In the same series as the "Abolition Catastrophe" is a cartoon entitled "Miscegenation; or, the Millennium of Abolition," intended to depict the possible alarming consequences of proclaiming the whole colored race free and equal. It humorously depicts a scene in which there is absolute social equality between the whites and the blacks. At one end of the picture Mr. Lincoln is receiving with great warmth and cordiality Miss Dinah Arabella Aramintha Squash, a negress of unprepossessing appearance, who has as her escort Henry Ward Beecher. At a table nearby Horace Greeley is treating another gorgeously attired negress to ice cream. Two repulsive looking negroes are making violent love to two white women. A passing carriage in charge of a white coachman and two white footmen contains a negro family. In the background, Englishmen, Frenchmen, and others are expressing their astonishment at the condition in which they find American society.
The attempt at escape, the apprehension and the incarceration of the President of the Confederacy are illustrated in a long series of cartoons. Two of the best are "The Confederacy in Petticoats" and "Uncle Sam's Menagerie." The first deals with the capture of Jefferson Davis at Irwinsville by General Wilson's cavalry. Davis, attired in feminine dress, is climbing over a fence in order to escape his pursuers. He has dropped his handbag, but he still holds his unsheathed knife. "I thought your government was too magnanimous to hunt down women and children," he calls out to the Union soldiers, one of whom has caught him by the skirts and is trying to drag him back. Mrs. Davis, by her husband's side, is entreating, "Don't irritate the President. He might hurt somebody."
Uncle Sam's Menagerie.
From the collection of the New York Historical Society.
The cartoon "Uncle Sam's Menagerie" shows Davis in captivity at Fortress Monroe. The Confederate president is depicted as a hyena in a cage, playing with a human skull. An Uncle Sans of the smooth-faced type in which he at first appeared is the showman. Round Davis's neck is a noose connecting with a huge gallows and the rope is about to be drawn taut, while from an organ below the cage a musician is grinding out the strain, "Yankee Doodle." In the shape of birds perched on little gallows of their own above the President's cage, each with a noose around his neck, are the figures of the other leaders of the Confederacy. A crow is pecking at a grinning skull under which is written "Booth." To this skull Uncle Sam is playfully pointing with his showman's cane.
Alleged Republican intimidation at the poles in the election of 1864 is assailed in a cartoon representing a Union soldier about to cast his vote for McClellan. A thick-lipped negro stands guard over the ballot box, rifle in hand. He presents the point of the bayonet at the soldier's decorated breast. "Hallo, dar!" he calls out threateningly, "you can't put in dat, you copper-head traitor, nor any odder, 'cept for Massa Lincoln." To which the soldier sadly replies, "I am an American citizen and did not think I had fought and bled for this. Alas, my country!" A corrupt election clerk is regarding the scene with disquiet. "I'm afraid we shall have trouble if that soldier is not allowed to vote," he says. To which a companion cynically replies, "Gammon him, just turn round; you must pretend you see nothing of the kind going on, and keep on counting your votes."
The Nation Mourning at Lincoln's Bier.
By Tenniel in "Punch."
CHAPTER XX
NATIONS AND MEN IN CARICATURE
In looking over the historical and political caricature of the nineteenth century, one very naturally finds several different methods of treatment and subdivision suggesting themselves. First, there is the obvious method of chronological order, which is being followed in the present volume, and which commended itself as being at once the simplest and the most comprehensive. It is the one method by which the history of the century may be regarded as the annals of a family of nations—a grotesque family of ill-assorted quadrupeds and still more curious bipeds, stepping forth two by two from the pages of comic art as from the threshold of some modern Noah's ark—Britannia and the British lion, Columbia and Uncle Sam, India and the Bengal tiger, French Liberty and the imperial eagle. It is the one method which focuses the attention upon the inter-relation, the significant groupings of these symbolic figures, and disregards their individual and isolated actions. What the Russian bear, the British lion, are doing in the seclusion of their respective fastnesses is of vastly less interest than the spectacle of the entire royal menagerie of Europe uniting in an effort to hold Napoleon at bay. In other words, this method enables us to pass lightly over questions of purely national interest and home policy—the Corn Laws of England, the tariff issues in the United States—and to keep the eye centered upon the really big dramas of history, played upon an international stage. It subordinates caricature itself to the sequence of great events and great personages. It is the Emperor Napoleon, his reign and his wars, and not the English caricaturist Gillray; it is Louis Philippe, the bourgeois king, and not Philipon and Daumier, who form the center of interest. In other words, from the present point of view, the caricature itself is not so much the object looked at as it is a powerful and clairvoyant lens through which we may behold past history in the curiously distorted form in which it was mirrored back by contemporary public opinion.
