus, week after week, for many a month, did _Le Charivari_ "utilize" these impossible characters to expose and satirize the plausible scoundrelism of the period. Mr. Thackeray, who ought to be an excellent authority on any point of satirical art, praises highly the execution of these pictures by M. Daumier. They seem carelessly done, he remarks; but it is the careless grace of the consummate artist. He recommends the illustrator of "Pickwick" to study Daumier. When we remember that Thackeray had offered to illustrate "Pickwick," his comments upon the artist who was preferred to himself have a certain interest: "If we might venture to give a word of advice to another humorous designer [Hablot K. Browne], whose works are extensively circulated, the illustrator of 'Pickwick' and 'Nicholas Nickleby,' it would be to study well those caricatures of M. Daumier, who, though he executes very carelessly, knows very well what he would express, indicates perfectly the attitude and identity of the figure, and is quite aware beforehand of the effect he intends to produce. The one we should fancy to be a practiced artist taking his ease, the other a young one somewhat bewildered--a very clever one, however, who, if he would think more and exaggerate less, would add not a little to his reputation." Possessors of the early editions of "Pickwick" will be tempted to think that in this criticism of Mr. Browne's performances by a disappointed rival there was an ingredient of wounded self-love. The young author, however, in another passage, gave presage of the coming Thackeray. He observes that in France ladies in difficulties who write begging letters, or live by other forms of polite beggary, are wont to style themselves "widows of the Grand Army." They all pretended to some connection with _le Grand Homme_, and all their husbands were colonels. "This title," says the wicked Thackeray, "answers exactly to the clergyman's daughter in England;" and he adds, "The difference is curious as indicating the standard of respectability."

Many caricaturists who afterward attained celebrity were early contributors to M. Philipon's much-prosecuted periodical. Among them was "the elegant Gavarni," who for thirty years was the favorite comic artist of Paris _roués_ and dandies--himself a _roué_ and dandy. At this period, according to his friend, Théophile Gautier, he was a very handsome young man, with luxuriant blonde curls, always fashionably attired, somewhat in the English taste, neat, quiet, and precise, and "possessing in a high degree the feeling for modern elegances." He was of a slender form, which seemed laced in, and he had the air of being carefully dressed and thoroughly appointed, his feet being effeminately small and daintily clad. In short, he was a dandy of the D'Orsay and N. P. Willis period. For many years he expended the chief force of his truly exquisite talent in investing vice with a charm which in real life it never possesses. Loose women, who are, as a class, very stupid, very vulgar, most greedy of gain and pleasure, and totally devoid of every kind of interesting quality, he endowed with a grace and wit, a fertility of resource, an airy elegance of demeanor, never found except in honorable women reared in honorable homes. He was the great master of that deadly school of French satiric art which finds all virtuous life clumsy or ridiculous, and all abominable life graceful and pleasing.

Albums of this kind are extant in which married men are _invariably_ represented as objects of contemptuous pity, and no man is graceful or interesting except the sneaking scoundrel who has designs upon the integrity of a household. Open the "Musée pour Rire," for example. Here is a little family of husband, wife, and year-old child in bed, just awake in the morning, the wife caressing the child, and the husband looking on with admiring fondness. This scene is rendered ridiculous by the simple expedient of making the wife and child hideously ugly, and the fond father half an idiot. Another picture shows the same child, with a head consisting chiefly of mouth, yelling in the middle of the night, while the parents look on, imbecile and helpless. Turn to the sketches of the masked ball or the midnight carouse, and all is elegant, becoming, and delightful. If the French caricatures of the last thirty years do really represent French social life and French moral feeling, we may safely predict that in another generation France will be a German province; for men capable of maintaining the independence of a nation can not be produced on the Gavarnian principles.

Marriage and civilization we might almost call synonymous terms. Marriage was at least the greatest conquest made by primitive man over himself, and the indispensable preliminary to a higher civilization. Nor has any mode yet been discovered of rearing full-formed and efficient men capable of self-control, patriotism, and high principle, except the union of both parents striving for that end with cordial resolution longer than an average life-time. It is upon this most sacred of all institutions that the French caricaturists of the Gavarni school pour ceaseless scorn and contempt. As I write these lines, my eyes fall upon one of the last numbers of a comic sheet published in Paris, on the first page of which there is a picture which illustrates this propensity. A dissolute-looking woman, smoking a cigarette, is conversing with a boy in buttons who has applied for a place in her household. "How old are you?" she asks. "Eleven, madame." "And your name?" "Joseph!" Upon this innocent reply the woman makes a comment which is truly comic, but very Gavarnian: "So young, and already he calls himself Joseph!"

