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Elizabeth C. Childs, “Daumier, Gargantua, and the Censorship
of Political Caricature,” Art Journal, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Spring
1992), pp. 26-37.
1) On what grounds were Daumier, his publisher, and printer
brought to trial? What punishment was meted out upon them?
(p. 27)
2) What related issues does Childs explore to explain why
Daumier’s image was perceived to be so offensive to the
government? (p. 27)
3) What inspired Daumier’s scene of gluttony? What additional
methodology does Childs explore, in order to analyze the
Rabelaisian banquet imagery? (p. 28)
4) What episode from Rabelais’ account of Gargantua does
Daumier appropriate to transform Louis-Philippe’s throne into
the bathroom? (pp. 28-29)
5) According to the author, why did Daumier invoke a modern
reading of the classic French author Rabelais? (p. 29)
6) According to Childs, what specific context of contemporary
politics in Paris should be considered when examining
Daumier's image of consumption and exploitation? What
various policies of Louis-Philippe's government does Daumier's
Gargantuan imagery target? (pp. 30-31)
7) Under which provision of the law of 1830 did Daumier's
Gargantua get him into big trouble? (p. 31)
8) What example from early modern caricature does Childs
provide as an example of the rich tradition of grotesque imagery
of the body and defecation? What other methodological
approach does the author cite as a means by which to
understand the scatological tradition? (pp. 31-32)
9) According to Childs, when discussing Daumier’s caricatures
published immediately prior to the release of Gargantua in
December 1831, what was the unpardonable trespass that the
artist committed? What motifs and puns did Daumier employ to
deride Louis-Philippe? (pp. 32-33)
10) After Daumier's conviction, how do republican political
cartoonists use more cautious representations of the king in the
scatological discourse? (p. 33)
11) In Gargantua, how did Daumier test the same ground of
artistic freedom that Philipon had just defended? (p. 34)
12) What were the most important issues in Daumier’s appeal of
his conviction? What evidence does Childs offer to support the
notion that the government believed pictures were more
dangerous than words? (p. 35)
13) How did Daumier’s conviction alter his commitment to
political caricature? (p. 35)
14) Once the September Laws of 1835 imposed rigid and
explicit press censorship, how did French caricaturists address
overtly political subject matter during the remainder of the July
Monarchy? (pp. 35-36)
15) In later years, as a mature caricaturist and an astute
negotiator of censorship, how did Daumier mount attacks on
political leaders? (p. 36)
Big Trouble: Daumier, Gargantua, and the Censorship of
Political Caricature
Author(s): Elizabeth C. Childs
Source: Art Journal, Vol. 51, No. 1, Uneasy Pieces (Spring,
1992), pp. 26-37
Published by: College Art Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777251
Accessed: 24/12/2009 17:20
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Big Trouble
Daumier, Gargantua, and the Censorship
of Political Caricature
ELIZABETH C. CHILDS
f the graphic arts, political caricature has fallen
victim most often to repressive acts of censorship.
Government officials, fearing at the least for their
dignity, and at most for their very authority, have struggled
to define the shifting lines that separate humorous jests from
slander and even treason. Censors often discover the mutable
26 boundaries of the permissible only after a trespass has oc-
curred. When provocative art attacks the realm of the sacro-
sanct and the powerful, censors either race to defend their
territory or retreat to redraw their borders. At no time in the
nineteenth century did the political landscape invite a more
eager or inventive group of satirists than in the early years of
the July Monarchy in France.
After the revolution of 1830, the constitutional charter
of the new monarchy of King Louis-Philippe had rees-
tablished freedom of the French press, promising that the
rigorous censorship of the Restoration would never be re-
peated. This expansive idealism of the summer of 1830 was
rapidly tempered by the passage of more cautious laws in
November of the same year, which made press attacks against
royal authority or against the person of the king punishable
by fines or imprisonment or both. Yet such laws could hardly
dampen the spirit of a press newly liberated. Moreover, the
development of lithography facilitated the dissemination of
caricatures to members of an art-buying middle class with a
taste for political humor and for affordable prints that could
be displayed in the home. The opportunity for testing the new
freedoms and new powers of the press was irresistible.1
Between 1830 and 1835 (when far more severe press
laws were reinstated), the opposition press staged an aggres-
sive cat-and-mouse game with the government. The king
became a favorite target of caricaturists' potshots, and skir-
mishes with the new image police landed artists such as
Charles Philipon (1800-62) and Honore Daumier (1808-79)
in jail. Daumier's first clash with censorship came early in
his career, in 1831-only a year after he had begun publish-
ing caricatures in earnest. A detailed examination of the
offending lithograph, Gargantua (fig. 1), offers important
insights not only into the early artistic and political develop-
ment of one of the most forceful caricaturists of the nineteenth
century, but also into the larger question of the ability of a
state to delimit artistic interpretation and to control political
art. As any brief survey of Daumier's career will show, the
various threats and punishments levied by the government of
the July Monarchy did little to sour the artist's inventive
humor, or to deflect his republican sentiments. If anything,
the tale of Daumier's Gargantua is only the first chapter of an
epic that charts the resilience of the artist's political expres-
sion in spite of the government's attempted regulation or
censure.
On December 16, 1831, La Maison Aubert, the
publishing business run by Philipon, submitted Daumier's
lithograph Gargantua to the Depot legal, in accordance with
the process required for the publication of caricatures in
Paris.2 The image is a grotesque and scathing representation
of King Louis-Philippe as the obese giant Gargantua, a
character from Francois Rabelais's Gargantua et Pan-
tagruel, originally published in 1532-35. As the monumen-
tal king lounges in a large chaise percee, or toilet, a huge
plank descends from his mouth like a grotesque extended
tongue. Daumier accentuates Gargantua's enormity through
the perspectival device of a diagonal plank, which links the
giant dominating the middle ground with the pathetic crowd
pressed into the right foreground of the print. Cripples,
emaciated mothers, and tattered workers gather in front of the
Parisian skyline, identifiable by the dome of the Invalides at
the right, which Daumier has effaced, and by towers that may
include Notre Dame. The poor drop coins into the baskets of
lilliputian ministers, who dutifully march like ants up the
gangplank to dump the tribute, and apparently themselves,
into the gaping maw of the waiting monarch. As stray coins
fall from overloaded baskets, obsequious ministers huddle at
the feet of the king grab for riches. And as Louis-Philippe
feeds, he also excretes a fresh load of rewards to another
crowd of miniature officials, gathered beneath his toilet-
throne in front of the National Assembly. These ministers
eagerly flock to receive the shower of decorative crosses and
papers labeled "prefecture" (prefectu[reJ), "nomination of
peers" (nomination de pairs), and "military commission"
(brevet de la ldgion).
Although the size of the print and the inscriptions on its
first state suggest that Gargantua may have been intended for
SPRING 1992
27
FIG. 1 Honore Daumier, Gargantua, deposited December 16,
1831, lithograph, 91/2 x12 inches. The Benjamin A. and Julia
M. Trustman Collection, Brandeis
University Libraries, Waltham, Massachusetts, Delteil 34.
Philipon's popular satirical journal La Caricature, it was in
fact not published there; rather, the lithograph was briefly
sold separately in the display window of Gabriel Aubert's
fashionable caricature shop in the Galerie Vero-Dodat.3 Al-
though Philipon later claimed that he had not published
Gargantua in La Caricature because of its alleged artistic
inferiority, his decision probably reflects not his aesthetic
judgment, but a well-founded fear that the government would
not tolerate the image. In late December the print-along
with two other recent caricatures (including fig. 7) by
Daumier-was seized by the police, who ordered Aubert to
destroy the original lithographic stone and all remaining
proofs.4 The extreme rarity of impressions today suggests that
the police were largely successful in achieving their goal.
Not all seizures of offensive prints led to criminal
prosecutions at this time, but Daumier was not so lucky. On
February 22, 1832, he, Aubert (Philipon's brother-in-law and
owner of the publishing house), and Hippolyte Delaporte (a
lithographic printer) were all brought to trial for their part in
the affair-Daumier for composing Gargantua, Delaporte
for printing it, and Aubert for exhibiting and selling it. All
were charged with breaking the press law of November 1830
by arousing hatred and contempt of the king's government,
and by offending the king's person, a crime of treason known
as lhse majeste.5 Each was convicted and sentenced to six
months in prison and a fine of five hundred francs. Subse-
quently, Daumier, Delaporte, and Aubert all pleaded for
mercy. The printer and the publisher were partly successful;
only the young artist was held fully responsible for his part in
the offense, as his "seditious crayon had traced the guilty
image."6 Of the three men, only Daumier served a prison
term. Although some two dozen of his lithographs were
censored over the course of his career, this was the only
offense for which he was incarcerated. In the later July
Monarchy and in the Second Empire, he negotiated the
minefields of censorship more adroitly.
Why was Daumier's image so offensive to the govern-
ment and why did it merit so harsh a punishment? The
reasons are complex, and require an examination of several
related issues-not only of Daumier's appropriation of the
Rabelaisian character Gargantua, but also of the context of
domestic politics in 1831, of the general discourse of scatol-
ogy invoked in political satire in that year, and of the specific
context of Philipon's related satire of Louis-Philippe as la
poire-the king in the image of a pear.
Let us begin with the tale of Gargantua, the mythic
giant of French folklore in the late middle ages, whose
experiences were subsequently chronicled and codified in
burlesque epic by Rabelais. Rabelais's work enjoyed wide
popularity during the first half of the nineteenth century; his
ART JOURNAL
r^S B . ... FIG. 2 Anonymous,
Gargantua at His Table
...... " (Gargantua a son grand
couvert), ca. 1810,
etching, 9?4 x 123/4 inches.
Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.
complete writings were published in Paris in at least nine
editions between 1820 and 1840. The character of Gargantua
had particular renown, and appeared in passing reference
in the works of such novelists as Hugo and Balzac, as the
archetypal glutton and the embodiment of material excess.7
Gargantua's enormous size was legendary, as was his appe-
tite; even as an infant, he required the milk of 17,913 cows at
one time to feed him.8 Daumier's scene of gluttony does not
illustrate a particular passage; rather, his image plays off any
number of feasting scenes in the book.9 Daumier was un-
doubtedly inspired not only by his own reading of Rabelais's
text, but also by early-nineteenth-century representations
that feature the adult Gargantua as a gourmand. One exam-
ple shows the giant as a ravenous bourgeois stuffing his face
from huge platters of fish, game, and sweets while tiny
servants haul baskets of more food up long ladders to re-
plenish his table (fig. 2). Daumier's Gargantua bypasses the
standard convention of the feasting table in favor of a single
ramp that intensifies the direct opposition between powerless
and powerful, between the feeders and the fed.
Mikhail Bakhtin, in his analysis of Rabelaisian ban-
quet imagery, stresses that the image of food is often a
symbol for the entire labor process. That is, human labor is
traditionally a struggle to wrest sustenance from the world,
and the act of feasting is a celebration of the success of that
labor.10 In the case of the grotesque body, exemplified by
Gargantua, the body transgresses its own limits, devouring
and growing only at the world's expense. The balance of labor
and reward is lost when the only one to feast is the giant; the
gluttony of Daumier's Gargantua occurs at the expense of any
sustenance for the laborers who supply his meal.
Daumier's image combines, as if in continuous narra-
tive, massive ingestion with defecation. In popular prints,
the grand dinners of Gargantua are often followed by huge
defecations of poorly digested food (fig. 3). The giant's
servants attend him in this bodily function as well, and leave
with whatever rewards they can salvage. Similarly, Daumier's
more privileged servants-the ministers-benefit from the
royal excrement of symbolic reward. The cycle Daumier de-
picts is self-perpetuating but perverse-the baskets of coins
poured into the giant king's mouth resemble turds more than
do the sheets of paper that fall beneath the king's seat.
Money, or symbolic wealth, metamorphoses into food/feces,
and feces metamorphose back into paper symbolic of wealth
and position. Such reversals of nature are consistent with
Bakhtin's analysis of Rabelais's humor of the burlesque, in
which a logic of inversion rules in a topsy-turvy world.1
Another significant inversion occurs in the body of the king,
which Daumier has conspicuously infantalized by showing
him being fed by others. His insatiable appetites and perpet-
ual bowel movements have rendered him passive and seden-
tary. Daumier's gluttonous Louis-Philippe rules not in the
elevated spheres of politics, power, and philosophy, but in the
lower spheres of food, fat, and feces.
In attacking Louis-Philippe's literal seat of power,
Daumier has transformed the throne room into the bathroom.
