CHAPTER XXII

THE DÉBÂCLE

After the unimportant engagement at Saarbrück disaster began falling thick and fast on the French arms, and soon we find _Punch_ taking up again the idea of the two monarchs as rival duelists. By this time the duel has been decided. Louis Napoleon, sorely wounded and with broken sword, is leaning against a tree. "You have fought gallantly, sir," says the King. "May I not hear you say you have had enough?" To which the Emperor replies: "I have been deceived about my strength. I have no choice." With Sedan, the downfall of the Empire, and the establishment of the Republic, France ceased to be typified under the form of Louis Napoleon. Henceforth she became an angry, blazing-eyed woman, calling upon her sons to rise and repel the advance of the invader. The cartoon in _Punch_ commemorating September 4, 1870, when the Emperor was formally deposed and a Provisional Government of National Defense established under the Presidency of General Trochu, with Gambetta, Favre, and Jules Ferry among its leading members, shows her standing erect by the side of a cannon, the imperial insignia trampled beneath her feet, waving aloft the flag of the Republic, and shouting from the "Marseillaise":

"Aux armes, citoyens, Formez vos bataillons!"

The announcement that the German royal headquarters was to be removed to Versailles, and that the palace of Louis XIV. was to shelter the Prussian King surrounded by his conquering armies, drew from Tenniel the cartoon in which he showed the German monarch seated at his table in the palace studying the map of Paris, while in the background are the ghosts of Louis XIV. and the great Napoleon. The ghost of the Grand Monarque is asking sadly: "Is this the end of 'all the glories'?" The sufferings of Paris during the siege are summed up in a cartoon entitled "Germany's Ally," in which the figure of Famine is laying its cold, gaunt hand on the head of the unhappy woman typifying the stricken city. The beginning of the bombardment was commemorated in a cartoon entitled "Her Baptism of Fire," showing the grim and bloody results of the falling of the first shells. The whole tone of _Punch_ after the downfall of the Emperor shows a growing sympathy on the part of the English people toward France, and the feeling in England that Germany, guided by the iron hand of Bismarck, was exacting a cruel and unjust penalty entirely out of proportion. This belief that the terms demanded by the Germans were harsh and excessive is shown in the _Punch_ cartoon "Excessive Bail," where justice, after listening to Bismarck's argument, says that she cannot "sanction a demand for exorbitant securities."

French caricature during "the terrible year" which saw Gravelotte, Sedan, and the downfall of the Empire was necessarily somber and utterly lacking in French gayety. It was not until the tragic days of the Siege and the Commune that the former strict censorship of the French press was relaxed, and the floodgates were suddenly opened for a veritable inundation of cartoons. M. Armand Dayot, in his admirable pictorial history of this epoch, which has already been frequently cited in the present volume, says in this connection: "It has been said with infinite justice that when art is absent from caricature nothing remains but vulgarity." In proof of this, one needs only to glance through the albums containing the countless cartoons that appeared during the Siege, and more especially during the Commune. Aside from those signed by Daumier, Cham, André Gill, and a few other less famous artists, they are unclean compositions, without design or wit, odious in color, the gross stupidity of their legends rivaling their lamentable poverty of execution. But under the leadership of Daumier, the small group of artists who infused their genius into the weekly pages of _Charivari_, made these tragic months one of the famous periods in the annals of French caricature. Of the earlier generation, the irrepressible group whose mordant irony had hastened the down fall of Louis Philippe, Daumier alone survived to chronicle by his pencil the disasters which befell France, with a talent as great as he had possessed thirty-odd years before, when engaged in his light-hearted and malicious campaign against the august person of Louis Philippe. Then there were the illustrious "Cham" (Comte de Noë), and André Gill (a caricaturist of striking wit), Hadol, De Bertall, De Pilopel, Faustin, Draner, and a number of others not so well known. But, above all, it was Daumier who, after twenty years of the Empire, during which his pencil had been politically idle, returned in his old age to the fray with all the vigor of the best days of _La Caricature_.

Yet to those whose sympathies were with France during the struggle of 1870-71, there is a distinct pathos in the change that is seen in the later work of Daumier--not a personal pathos, but a pathos due to the changed condition of the country which it reflects. The old dauntless audacity, the trenchant sarcasm, the mocking, light-hearted laughter, is gone. In its place is the haunting bitterness of an old man, under the burden of an impotent wrath--a man who, for all that he dips his pencil in pure vitriol, cannot do justice to the nightmare visions that beset him. There is no better commentary upon the pervading feeling of helpless anger and outraged national pride of this epoch than in these haunting designs of Daumier's. They are the work of a man tremulous with feverish indignation, weird and ghastly conceptions, such as might have emanated from the caldron of Macbeth's witches. The backgrounds are filled in with solid black, like a funeral pall; and from out the darkness the features of Bismarck, of Von Moltke, of William I., leer malevolently, distorted into hideous, ghoulish figures--vampires feasting upon the ruin they have wrought. French liberty, in the guise of a wan, emaciated, despairing figure, the personification of a wronged and outraged womanhood, haunts Daumier's pages. At one time she is standing, bound and gagged, between the gaping muzzles of two cannon marked, respectively, "Paris, 1851," and "Sedan, 1870," and underneath the laconic legend, "Histoire d'un Règne."