Figures from a Triumph.
The Diagnosis.
"A bad régime during ten years. All your trouble comes from that. You will soon become convalescent with a good constitution and fewer leeches."
Other methods, however, might be used effectively, each offering some special advantage of its own. For instance, the whole history of the nineteenth century might be divided, so to speak, geographically. The separate history of each nation might have been followed down in turn—the changing fortunes of England, typified by John Bull; of Russia in the guise of the bear; of the United States under the forms of the swarthy, smooth-faced Jonathan of early days, and the pleasanter Uncle Sam of recent years; and of France, typified at different times as an eagle, as a Gallic cock, as an angry goddess, and as a plump, pleasant-faced woman in a tricolored petticoat. Again, if it were desirable to emphasize the development of comic art rather than its influence in history, one might group the separate divisions of the subject around certain schools of caricature, dealing first with Gillray, Rowlandson, and their fellows among the allied Continental nations; passing thence to the caricaturists of 1830, and thence carrying the sequence through Leech, Cham, Tenniel, Nast, down to the caricaturists who in the closing years of the century developed the scope of caricature to a hitherto unparalleled extent. Still again, the history of the century in caricature might be traced along from some peculiarity, greatly exaggerated, of some great man to another personal peculiarity of some other great man: leaping from the tri-cornered hat of the Emperor Napoleon to the great nose of the Iron Duke, then on to the toupet and pear-shaped countenance of Louis Philippe, the emaciation of Abraham Lincoln, the grandpa's hat of the Harrison administration, the forehead curl of Disraeli, the collar of Gladstone, the turned-up moustaches of the Emperor William, and the prominent teeth of Mr. Roosevelt. This feature of the caricature seems important enough to justify a brief digression. It forms one of the foundation stones of the art, second only in importance to the conventionalized symbols of the different nations. From the latter the cartoonist builds up the century's history as recorded in its great events. From the former he traces that history as recorded in the personality of its great men.
The Egerean Nymph.
Paul and Virginia.
The cartoons in which these different peculiarities of personal appearance are emphasized cover the whole range of caricature, and the whole gamut of public opinion which inspired it. Here we may find every degree of malice, from the fierce goggle eyes and diabolical expression which Gillray introduced into his portraits of the hated Bonaparte down to the harmless exaggeration of the collar points by which Furniss good-naturedly satirized the appearance of Mr. Gladstone. Again, in this respect caricature varies much, because all the great men of the century did not offer to the caricaturists the same opportunities in the matter of unusual features or personal eccentricities.
The First Conscript of France.
The authentic portraits and contemporary descriptions of the first Napoleon show us that he was a man whose appearance was marred by no particular eccentricity of feature, and that the cartoons of which he is the principal subject are largely allegorical, or inspired by the artist's intensity of hatred. One German caricaturist, by a subtle distortion and a lengthening of the cheeks and chin, introduced a resemblance to a rapacious wolf while preserving something of the real likeness. But in the goggle-eyed monsters of Gillray there is nothing save the hat and the uniform which suggests the real Napoleon. It was a sort of incarnation of Beelzebub which Gillray wished to draw and did draw, a monstrosity designed to rouse the superstitious hatred of the ignorant and lower classes of England, and to excite the nation to a warlike frenzy. The caricature aimed at Bonaparte's great rival, the conqueror of Waterloo, was produced in more peaceful times, was the work of his own countryman, was based mainly on party differences, and, naturally enough, it was in the main good-natured and kindly. Wellington in caricature may be summed up by saying that it was all simply an exaggeration of the size of his nose. The poire drawn into resemblance of the countenance of Louis Philippe was originally innocent enough, and had it been entirely ignored by the monarch and his ministers, would probably have had no political effect, and in the course of a few years been entirely forgotten. But being taken seriously and characterized as seditious, it acquired an exaggerated significance which may almost be said to have led to the revolution of 1848 and the establishment of the Second Republic. From the rich material offered by our War of Secession the caricaturists drew little more than the long, gaunt figure and the scraggy beard of Lincoln, and