In linking the king's defecation to paper, Daumier may have
been inspired by a famous episode in Gargantua's childhood,
SPRING 1992
': : i i. .i;;:yG , :. 'I l
"
A- -,A e S: ' ' ; X_ ;
29
FIG. 3 Anonymous, Gargantua
after His Dinner (Apres dinee de
Gargantua), ca. 1810, etching,
91/2 x 125/8 inches. Bibliotheque
Nationale, Paris.
in which the child-giant searches for an ideal arse-wipe. 12 In
Rabelais's account, the child tests various crude substitutes,
ranging from cats and nettles to tablecloths. He also tries
paper, and composes a clever rhyme on its inefficacy. Here,
Gargantua delights in reordering his universe according to
the utility of the various objects appropriated for this most
lowly purpose. The scatological humor of such grotesque
realism derives from the strategic dislocation of the familiar
and its relocation in the sphere of what Bakhtin describes
as the material bodily lower stratum. Bakhtin argues that
Rabelais's humor depends on the "downward" thrusts of his
imagery lifted from the culture of popular festive mer-
riment-out of the elevated realms of intellect and reason
and into the lower spheres represented by either the bowels of
the earth or of the human body. Bakhtin describes the action
of such comic inversion as moving "down, inside out, vice
versa, upside down. . . . All of [these movements] thrust
down, turn over, push headfirst, transfer top to bottom, and
bottom to top, both in the literal sense of space, and in the
metaphorical meaning of the image."'3 Low goes high, and
high goes low in Gargantua's world. Turd-shaped nourish-
ment is carried into the heights on the backs of ambitious
servants, only to be "downed" by the giant and excreted in
the lower stratum in the displaced symbols of exalted position
and authority in official culture.
Casting King Louis-Philippe as Gargantua was in it-
self a Rabelaisian act, for during Daumier's era it was widely
believed that Rabelais had intended his book to be a moral
and political critique of the reign of his own king, Francois I.
Such an interpretation, widely proposed in literary criticism
of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, ap-
peared in the introduction to numerous editions of Rabelais's
Gargantua.14 According to such a reading, Grandgousier
(Gargantua's father) was none other than Louis XII (Francois
I's father-in-law); Pantagruel (Gargantua's son) was really
Henri II (Francois I's successor); and so on. Given that the
reign of Francois I had seen the expansion and consolidation
of an absolute monarchy, Daumier's image accuses the Citi-
zen King of being more King than Citizen in drawing paral-
lels between the authoritarian reign of Francois I and the new
constitutional monarchy.
In his use of literary inspiration for political satire,
Daumier followed a widespread practice among artists in
Philipon's circle, whose caricatures often turned on a mod-
ern reading of a classic French author.15 Yet by invoking
Rabelais, Daumier recalled an author who offered particular
inspiration in a volatile time. Rabelais himself had braved
attacks of censors in 1533, when the Sorbonne had placed
Gargantua and Pantagruel on the official list of condemned
books because of its alleged obscenity.16 By the time
Daumier created Gargantua, one of his own prints (see
fig. 6) had just been seized by the police and Philipon had
already been prosecuted twice. As the freedom of the press
was now so blatantly threatened, Daumier may have resur-
rected this Rabelaisian character to reinforce the opposi-
tional power of his art in the supposedly tolerant era of the
Juste Milieu.
What was the relevance of casting Louis-Philippe as
ART JOURNAL
-- :B?
i: I
i _ :::-:::-:::::
::_:::::: :: ::-,:-::-:::::;-:- :I: ::--: .- -.--..- ;1:::: ::::-:::-:-:;-i ;::::
::-:-ii:r_:._::?:::::::-_:;:--.: -:I::-i:::::;::: :I:::: ::;; ::::;::; : :::: :i::_
30
F I G. 4 Honor6 Daumier, Ah, poor sheep! No matter what you
do, you will always get sheared (Pauvres moutons ah! vous avez
beau faire, toujours on vous
tondra), deposited December 1, 1830, hand-colored lithograph,
10Y2 x 143/8 inches. The Benjamin A. and Julia M. Trustman
Collection, Brandeis University
Libraries, Waltham, Massachusetts, Delteil 18.
Gargantua in 1831? Daumier conceived the image with a
particular audience in mind-he could assume that the
middle-class clientele of La Maison Aubert would be both
sufficiently educated to recognize the literary reference to
Rabelais and sufficiently critical of the Orleanists to enjoy a
good joke at the government's expense. Daumier had emerged
as a critic of Louis-Philippe as early as December 1831, only
five months into the new reign. In his caricature Pauvres
moutons . .., an easily recognizable king, dressed as a
peasant, shears a flock of sheep who wear the tricolor cock-
ade of France (fig. 4). Although Daumier here attacks Louis-
Philippe for profiting from the French people, his shepherd
metaphor is mild, and occasioned no seizure of the print.
But Daumier's pastoral imagery soon gave way to a more
grotesque language of exploitation coupled with obscenity
in Gargantua.
Daumier's intensified critique responded to a growing
mood of political disillusionment that swept through both the
working classes and the republican bourgeoisie in France
in 1831. The national economy, already flagging under the
decline of 1827-29, had been severely depressed in the
months following the revolution of 1830. Cycles of production,
sales, and credit collapsed in industry throughout the coun-
try, resulting in widespread bankruptcies and also stagger-
ing unemployment among the working class. By 1831 demon-
strations and even violent insurrection registered popular
discontent with labor conditions. The republican movement,
still largely bourgeois in 1831, but sympathetic to the prob-
lems of workers, mobilized its resistance to Louis-Philippe's
administration in associations and secret societies.17 Louis-
Auguste Blanqui, writing in defense of the Societe des Amis
du Peuple, argued at about this time that the new government
was little more than a constant pump that lined the coffers of
the idle rich by pressing out the blood and labor of peasants
and workers.18 In such republican discourse, Daumier may
have found inspiration for his critique of Louis-Philippe's
social cannibalism.
Daumier's image of consumption and exploitation
should also be considered in the more specific context of
contemporary politics in Paris. One major debate in the
National Assembly in December 1831 was the proposed
national budget of 12 hundred million francs.19 Daumier's
inscription of the number 12 on two baskets of coins used to
feed Gargantua suggests that the giant embodies this in-
flated annual budget. But the caricature also invokes a more
particular budgetary debate, that of the king's civil list, the
SPRING 1992
stipend given to the monarch by the state for his personal
support and that of his family. It was not until January 1832
that the National Assembly agreed on the final figure of 12
million francs for this annual support, a relatively modest
figure in comparison with the 34 million required by Louis
XVIII and the 32 million paid to Charles X. Yet throughout
1831 a faction of the Chamber of Deputies, led by Louis de
Cormenin, objected to allocating any substantial civil list to
a king who had come to the throne with considerable personal
property. 20 Debate over the terms and amount of the civil list
recurred in the Chamber of Deputies throughout the fall, and
was lively in the first half of December, precisely the time
when Daumier conceived his Gargantua.21
Daumier was probably also guided to the subject of the
civil list by texts and images in La Caricature in the last half
of 1831. The civil list is one of several governmental expendi-
tures lampooned by Grandville in lithographs published on
August 4 and September 15. Later in the winter, two satirical
articles in the journal targeted the civil list specifically. A
satirical article of November 3 by Derville gave an account of
the fictional budget of the King of Yvetot, a character from a
popular chanson by the republican Pierre Jean Beranger.
Derville's king practiced admirable economy, and his chaise
percee also served as a throne. This passage is undoubtedly
one inspiration for Daumier's depiction of the enthroned
Louis-Philippe. Balzac, in another article on the civil list in
La Caricature on December 8, blasts the government's cur-
rent proposal to spend 18 million francs on the monarch's
support. He was especially cynical in his account of the
inflated budget for heating, wine, cuisine, the royal stable,
and miscellaneous pleasures. Daumier easily translates into
Rabelaisian metaphor the themes of royal extravagance and
selfishness addressed by these articles. He refers to the
debate over the civil list by inscribing the numbers 12 and
18-standing for proposed budget figures of 12 million and
18 million francs-on the second of the baskets the ministers
carry (the number 12 may thus refer simultaneously to the
national budget and to the civil list). Daumier transforms the
symbolic means of the king's material support-the bags of
coins-into the feast that nourishes his bulging belly, a
sagging white sphere that itself resembles a huge sack of
coins.
In choosing the character of Gargantua to parody the
king and his civil list, Daumier may have been aware of a
specifically republican interpretation of Rabelais that pro-
posed the relevance of the Renaissance text for modern
satire. Henri Martin's critique, written in 1791 and often
quoted in the prefaces to later editions of Rabelais's work,
called attention to its potential contemporary applications.22
He argued that the excessive amount of food and clothing
needed by Gargantua probably approximated in value the
civil list actually required by modern kings (implying Louis
XVI) and their courts. Daumier's caricature recycles essen-
tially the same republican rhetoric some forty years later.
Moreover, anonymous political caricatures from the revolu-
tion of 1789 feature Louis XVI as the ravenous Modern
Gargantua, living off of the labor of his subjects. These
artists, like Daumier, use Gargantua's body as a metaphor
for a king whose power has become disproportionate and
inflated.23
Daumier's Gargantuan imagery targets various policies
of Louis-Philippe's government in late 1831. The awards that
fall from the giant's toilet include the "nomination of peers," a
reference to Louis-Philippe's recent appointment of thirty-
six new peers in an effort to increase his support in the
Chamber of Peers. The "military commission" recalls the
king's recent proposal to increase the benefits of the recip-
ients of the Legion of Honor.24 These signs of official reward
contrast sharply with the evident sacrifice of the impov-
erished crowd of workers.
Daumier's Gargantua depicts both a king who is
greedy and self-serving at the expense of the material welfare
of his people, and an administration whose officials cater to
the king's will for their own personal gain. These implica-
tions alone might have provided sufficient cause to seize the
print as an illegal attack against royal authority. But it was
under the second provision of that law of 1830, the proscrip-
tion against attacking the royal person of the king, that
Daumier's Gargantua got him into big trouble.
In Daumier's print, the king's body is the agent of his
own political corruption. In appropriating the king's person
as the vehicle for insulting both the royal body and the body
politic, Daumier stages a court of burlesque justice where the
king gets his own just deserts. Although he is master of his
throne, the king is also a prisoner of his toilet and is punished
by his own body. This print is fundamentally an attack on
material privilege, and Daumier privileges a fundamental
matter, excrement, to bring down his king. Daumier was
neither original nor unique in this appeal to scatological
humor, but he was unquestionably successful.
Excrement is, as Bakhtin has observed, one of the best
substances for the degrading of all that is exalted.25 In early
modern caricature in both England and France there is a rich
tradition of such grotesque imagery of the body and defeca-
tion. Satirists often symbolically disempowered politicians
by depicting them engaged in action below the belt, and
heads of state often became the literal butt of the joke.26 A
line of distinguished defecators stands (and sits) behind
Louis-Philippe. For example, James Gillray satirized Wil-
liam Pitt in 1797 when Pitt substituted paper currency for
gold coinage (fig. 5). In Gillray's print, Pitt appears sitting
astride the Bank of England. He simultaneously defecates
and vomits new symbols of wealth, hoarding the old riches
and showering the English people with the new currency. His
rotund stomach, stuffed with coins, foreshadows the over-
loaded belly of Gargantua, and like his Rabelaisian counter-
part, his body is made obscene by its unnatural excretions.
Daumier's print also recalls, as James Cuno has pointed out,
ART JOURNAL
31
duct negotiations with the rebels. Here, Louis-Philippe gives
his son a slice of bread laden with a dark substance scooped
from a pot labeled "butter." He instructs the prince to go to
Lyons and to "promise them what I'm giving you." The salve
the king sends the striking workers is not butter to grease
diplomatic wheels, but a little pile of excrement, and the pot
from which Louis-Philippe has obtained his "butter" is a
simple chamber pot. Daumier equates the king's alleged
concern for workers' rights with ordure. This version of
Daumier's print was seized by the police in early December
1831. That the depiction of the king handling excrement
(presumably his own) was the violating feature of this print
is indicated by a subsequent version of the lithograph
(Delteil 31) that was not seized, once the offending chamber
pot had been effaced. The second, "cleaned-up" version was
deposited at the Depot legal on December 5, 1831.