Among the heaps of albums to be found in a French collection we turn with particular curiosity to those which satirize the child life of France. Gavarni's celebrated series of "Enfants Terribles" has gone round the world, and called forth child satire in many lands. The presence of children in his pictures does not long divert this artist from his ruling theme. One of his terrible children, a boy of four, prattles innocently to his mother in this strain: "Nurse is going to get up very early, now that you have come home, mamma. Goodness! while you were in the country she always had her breakfast in bed, and it was papa who took in the milk and lighted the fire. But wasn't the coffee jolly sweet, though!" Another alarming boy of the same age, who is climbing up his father's chair and wearing his father's hat, all so merry and innocent, discourses thus to the petrified author of his being: "Who is Mr. Albert? Oh, he is a gentleman belonging to the Jardin des Plantes, who comes every day to explain the animals to mamma; a large man with mustaches, whom you don't know. He didn't come to-day until after they had shut up the monkeys. You ought to have seen how nicely mamma entertained him. Oh dear!" (discovering a bald place on papa's pate) "you have hardly any hair upon the top of your head, papa!" In a third picture both parents are exhibited seated side by side upon a sofa, and the terrible boy addresses his mother thus: "Mamma, isn't that little mustache comb which Cornelia found in your bedroom this morning for me?" Another sketch shows us father, mother, and terrible boy taking a walk in the streets of Paris. A dandy, in the likeness of Gavarni himself, goes by, with his cane in his mouth, and his face fixed so as to seem not to see them. But the boy sees _him_, and bawls to his mother: "Mamma! mamma! that Monsieur du Luxembourg!--you know him--the one you said was such a great friend to papa--he has gone by without saluting! I suppose the reason is, he don't know how to behave." Another picture presents to view a little girl seated on a garden bench eating nuts, and talking to a young man: "The rose which you gave to mamma?" "Yes, yes." "The one you nearly broke your neck in getting? Let me see. Oh, my cousin Nat stuck it in the tail of Matthew's donkey. How mamma did laugh! Got any more nuts?" The same appalling girl imparts a family secret to her tutor: "Mamma wrote to M. Prosper, and papa read the letter. Oh, wasn't papa angry, though! And all because she had spelled a word wrong." A mother hearing a little girl say the catechism is a subject which one would suppose was not available for the purposes of a Gavarni, but he finds even that suggestive. "Come, now, pay attention. What must we do when we have sinned [_péché_]?" To which the terrible child replies, playing unconsciously upon the word _péché_ (sinned), which does not differ in sound from _pêché_ (fished), "When we have _pêché_? Wait a moment. Oh! we go back to the White House with all the fish in the basket, which my nurse eats with Landerneau. He is a big soldier who has white marks upon his sleeve. And I eat _my_ share, let me tell you!"

It is thus that the first caricaturist of France "utilized" the innocence of childhood when Louis Philippe was King of the French.

There is a later series by Randon, entitled "Messieurs nos Fils et Mesdemoiselles nos Filles," which exhibits other varieties of French childhood, some of which are inconceivable to persons not of the "Latin race." It has been said that in America there are no longer any children; but nowhere among us are there young human beings who could suggest even the burlesque of precocity such as M. Randon presents to us. We have no boys of ten who go privately to the hero of a billiard "tournament" and request him with the politest gravity, cap in hand, to "put him up to some points of the game for his exclusive use." We have no boys of eight who stand with folded arms before a sobbing girl of seven and address her in words like these: "Be reasonable, then, Amelia. The devil! People can't be always loving one another." We have no errand-boys of eight who offer their services to a young gentleman thus: "For delivering a note on the sly, or getting a bouquet into the right hands, monsieur can trust to me. I am used to little affairs of that kind, and I am as silent as the tomb." We have no little boys in belt and apron who say to a bearded veteran of half a dozen wars: "You don't know your happiness. For my part, give me a beard as long as yours, and not a woman in the world should resist me!" We have no little boys who in the midst of a fight with fists, one having a black eye and the other a bloody nose, would pause to say: "At least we don't fight for money, like the English. It is for glory that _we_ fight." We have no little boys who, on starting for a ride, wave aside the admonitions of the groom by telling him that they know all about managing a horse, and what they want of him is simply to tell them where in the _Bois_ they will be likely to meet most "Amazons." No, nor in all the length and breadth of English-speaking lands can there be found a small boy who, on being lectured by his father, would place one hand upon his heart, and lift the other on high, and say, "Papa, by all that I hold dearest, by my honor, by your ashes, by any thing you like, I swear to change my conduct!" All these things are so remote from our habits that the wildest artist could not conceive of them as passable caricature.

The opprobrious words in use among French boys would not strike the boys of New York or London as being very exasperating. M. Randon gives us an imaginary conversation between a very small trumpeter in gorgeous uniform and a _gamin_ of the street. Literally translated, it would read thus: "Look out, little fly, or you will get yourself crushed." To which the street boy replies, "Descend, then, species of toad: I will make you see what a little fly is!" On the other hand, if we may believe M. Randon, French boys of a very tender age consider themselves subject to the code of honor, and hold themselves in readiness to accept a challenge to mortal combat. A soldier of ten years appears in one of this series with his arm in a sling, and he explains the circumstance to his military comrade of the same age: "It's all a sham, my dear. I'll tell you the reason in strict confidence: it is to make a certain person of my acquaintance believe that I have fought for her." The boys of France, it is evident, are nothing if not military. Most of the young veterans _blasés_ exhibited in these albums are in uniform.

An interesting relic of those years when Frenchmen still enjoyed some semblance of liberty to discuss subjects of national and European concern is Gavarni's series of masterly sketches burlesquing the very idea of private citizens taking an interest in public affairs. This is accomplished by the device of giving to all the men who are talking politics countenances of comic stupidity. An idiot in a blouse says to an idiot in a coat, "Poland, don't you see, will never forgive your ingratitude!" An idiot in a night-cap says to an idiot bare-headed, with ludicrous intensity, "And when you have taken Lombardy, then what?" Nothing can exceed the skill of the draughtsman of this series, except the perversity of the man, to whom no human activity seemed becoming unless its object was the lowest form of sensual pleasure. But the talent which he displayed in this album was immense. It was, if I may say so, _frightful_; for there is nothing in our modern life so alarming as the power which reckless and dissolute talent has to make virtuous life seem provincial and ridiculous, vicious life graceful and metropolitan.