CHAPTER XIX.

LATER FRENCH CARICATURE.

During the twenty years of Louis Napoleon, political caricature being extinguished, France was inundated with diluted Gavarni. Any wretch who drew or wrote for the penny almanacs, sweltering in his Mansard on a franc a day, could produce a certain effect by representing the elegant life of his country, of which he knew nothing, to be corrupt and sensual. Pick up one of these precious works blindfold, open it at random, and you will be almost certain to light upon some penny-a-line calumny of French existence, with a suitable picture annexed. I have just done so. The "Almanach Comique" for 1869, its twenty-eighth year, lies open before me at the page devoted to the month of August. My eye falls upon a picture of a loosely dressed woman gazing fondly upon a large full purse suspended upon the end of a walking-stick, and underneath are the words, "_Elle ne tarde pas à se réapprivoiser._" She does not delay to _retame_ herself, the verb being the one applied to wild beasts. There is even a subtle deviltry in the syllable _ré_, implying that she has rebelled against her destiny, but is easily enough brought to terms by a bribe. The reading matter for the month consists of the following brief essay, entitled "August--the Virgin:" "How to go for a month to the sea-shore during the worst of the dog-days. Hire a chalet at Cabourg for madame, and a cottage on the beach of Trouville for _mademoiselle_. The transit between those two places is accomplished per omnibus in an hour. That is very convenient. Breakfast with Mademoiselle; dine with Madame. This double existence is very expensive, but _as it is the most common_, we are compelled to examine it in order to establish a basis for the expenditures of the twelve months." Is it not obvious that this was "evolved?" Does it not smell of a garlicky Mansard? And have not all modern communities a common interest in discrediting anonymous calumny? It were as unjust, doubtless, to judge the frugal people of France by the comic annuals as the good-natured people of England by the _Saturday Review_.

It is evident, too, that the French have a totally different conception from ourselves of what is fit and unfit to be uttered. They ridicule our squeamishness; we stand amazed at their indelicacy. Voltaire, who could read his "Pucelle" to the Queen of Prussia, her young daughter being also present and seen to be listening, was astounded in London at the monstrous indecency of "Othello;" and English people of the same generation were aghast at the license of the Parisian stage. M. Marcelin, a popular French caricaturist of to-day, dedicates an album containing thirty pictures of what he styles _Un certain Monde_ to his mother! We must not judge the productions of such a people by standards drawn from other than "Latin" sources.

Among the comic artists who began their career in Louis Philippe's time, under the inspiration of Philipon and Daumier, was a son of the Comte de Noé, or, as we might express it, Count Noah, a peer of France when there were peers of France. Amédée de Noé, catching the spirit of caricature while he was still a boy (he was but thirteen when _Le Charivavi_ was started), soon made his pseudonym, Cham, familiar to Paris. Cham being French for Shem, it was a happy way of designating a son of Count Noah. From that time to the present hour Cham has continued to amuse his countrymen, pouring forth torrents of sketches, which usually have the merit of being harmless, and are generally good enough to call up a smile upon a face not too stiffly wrinkled with the cares of life. He is almost as prolific of comic ideas as George Cruikshank, but his pictures are now too rudely executed to serve any but the most momentary purpose. When a comic album containing sixty-one pictures by Cham is sold in Paris for about twelve cents of our currency, the artist can not bestow much time or pains upon his work. The comic almanac quoted above, containing one hundred and eighty-three pages and seventy pictures, costs the retail purchaser ten cents.

Gustave Doré, now so renowned, came from Strasburg to Paris in 1845, a boy of thirteen, and made his first essays in art, three years after, as a caricaturist in the _Journal pour Rire_. But while he scratched trash for his dinner, he reserved his better hours for the serious pursuit of art, which, in just ten years, delivered him from a vocation in which he could never have taken pleasure. His great subsequent celebrity has caused the publication of several volumes of his comic work. It abounds in striking ideas, but the pictures were executed with headlong haste, to gratify a transient public feeling, and keep the artist's pot boiling. His series exhibiting the Different Publics of Paris is full of pregnant suggestions, and there are happy thoughts even in his "Histoire de la Sainte Russie," a series published during the Crimean war, though most of the work is crude and hasty beyond belief.