That same week, a more subtle scatological reference
in Daumier's caricature escaped the immediate censure of
the government. In a print deposited December 7 (one week
before he submitted Gargantua), Daumier depicted the
crown prince and the minister of war, Marshal Soult, riding a
horse between Lyons and Paris (fig. 7). In this print, Ils ne
font q'un saut!, the marshal carries a canon, positioned on
his lap like an enormous phallus, in mockery of the military
prowess of the regime. (The government's troops, at first
FI . 5 James Gillray, Midas Transmuting all into 6eM Paper,
1797, etching,
14 x 103/8 inches. Courtesy Trustees of the British Museum,
London.
a more recent scatological tradition in French political cari-
cature. Some satires of Charles X turn on similar jokes, as
the king swallows medals and defecates the Order of the
Lilies.27 Such imagery invites consideration in the light of
Freud's theory of anal erotism, which links adult greed with
childhood obsession with feces.28 According to Freud, a
child's sense of power and independence derives in part fiom
his or her manipulation of excrement; as she or he matures,
this early anal erotism is repressed and sublimated in a
reattachment to another symbol of power, money. Such theory
may offer insight into the humor of infantalization prevalent in
so many of these scatological caricatures. From Cruikshank
to Daumier and beyond, politicians obsessed with their
wealth and power often take a childish delight in redistribut-
ing their doo-doo.
As Daumier learned in the winter of 1831-32, too
much fun with royal feces could get a caricaturist in too deep.
The government's intolerance of such subject matter in con-
nection with the image of the king is indicated by the official
response to Daumier's Depart pour Lyon (fig. 6). The print
refers to the massive November insurrection in Lyons by some
twenty thousand canuts, weavers and other workers in the silk
industry.29 In early December, Louis-Philippe sent his son,
the crown prince Ferdinand-Philippe, to Lyons to help con-
FIG. 6 Honore Daumier, Departure for Lyons. Go, my pet, and
promise them
what I am giving you (Depart pour Lyon. Vas poulot, et promets
leur ce que je
te donne), late November or early December 1831, lithograph,
13?2 x 10 inches.
The Benjamin A. and Julia M. Trustman Collection, Brandeis
University
Libraries, Waltham, Massachusetts, Delteil 30.
SPRING 1992
FIG. 7 Honore Daumier, They
make only one jump! (lls ne font
q'un saut.), deposited December
7,1831, hand-colored lithograph,
97/8 14X8/ inches. The Benjamin
A. and Julia M. Trustman
Collection, Brandeis University
Libraries, Waltham,
Massachusetts, Delteil 32.
defeated by the workers and by defecting members of the
National Guard, had returned with Soult to Lyons on Decem-
ber 2, only to find that the rebellion had already ended.) The
crown prince brings the striking workers a small pot labeled
"compotes" (as in fruit compotes), a pun on "compost," a
wordplay that reiterates Daumier's previous reference to the
king's chamber pot and the excrement that constitutes his
royal goodwill. Although at first tolerant of this print, the
police seized it several weeks later, along with Gargantua.
When the government tried Daumier in February 1832 for
both of these prints, the artist was found guilty of charges
related to Gargantua, but was cleared of those relating to Ils
nefont q'un saut!30 These latter charges were probably based
on the offensive legend, which, turning on a clever pun, not
only stated that the marshal and prince make only one jump
(saut) on their horse, but also implied that together they have
only the intelligence to make up one idiot (sot, a homophone of
saut). Although the compost makes the joke here another
"dirty" one, it is but a small detail. The unpardonable
trespass in the winter of 1831-32 seems not to have been
scatological humorper se, but rather the depiction of the king
distributing feces, as in Gargantua or Depart pour Lyon.
This scatological discourse continued in more cautious
representations of the king in La Caricature after Daumier's
conviction. In Grandville's Digestion du Budjet [sic] (fig. 8),
for example, Louis-Philippe sucks nourishment from a vat
filled with wealth, only to excrete waste that is siphoned from
his seat by his deputies and by hidden "secret funds" that
were used to bribe the government's opponents. Like Gargan-
tua, this print targets the draining of national resources by an
exploitative government. Yet in consideration of the press
laws Grandville cleverly turns the king's face and body away
from the viewer, discreetly conveying his identity through his
characteristic hairstyle and sideburns. In such tempered
images, scatological political satire escaped the closing nets
of censorship.
Daumier invoked many satirical discourses simul-
taneously in Gargantua. His violation of the king's person
was not limited to imagery of gluttony, obesity, and defeca-
tion; he also directly quoted from a new metamorphic satire
just developed by Philipon in the image of the pear (lapoire).
This new image raised the central question of the caricatur-
ist's right to create and transform resemblance, regardless of
the law. On November 14, Philipon had stood trial for one of
his several violations of the press laws of 1830. The print in
question, published in La Caricature the previous June,
represented Louis-Philippe as a mason plastering over the
promises of 1830. In an attempt to clear himself in the trial,
Philipon argued that because he never depicted royal insig-
nia, he had never portrayed the actual king. Instead, he
relied only on the king's general resemblance to represent the
government in symbolic fashion. In support of his contention
that the law could not control "the liberty of the crayon,"
Philipon drew the now famous quartet of images in which the
recognizable face of the king gradually metamorphoses into a
pear; he asked the court whether the ultimate resemblance
between king and pear meant that one could no longer draw
pears. The comparison was a clever insult, since poire means
both "pear" and "fathead" or "simpleton" in French slang.31
Although the sign of the pear soon evolved into a satirical
emblem of the entire political regime of Louis-Philippe, it
was closely linked in its early days to the specific identity and
ART JOURNAL
33
physiognomy of the king.32 The government's dilemma in
judging the intent of such resemblance emerges repeatedly,
as we shall see, in the official debate regarding the censor-
ship of Daumier's Gargantua.
However ingenious, Philipon's defense of freedom of
the press based on the mutating pear failed to win his court
case, and he received a heavy sentence of six months in
prision and a fine of two thousand francs. On November 24,
1831, just three weeks before Daumier deposited Gargan-
tua, La Caricature published Philipon's courtroom drawings
of the pear (fig. 9). With the pear thus publicly baptized
(although the issue was later seized by the police), Daumier
rapidly incorporated Philipon's punning image into two of his
own works, Depart pour Lyon and Gargantua. The undenia-
bly pyramidal shape of Gargantua's head, defined by his
34 ample whiskers and pointed coiffure, emphatically recalls
the pear. Even Gargantua's pointed cowlick mirrors the stem
of Philipons pear, and the rounded pyramidal shape of the
king's entire body echoes the bulbous shape of the fruit. For
the initiated viewer, these visual puns transform Gargantua's
face, making it more fruitlike and bellylike than facelike.
These physiognomic dislocations reinforce the burlesque
inversions of natural order already present in Daumier's
scatological imagery.
In taking such playful liberties with the king's person,
Daumier clearly intended to test the same ground of artistic
freedom that Philipon had just defended. Perhaps he kept in
mind the exhortation published by Philipon in La Caricature
on November 24: "Yes, we have the right to personify power.
Yes, we have the right to take, for this personification,
whatever resemblance suits our needs! Yes, all resemblances
belong to us!" Given Philipon's fate in the courts the previous
month, Daumier assumed an obvious risk in accepting his
challenge to caricaturists. He seems even to have flaunted
his authorship in the face of possible repression; although he
had left several recent provocative caricatures unsigned
(such as Delteil 30-33), he boldly signed his name in the
lower left corner of Gargantua.
The guilty verdict at Daumier's trial the following
February turned, predictably, on the issue of whether or not
Gargantua actually represented the king, or was intended as
a more symbolic representation of the government's swollen
budget. The image was of course both, but for pragmatic
reasons the convicted men soon attempted to argue other-
wise. Previously unpublished documents reveal that
Daumier, Delaporte, and Aubert appealed their conviction in
joint letters to the king.33 They protested their innocent
intentions in publishing the "inoffensive drawing." They
pleaded in the name of "the liberty most dear to the French,
who have named you King," and they begged obsequiously as
F I G. 8 Grandville [Jean-lgnace-lsidore Gerard], Digestion du
Budjet [sic]: Travail administratif, politique, moral et surtout
economique, (Digestion of the
Budget: Administrative, political, moral, and above all,
economic task), published in La Caricature, May 24,1832,
lithograph, 9?2 x 12 inches. Santa Barbara
Museum of Art, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Michael Wilson.
SPRING 1992
the king's "very humble, faithful, and obedient subjects."
Subsequently, they also pleaded their cases independently;
perhaps Aubert and Delaporte, more experienced in defend-
ing themselves in press violations, sensed that each stood
a better chance on his own than with the young artist.
Delaporte, for example, appealed to the king's promise in the
charter not to reestablish censorship, arguing that to hold a
mere printer responsible for the offense would be to create
"a new censor, one thousand times more dangerous [than
the last]."
The most important argument in these documents re-
volves, again, around the issues of resemblance and signifi-
cation. Daumier claimed Gargantua merely personified the
Budget. He "didn't want to represent the chief of the govern-
ment" and he offered as proof the "little personages grouped
around the principal figure, who have the same clothing, the
same figure and the same physiognomy [as Gargantua]." This
line of reasoning-that since the tiny ministers all looked
like Gargantua, none of the figures could be the singular
person of the king-was transparently thin. The little clones
of the giant merely intensified the insult to His Majesty.
It took the court several months to consider this joint
appeal; in memos dated March 19 and May 2, 1832, the court
recommended that Delaporte's and Aubert's prison sentences
be suspended, but that Daumier serve his full sentence.
Everyone still paid their fines, however, because the court
still found all parties guilty of offending the king's person
with the image. One memo noted that the "easily grasped"
resemblance of Gargantua to Louis-Philippe could hardly be
the result of pure chance, as Daumier baldly maintained. In
the court's view, the manifest goal of the artist had been to
"figure, with exaggerated and monstrous features, the person
of the King, represented devouring, under the eyes of his
starving people, the dishes of a feast in the style of Rabelais."
The government was not just being literal-minded in uphold-
ing Daumier's harsh punishment; it feared the power of the
artist above that of his business collaborators. Pictures were,
it seemed, more dangerous than words, in part because they
could be comprehended relatively quickly by literate and
nonliterate audiences alike. Authors and editors of opposi-
tional texts enjoyed greater leniency than artists at this time,
as is suggested by another trial held on February 24, 1832.
The same court that had condemned Daumier the day before
now acquitted two members of the republican Societe des
Amis du Peuple of identical charges. The pamphlet in ques-
tion, attacking the right of the king and his deputies to their
power, was surely at least as inflammatory-if not more so-
as the condemned caricature.34
Daumier's conviction for Gargantua did little to alter
his commitment to political caricature. In the period between
35
FIG. 9 Charles Philipon, The Pears (Les Poires) published in La
Caricature,
November 24, 1831, lithograph, 1334 x 10 inches. Print
Collection, Miriam and
Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, New
York Public
Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations, New York.
his February trial and his imprisonment in August 1832, he
produced several controversial lithographs that were seized
by the government.35 Prison did not stop Daumier from
drawing; in fact, it seems to have given him an opportunity
to rework his image. The Gazette de Sainte Pelagie reported
that in the cell inhabited by Daumier in 1832 a drawing of
Gargantua appeared on the wall. This time the giant was
served by easily recognizable personages, including the
current ministers of justice, of the interior, of finance, and of
war. 36 This was one drawing on stone the government did not
worry about. After Daumier's release from prison, the char-
acter Gargantua (unlike la poire) disappeared from his satir-
ical repertoire.37
Although his firm attachment to republican ideals
dates from the early July Monarchy, Daumier learned how to
live with the presence of censorship. He continued to make
biting political satires, but, like his colleagues at La Maison
Aubert, he also began to contribute social caricature to the
less overtly political journals, such as Le Charivari, which
began publication in 1832. Once the September Laws of 1835
imposed rigid and explicit press censorship, French cari-
ART JOURNAL
caturists were forced to abandon overtly political subject
matter until 1848. During this period, an active army of
censors in the Ministry of the Interior reviewed each carica-
36 ture before publication. Archival documents record the occa-
sional frustration of the censors assigned to Le Charivari as
they struggled with suspicious imagery.38 Aubert submitted
at least fifty lithographs by various artists that were denied
publication between 1835 and 1848. This record suggests
that Daumier and his colleagues walked a delicate tightrope
of the permissible in satire for the remainder of the July
Monarchy.
During the idealistic period of the Second Republic of
1848-52, Daumier and fellow caricaturists enjoyed a more
tolerant official attitude toward the press. But in the volatile
days at the end of the Second Republic, some of Daumier's
colleagues, such as Charles Vernier, were imprisoned for
publishing caricatures of President Louis-Napoleon.