the cigar of General Grant. The possibilities of this cigar, as they probably would have been brought out by an artist like Daumier, have been suggested in an earlier chapter. It was the goatee of Louis Napoleon that was exaggerated to give a point to most of the cartoons in which he was a figure, although during the days of his power there were countless caricatures which drew suggestions from the misadventures of his early life, his alleged experiences as a waiter in New York and a policeman in London, his escape from prison in the clothes of the workman Badinguet (a name which his political enemies applied to him very freely), and the fiasco at Strasburg. No men of their time were more freely caricatured than Disraeli in England and Thiers in France, for no men offered more to the caricaturist, Disraeli being at once a Jew and the most exquisite of affected dandies, and Thiers being, with the exception of Louis Blanc, the smallest man of note in France. In one cartoon in Punch, Disraeli was figured as presiding over "Fagin's Political School." In another he was represented as a hideous Oriental peri fluttering about the gates of Paradise. Thiers's large head and diminutive stature are subjects of countless cartoons, in which he is shown emerging from a wineglass or concealed in a waistcoat pocket, although Punch once humorously depicted him as Gulliver bound down by the Lilliputians.
The Situation.
By Gill.
If one were to attempt to draw a broad general distinction between French and English caricature throughout the century, it would be along the line of English superiority in the matter of satirizing great events, French superiority in satirizing great men. The English cartoonists triumphed in the art of crowded canvases and effective groupings; the French in seizing upon the salient feature of face or form, and by a grotesque distortion, a malicious quirk, fixing upon their luckless subject a brand of ridicule that refused to be forgotten. Although the fashion of embodying fairly recognizable portraits of prominent statesmen in caricatures became general in England early in the century, for a long time the effect was marred by their lack of facial expression. From situations of all sorts, ranging from high comedy to deadly peril and poignant suffering, the familiar features of British statesmen look forth placid, unconcerned, with the fixed, impersonal stare of puppets in a Punch-and-Judy show. No French artist ever threw away his opportunities in such a foolish, spendthrift manner. Even where the smooth, regular features of some especially characterless face gave little or nothing for a satiric pencil to seize upon, a Daumier or a Gill would manufacture a ludicrous effect through the familiar device of a giant's head on a dwarf's body, or the absurdly distorted reflection of a cylindrical mirror. But by the time hostilities broke out between France and Prussia facial caricature had become an important factor in the British school of satire, as exemplified in the weekly pages of Punch.
CHAPTER XXI
THE OUTBREAK OF THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR
Louis Blanc.
Rival Arbiters.
Napoleon and Bismarck at the time of the Austro-Prussian War.
By Tenniel in Punch.
This was very natural, because the history of these years was largely a history of individuals. During the years between the close of the Civil War and the outbreak of war between France and Prussia the three dominant figures in European political caricature were the French Emperor, Prince Bismarck, and Benjamin Disraeli. Since 1848, Louis Napoleon had been the most widely caricatured man in Europe; and the outcome of the War of 1866 had raised Bismarck, as the pilot of the Prussian ship of state, to an importance second only to Napoleon himself. The caricature of which Disraeli was the subject was necessarily much narrower in its scope, and confined to a great extent to England. It was not until the century's eighth decade that he received full recognition at the hands of the Continental caricaturists, and his prominence in the cartoons preceding the Franco-Prussian War was due to the prestige of Punch, and to the opportunity which his own peculiar personality and striking appearance offered to the caricaturists. It was not long after the fall of Richmond and the end of the war that the agitation over the claims of the United States against England on account of the damage done by the warship Alabama, a question which was not settled until a number of years later, began. The two powers for a time could not agree on any scheme of arbitration, and the condition of affairs in the autumn of 1865 was summed up by Tenniel in Punch, in a cartoon entitled "The Disputed Account," in which the United States and England are represented as two haggling women and Madame Britannia is haughtily saying: "Claim for damages against me? Nonsense, Columbia! Don't be mean over money matters." But England, as well as America, had