In looking over the volumes of recent French caricature, we discover that a considerable number of English words have become domesticated in France. France having given us the words of the theatre and the restaurant, has adopted in return several English words relating to out-of-door exercises: Turf, ring, steeple-chase, box (in a stable), jockey, jockey-club, betting, betting-book, handicap, race, racer, four-in-hand, mail-coach, sport, tilbury, dog-cart, tandem, pickpocket, and revolver. Rosbif, bifstek, and "choppe" have long been familiar. "Milord" is no longer exclusively used to designate a sumptuous Englishman, but is applied to any one who expends money ostentatiously. Gentleman, dandy, dandyism, flirt, flirtation, puff, cockney, and cocktail are words that would be recognized by most Parisians. A French writer quotes the phrase "hero of two hemispheres," applied to Lafayette, as a specimen of the "_puff_" superlative. "Othello" has become synonymous with "jealous man;" and the sentence, "That is the question," from "Hamlet," seems to have acquired currency in France. Cab, abbreviated a century ago from the French (cabriolet), has been brought back to Paris, like the head of a fugitive decapitated in exile.

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.

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.

It remains to give a specimen of recent French caricature of another kind. Once more, after so many proofs of its impolicy, the Government of France attempts to suppress such political caricature as is not agreeable to it, while freely permitting the publication of pictures flagrantly indecent. At no former period, not even in Voltaire's time, could the French press have been more carefully hedged about with laws tending to destroy its power to do good, and increase its power to do harm. The Government treats the press very much after the manner of those astute parents who forbid their children to see a comedy of Robertson or a play of Shakspeare, but make it up to them by giving them tickets to the variety show. A writer familiar with the subject gives us some astounding details:

"There exist at present," he remarks, "sixty-eight laws in France, all intended to suppress, curtail, weaken, emasculate, and even to strangle newspapers; but not one single law to foster them in their dire misfortune. If any private French gentleman wishes to establish a newspaper, he must first write to the Préfet de Police, on paper of a certain size and duly stamped, and give this functionary notice that he intends to establish a newspaper. His signature has, of course, to be countersigned by the Maire. But if the paper our friend wishes to establish is purely literary, he has first to make his declaration to the police, who rake up every information that is possible about the unfortunate projector. After that, the Ministère de l'Intérieur institutes another searching inquiry, and these two take seven or eight months at least. When the _enquête_ and the _contre-enquête_ are ended, the _avis favorable_ of the whole Ministry is necessary before the paper can be published. Another six months to wait yet; but this is not all. Our would-be newspaper proprietor or editor possesses now the right of publishing his paper; but he has not yet the right to sell it. In order to obtain this, he must begin anew all his declarations and attempts, so that his purely literary paper may be sold at all the ordinary book-sellers' shops. But if he wishes it to be sold in the streets--or, in other words, in the kiosques--he must address himself to another office _ad hoc_, and then the Commissaire de Police sends the answer of the Préfet de Police to the unfortunate proprietor, editor, or publisher, who by this time must be nearly at his wits' end.

But even this is not all. If the unhappy projector proposes to illustrate his paper, his labors are still far from ending. "He must," continues the writer, "obtain, of course, the permission of the Ministère de l'Intérieur for Paris, or of the prefects for the provinces. The Ministère asks for the opinion of the Governor of Paris, who asks, in his turn, for the opinion of the Bureau de Censure, a body of gentlemen working in the dark, and which, to the eye of the obtuse foreigner, appears only established to prevent any political insinuations to be made, but to allow the filthiest drawings to be publicly exposed for sale, and the most indecent innuendoes to be uttered on the stage or in novels. The Censure demands, under the penalty of seizing, forbidding, and bringing before the court, that every sketch or outline shall be submitted to it. When this is done, and the Censure finds nothing to criticise in it, it requires further that the drawing, when finished, be anew laid before it, and, if the drawing be colored, it must be afresh inspected after the dangerous paints have been smirched on. When our happy editor wishes to publish the caricature or the portrait of any one, he can not do so unless he has the permission of the gentleman or lady whose likeness he wishes to produce."

Such was the measure of freedom enjoyed in the French republic governed by soldiers. But this elaborate system of repression can be both evaded and turned to account by the caricaturist. During the last two or three years, a writer who calls himself Touchatout has been amusing Paris by a series of satirical biographies, each preceded by a burlesque portrait. But occasionally the Censure refuses its consent to the insertion of the portrait. The son of Louis Napoleon was one individual whom the Censure thus endeavored to protect. Observe the result. Instead of exhibiting to the people of Paris a harmless picture representing the head of the unfortunate young man mounted upon a pair of diminutive legs, Touchatout prints at the head of his biographical sketch the damaging burlesque subjoined:

____________________________________________________ | | | RÉPUBLIQUE FRANÇAISE. | | | | LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, | | AND CENSURE. | | | | THE PUBLICATION OF THE PORTRAIT OF | | | | Vélocipède IV. | | | | HAS BEEN FORBIDDEN BY THE CENSURE. | |____________________________________________________| | IT CAN BE FOUND AT ALL THE PHOTOGRAPHERS. | |____________________________________________________|

I translate the burlesque biography that follows the above. It may serve also as a specimen of the new literary commodity of which the Parisians seem so fond, and for which a name has been invented--_blague_--which means amusingly malign gossip.