Daumier managed nonetheless to produce highly critical
satires of Louis-Napoleon, and still escape such punishment.
Some of these directly satirized the president; others crit-
icized his policies through the fictional member of his secret
police force, Ratapoil. Such imagery was censored with the
arrival of the Second Empire and the reestablishment of strict
censorship laws in 1852. In spite of this, Daumier sustained
a subtle antibonapartist critique, even during the most re-
pressive days of the Second Empire.
In 1831 Daumier's caricature of Louis-Philippe as
Gargantua had relied on the artist's manipulation of the
king's physiognomy. In later years, as a mature caricaturist
and an astute negotiator of censorship, Daumier mounted
attacks on political leaders that often took a more subtle and
covert form. He moved occasionally from the obvious exag-
gerations of the physical characteristics of his subject to the
creation of clever surrogates, often lifted from exotic cultures
to further displace them from the domestic context. One
fascinating example of this satiric strategy is his representa-
tion of Faustin Soulouque, the emperor of Haiti between 1849
and 1859 (fig. 10).39 Soulouque first appears in Daumier's
FIG. 10 Honore Daumier, Emperor Soulouque, having learned
that a European
journalist allowed himself to criticize several of the acts of his
administration,
succeeds in seizing the guilty one and plunging him in a caldron
full of boiling
tar-All done in the hope that this will serve as a lesson to this
hack journalist
and that he will not write a second article against His Majesty
(Official
Monitor of Haiti) (L'Empereur Soulouque ayant appris qu'un
journaliste
europeen s'etait permis de critiquer quelques uns des actes de
son
administration est parvenu a saisir le coupable et I'a plong6
dans une
chaudiere remplie de goudron brilant-Tout fait esperer que cela
servira de
lecon a ce folliculaire et qu'il n'ecrira pas un second article
contre sa majeste
(Moniteur officiel d'Haiti, published in Le Charivari, June 15,
1850,
lithograph, 91/2 x 814 inches. The Armand Hammer Daumier
and
Contemporaries Collection, Armand Hammer Museum of Art
and Cultural
Center, Los Angeles, Delteil 2015.
work in June 1850 as a barbaric despot who angrily plunges a
terrified journalist into a boiling caldron. Soulouque pun-
ishes the European for his articles that criticize the black
emperor's regime. This satire does not refer to any current
event in Haiti; rather, Daumier here casts Louis-Napoleon in
blackface in order to criticize the French government's recent
repression of a republican newspaper. The identification of
President Louis-Napoleon with the despotic Soulouque was a
well-established racist insult within republican discourse in
Paris at the time of the coup d'etat of December 2, 1851.
During the decade that followed, Daumier and a few of his
contemporaries continued to parody the regime of Louis-
Napoleon (who became Emperor Napoleon III in 1852)
through the personage of Soulouque. As the press lost its
freedom, Daumier occasionally appropriated such exotic per-
sonae to provide a means for circumventing the literal minds
of the censors. Thus, even in the repressive early Second
SPRING 1992
Empire, Napoleon III's strenuous efforts to control political
caricature could not prevent Daumier from inventing or de-
veloping a limited but persistent satire of opposition.
The creation and censorship of Gargantua came at a
pivitol moment in the early development of Daumier's long
career as a political satirist. Inspired by the work of artists
and journalists in Philipon's circle, as well as by his own
republican politics, he tested the limits of tolerance of an ever
more reactionary government. He used Rabelaisian imagery
of gluttony and defecation to degrade both the person and the
politics of the king, and with this explicit imagery he stood
his ground in the face of a government reneging on its
promises of freedom for the press. That his satiric aim was
precisely on target is suggested by the suppression of the
print and the severity of Daumier's punishment. His "se-
ditious crayon" often returned to taboo subjects, and his
Gargantua fired the opening volley in what became a long
career of comic attacks against the strongholds of censorship.
Notes
A version of this essay was presented in a lecture at the Mount
Holyoke College Art
Museum in October 1991. I gratefully acknowledge the support
of a grant from the
American Council of Learned Societies, which partially
supported the research for
this article. I am also grateful to Lisa Leary, Michael Marrinan,
and Roberta Wadell
for their assistance with research problems, and to Gerald Silk,
John Klein, John
House, and Kirsten Powell for their insightful comments on
drafts of this essay.
1. A useful survey of press laws and acts of censorship during
this period is found in
Robert Justin Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature in
Nineteenth-Century
France (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1989), chapter
4. For an exhaustive
study on the development of the caricature business in Paris, see
James Cuno,
"Charles Philipon and La Maison Aubert: The Business,
Politics, and Public of
Caricature in Paris, 1820-1840" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard Univerity,
1985).
2. Gargantua (Delteil 34) was deposited on December 16, not
December 15, as
recorded in Loys Delteil, Le Peintre-Graveur illustre: Daumier,
11 vols. (Paris: Chez
l'auteur, 1925-30). All Daumier prints will be referred to by
their Delteil number. On
Daumier's process of publishing of caricature, and his
encounters with censorship,
see Elizabeth C. Childs, "Honor6 Daumier and the Exotic
Vision: Studies in French
Culture and Caricature, 1830-1870" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia
University, 1989),
chapter 1.
3. State 1 of Gargantua (Delteil 34) bears an inscription at the
lower right, "On
s'abonne chez Aubert" (subscriptions available at La Maison
Aubert), the same
inscription that appears on prints published in La Caricature.
4. The police seized Delteil 32 (fig. 7), 33, and 34 (fig. 1).
5. Darmaing, "Chronique," Gazette des tribunaux, February 23,
1832, 432.
6. Archives Nationales, Paris (hereafter A.N.), BB 21 373 (no.
4172-S8). Between
August 27, 1832, and February 22, 1833, Daumier spent two and
one-half months in
the prison of Sainte Pelagie, and an additional three and one-
half months under
supervision in Dr. Pinel's maison de sante.
7. See passages in Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo (Paris,
1832; reprint, Paris:
Garnier, 1959), 18, and Honore de Balzac, La Peau de chagrin
(Paris, 1831; reprint,
Paris: Garnier, 1960), 53.
8. For examples of Gargantua's insatiable appetite, see Francois
Rabelais, Gargan-
tua and Pantagruel (London: Penguin, 1955), chapters 6, 7, and
21.
9. Sarah Symmons unconvincingly proposes a connection
between the print and two
passages in the book, including Gargantua's theft of the bells of
Notre Dame and
Alcofribas's defecation in the throat of Pantagruel. See her
Daumier (London: Oresko,
1979), 24.
10. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington:
Indiana University
Press, 1984), chapter 4.
11. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, chapter 6.
12. Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, chapter 13. I am
grateful to Eric
Nicholson for bringing this passage to my attention.
13. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 370.
14. For example, see Charles Sainte-Beuve, Tableau historique
et critique de lapoesie
francaise au XVI siecle (Paris, 1829; reprint, Paris: Charpentier,
1843), 268, and
Oeuvres de Rabelais (Paris: Dalibon, 1823), with commentary
by Esmangart and Eloi
Johanneau.
15. See, for example, Kirsten Powell, "The Press Repressed:
Themes of Suppression
and Censorship of the Press in Caricatures of La Fontaine's
Fables," Proceedings of
the Western Societyfor French History 17 (Auburn, Alabama:
Auburn University,
1990), 347-59.
16. See Natalie Zemon Davis, "Rabelais among the Censors
(1940s, 1540s)," Repre-
sentations 32 (Fall 1990): 15-17.
17. See Christopher H. Johnson, "The Revolution of 1830 in
French Economic
History," in 1830 in France, ed. John Merriman (New York:
New Viewpoints, 1975),
139-90, and H. A. C. Collingham, The July Monarchy: A
Political History of
France, 1830-48 (New York: Longman, 1988), chapter 11.
18. Blanqui quoted in Stanislav Osiakovski, "Some Political and
Social Views of
Honore Daumier as Shown in His Lithographs" (Ph.D. diss.,
University of London,
1957), 82.
19. See Le Moniteur universel (Paris), December 9, December
11, December 13,
1831.
20. See John Baughman, "Financial Resources of Louis
Philippe," French Histori-
cal Studies 4 (Spring 1965): 63-83.
21. See Le Moniteur universel, October 5, December 5,
December 13, 1831.
22. "De la Liste civile, ou de la d6pense personnelle d'un roi,"
chapter 2 in Henri
Martin, De l'autorite de Rabelais dans la r6volution presente
(Paris: Gattey, 1791).
Martin's book is commonly cited in early-nineteenth-century
editions of Rabelais's
complete works (for example, the Dalibon edition, published in
Paris in 1823).
23. Examples of such etchings from 1790-91 are reproduced in
French Caricature
and the French Revlution, 1789-1799, exh. cat. (Los Angeles:
Grunwald Center for
the Graphic Arts, University of California, 1988), 181-82.
24. On the reforms of the Legion of Honor, see Le Moniteur
universel, November 29
and December 9, 1831.
25. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 152.
26. See, for example, David's caricature The English
Government, of 1793-94, in
Albert Boime, "Jacques-Louis David, Scatological Discourse in
the French Revolu-
tion, and the Art of Caricature," Arts 62 (February 1988): 74.
27. Cuno, "Charles Philipon and La Maison Aubert," 214-16.
28. A fascinating discussion of this Freudian theory in the
context of scatological art
appears in an unpublished paper by Gerald Silk, "Myths and
Meanings in Manzoni's
Merda d'artista," presented at the College Art Association
annual conference, New
York, 1990.
29. On the November strike in Lyons, see Robert Bezucha, The
Lyon Uprising of
1834: Social and Political Conflict in the Early July Monarchy
(Cambridge, Massa-
chusetts: Harvard University Press, 1974), chapter 2.
30. Gazette des tribunaux, February 23, 1832. On these prints,
see also Peter Morse,
"Daumier's Early Lithographs," Print Review 11 (1980): 32-36.
31. It is not clear whether this slang meaning ofpoire preceded
Philipon's appropria-
tion of the fruit motif, or was perhaps generated subsequently
by the enormous
popularity of the satire. The most complete study of La Poire is
Elise Kenney and John
Merriman's The Pear: French Graphic Arts in the Golden Age of
Caricature, exh. cat.
(South Hadley, Massachusetts: Mount Holyoke College Art
Museum, 1991). See also
Sandy Petrey, "Pears in History," Representations, no. 35
(Summer 1991): 52-71.
32. On this important distinction, see Cuno, "Charles Philipon
and La Maison
Aubert," 197-207.
33. Quotations regarding the appeals are taken from ten
unnumbered documents in
the Recours de grace file, A.N. BB 21 3737 (no. 4172-S8). All
translations are the
author's.
34. Gazette des tribunaux, February 24, 1832.
35. Les Blanchisseurs (Delteil 39) may have provoked
Daumier's arrest on August 27.
36. Gazette de Sainte Pelagie, January 17, 1833.
37. Grandville published a caricature of Gargantua in the pages
of La Caricature
(February 20, 1834). This later version featured a foreign
monarch, Czar Nicholas of
Russia, as the giant; Louis-Philippe appears only as one of the
servants feeding the
barbaric glutton.
38. For example, see letter from the minister of the interior to
the minister of justice,
August 6, 1841, A.N. BB 18 1396 (2289).
39. For a thorough discussion of Daumier's caricatures of
Soulouque, see Elizabeth
C. Childs, "The Secret Agents of Satire: Daumier, Censorship
and the Image of the
Exotic in Political Caricature, 1850-1860," Proceedings of
theAnnual Meeting of the
Western Societyfor French History 17 (Auburn, Alabama:
Auburn University, 1990),
336-46.
ELIZABETH C. CHILDS is assistantprofessor atS.U.N.Y.,
Purchase. She co-curated the exhibition Femmes d'Esprit:
Women in Daumier's Caricature and is currently editing a
book of essays on art and censorship.
