Print as Political Statement: Lithography and the Popular Press

The development of the lithographic process marked a turning point in the production and distribution of political satire in the nineteenth century, considered the “golden age” of French caricature. Ongoing political upheavals demanded a printmaking medium that could correspondingly keep pace with the times. Lithographs are drawn with a greasy crayon directly onto a polished limestone slab that is processed and printed to make images that reproduce the original drawing. Easily adapted to mechanization, the technique was favored by caricaturists who were often expected to publish daily in illustrated journals. It was also used by artists such as Édouard Manet to create large-scale political commentaries as fine art prints. This selection of lithographs represents the scope of the artistic expression and the functions that lithography served in the nineteenth century.

Lithography became a pivotal mode of representation under King Louis-Philippe (reign 1830–1848), whose disappointing tenure as the “bourgeois monarch” was characterized by increasingly draconian press censorship laws. In spite of the censors, caricaturists continued to produce their prints, often facing fines and imprisonment. The subsequent presidency (1848–1852) and empire (1852–1870) of Napoleon III slightly relaxed these laws but never entirely allowed for unfettered publication.

Napoleon III’s ill-advised prosecution of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 - primarily rooted in competing imperial ambitions between the two countries - initiated nearly two years of devastation for the city of Paris. Convinced of military superiority, France declared war on Prussia in July 1870, only to suffer a string of rapid defeats culminating in the collapse of the French army and the capture of Napoleon at the Battle of Sudan on September 2, abruptly ending the Second Empire. A provisional Government of National Defense immediately declared the establishment of the French Third Republic and ineffectively continued the war with the remains of the army. By late September 1870, the Prussians had reached the outskirts of Paris and began a siege of privation that was to last four months. The capital finally fell when France surrendered the war on January 27, 1871. The financial and emotional losses incurred under the siege were chronicled in print, with caricaturists like Cham and Daumier vocal in their commentaries on the unrelenting violence and starvation facing Parisians.

With the government in exile in Versailles, the anger of Parisian working class socialists and political radicals over the war and unresolved grievances resulted in the formation of a Paris Commune that attempted to gain control of the city. The ensuing civil war left the city in ruins, with thousands of suspected communards exiled or massacred by government troops before order was restored. In the decades that followed, the memory of the revolt’s violent suppression remained within the artistic ethos in France. 

Jessica Larson, summer intern, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Art History, University of Delaware