The giant, the plank, and the excreted honors

Remember what you are looking at: not a painting but a lithograph, a black-and-white printed sheet, wider than it is tall — a landscape image about a foot wide and eight and a half inches high (roughly 30 centimeters across by 21 high) — small enough to hold, cheap enough to sell on the street, drawn entirely in greasy crayon on stone. Judge it as a print, not a picture: no color to seduce you, no oil to admire, just line and shadow doing argument. And the argument is brutally simple. Daumier has drawn the whole economy of the July Monarchy as a single picture of a giant being fed. Once you see how the parts connect, you cannot un-see it.

Up at the left sits the giant, and the giant is the king. Daumier has drawn Louis-Philippe as Gargantua — the enormous, insatiable glutton of François Rabelais’s sixteenth-century comic satire (Rabelais’s 1534 giant is the figure who gave English the word gargantuan; in 1831 every reader knew the name as a byword for monstrous, bottomless appetite). He is a mountain of a man slumped in a low armchair on a platform, legs splayed, his belly a vast pale dome, and he is doing the only thing this version of him ever does: eating. His mouth hangs open to receive. And crowning the whole bloated body — the detail that named names — is the pear: that round-cheeked, top-tufted head from Philipon’s courtroom gag, so the dimmest viewer in Paris could not miss who the giant was. The biggest thing in the picture is the king, and he is pure mouth.

Now follow the one bold diagonal that organizes everything: a long plank, a steep ramp or gangway, runs from the ground at the lower right all the way up to the king’s open mouth. This is the spine of the cartoon. Cover it with your thumb and you have a fat man in a chair; uncover it and you have a feeding machine. The plank turns the giant from a person into a system — a thing with an intake. Everything the picture cares about travels up this board and vanishes into him. Daumier did the entire politics of the regime with a single drawn line propped against a chin.

Look at who is on the plank. Tiny, bent figures — laborers hauling baskets and sacks of coins — trudge up the ramp toward the mouth, and at the bottom of it one of them doubles over a great hamper, loading the king’s next mouthful. The size gap is the whole joke and the whole accusation: the king is a giant, the people feeding him are insects, and the food is the public’s money. These are the taxpayers, drawn as ants carrying their own substance up a ramp into a creature that will never, ever be full. Their coins go up. Watch what does not come back down to them.

Off to the right, massed and shabby, stands the crowd of the poor— the source of all this squeezed wealth. Daumier draws them thin and ragged and many, a worn human reservoir being drained to fill one bottomless belly. The contrast does the moral work without a caption: gorged giant on one side, a whole emptied population on the other, and a plank carrying the difference from them to him. This is what the Citizen King’s “monarchy for everybody” actually looked like, the cartoon says — the everybody pays, and the king eats.

And here is the detail that turned a rude joke into a crime. Look beneath the king, at what comes out the other end of the giant. It is not waste. It is paper — a shower of patents, commissions, ribbons, decorations, official honors — and a scrum of well-dressed officials and cronies is scrambling on the ground to gather them up and carry them off, toward a government building at the lower left — widely identified as the Palais Bourbon, the seat of the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of France’s parliament). Hold the whole circuit in your head at once, because that is the masterpiece of it: the poor’s taxes go up the plank into the king’s mouth, and out his backside drop the jobs, medals, and favors — for the rich. Money in from the bottom; rewards out to the top. It is trickle-upeconomics, drawn with a literalness so crude and so clear that no one could pretend to misread it. Daumier did not write “the king devours the nation and feeds his friends.” He drew it, digestively, and made the viewer’s own eye complete the insult.

That is the engine of the print: appetite at the top, exhaustion at the bottom, a single plank carrying wealth one way and a rain of honors falling the other. It is filthy, it is funny, and it is an argument about how a whole state distributes its money — all of it sketched in greasy crayon on a stone, in a sheet you could buy for pocket change. Down in the corner, the signature: h. Daumier. He had just signed a confession.