ART JOURNAL
37
Article
Contentsp.26p.27p.28p.29p.30p.31p.32p.33p.34p.35p.36p.37Iss
ue Table of ContentsArt Journal, Vol. 51, No. 1, Uneasy Pieces
(Spring, 1992), pp. 1-128Front Matter [pp.1-126]Artist's
PagesJoseph Kosuth [pp.5-19]Editors' StatementsUneasy Pieces:
Controversial Works in the History of Art, 1830-1950 [pp.22-
25]Big Trouble: Daumier, Gargantua, and the Censorship of
Political Caricature [pp.26-37]Gustave Courbet's Venus and
Psyche: Uneasy Nudity in Second-Empire France [pp.38-
44]Louis Legrand's Battle over Prostitution: The Uneasy
Censoring of Le Courrier Français [pp.45-50]An American
Victorian Dilemma, 1875: Should a Woman Be Allowed to
Sculpt a Man? [pp.51-56]The Political Censorship of Jan
Matejko [pp.57-63]Nevinson's Elegy: Paths of Glory [pp.64-
71]The Most Famous Painting of the "Golden Twenties"? Otto
Dix and the Trench Affair [pp.72-80]Bernhard Hoetger's Tree of
Life: German Expressionism and Racial Ideology [pp.81-
91]Book ReviewsVisual Theory [pp.93-99]Contemporary Artists
[pp.99-105]Georgia O'Keeffe [pp.105-113]Corot [pp.113-
115]Books and Catalogues Received [pp.117-123]Letters to the
EditorFrom Sidney Geist [pp.125-128]From Selby Whittingham
[p.125]From Michael Rabe [pp.125-127]From Robert Storr
[p.128]Back Matter

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Elizabeth C. Childs, Daumier, Gargantua, and the Censorship of Po.docx

  • 1. Elizabeth C. Childs, “Daumier, Gargantua, and the Censorship of Political Caricature,” Art Journal, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Spring 1992), pp. 26-37. 1) On what grounds were Daumier, his publisher, and printer brought to trial? What punishment was meted out upon them? (p. 27) 2) What related issues does Childs explore to explain why Daumier’s image was perceived to be so offensive to the government? (p. 27) 3) What inspired Daumier’s scene of gluttony? What additional methodology does Childs explore, in order to analyze the Rabelaisian banquet imagery? (p. 28) 4) What episode from Rabelais’ account of Gargantua does Daumier appropriate to transform Louis-Philippe’s throne into the bathroom? (pp. 28-29) 5) According to the author, why did Daumier invoke a modern reading of the classic French author Rabelais? (p. 29) 6) According to Childs, what specific context of contemporary politics in Paris should be considered when examining Daumier's image of consumption and exploitation? What various policies of Louis-Philippe's government does Daumier's Gargantuan imagery target? (pp. 30-31) 7) Under which provision of the law of 1830 did Daumier's Gargantua get him into big trouble? (p. 31) 8) What example from early modern caricature does Childs provide as an example of the rich tradition of grotesque imagery of the body and defecation? What other methodological approach does the author cite as a means by which to understand the scatological tradition? (pp. 31-32) 9) According to Childs, when discussing Daumier’s caricatures published immediately prior to the release of Gargantua in December 1831, what was the unpardonable trespass that the artist committed? What motifs and puns did Daumier employ to deride Louis-Philippe? (pp. 32-33)
  • 2. 10) After Daumier's conviction, how do republican political cartoonists use more cautious representations of the king in the scatological discourse? (p. 33) 11) In Gargantua, how did Daumier test the same ground of artistic freedom that Philipon had just defended? (p. 34) 12) What were the most important issues in Daumier’s appeal of his conviction? What evidence does Childs offer to support the notion that the government believed pictures were more dangerous than words? (p. 35) 13) How did Daumier’s conviction alter his commitment to political caricature? (p. 35) 14) Once the September Laws of 1835 imposed rigid and explicit press censorship, how did French caricaturists address overtly political subject matter during the remainder of the July Monarchy? (pp. 35-36) 15) In later years, as a mature caricaturist and an astute negotiator of censorship, how did Daumier mount attacks on political leaders? (p. 36) Big Trouble: Daumier, Gargantua, and the Censorship of Political Caricature Author(s): Elizabeth C. Childs Source: Art Journal, Vol. 51, No. 1, Uneasy Pieces (Spring, 1992), pp. 26-37 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777251 Accessed: 24/12/2009 17:20 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that
  • 3. unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=caa. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected] College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Journal. http://www.jstor.org http://www.jstor.org/stable/777251?origin=JSTOR-pdf http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=caa Big Trouble Daumier, Gargantua, and the Censorship of Political Caricature
  • 4. ELIZABETH C. CHILDS f the graphic arts, political caricature has fallen victim most often to repressive acts of censorship. Government officials, fearing at the least for their dignity, and at most for their very authority, have struggled to define the shifting lines that separate humorous jests from slander and even treason. Censors often discover the mutable 26 boundaries of the permissible only after a trespass has oc- curred. When provocative art attacks the realm of the sacro- sanct and the powerful, censors either race to defend their territory or retreat to redraw their borders. At no time in the nineteenth century did the political landscape invite a more eager or inventive group of satirists than in the early years of the July Monarchy in France. After the revolution of 1830, the constitutional charter of the new monarchy of King Louis-Philippe had rees- tablished freedom of the French press, promising that the rigorous censorship of the Restoration would never be re- peated. This expansive idealism of the summer of 1830 was rapidly tempered by the passage of more cautious laws in November of the same year, which made press attacks against royal authority or against the person of the king punishable by fines or imprisonment or both. Yet such laws could hardly dampen the spirit of a press newly liberated. Moreover, the
  • 5. development of lithography facilitated the dissemination of caricatures to members of an art-buying middle class with a taste for political humor and for affordable prints that could be displayed in the home. The opportunity for testing the new freedoms and new powers of the press was irresistible.1 Between 1830 and 1835 (when far more severe press laws were reinstated), the opposition press staged an aggres- sive cat-and-mouse game with the government. The king became a favorite target of caricaturists' potshots, and skir- mishes with the new image police landed artists such as Charles Philipon (1800-62) and Honore Daumier (1808-79) in jail. Daumier's first clash with censorship came early in his career, in 1831-only a year after he had begun publish- ing caricatures in earnest. A detailed examination of the offending lithograph, Gargantua (fig. 1), offers important insights not only into the early artistic and political develop- ment of one of the most forceful caricaturists of the nineteenth century, but also into the larger question of the ability of a state to delimit artistic interpretation and to control political art. As any brief survey of Daumier's career will show, the various threats and punishments levied by the government of the July Monarchy did little to sour the artist's inventive humor, or to deflect his republican sentiments. If anything, the tale of Daumier's Gargantua is only the first chapter of an epic that charts the resilience of the artist's political expres-
  • 6. sion in spite of the government's attempted regulation or censure. On December 16, 1831, La Maison Aubert, the publishing business run by Philipon, submitted Daumier's lithograph Gargantua to the Depot legal, in accordance with the process required for the publication of caricatures in Paris.2 The image is a grotesque and scathing representation of King Louis-Philippe as the obese giant Gargantua, a character from Francois Rabelais's Gargantua et Pan- tagruel, originally published in 1532-35. As the monumen- tal king lounges in a large chaise percee, or toilet, a huge plank descends from his mouth like a grotesque extended tongue. Daumier accentuates Gargantua's enormity through the perspectival device of a diagonal plank, which links the giant dominating the middle ground with the pathetic crowd pressed into the right foreground of the print. Cripples, emaciated mothers, and tattered workers gather in front of the Parisian skyline, identifiable by the dome of the Invalides at the right, which Daumier has effaced, and by towers that may include Notre Dame. The poor drop coins into the baskets of lilliputian ministers, who dutifully march like ants up the
  • 7. gangplank to dump the tribute, and apparently themselves, into the gaping maw of the waiting monarch. As stray coins fall from overloaded baskets, obsequious ministers huddle at the feet of the king grab for riches. And as Louis-Philippe feeds, he also excretes a fresh load of rewards to another crowd of miniature officials, gathered beneath his toilet- throne in front of the National Assembly. These ministers eagerly flock to receive the shower of decorative crosses and papers labeled "prefecture" (prefectu[reJ), "nomination of peers" (nomination de pairs), and "military commission" (brevet de la ldgion). Although the size of the print and the inscriptions on its first state suggest that Gargantua may have been intended for SPRING 1992 27 FIG. 1 Honore Daumier, Gargantua, deposited December 16, 1831, lithograph, 91/2 x12 inches. The Benjamin A. and Julia M. Trustman Collection, Brandeis University Libraries, Waltham, Massachusetts, Delteil 34. Philipon's popular satirical journal La Caricature, it was in fact not published there; rather, the lithograph was briefly
  • 8. sold separately in the display window of Gabriel Aubert's fashionable caricature shop in the Galerie Vero-Dodat.3 Al- though Philipon later claimed that he had not published Gargantua in La Caricature because of its alleged artistic inferiority, his decision probably reflects not his aesthetic judgment, but a well-founded fear that the government would not tolerate the image. In late December the print-along with two other recent caricatures (including fig. 7) by Daumier-was seized by the police, who ordered Aubert to destroy the original lithographic stone and all remaining proofs.4 The extreme rarity of impressions today suggests that the police were largely successful in achieving their goal. Not all seizures of offensive prints led to criminal prosecutions at this time, but Daumier was not so lucky. On February 22, 1832, he, Aubert (Philipon's brother-in-law and owner of the publishing house), and Hippolyte Delaporte (a lithographic printer) were all brought to trial for their part in the affair-Daumier for composing Gargantua, Delaporte for printing it, and Aubert for exhibiting and selling it. All were charged with breaking the press law of November 1830 by arousing hatred and contempt of the king's government, and by offending the king's person, a crime of treason known as lhse majeste.5 Each was convicted and sentenced to six months in prison and a fine of five hundred francs. Subse- quently, Daumier, Delaporte, and Aubert all pleaded for
  • 9. mercy. The printer and the publisher were partly successful; only the young artist was held fully responsible for his part in the offense, as his "seditious crayon had traced the guilty image."6 Of the three men, only Daumier served a prison term. Although some two dozen of his lithographs were censored over the course of his career, this was the only offense for which he was incarcerated. In the later July Monarchy and in the Second Empire, he negotiated the minefields of censorship more adroitly. Why was Daumier's image so offensive to the govern- ment and why did it merit so harsh a punishment? The reasons are complex, and require an examination of several related issues-not only of Daumier's appropriation of the Rabelaisian character Gargantua, but also of the context of domestic politics in 1831, of the general discourse of scatol- ogy invoked in political satire in that year, and of the specific context of Philipon's related satire of Louis-Philippe as la poire-the king in the image of a pear. Let us begin with the tale of Gargantua, the mythic giant of French folklore in the late middle ages, whose experiences were subsequently chronicled and codified in burlesque epic by Rabelais. Rabelais's work enjoyed wide popularity during the first half of the nineteenth century; his ART JOURNAL r^S B . ... FIG. 2 Anonymous,
  • 10. Gargantua at His Table ...... " (Gargantua a son grand couvert), ca. 1810, etching, 9?4 x 123/4 inches. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. complete writings were published in Paris in at least nine editions between 1820 and 1840. The character of Gargantua had particular renown, and appeared in passing reference in the works of such novelists as Hugo and Balzac, as the archetypal glutton and the embodiment of material excess.7 Gargantua's enormous size was legendary, as was his appe- tite; even as an infant, he required the milk of 17,913 cows at one time to feed him.8 Daumier's scene of gluttony does not illustrate a particular passage; rather, his image plays off any number of feasting scenes in the book.9 Daumier was un- doubtedly inspired not only by his own reading of Rabelais's text, but also by early-nineteenth-century representations that feature the adult Gargantua as a gourmand. One exam- ple shows the giant as a ravenous bourgeois stuffing his face from huge platters of fish, game, and sweets while tiny servants haul baskets of more food up long ladders to re- plenish his table (fig. 2). Daumier's Gargantua bypasses the standard convention of the feasting table in favor of a single ramp that intensifies the direct opposition between powerless and powerful, between the feeders and the fed. Mikhail Bakhtin, in his analysis of Rabelaisian ban- quet imagery, stresses that the image of food is often a
  • 11. symbol for the entire labor process. That is, human labor is traditionally a struggle to wrest sustenance from the world, and the act of feasting is a celebration of the success of that labor.10 In the case of the grotesque body, exemplified by Gargantua, the body transgresses its own limits, devouring and growing only at the world's expense. The balance of labor and reward is lost when the only one to feast is the giant; the gluttony of Daumier's Gargantua occurs at the expense of any sustenance for the laborers who supply his meal. Daumier's image combines, as if in continuous narra- tive, massive ingestion with defecation. In popular prints, the grand dinners of Gargantua are often followed by huge defecations of poorly digested food (fig. 3). The giant's servants attend him in this bodily function as well, and leave with whatever rewards they can salvage. Similarly, Daumier's more privileged servants-the ministers-benefit from the royal excrement of symbolic reward. The cycle Daumier de- picts is self-perpetuating but perverse-the baskets of coins poured into the giant king's mouth resemble turds more than do the sheets of paper that fall beneath the king's seat. Money, or symbolic wealth, metamorphoses into food/feces, and feces metamorphose back into paper symbolic of wealth and position. Such reversals of nature are consistent with Bakhtin's analysis of Rabelais's humor of the burlesque, in which a logic of inversion rules in a topsy-turvy world.1 Another significant inversion occurs in the body of the king, which Daumier has conspicuously infantalized by showing him being fed by others. His insatiable appetites and perpet-
