The Citizen King and the war of the press

In July 1830, for three days, Paris belonged to the barricades. Crowds had thrown out the last hard-line Bourbon king, Charles X, who had been trying to wind the clock back to before the great Revolution of 1789 (the upheaval that toppled the absolute monarchy and beheaded Louis XVI). And then, with the old man gone and the throne empty, the men who actually ran France — the bankers, the deputies, the propertied middle class — did something clever. Instead of declaring a republic, they handed the crown to the dead king’s liberal cousin, Louis-Philippe of the house of Orléans, and rebranded the whole institution. He would not be “King of France” — too lordly. He would be King of the French, the roi citoyen, the “Citizen King”: a modern, modest, businesslike monarch who walked the boulevards in a frock coat, carried an umbrella, and shook hands. The regime he headed (1830–1848) is called the July Monarchy, after the month it was born in. (The full politics of 1830 lives in the Realism overview one level up; here we need only the shape of it.)

The marketing was that France finally had a king for everybody. The reality was that France had a king for the people who owned things. The vote was tied to wealth, so a tiny sliver of rich men chose the parliament; the government governed for banks and investors; and the workers and the poor who had actually fought on the July barricades got the bill and none of the bargain. Within a year the hope had soured into a sour, specific feeling that the whole revolution had been pocketed by the comfortable. That feeling is the fuel this entire story runs on. Somebody just had to draw it.

Enter Charles Philipon (1800–1862), the most dangerous man in France with a pencil — not because he drew best, but because he saw, before almost anyone, that a picture could do political damage a thousand articles could not. In 1831 Philipon founded a satirical weekly called La Caricature— a journal whose entire purpose was to mock the powerful in print (the word “caricature” means a drawing that exaggerates someone’s features or character to ridicule them). He ran it as open war on the July Monarchy. He gathered a stable of young artists, pointed them at the government, and dared the censors to do something about it.

Philipon’s own masterstroke was a doodle. Hauled into court late in 1831 for insulting the king, he is famously said to have defended himself by sketching, right there for the jury, the king’s round face metamorphosing in four steps into a pear — proving, he argued, that you could not ban a resemblance, because anything could be made to look like the king. The pear stuck. La poire— “the pear,” also French slang for “fathead” or “simpleton” — became the inescapable mocking shorthand for Louis-Philippe, scrawled on walls all over Paris. And Philipon was no mere bystander to the danger he aimed his artists at: he too was repeatedly prosecuted, convicted, and jailed for his attacks on the king — Daumier was not the only one who paid for this war in prison. (The courtroom pear-drawing is the famous traditional account of how the gag was born; treat the live-in-court details as received legend, not a verbatim transcript. That the pear became the regime’s tormenting emblem is not in doubt.) Hold the pear in your mind — you are about to meet it on a giant’s shoulders.

What made Philipon’s war possible was a fairly new printing trick called lithography (lith-OG-ruh-fee). Here is the whole thing in one breath: an artist draws directly onto a flat slab of limestone with a greasy crayon; the stone is then wetted and inked, and because grease and water repel each other, the ink sticks only where the crayon went; press paper to the stone and you have a print — and you can pull it again and again. The point that matters politically is the directness and the cheapness. A lithograph carries the artist’s own hand, every line exactly as he drew it, and it can be churned out by the hundred for pennies. For the first time, a single furious image could be in shop windows across Paris by the weekend, affordable to people who could barely read. Philipon had a printing press for outrage. He needed a giant.

The young man who supplied it was Honoré Daumier (1808–1879), a stocky, good-humored Marseillais then in his early twenties and not yet famous for anything. Over his life Daumier would draw something like four thousand lithographs— he is the great visual satirist of the whole century, and decades later, with a brush instead of a crayon, he would become a serious painter of the city’s poor (the Realism overview tells that long arc; you will meet the painter again in Chapter 5). But all of that is ahead of him. In December 1831 he was a hired hand at Philipon’s shop, and he was about to draw the single most reckless picture of his life — a cartoon so direct it would put him in prison. The next chapter is the drawing itself.