Another cartoon shows France as a female Prometheus bound to the rock, her vitals being torn by the Germanic vulture. A number of these cartoons, all of which appeared in _La Charivari_, treat bitterly of the disastrous results of the twenty years during which Louis Napoleon was the Emperor of the French. The sketch called "This Has Killed That" has allusion to the popular ballot which elected the Prince-President to the throne. A gaunt, angry female figure is pointing with one hand to the ballot-box, in which repose the "Ours" which made Louis Napoleon an Emperor, and with the other to the corpses on the battlefield where the sun of his empire finally sets. "This," she cries, "has killed that." The same idea suggested a somewhat similar cartoon, in which a French peasant, gazing at the shell-battered ruins of his humble home, exclaims in the peasant's ungrammatical _patois_: "And it was for this that I voted 'Yes.'" Still more grim and ominous is the cartoon showing a huge mouse-trap with three holes. The mouse-trap represents the Plebiscite. Two of the holes, marked respectively, "1851" and "1870," have been sprung, and each has caught the throat of a victim. The third, however, still yawns open warningly, with the date not completely filled in.

Still another cartoon, thoroughly characteristic of Daumier's later manner, is "The Dream of Bismarck," one which touches upon the idea which has been used allegorically in connection with every great conqueror whose wake is marked by the strewn corpses of fallen thousands. In it Bismarck, frightfully haggard and ghastly of countenance, is sleeping in his chair, while at his side is the grim figure of Death bearing a huge sickle and pointing out over the bloody battlefield.

Of the younger group of cartoonists none is more closely connected with the events of the _année terrible_ than "Cham," the Comte de Noë. The name Noë, it will be remembered, is French for Noah, just as Cham is the French equivalent of Ham, second son of the patriarch of Scripture. The Comte de Noë was also second son of his father, hence the appropriateness of his pseudonym. As a caricaturist, Cham was animated by no such seriousness of purpose as formed the inspiration of Daumier; and this was why he never became a really great caricaturist. It was the humorous side of life, even of the tragedies of life, that appealed to him, and he reflected it back with an incisive drollery which was irresistible. He was one of the most rapid and industrious of workers, and found in the events of _l'année terrible_ the inspiration of a vast number of cartoons. The looting propensities of the Prussians were satirized in a sketch showing two Prussian officers looking greedily at a clock on the mantelpiece in a French château. "Let us take the clock." "But peace has already been signed." "No matter. Don't you see the clock is slow?" The German acquisition of the Rhenish provinces is summed up in a picture which shows a German officer attaching to his leg a chain, at the end of which is a huge ball marked Alsace. The siege having turned every Parisian into a nominal soldier, this condition of affairs is hit off by Cham in a cartoon underneath which is written: "Everybody being soldiers, the officers will have the right to put through the paces anyone whom they meet in the streets." The sketch shows a cook in the usual culinary costume, and bearing on his head a flat basket filled with kettles and pans, marking time at the command of an officer. The attitude of England during the war seemed to the caricaturist perfidious, after the practical aid which France had rendered Albion in the Crimea. Cham hits this off by representing the two nations as women, Britannia looking ironically at prostrate France and saying: "Oh, no! Prussia has not yet entirely killed her! So it is not yet time to go to her aid."

The statesmen and warriors of that period were very happily caricatured in a series of cartoons, most of which appeared in _L'Éclipse_. Gill excelled in his caricature of individual men rather than in the caricature of events or groups. His real name was Louis Alexandre Gosset. He was born at Landouzy-li-Ville, October 19, 1840, and died in Paris, December 29, 1885. Thiers, Gambetta, Louis Blanc, all the men of the time, were hit off by his pencil. His method in most cases consisted of the grotesque exaggeration of the subject's head at the expense of the body. He was especially happy in his caricature of Thiers, whose diminutive size, as well as his great importance, made him a favorite subject for the cartoonist. Thiers as Hamlet soliloquizing, "To be or not to be"; Thiers as "The Man Who Laughs"; the head of Thiers peering over the rim of a glass, "A tempest in a glass of water"; Thiers as the first conscript of France; Thiers as Achilles in retreat--all these and countless others are from the pencil of Gill.

A striking satirical sketch by Hadol, entitled "La Parade," sums up all the buffooneries of the Second Empire. In it the Duc de Morny as the barking showman is violently inviting the populace to enter and inspect the wonders of the Théâtre Badinguet. Badinguet, as said before, was the name of the workman in whose clothes Louis Napoleon was said to have escaped from his imprisonment at Ham; and throughout the Second Empire it was the name by which the Parisians maliciously alluded to the Emperor. Behind De Morny in the cartoon are the Emperor and Empress, seated at the cashier's desk at the entrance of the theater to take in the money of the dupes whom De Morny can persuade to enter. To the right and left, in grotesque attire, are the actors of the show, representing the various statesmen and soldiers whose names were connected with the reign.

Popular hatred of Marshal Bazaine after the surrender of Metz, based on the prevalent belief that he had sold the city and the army under his command to the Germans, finds pictorial expression in the grim cartoon by Faustin, reproduced here. The artist has cunningly drawn into the features of the Marshal an expression of unutterable craft and treachery. Round his neck there has been flung what at the first glance seems like a decoration of honor, an impression strengthened by the cross and inscription on his breast. But as you look more closely you perceive that this decoration is suspended from the noose of the hangman's rope, and that the words "Au Maréchal Bazaine--La France Reconnaissante" have another and a deeper significance. The defender of the city of Paris, General Trochu, was genially caricatured by André Gill in _L'Éclipse_ as a _blanchisseuse_ industriously ironing out the dirty linen of France. However great his popularity was at the time, Trochu has by no means escaped subsequent criticism. To him the resistance of Paris seemed nothing but "an heroic folly," and he had no hesitation about proclaiming his opinion. Another exceedingly happy caricature by André Gill was that representing Henri Rochefort, the implacable enemy of Louis Napoleon, as a member of the Government of the National Defense. Here Rochefort's head is shown peering out of the mouth of a cannon projecting through a hole in the city's fortifications.