  • 12. ual bowel movements have rendered him passive and seden- tary. Daumier's gluttonous Louis-Philippe rules not in the elevated spheres of politics, power, and philosophy, but in the lower spheres of food, fat, and feces. In attacking Louis-Philippe's literal seat of power, Daumier has transformed the throne room into the bathroom. In linking the king's defecation to paper, Daumier may have been inspired by a famous episode in Gargantua's childhood, SPRING 1992 ': : i i. .i;;:yG , :. 'I l " A- -,A e S: ' ' ; X_ ; 29 FIG. 3 Anonymous, Gargantua after His Dinner (Apres dinee de Gargantua), ca. 1810, etching, 91/2 x 125/8 inches. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. in which the child-giant searches for an ideal arse-wipe. 12 In Rabelais's account, the child tests various crude substitutes, ranging from cats and nettles to tablecloths. He also tries paper, and composes a clever rhyme on its inefficacy. Here, Gargantua delights in reordering his universe according to the utility of the various objects appropriated for this most
  • 13. lowly purpose. The scatological humor of such grotesque realism derives from the strategic dislocation of the familiar and its relocation in the sphere of what Bakhtin describes as the material bodily lower stratum. Bakhtin argues that Rabelais's humor depends on the "downward" thrusts of his imagery lifted from the culture of popular festive mer- riment-out of the elevated realms of intellect and reason and into the lower spheres represented by either the bowels of the earth or of the human body. Bakhtin describes the action of such comic inversion as moving "down, inside out, vice versa, upside down. . . . All of [these movements] thrust down, turn over, push headfirst, transfer top to bottom, and bottom to top, both in the literal sense of space, and in the metaphorical meaning of the image."'3 Low goes high, and high goes low in Gargantua's world. Turd-shaped nourish- ment is carried into the heights on the backs of ambitious servants, only to be "downed" by the giant and excreted in the lower stratum in the displaced symbols of exalted position and authority in official culture. Casting King Louis-Philippe as Gargantua was in it- self a Rabelaisian act, for during Daumier's era it was widely believed that Rabelais had intended his book to be a moral and political critique of the reign of his own king, Francois I. Such an interpretation, widely proposed in literary criticism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, ap- peared in the introduction to numerous editions of Rabelais's Gargantua.14 According to such a reading, Grandgousier (Gargantua's father) was none other than Louis XII (Francois I's father-in-law); Pantagruel (Gargantua's son) was really Henri II (Francois I's successor); and so on. Given that the
  • 14. reign of Francois I had seen the expansion and consolidation of an absolute monarchy, Daumier's image accuses the Citi- zen King of being more King than Citizen in drawing paral- lels between the authoritarian reign of Francois I and the new constitutional monarchy. In his use of literary inspiration for political satire, Daumier followed a widespread practice among artists in Philipon's circle, whose caricatures often turned on a mod- ern reading of a classic French author.15 Yet by invoking Rabelais, Daumier recalled an author who offered particular inspiration in a volatile time. Rabelais himself had braved attacks of censors in 1533, when the Sorbonne had placed Gargantua and Pantagruel on the official list of condemned books because of its alleged obscenity.16 By the time Daumier created Gargantua, one of his own prints (see fig. 6) had just been seized by the police and Philipon had already been prosecuted twice. As the freedom of the press was now so blatantly threatened, Daumier may have resur- rected this Rabelaisian character to reinforce the opposi- tional power of his art in the supposedly tolerant era of the Juste Milieu. What was the relevance of casting Louis-Philippe as ART JOURNAL -- :B? i: I i _ :::-:::-::::: ::_:::::: :: ::-,:-::-:::::;-:- :I: ::--: .- -.--..- ;1:::: ::::-:::-:-:;-i ;::::
  • 15. ::-:-ii:r_:._::?:::::::-_:;:--.: -:I::-i:::::;::: :I:::: ::;; ::::;::; : :::: :i::_ 30 F I G. 4 Honor6 Daumier, Ah, poor sheep! No matter what you do, you will always get sheared (Pauvres moutons ah! vous avez beau faire, toujours on vous tondra), deposited December 1, 1830, hand-colored lithograph, 10Y2 x 143/8 inches. The Benjamin A. and Julia M. Trustman Collection, Brandeis University Libraries, Waltham, Massachusetts, Delteil 18. Gargantua in 1831? Daumier conceived the image with a particular audience in mind-he could assume that the middle-class clientele of La Maison Aubert would be both sufficiently educated to recognize the literary reference to Rabelais and sufficiently critical of the Orleanists to enjoy a good joke at the government's expense. Daumier had emerged as a critic of Louis-Philippe as early as December 1831, only five months into the new reign. In his caricature Pauvres moutons . .., an easily recognizable king, dressed as a peasant, shears a flock of sheep who wear the tricolor cock- ade of France (fig. 4). Although Daumier here attacks Louis- Philippe for profiting from the French people, his shepherd metaphor is mild, and occasioned no seizure of the print. But Daumier's pastoral imagery soon gave way to a more grotesque language of exploitation coupled with obscenity in Gargantua.
  • 16. Daumier's intensified critique responded to a growing mood of political disillusionment that swept through both the working classes and the republican bourgeoisie in France in 1831. The national economy, already flagging under the decline of 1827-29, had been severely depressed in the months following the revolution of 1830. Cycles of production, sales, and credit collapsed in industry throughout the coun- try, resulting in widespread bankruptcies and also stagger- ing unemployment among the working class. By 1831 demon- strations and even violent insurrection registered popular discontent with labor conditions. The republican movement, still largely bourgeois in 1831, but sympathetic to the prob- lems of workers, mobilized its resistance to Louis-Philippe's administration in associations and secret societies.17 Louis- Auguste Blanqui, writing in defense of the Societe des Amis du Peuple, argued at about this time that the new government was little more than a constant pump that lined the coffers of the idle rich by pressing out the blood and labor of peasants and workers.18 In such republican discourse, Daumier may have found inspiration for his critique of Louis-Philippe's social cannibalism. Daumier's image of consumption and exploitation should also be considered in the more specific context of contemporary politics in Paris. One major debate in the National Assembly in December 1831 was the proposed national budget of 12 hundred million francs.19 Daumier's
  • 17. inscription of the number 12 on two baskets of coins used to feed Gargantua suggests that the giant embodies this in- flated annual budget. But the caricature also invokes a more particular budgetary debate, that of the king's civil list, the SPRING 1992 stipend given to the monarch by the state for his personal support and that of his family. It was not until January 1832 that the National Assembly agreed on the final figure of 12 million francs for this annual support, a relatively modest figure in comparison with the 34 million required by Louis XVIII and the 32 million paid to Charles X. Yet throughout 1831 a faction of the Chamber of Deputies, led by Louis de Cormenin, objected to allocating any substantial civil list to a king who had come to the throne with considerable personal property. 20 Debate over the terms and amount of the civil list recurred in the Chamber of Deputies throughout the fall, and was lively in the first half of December, precisely the time when Daumier conceived his Gargantua.21 Daumier was probably also guided to the subject of the civil list by texts and images in La Caricature in the last half of 1831. The civil list is one of several governmental expendi- tures lampooned by Grandville in lithographs published on
  • 18. August 4 and September 15. Later in the winter, two satirical articles in the journal targeted the civil list specifically. A satirical article of November 3 by Derville gave an account of the fictional budget of the King of Yvetot, a character from a popular chanson by the republican Pierre Jean Beranger. Derville's king practiced admirable economy, and his chaise percee also served as a throne. This passage is undoubtedly one inspiration for Daumier's depiction of the enthroned Louis-Philippe. Balzac, in another article on the civil list in La Caricature on December 8, blasts the government's cur- rent proposal to spend 18 million francs on the monarch's support. He was especially cynical in his account of the inflated budget for heating, wine, cuisine, the royal stable, and miscellaneous pleasures. Daumier easily translates into Rabelaisian metaphor the themes of royal extravagance and selfishness addressed by these articles. He refers to the debate over the civil list by inscribing the numbers 12 and 18-standing for proposed budget figures of 12 million and 18 million francs-on the second of the baskets the ministers carry (the number 12 may thus refer simultaneously to the national budget and to the civil list). Daumier transforms the symbolic means of the king's material support-the bags of coins-into the feast that nourishes his bulging belly, a sagging white sphere that itself resembles a huge sack of coins. In choosing the character of Gargantua to parody the
  • 19. king and his civil list, Daumier may have been aware of a specifically republican interpretation of Rabelais that pro- posed the relevance of the Renaissance text for modern satire. Henri Martin's critique, written in 1791 and often quoted in the prefaces to later editions of Rabelais's work, called attention to its potential contemporary applications.22 He argued that the excessive amount of food and clothing needed by Gargantua probably approximated in value the civil list actually required by modern kings (implying Louis XVI) and their courts. Daumier's caricature recycles essen- tially the same republican rhetoric some forty years later. Moreover, anonymous political caricatures from the revolu- tion of 1789 feature Louis XVI as the ravenous Modern Gargantua, living off of the labor of his subjects. These artists, like Daumier, use Gargantua's body as a metaphor for a king whose power has become disproportionate and inflated.23 Daumier's Gargantuan imagery targets various policies of Louis-Philippe's government in late 1831. The awards that fall from the giant's toilet include the "nomination of peers," a reference to Louis-Philippe's recent appointment of thirty- six new peers in an effort to increase his support in the Chamber of Peers. The "military commission" recalls the king's recent proposal to increase the benefits of the recip- ients of the Legion of Honor.24 These signs of official reward contrast sharply with the evident sacrifice of the impov- erished crowd of workers. Daumier's Gargantua depicts both a king who is
  • 20. greedy and self-serving at the expense of the material welfare of his people, and an administration whose officials cater to the king's will for their own personal gain. These implica- tions alone might have provided sufficient cause to seize the print as an illegal attack against royal authority. But it was under the second provision of that law of 1830, the proscrip- tion against attacking the royal person of the king, that Daumier's Gargantua got him into big trouble. In Daumier's print, the king's body is the agent of his own political corruption. In appropriating the king's person as the vehicle for insulting both the royal body and the body politic, Daumier stages a court of burlesque justice where the king gets his own just deserts. Although he is master of his throne, the king is also a prisoner of his toilet and is punished by his own body. This print is fundamentally an attack on material privilege, and Daumier privileges a fundamental matter, excrement, to bring down his king. Daumier was neither original nor unique in this appeal to scatological humor, but he was unquestionably successful. Excrement is, as Bakhtin has observed, one of the best substances for the degrading of all that is exalted.25 In early modern caricature in both England and France there is a rich tradition of such grotesque imagery of the body and defeca- tion. Satirists often symbolically disempowered politicians by depicting them engaged in action below the belt, and heads of state often became the literal butt of the joke.26 A line of distinguished defecators stands (and sits) behind Louis-Philippe. For example, James Gillray satirized Wil- liam Pitt in 1797 when Pitt substituted paper currency for
  • 21. gold coinage (fig. 5). In Gillray's print, Pitt appears sitting astride the Bank of England. He simultaneously defecates and vomits new symbols of wealth, hoarding the old riches and showering the English people with the new currency. His rotund stomach, stuffed with coins, foreshadows the over- loaded belly of Gargantua, and like his Rabelaisian counter- part, his body is made obscene by its unnatural excretions. Daumier's print also recalls, as James Cuno has pointed out, ART JOURNAL 31 duct negotiations with the rebels. Here, Louis-Philippe gives his son a slice of bread laden with a dark substance scooped from a pot labeled "butter." He instructs the prince to go to Lyons and to "promise them what I'm giving you." The salve the king sends the striking workers is not butter to grease diplomatic wheels, but a little pile of excrement, and the pot from which Louis-Philippe has obtained his "butter" is a simple chamber pot. Daumier equates the king's alleged concern for workers' rights with ordure. This version of Daumier's print was seized by the police in early December 1831. That the depiction of the king handling excrement (presumably his own) was the violating feature of this print is indicated by a subsequent version of the lithograph (Delteil 31) that was not seized, once the offending chamber pot had been effaced. The second, "cleaned-up" version was deposited at the Depot legal on December 5, 1831.