other matters besides the Alabama claims to disturb her and to keep busy the pencils of her cartoonists. Besides purely political issues at home, there were the Jamaica troubles and Fenianism: and the French Emperor was very urgent that stronger extradition treaties should be established between the two countries. This last issue was cleverly hit off by Punch in a cartoon which pictures Britannia showing Napoleon the Third a portrait of himself as he appeared in 1848 and saying: "That, Sire, is the portrait of a gentleman whom I should have had to give up to the French Government had I always translated 'extradition' as your Majesty's lawyers now wish." The agitation over the Jamaica troubles died out, the threatened Fenian invasion of Canada came to nothing, Louis Napoleon withdrew the French troops from Mexico, and the eyes of Europe were directed toward the war cloud hovering over Prussia and Austria. Early in June, 1866, there was a cessation of diplomatic relations between the two countries, followed immediately by a declaration of war on the part of Prussia, whose armies straightway entered Saxony and Hanover. The attitude of England and France toward the belligerents was the subject of Punch's cartoon that week. It was called "Honesty and Policy," and shows Britannia and Napoleon discussing the situation, while in the background the Prussian King and the Austrian Emperor are shaking their fists in each other's faces. Britannia confides regretfully to Napoleon: "Well, I've done my best. If they must smash each other, they must." And the French Emperor says in a gleeful aside: "And someone may pick up the pieces!" The same figure of speech is further developed in a later cartoon which appeared in August, during the negotiations for peace. Napoleon III., in the guise of a ragpicker, is being warned off the Königstrasse by Bismarck: "Pardon, mon ami, but we really can't allow you to pick up anything here;" and "Nap. the Chiffonnier" rejoins: "Pray, don't mention it, M'sieu! It's not of the slightest consequence."
The Man who Laughs.
By André Gill
The Man who Thinks.
By André Gill
"To be or not to be."
By Gill.
Achilles in Retreat.
By Gill.
After the battle of Sadowa, Austria accepted readily the offer of the French Emperor to bring about a suspension of hostilities, the Emperor of Austria agreeing to cede Venetia, which was handed over to France, as a preliminary to its cession to Italy. Tenniel pictured this event in a cartoon showing Napoleon acting as the temporary keeper of the Lion of St. Mark's. Bismarck was now becoming a conspicuous figure in European politics, and his rivalry to Napoleon is shown in a Punch cartoon entitled "Rival Arbiters," which appeared about this time.
The President of Rhodes.
By Daumier.
The growing spirit of discontent in France during the year or two immediately preceding the Franco-Prussian War was made the subject of some excellent Punch cartoons. One of these, called "Easing the Curb," appeared in July, 1869. The imperial rule was gradually becoming unpopular, and the opposition gaining in strength and boldness. The Emperor found it prudent to announce that it was his intention to grant to the French Chamber a considerable extension of power. In "Easing the Curb," Punch depicts France as a horse drawing the imperial carriage. Within are the Empress and the Prince Imperial, evidently greatly alarmed. Napoleon is standing at the horse's head, calling out: "Have no fear, my dears. I shall just drop ze curb a leetel." In another cartoon a few months later, Napoleon the Third is shown wearing the crown of King John, and surrounded by a group of persistent barons, signing a magna charta for France.
A Tempest in a Glass of Water.
By Gill.
In the pages of Punch from July, 1870, until the spring of 1871, one may follow very closely the history of the Franco-Prussian War and of the Commune. The first of the cartoons on this subject, published just before the declaration of war, is entitled "A Duel to the Death." In it the King of Prussia and the French Emperor are shown as duellists, sword in hand, while Britannia is endeavoring to act as mediator. "Pray stand back, madam," says Napoleon. "You mean well, but this is an old family quarrel and we must fight it out." Punch seemed to have an early premonition of what the result of the war would be, for, before any decisive battle had been fought, it published a striking cartoon entitled "A Vision on the Way," representing the shade of the great Napoleon confronting the Emperor and his son on the warpath, and bidding them "Beware!" The departure of the Prince Imperial to the front is made the subject of a very pretty and pathetic cartoon called "Two Mothers." It shows the Empress bidding farewell to her son, while France, as another weeping mother, is saying: "Ah, madam, a sure happiness for you, sooner or later; but there were dear sons of mine whom I shall never see again."
A Duel to the Death.
By Tenniel in "Punch."