"VÉLOCIPÈDE IV. (Napoleon-Eugene-Louis-Jean-Joseph, Prince Imperial, more commonly known by the name of:) born at Paris, March 16th, 1856. He is the son of Napoleon III. and of the Empress, Eugénie de Montijo.

"Here a parenthesis. The Trombinoscope has often been accused of brutality. When we traced the profile of the ex-empress, the cry was that we had no consideration even for women. We replied that, in our eyes, sovereigns were no more women than were the she petroleum-throwers. To-day there will not be wanting people to say that we do not spare children; and we shall reply, as we have often said before, that sons are not responsible for the crimes of their fathers until the day when they set up a claim to profit by them. If, during the two years that the Trombinoscope has plied his vocation, we have not aimed a shot at the young hero of Sarrebruck, it is precisely because childhood inspires respect in us. If this youth, when consulted upon his calling, had replied, 'My desire is to be an architect or a shoe-maker,' we should have had nothing to say. But mark: scarcely has he ceased to be a child when, on being questioned as to his choice of a trade, he answers, 'I wish to be emperor.' Oh, indeed! The son of Napoleon III. has entered upon his career; he is a child no more; and the Trombinoscope re-enters into all his rights.

"We said, then, that Eugene-Napoleon was born March 16th, 1856. The doctor who received him perceived that he had upon _la fesse droite_ a mass of odd little red marks. Upon examining closely this phenomenon, he perceived that these marks were a representation of the bombardment of the house Sallanvrouze in December, 1851, upon the Boulevard Montmartre. All was there: the intrepid artillery of Canrobert, smashing the shop-windows and pulverizing a newspaper stand; the nurses disemboweled upon the seats; the bootblack on the corner having his customer's leg carried away from between his hands, etc., etc.

"The empress during her pregnancy had read Victor Hugo's 'Napoleon the Little,' and had been much struck with the chapter in which the _coup d'état_ is so well related. They concealed from the people this tattooing--this far too significant trade-mark--and they placed the new-born child in a cradle with the ribbon of the Legion of Honor around his neck. The high dignitaries then advanced to prostrate themselves before the august infant, who sucked his thumb, and they relate, in this connection, in the blatant clap-trap History of Napoleon III., that one of the courtiers narrowly escaped falling into disgrace by appearing stupefied to see the Prince Imperial decorated at the age of fifteen hours. Happily he recovered himself in time, and replied to the emperor, who had remarked his surprise:

"'Sire! I am indeed astonished that His Highness is only commander.'

"To the age of eighteen months, the Prince Imperial did nothing remarkable; but, dating from that moment, he became a veritable prodigy. Along with his first pair of trousers, his father ordered two dozen witticisms of the editors of _Figaro_. These sallies at once went the rounds of the domestic press, and the Prince Imperial had not reached his sixth year when he passed, in the rural districts, for having all the wit which his mother lacked. Thus, in full _Figaro_, appeared one morning a crayon drawing attributed to the Prince Imperial, at the age when as yet he only executed in _sepia_ upon the flaps of his shirt.

"This marvel of precocity astonished all men who had need of a sub-prefectship or a place in the tobacco excise; and this to such a point that they were not in the least surprised when, during the Exhibition of 1867, a reporter prepared his left button-hole to receive the recompense due to the brave by printing--in the self-same _Figaro_, by heavens!--that the little prince, then eleven years of age, had discussed with engineers of experience the strong and weak points of all the wheel work in the grand hall of machinery.

"The years which followed were for the young phenomenon only a succession of triumphs of the same calibre, until the day when his father declared that, in order to complete his imperial education, nothing was wanting to him but to learn to ride the velocipede.

"It need not be said that he learned this noble art, like all the others, by just blowing upon it.

"Meanwhile, Eugene-Napoleon had achieved various grades in the army. Named Corporal in the Grenadiers of the Guard at the age of twenty-two months, one evening when he had not cried for being put to bed at eight o'clock, he had been made successively pioneer, sergeant, sergeant-major, and adjutant of the same corps. When he made some difficulties about swallowing his iodide of potassium in the morning, they promised him promotion, and that encouraged him. From glass to glass, he won the epaulet of sub-lieutenant; and at the moment when the war with Prussia broke out he had just deserved the epaulet of lieutenant by letting them give him, without crying, an injection with salt, which inspired him with profound horror.