  • 22. That same week, a more subtle scatological reference in Daumier's caricature escaped the immediate censure of the government. In a print deposited December 7 (one week before he submitted Gargantua), Daumier depicted the crown prince and the minister of war, Marshal Soult, riding a horse between Lyons and Paris (fig. 7). In this print, Ils ne font q'un saut!, the marshal carries a canon, positioned on his lap like an enormous phallus, in mockery of the military prowess of the regime. (The government's troops, at first FI . 5 James Gillray, Midas Transmuting all into 6eM Paper, 1797, etching, 14 x 103/8 inches. Courtesy Trustees of the British Museum, London. a more recent scatological tradition in French political cari- cature. Some satires of Charles X turn on similar jokes, as the king swallows medals and defecates the Order of the Lilies.27 Such imagery invites consideration in the light of Freud's theory of anal erotism, which links adult greed with childhood obsession with feces.28 According to Freud, a child's sense of power and independence derives in part fiom his or her manipulation of excrement; as she or he matures, this early anal erotism is repressed and sublimated in a reattachment to another symbol of power, money. Such theory may offer insight into the humor of infantalization prevalent in so many of these scatological caricatures. From Cruikshank to Daumier and beyond, politicians obsessed with their wealth and power often take a childish delight in redistribut- ing their doo-doo. As Daumier learned in the winter of 1831-32, too much fun with royal feces could get a caricaturist in too deep.
  • 23. The government's intolerance of such subject matter in con- nection with the image of the king is indicated by the official response to Daumier's Depart pour Lyon (fig. 6). The print refers to the massive November insurrection in Lyons by some twenty thousand canuts, weavers and other workers in the silk industry.29 In early December, Louis-Philippe sent his son, the crown prince Ferdinand-Philippe, to Lyons to help con- FIG. 6 Honore Daumier, Departure for Lyons. Go, my pet, and promise them what I am giving you (Depart pour Lyon. Vas poulot, et promets leur ce que je te donne), late November or early December 1831, lithograph, 13?2 x 10 inches. The Benjamin A. and Julia M. Trustman Collection, Brandeis University Libraries, Waltham, Massachusetts, Delteil 30. SPRING 1992 FIG. 7 Honore Daumier, They make only one jump! (lls ne font q'un saut.), deposited December 7,1831, hand-colored lithograph, 97/8 14X8/ inches. The Benjamin A. and Julia M. Trustman Collection, Brandeis University Libraries, Waltham, Massachusetts, Delteil 32. defeated by the workers and by defecting members of the
  • 24. National Guard, had returned with Soult to Lyons on Decem- ber 2, only to find that the rebellion had already ended.) The crown prince brings the striking workers a small pot labeled "compotes" (as in fruit compotes), a pun on "compost," a wordplay that reiterates Daumier's previous reference to the king's chamber pot and the excrement that constitutes his royal goodwill. Although at first tolerant of this print, the police seized it several weeks later, along with Gargantua. When the government tried Daumier in February 1832 for both of these prints, the artist was found guilty of charges related to Gargantua, but was cleared of those relating to Ils nefont q'un saut!30 These latter charges were probably based on the offensive legend, which, turning on a clever pun, not only stated that the marshal and prince make only one jump (saut) on their horse, but also implied that together they have only the intelligence to make up one idiot (sot, a homophone of saut). Although the compost makes the joke here another "dirty" one, it is but a small detail. The unpardonable trespass in the winter of 1831-32 seems not to have been scatological humorper se, but rather the depiction of the king
  • 25. distributing feces, as in Gargantua or Depart pour Lyon. This scatological discourse continued in more cautious representations of the king in La Caricature after Daumier's conviction. In Grandville's Digestion du Budjet [sic] (fig. 8), for example, Louis-Philippe sucks nourishment from a vat filled with wealth, only to excrete waste that is siphoned from his seat by his deputies and by hidden "secret funds" that were used to bribe the government's opponents. Like Gargan- tua, this print targets the draining of national resources by an exploitative government. Yet in consideration of the press laws Grandville cleverly turns the king's face and body away from the viewer, discreetly conveying his identity through his characteristic hairstyle and sideburns. In such tempered images, scatological political satire escaped the closing nets of censorship. Daumier invoked many satirical discourses simul- taneously in Gargantua. His violation of the king's person was not limited to imagery of gluttony, obesity, and defeca- tion; he also directly quoted from a new metamorphic satire just developed by Philipon in the image of the pear (lapoire). This new image raised the central question of the caricatur- ist's right to create and transform resemblance, regardless of the law. On November 14, Philipon had stood trial for one of his several violations of the press laws of 1830. The print in question, published in La Caricature the previous June,
  • 26. represented Louis-Philippe as a mason plastering over the promises of 1830. In an attempt to clear himself in the trial, Philipon argued that because he never depicted royal insig- nia, he had never portrayed the actual king. Instead, he relied only on the king's general resemblance to represent the government in symbolic fashion. In support of his contention that the law could not control "the liberty of the crayon," Philipon drew the now famous quartet of images in which the recognizable face of the king gradually metamorphoses into a pear; he asked the court whether the ultimate resemblance between king and pear meant that one could no longer draw pears. The comparison was a clever insult, since poire means both "pear" and "fathead" or "simpleton" in French slang.31 Although the sign of the pear soon evolved into a satirical emblem of the entire political regime of Louis-Philippe, it was closely linked in its early days to the specific identity and ART JOURNAL 33 physiognomy of the king.32 The government's dilemma in judging the intent of such resemblance emerges repeatedly, as we shall see, in the official debate regarding the censor- ship of Daumier's Gargantua. However ingenious, Philipon's defense of freedom of
  • 27. the press based on the mutating pear failed to win his court case, and he received a heavy sentence of six months in prision and a fine of two thousand francs. On November 24, 1831, just three weeks before Daumier deposited Gargan- tua, La Caricature published Philipon's courtroom drawings of the pear (fig. 9). With the pear thus publicly baptized (although the issue was later seized by the police), Daumier rapidly incorporated Philipon's punning image into two of his own works, Depart pour Lyon and Gargantua. The undenia- bly pyramidal shape of Gargantua's head, defined by his 34 ample whiskers and pointed coiffure, emphatically recalls the pear. Even Gargantua's pointed cowlick mirrors the stem of Philipons pear, and the rounded pyramidal shape of the king's entire body echoes the bulbous shape of the fruit. For the initiated viewer, these visual puns transform Gargantua's face, making it more fruitlike and bellylike than facelike. These physiognomic dislocations reinforce the burlesque inversions of natural order already present in Daumier's scatological imagery. In taking such playful liberties with the king's person, Daumier clearly intended to test the same ground of artistic freedom that Philipon had just defended. Perhaps he kept in mind the exhortation published by Philipon in La Caricature on November 24: "Yes, we have the right to personify power. Yes, we have the right to take, for this personification, whatever resemblance suits our needs! Yes, all resemblances belong to us!" Given Philipon's fate in the courts the previous
  • 28. month, Daumier assumed an obvious risk in accepting his challenge to caricaturists. He seems even to have flaunted his authorship in the face of possible repression; although he had left several recent provocative caricatures unsigned (such as Delteil 30-33), he boldly signed his name in the lower left corner of Gargantua. The guilty verdict at Daumier's trial the following February turned, predictably, on the issue of whether or not Gargantua actually represented the king, or was intended as a more symbolic representation of the government's swollen budget. The image was of course both, but for pragmatic reasons the convicted men soon attempted to argue other- wise. Previously unpublished documents reveal that Daumier, Delaporte, and Aubert appealed their conviction in joint letters to the king.33 They protested their innocent intentions in publishing the "inoffensive drawing." They pleaded in the name of "the liberty most dear to the French, who have named you King," and they begged obsequiously as F I G. 8 Grandville [Jean-lgnace-lsidore Gerard], Digestion du Budjet [sic]: Travail administratif, politique, moral et surtout economique, (Digestion of the Budget: Administrative, political, moral, and above all, economic task), published in La Caricature, May 24,1832, lithograph, 9?2 x 12 inches. Santa Barbara Museum of Art, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Michael Wilson. SPRING 1992
  • 29. the king's "very humble, faithful, and obedient subjects." Subsequently, they also pleaded their cases independently; perhaps Aubert and Delaporte, more experienced in defend- ing themselves in press violations, sensed that each stood a better chance on his own than with the young artist. Delaporte, for example, appealed to the king's promise in the charter not to reestablish censorship, arguing that to hold a mere printer responsible for the offense would be to create "a new censor, one thousand times more dangerous [than the last]." The most important argument in these documents re- volves, again, around the issues of resemblance and signifi- cation. Daumier claimed Gargantua merely personified the Budget. He "didn't want to represent the chief of the govern- ment" and he offered as proof the "little personages grouped around the principal figure, who have the same clothing, the same figure and the same physiognomy [as Gargantua]." This line of reasoning-that since the tiny ministers all looked like Gargantua, none of the figures could be the singular person of the king-was transparently thin. The little clones of the giant merely intensified the insult to His Majesty. It took the court several months to consider this joint appeal; in memos dated March 19 and May 2, 1832, the court recommended that Delaporte's and Aubert's prison sentences be suspended, but that Daumier serve his full sentence. Everyone still paid their fines, however, because the court still found all parties guilty of offending the king's person with the image. One memo noted that the "easily grasped" resemblance of Gargantua to Louis-Philippe could hardly be
  • 30. the result of pure chance, as Daumier baldly maintained. In the court's view, the manifest goal of the artist had been to "figure, with exaggerated and monstrous features, the person of the King, represented devouring, under the eyes of his starving people, the dishes of a feast in the style of Rabelais." The government was not just being literal-minded in uphold- ing Daumier's harsh punishment; it feared the power of the artist above that of his business collaborators. Pictures were, it seemed, more dangerous than words, in part because they could be comprehended relatively quickly by literate and nonliterate audiences alike. Authors and editors of opposi- tional texts enjoyed greater leniency than artists at this time, as is suggested by another trial held on February 24, 1832. The same court that had condemned Daumier the day before now acquitted two members of the republican Societe des Amis du Peuple of identical charges. The pamphlet in ques- tion, attacking the right of the king and his deputies to their power, was surely at least as inflammatory-if not more so- as the condemned caricature.34 Daumier's conviction for Gargantua did little to alter his commitment to political caricature. In the period between 35 FIG. 9 Charles Philipon, The Pears (Les Poires) published in La Caricature, November 24, 1831, lithograph, 1334 x 10 inches. Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations, New York.
  • 31. his February trial and his imprisonment in August 1832, he produced several controversial lithographs that were seized by the government.35 Prison did not stop Daumier from drawing; in fact, it seems to have given him an opportunity to rework his image. The Gazette de Sainte Pelagie reported that in the cell inhabited by Daumier in 1832 a drawing of Gargantua appeared on the wall. This time the giant was served by easily recognizable personages, including the current ministers of justice, of the interior, of finance, and of war. 36 This was one drawing on stone the government did not worry about. After Daumier's release from prison, the char- acter Gargantua (unlike la poire) disappeared from his satir- ical repertoire.37 Although his firm attachment to republican ideals dates from the early July Monarchy, Daumier learned how to live with the presence of censorship. He continued to make biting political satires, but, like his colleagues at La Maison Aubert, he also began to contribute social caricature to the less overtly political journals, such as Le Charivari, which
  • 32. began publication in 1832. Once the September Laws of 1835 imposed rigid and explicit press censorship, French cari- ART JOURNAL caturists were forced to abandon overtly political subject matter until 1848. During this period, an active army of censors in the Ministry of the Interior reviewed each carica- 36 ture before publication. Archival documents record the occa- sional frustration of the censors assigned to Le Charivari as they struggled with suspicious imagery.38 Aubert submitted at least fifty lithographs by various artists that were denied publication between 1835 and 1848. This record suggests that Daumier and his colleagues walked a delicate tightrope of the permissible in satire for the remainder of the July Monarchy. During the idealistic period of the Second Republic of 1848-52, Daumier and fellow caricaturists enjoyed a more tolerant official attitude toward the press. But in the volatile days at the end of the Second Republic, some of Daumier's colleagues, such as Charles Vernier, were imprisoned for publishing caricatures of President Louis-Napoleon. Daumier managed nonetheless to produce highly critical satires of Louis-Napoleon, and still escape such punishment.