CHAPTER XXII
THE DÉBÂCLE
France, September 4, 1870.
"Aux armes, citoyens,
Formez vos bataillons."
After the unimportant engagement at Saarbrück disaster began falling thick and fast on the French arms, and soon we find Punch taking up again the idea of the two monarchs as rival duelists. By this time the duel has been decided. Louis Napoleon, sorely wounded and with broken sword, is leaning against a tree. "You have fought gallantly, sir," says the King. "May I not hear you say you have had enough?" To which the Emperor replies: "I have been deceived about my strength. I have no choice." With Sedan, the downfall of the Empire, and the establishment of the Republic, France ceased to be typified under the form of Louis Napoleon. Henceforth she became an angry, blazing-eyed woman, calling upon her sons to rise and repel the advance of the invader. The cartoon in Punch commemorating September 4, 1870, when the Emperor was formally deposed and a Provisional Government of National Defense established under the Presidency of General Trochu, with Gambetta, Favre, and Jules Ferry among its leading members, shows her standing erect by the side of a cannon, the imperial insignia trampled beneath her feet, waving aloft the flag of the Republic, and shouting from the "Marseillaise":
"Aux armes, citoyens,
Formez vos bataillons!"
Her Baptism of Fire.
By Tenniel in "Punch."
André Gill.
The announcement that the German royal headquarters was to be removed to Versailles, and that the palace of Louis XIV. was to shelter the Prussian King surrounded by his conquering armies, drew from Tenniel the cartoon in which he showed the German monarch seated at his table in the palace studying the map of Paris, while in the background are the ghosts of Louis XIV. and the great Napoleon. The ghost of the Grand Monarque is asking sadly: "Is this the end of 'all the glories'?" The sufferings of Paris during the siege are summed up in a cartoon entitled "Germany's Ally," in which the figure of Famine is laying its cold, gaunt hand on the head of the unhappy woman typifying the stricken city. The beginning of the bombardment was commemorated in a cartoon entitled "Her Baptism of Fire," showing the grim and bloody results of the falling of the first shells. The whole tone of Punch after the downfall of the Emperor shows a growing sympathy on the part of the English people toward France, and the feeling in England that Germany, guided by the iron hand of Bismarck, was exacting a cruel and unjust penalty entirely out of proportion. This belief that the terms demanded by the Germans were harsh and excessive is shown in the Punch cartoon "Excessive Bail," where justice, after listening to Bismarck's argument, says that she cannot "sanction a demand for exorbitant securities."
Le Marquis aux Talons Rouges.
By Willette.
The Marquis de Galliffet will be remembered as the French Minister of War during the second Dreyfus trial. It was Willette's famous cartoon of Queen Victoria which stirred up so much ill feeling during the Boer War.
The History of a Reign.
By Daumier in "Charivari."
"This has killed That."
By Daumier in "Charivari."
French caricature during "the terrible year" which saw Gravelotte, Sedan, and the downfall of the Empire was necessarily somber and utterly lacking in French gayety. It was not until the tragic days of the Siege and the Commune that the former strict censorship of the French press was relaxed, and the floodgates were suddenly opened for a veritable inundation of cartoons. M. Armand Dayot, in his admirable pictorial history of this epoch, which has already been frequently cited in the present volume, says in this connection: "It has been said with infinite justice that when art is absent from caricature nothing remains but vulgarity." In proof of this, one needs only to glance through the albums containing the countless cartoons that appeared during the Siege, and more especially during the Commune. Aside from those signed by Daumier, Cham, André Gill, and a few other less famous artists, they are unclean compositions, without design or wit, odious in color, the gross stupidity of their legends rivaling their lamentable poverty of execution. But under the leadership of Daumier, the small group of artists who infused their genius into the weekly pages of Charivari, made these tragic months one of the famous periods in the annals of French caricature. Of the earlier generation, the irrepressible group whose mordant irony had hastened the down fall of Louis Philippe, Daumier alone survived to chronicle by his pencil the disasters which befell France, with a talent as great as he had possessed thirty-odd years before, when engaged in his light-hearted and malicious campaign against the august person of Louis Philippe. Then there were the illustrious "Cham" (Comte de Noë), and André Gill (a caricaturist of striking wit), Hadol, De Bertall, De Pilopel, Faustin, Draner, and a number of others not so well known. But, above all, it was Daumier who, after twenty years of the Empire, during which his pencil had been politically idle, returned in his old age to the fray with all the vigor of the best days of La Caricature.
