Enfoncé Lafayette! Attrape, Mon Vieux! (Crushed Lafayette!... Trapped, Old Fellow!),

1834

Press censorship laws were relaxed in France with the ascension of the liberal King Louis-Philippe in 1830, giving rise to a number of populist newspapers critical of the government and of the bourgeois values it supported. Most notable were those published by Charles Philipon, La Caricature and Le Charivari, which combined journalism with the art of caricature. In 1834, Philipon established
L’Association mensuelle, an organization that published a series of satirical lithographs distributed monthly to regular subscribers, the proceeds of which went to pay legal fines imposed on the publisher. Daumier regularly contributed
to Philipon’s enterprises and produced both of these lithographs for L’Association mensuelle. In Enfoncé Lafayette! Attrape, Mon Vieux!, Louis-Philippe
appears as a mourning undertaker at the funeral of the Marquis de Lafayette, the popular hero of the American Revolution who had played an important role in Louis-Philippe’s rise to the throne—a role Lafayette came to regret before his
death in 1834. Rue Transnonain, le 15 avril 1834, perhaps Daumier’s most haunting lithograph, memorializes the tragic massacre of nineteen people, shot in their homes by soldiers attempting to quell riots in a working-class section of Paris.