  • 33. Some of these directly satirized the president; others crit- icized his policies through the fictional member of his secret police force, Ratapoil. Such imagery was censored with the arrival of the Second Empire and the reestablishment of strict censorship laws in 1852. In spite of this, Daumier sustained a subtle antibonapartist critique, even during the most re- pressive days of the Second Empire. In 1831 Daumier's caricature of Louis-Philippe as Gargantua had relied on the artist's manipulation of the king's physiognomy. In later years, as a mature caricaturist and an astute negotiator of censorship, Daumier mounted attacks on political leaders that often took a more subtle and covert form. He moved occasionally from the obvious exag- gerations of the physical characteristics of his subject to the creation of clever surrogates, often lifted from exotic cultures to further displace them from the domestic context. One fascinating example of this satiric strategy is his representa- tion of Faustin Soulouque, the emperor of Haiti between 1849 and 1859 (fig. 10).39 Soulouque first appears in Daumier's FIG. 10 Honore Daumier, Emperor Soulouque, having learned that a European journalist allowed himself to criticize several of the acts of his administration, succeeds in seizing the guilty one and plunging him in a caldron full of boiling tar-All done in the hope that this will serve as a lesson to this hack journalist and that he will not write a second article against His Majesty (Official
  • 34. Monitor of Haiti) (L'Empereur Soulouque ayant appris qu'un journaliste europeen s'etait permis de critiquer quelques uns des actes de son administration est parvenu a saisir le coupable et I'a plong6 dans une chaudiere remplie de goudron brilant-Tout fait esperer que cela servira de lecon a ce folliculaire et qu'il n'ecrira pas un second article contre sa majeste (Moniteur officiel d'Haiti, published in Le Charivari, June 15, 1850, lithograph, 91/2 x 814 inches. The Armand Hammer Daumier and Contemporaries Collection, Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, Los Angeles, Delteil 2015. work in June 1850 as a barbaric despot who angrily plunges a terrified journalist into a boiling caldron. Soulouque pun- ishes the European for his articles that criticize the black emperor's regime. This satire does not refer to any current event in Haiti; rather, Daumier here casts Louis-Napoleon in blackface in order to criticize the French government's recent repression of a republican newspaper. The identification of President Louis-Napoleon with the despotic Soulouque was a well-established racist insult within republican discourse in Paris at the time of the coup d'etat of December 2, 1851. During the decade that followed, Daumier and a few of his contemporaries continued to parody the regime of Louis- Napoleon (who became Emperor Napoleon III in 1852)
  • 35. through the personage of Soulouque. As the press lost its freedom, Daumier occasionally appropriated such exotic per- sonae to provide a means for circumventing the literal minds of the censors. Thus, even in the repressive early Second SPRING 1992 Empire, Napoleon III's strenuous efforts to control political caricature could not prevent Daumier from inventing or de- veloping a limited but persistent satire of opposition. The creation and censorship of Gargantua came at a pivitol moment in the early development of Daumier's long career as a political satirist. Inspired by the work of artists and journalists in Philipon's circle, as well as by his own republican politics, he tested the limits of tolerance of an ever more reactionary government. He used Rabelaisian imagery of gluttony and defecation to degrade both the person and the politics of the king, and with this explicit imagery he stood his ground in the face of a government reneging on its promises of freedom for the press. That his satiric aim was precisely on target is suggested by the suppression of the print and the severity of Daumier's punishment. His "se- ditious crayon" often returned to taboo subjects, and his Gargantua fired the opening volley in what became a long career of comic attacks against the strongholds of censorship.
  • 36. Notes A version of this essay was presented in a lecture at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in October 1991. I gratefully acknowledge the support of a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, which partially supported the research for this article. I am also grateful to Lisa Leary, Michael Marrinan, and Roberta Wadell for their assistance with research problems, and to Gerald Silk, John Klein, John House, and Kirsten Powell for their insightful comments on drafts of this essay. 1. A useful survey of press laws and acts of censorship during this period is found in Robert Justin Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature in Nineteenth-Century France (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1989), chapter 4. For an exhaustive study on the development of the caricature business in Paris, see James Cuno, "Charles Philipon and La Maison Aubert: The Business, Politics, and Public of Caricature in Paris, 1820-1840" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard Univerity, 1985). 2. Gargantua (Delteil 34) was deposited on December 16, not December 15, as recorded in Loys Delteil, Le Peintre-Graveur illustre: Daumier, 11 vols. (Paris: Chez l'auteur, 1925-30). All Daumier prints will be referred to by their Delteil number. On Daumier's process of publishing of caricature, and his encounters with censorship, see Elizabeth C. Childs, "Honor6 Daumier and the Exotic
  • 37. Vision: Studies in French Culture and Caricature, 1830-1870" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1989), chapter 1. 3. State 1 of Gargantua (Delteil 34) bears an inscription at the lower right, "On s'abonne chez Aubert" (subscriptions available at La Maison Aubert), the same inscription that appears on prints published in La Caricature. 4. The police seized Delteil 32 (fig. 7), 33, and 34 (fig. 1). 5. Darmaing, "Chronique," Gazette des tribunaux, February 23, 1832, 432. 6. Archives Nationales, Paris (hereafter A.N.), BB 21 373 (no. 4172-S8). Between August 27, 1832, and February 22, 1833, Daumier spent two and one-half months in the prison of Sainte Pelagie, and an additional three and one- half months under supervision in Dr. Pinel's maison de sante. 7. See passages in Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo (Paris, 1832; reprint, Paris: Garnier, 1959), 18, and Honore de Balzac, La Peau de chagrin (Paris, 1831; reprint, Paris: Garnier, 1960), 53. 8. For examples of Gargantua's insatiable appetite, see Francois Rabelais, Gargan- tua and Pantagruel (London: Penguin, 1955), chapters 6, 7, and 21. 9. Sarah Symmons unconvincingly proposes a connection between the print and two passages in the book, including Gargantua's theft of the bells of Notre Dame and Alcofribas's defecation in the throat of Pantagruel. See her Daumier (London: Oresko, 1979), 24. 10. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington:
  • 38. Indiana University Press, 1984), chapter 4. 11. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, chapter 6. 12. Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, chapter 13. I am grateful to Eric Nicholson for bringing this passage to my attention. 13. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 370. 14. For example, see Charles Sainte-Beuve, Tableau historique et critique de lapoesie francaise au XVI siecle (Paris, 1829; reprint, Paris: Charpentier, 1843), 268, and Oeuvres de Rabelais (Paris: Dalibon, 1823), with commentary by Esmangart and Eloi Johanneau. 15. See, for example, Kirsten Powell, "The Press Repressed: Themes of Suppression and Censorship of the Press in Caricatures of La Fontaine's Fables," Proceedings of the Western Societyfor French History 17 (Auburn, Alabama: Auburn University, 1990), 347-59. 16. See Natalie Zemon Davis, "Rabelais among the Censors (1940s, 1540s)," Repre- sentations 32 (Fall 1990): 15-17. 17. See Christopher H. Johnson, "The Revolution of 1830 in French Economic History," in 1830 in France, ed. John Merriman (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975), 139-90, and H. A. C. Collingham, The July Monarchy: A Political History of France, 1830-48 (New York: Longman, 1988), chapter 11. 18. Blanqui quoted in Stanislav Osiakovski, "Some Political and Social Views of Honore Daumier as Shown in His Lithographs" (Ph.D. diss.,
  • 39. University of London, 1957), 82. 19. See Le Moniteur universel (Paris), December 9, December 11, December 13, 1831. 20. See John Baughman, "Financial Resources of Louis Philippe," French Histori- cal Studies 4 (Spring 1965): 63-83. 21. See Le Moniteur universel, October 5, December 5, December 13, 1831. 22. "De la Liste civile, ou de la d6pense personnelle d'un roi," chapter 2 in Henri Martin, De l'autorite de Rabelais dans la r6volution presente (Paris: Gattey, 1791). Martin's book is commonly cited in early-nineteenth-century editions of Rabelais's complete works (for example, the Dalibon edition, published in Paris in 1823). 23. Examples of such etchings from 1790-91 are reproduced in French Caricature and the French Revlution, 1789-1799, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, University of California, 1988), 181-82. 24. On the reforms of the Legion of Honor, see Le Moniteur universel, November 29 and December 9, 1831. 25. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 152. 26. See, for example, David's caricature The English Government, of 1793-94, in Albert Boime, "Jacques-Louis David, Scatological Discourse in the French Revolu- tion, and the Art of Caricature," Arts 62 (February 1988): 74. 27. Cuno, "Charles Philipon and La Maison Aubert," 214-16. 28. A fascinating discussion of this Freudian theory in the context of scatological art appears in an unpublished paper by Gerald Silk, "Myths and
  • 40. Meanings in Manzoni's Merda d'artista," presented at the College Art Association annual conference, New York, 1990. 29. On the November strike in Lyons, see Robert Bezucha, The Lyon Uprising of 1834: Social and Political Conflict in the Early July Monarchy (Cambridge, Massa- chusetts: Harvard University Press, 1974), chapter 2. 30. Gazette des tribunaux, February 23, 1832. On these prints, see also Peter Morse, "Daumier's Early Lithographs," Print Review 11 (1980): 32-36. 31. It is not clear whether this slang meaning ofpoire preceded Philipon's appropria- tion of the fruit motif, or was perhaps generated subsequently by the enormous popularity of the satire. The most complete study of La Poire is Elise Kenney and John Merriman's The Pear: French Graphic Arts in the Golden Age of Caricature, exh. cat. (South Hadley, Massachusetts: Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, 1991). See also Sandy Petrey, "Pears in History," Representations, no. 35 (Summer 1991): 52-71. 32. On this important distinction, see Cuno, "Charles Philipon and La Maison Aubert," 197-207. 33. Quotations regarding the appeals are taken from ten unnumbered documents in the Recours de grace file, A.N. BB 21 3737 (no. 4172-S8). All translations are the author's. 34. Gazette des tribunaux, February 24, 1832. 35. Les Blanchisseurs (Delteil 39) may have provoked Daumier's arrest on August 27. 36. Gazette de Sainte Pelagie, January 17, 1833.
  • 41. 37. Grandville published a caricature of Gargantua in the pages of La Caricature (February 20, 1834). This later version featured a foreign monarch, Czar Nicholas of Russia, as the giant; Louis-Philippe appears only as one of the servants feeding the barbaric glutton. 38. For example, see letter from the minister of the interior to the minister of justice, August 6, 1841, A.N. BB 18 1396 (2289). 39. For a thorough discussion of Daumier's caricatures of Soulouque, see Elizabeth C. Childs, "The Secret Agents of Satire: Daumier, Censorship and the Image of the Exotic in Political Caricature, 1850-1860," Proceedings of theAnnual Meeting of the Western Societyfor French History 17 (Auburn, Alabama: Auburn University, 1990), 336-46. ELIZABETH C. CHILDS is assistantprofessor atS.U.N.Y., Purchase. She co-curated the exhibition Femmes d'Esprit: Women in Daumier's Caricature and is currently editing a book of essays on art and censorship. ART JOURNAL 37 Article Contentsp.26p.27p.28p.29p.30p.31p.32p.33p.34p.35p.36p.37Iss ue Table of ContentsArt Journal, Vol. 51, No. 1, Uneasy Pieces (Spring, 1992), pp. 1-128Front Matter [pp.1-126]Artist's PagesJoseph Kosuth [pp.5-19]Editors' StatementsUneasy Pieces: Controversial Works in the History of Art, 1830-1950 [pp.22- 25]Big Trouble: Daumier, Gargantua, and the Censorship of Political Caricature [pp.26-37]Gustave Courbet's Venus and
  • 42. Psyche: Uneasy Nudity in Second-Empire France [pp.38- 44]Louis Legrand's Battle over Prostitution: The Uneasy Censoring of Le Courrier Français [pp.45-50]An American Victorian Dilemma, 1875: Should a Woman Be Allowed to Sculpt a Man? [pp.51-56]The Political Censorship of Jan Matejko [pp.57-63]Nevinson's Elegy: Paths of Glory [pp.64- 71]The Most Famous Painting of the "Golden Twenties"? Otto Dix and the Trench Affair [pp.72-80]Bernhard Hoetger's Tree of Life: German Expressionism and Racial Ideology [pp.81- 91]Book ReviewsVisual Theory [pp.93-99]Contemporary Artists [pp.99-105]Georgia O'Keeffe [pp.105-113]Corot [pp.113- 115]Books and Catalogues Received [pp.117-123]Letters to the EditorFrom Sidney Geist [pp.125-128]From Selby Whittingham [p.125]From Michael Rabe [pp.125-127]From Robert Storr [p.128]Back Matter