The Mouse-Trap and its Victims.
By Daumier in "Charivari."
Prussia Annexes Alsace.
By Cham in "Charivari."
"Oh, no! Prussia has not completely slain her. It is not yet time to go to her aid."
By Cham in "Charivari."
"Adieu!"
"No, 'au revoir.' Visits must be returned."
By Cham.
Yet to those whose sympathies were with France during the struggle of 1870-71, there is a distinct pathos in the change that is seen in the later work of Daumier—not a personal pathos, but a pathos due to the changed condition of the country which it reflects. The old dauntless audacity, the trenchant sarcasm, the mocking, light-hearted laughter, is gone. In its place is the haunting bitterness of an old man, under the burden of an impotent wrath—a man who, for all that he dips his pencil in pure vitriol, cannot do justice to the nightmare visions that beset him. There is no better commentary upon the pervading feeling of helpless anger and outraged national pride of this epoch than in these haunting designs of Daumier's. They are the work of a man tremulous with feverish indignation, weird and ghastly conceptions, such as might have emanated from the caldron of Macbeth's witches. The backgrounds are filled in with solid black, like a funeral pall; and from out the darkness the features of Bismarck, of Von Moltke, of William I., leer malevolently, distorted into hideous, ghoulish figures—vampires feasting upon the ruin they have wrought. French liberty, in the guise of a wan, emaciated, despairing figure, the personification of a wronged and outraged womanhood, haunts Daumier's pages. At one time she is standing, bound and gagged, between the gaping muzzles of two cannon marked, respectively, "Paris, 1851," and "Sedan, 1870," and underneath the laconic legend, "Histoire d'un Règne."
Souvenirs and Regrets.
By Aranda.
Another cartoon shows France as a female Prometheus bound to the rock, her vitals being torn by the Germanic vulture. A number of these cartoons, all of which appeared in La Charivari, treat bitterly of the disastrous results of the twenty years during which Louis Napoleon was the Emperor of the French. The sketch called "This Has Killed That" has allusion to the popular ballot which elected the Prince-President to the throne. A gaunt, angry female figure is pointing with one hand to the ballot-box, in which repose the "Ours" which made Louis Napoleon an Emperor, and with the other to the corpses on the battlefield where the sun of his empire finally sets. "This," she cries, "has killed that." The same idea suggested a somewhat similar cartoon, in which a French peasant, gazing at the shell-battered ruins of his humble home, exclaims in the peasant's ungrammatical patois: "And it was for this that I voted 'Yes.'" Still more grim and ominous is the cartoon showing a huge mouse-trap with three holes. The mouse-trap represents the Plebiscite. Two of the holes, marked respectively, "1851" and "1870," have been sprung, and each has caught the throat of a victim. The third, however, still yawns open warningly, with the date not completely filled in.
The Show of the Napoleonic Mountebanks.
From a caricature by Hadol.
Prussia introducing the New National Assembly to France.
By Daumier in "Charivari."
"Let Us eat the Prussian."
By André Gill.
Still another cartoon, thoroughly characteristic of Daumier's later manner, is "The Dream of Bismarck," one which touches upon the idea which has been used allegorically in connection with every great conqueror whose wake is marked by the strewn corpses of fallen thousands. In it Bismarck, frightfully haggard and ghastly of countenance, is sleeping in his chair, while at his side is the grim figure of Death bearing a huge sickle and pointing out over the bloody battlefield.