"At the very beginning of the war, his father took him to the Prussian frontier, in order to make him pass by his side under triumphal arches into Berlin, which the army _five times ready_ of Marshal Leboeuf was to enter within four days at the very latest.

"At the combat of Sarrebruck, that brilliant military pantomime which the Emperor caused to be performed under the guise of a parade, the Prince Imperial became the admiration of Europe by picking up on the field of battle '_a bullet which had fallen near him_,' said the dispatch of Napoleon to Eugénie. '_From the pocket of a mischievous staff officer_,' history will add.

"Since our disasters, the Prince Imperial grows and stuffs himself in exile, with some devoted servants whose salaries go on as before, and a Spanish mother who teaches him to love France as the most lucrative of the monarchical tobacco-excise offices in Europe.

"Recently the Prince Imperial, for the first time, declared his pretension to the throne by thanking the eight Bonapartists, who had hired a smoking compartment upon the Northern Line in order to present their compliments--and their bill--on the occasion of the 15th of August. That was the first act of a Pretender, the cutting of whose teeth still torments him, and whose new pantaloons become too short at the end of eight days. It was this which decided us to write his rather meagre biography.

"As to his person, the Prince Imperial is a perfect type of a slobbering aspirant of the eighth order. In his exterior, at least, he does not seem to have derived much from his father; but he has the empty, vain, and silly expression of his mother. He represents sufficiently well one of those married boobies whose insignificance condemns them to live upon their income in a little provincial city, working six hours a day their part of third cornet in a raw philharmonic society, while their wives at home make cuckolds of them with the officers of the garrison.

"SUPPLEMENTARY NOTICE.

_"Dates to be supplied by the collectors of the Trombinoscope._

"Eugene-Napoleon, attaining his majority March 16th, 1877, demands a settlement from his mother. She confesses to him that of his maternal fortune there remain but thirty-two francs. 'What has become, then,' he asks,'of all the fund which, during the twenty years of papa's empire, was produced by the exemption money of the conscripts for whom substitutes were not obtained, by the buttons which were wanting to the gaiters, and the gaiters which were wanting to the buttons?' 'What has become of it?' said the Empress. 'Do you suppose that, during these seven years past, I have maintained _our_ French journals with my old chignons?' Eugene-Napoleon replied to his mother: 'Then, if I have no longer a sou with which to take Mandarine to the races, hand me one of papa's riding-jackets that I may make a descent at Boulogne, to dethrone Louis Philippe II. He makes a descent at Boulogne, the ---- 18--, with five drunken men and the little Conneau, all disguised as circus staff officers. They put him on his trial; he is convicted the ---- 18--; is pardoned the ---- 18--; repeats the performance the ---- 18--. The Republic having turned out Louis Philippe II., Eugene-Napoleon re-enters France the ---- 18--as simple citizen. The republicans, who are always just so foolish, permit him to be elected deputy the ---- 18--, and president the ---- 18--. He seats himself upon the Republic December 2d, 18--, and re-establishes the Empire the ---- 18--. The social decomposition resumes its course. Vélocipède IV. marries the ---- 18--, a circus girl. The moral scale continues to rise: Blanche d'Antigny and Cora Pearl are ladies of honor at the Tuileries. The ----18--, at the moment when Vélocipède IV. is about to engage in a war with Prussia, which he thinks will consolidate his throne, but which, considering the organization of our artillery, threatens to extend the German frontiers as far as Saint-Ouen. France stops the drain of those ruinous imitations, drives out the Emperor, and again proclaims the Republic. This time, a thing wholly unexpected, some republicans are found who, after having energetically swept France clean of all that appertains to former systems, whether pretenders, office-holders, spies, etc., etc., push their logic even to the point of bolting the door inside, in order not to be interfered with in their loyal endeavor. This device, so simple, but by which we have passed three times in a century without seeing it, succeeds to admiration; and at length it is announced, the ---- 19--, that Vélocipède IV., after having been by turns, at London, keeper of a thirteen-sous bazaar, pickpocket, circus performer, magnetizer, and dealer in lead-pencils, dies in the flower of his age from the effects of a disease which his father did not contract while presiding at a meeting of his cabinet."

With this specimen of _blague_ we may leave the caricaturists of France to fight it out with La Censure.