Of the younger group of cartoonists none is more closely connected with the events of the année terrible than "Cham," the Comte de Noë. The name Noë, it will be remembered, is French for Noah, just as Cham is the French equivalent of Ham, second son of the patriarch of Scripture. The Comte de Noë was also second son of his father, hence the appropriateness of his pseudonym. As a caricaturist, Cham was animated by no such seriousness of purpose as formed the inspiration of Daumier; and this was why he never became a really great caricaturist. It was the humorous side of life, even of the tragedies of life, that appealed to him, and he reflected it back with an incisive drollery which was irresistible. He was one of the most rapid and industrious of workers, and found in the events of l'année terrible the inspiration of a vast number of cartoons. The looting propensities of the Prussians were satirized in a sketch showing two Prussian officers looking greedily at a clock on the mantelpiece in a French château. "Let us take the clock." "But peace has already been signed." "No matter. Don't you see the clock is slow?" The German acquisition of the Rhenish provinces is summed up in a picture which shows a German officer attaching to his leg a chain, at the end of which is a huge ball marked Alsace. The siege having turned every Parisian into a nominal soldier, this condition of affairs is hit off by Cham in a cartoon underneath which is written: "Everybody being soldiers, the officers will have the right to put through the paces anyone whom they meet in the streets." The sketch shows a cook in the usual culinary costume, and bearing on his head a flat basket filled with kettles and pans, marking time at the command of an officer. The attitude of England during the war seemed to the caricaturist perfidious, after the practical aid which France had rendered Albion in the Crimea. Cham hits this off by representing the two nations as women, Britannia looking ironically at prostrate France and saying: "Oh, no! Prussia has not yet entirely killed her! So it is not yet time to go to her aid."
New Design for a Hand Bell proposed by "Charivari" for the Purpose of Reminding the Assembly that Prussian Troops still hold French Territory.
Germany: "Farewell, Madame, and if—"
"Ha! We shall meet again!"
The statesmen and warriors of that period were very happily caricatured in a series of cartoons, most of which appeared in L'Éclipse. Gill excelled in his caricature of individual men rather than in the caricature of events or groups. His real name was Louis Alexandre Gosset. He was born at Landouzy-li-Ville, October 19, 1840, and died in Paris, December 29, 1885. Thiers, Gambetta, Louis Blanc, all the men of the time, were hit off by his pencil. His method in most cases consisted of the grotesque exaggeration of the subject's head at the expense of the body. He was especially happy in his caricature of Thiers, whose diminutive size, as well as his great importance, made him a favorite subject for the cartoonist. Thiers as Hamlet soliloquizing, "To be or not to be"; Thiers as "The Man Who Laughs"; the head of Thiers peering over the rim of a glass, "A tempest in a glass of water"; Thiers as the first conscript of France; Thiers as Achilles in retreat—all these and countless others are from the pencil of Gill.
Bismarck the First.
Trochu—1870.
A striking satirical sketch by Hadol, entitled "La Parade," sums up all the buffooneries of the Second Empire. In it the Duc de Morny as the barking showman is violently inviting the populace to enter and inspect the wonders of the Théâtre Badinguet. Badinguet, as said before, was the name of the workman in whose clothes Louis Napoleon was said to have escaped from his imprisonment at Ham; and throughout the Second Empire it was the name by which the Parisians maliciously alluded to the Emperor. Behind De Morny in the cartoon are the Emperor and Empress, seated at the cashier's desk at the entrance of the theater to take in the money of the dupes whom De Morny can persuade to enter. To the right and left, in grotesque attire, are the actors of the show, representing the various statesmen and soldiers whose names were connected with the reign.
Bazaine.
By Faustin.
Rochefort.
Popular hatred of Marshal Bazaine after the surrender of Metz, based on the prevalent belief that he had sold the city and the army under his command to the Germans, finds pictorial expression in the grim cartoon by Faustin, reproduced here. The artist has cunningly drawn into the features of the Marshal an expression of unutterable craft and treachery. Round his neck there has been flung what at the first glance seems like a decoration of honor, an impression strengthened by the cross and inscription on his breast. But as you look more closely you perceive that this decoration is suspended from the noose of the hangman's rope, and that the words "Au Maréchal Bazaine—La France Reconnaissante" have another and a deeper significance. The defender of the city of Paris, General Trochu, was genially caricatured by André Gill in L'Éclipse as a blanchisseuse industriously ironing out the dirty linen of France. However great his popularity was at the time, Trochu has by no means escaped subsequent criticism. To him the resistance of Paris seemed nothing but "an heroic folly," and he had no hesitation about proclaiming his opinion. Another exceedingly happy caricature by André Gill was that representing Henri Rochefort, the implacable enemy of Louis Napoleon, as a member of the Government of the National Defense. Here Rochefort's head is shown peering out of the mouth of a cannon projecting through a hole in the city's fortifications.