Nineteenth-Century French Political Censorship

“Nineteenth-Century French Political Censorship of Caricature in Comparative European Perspective”, conference of the Western Society for French History in Quebec City, november 2008, By Robert J. Goldstein.

On September 20, 1874, the French caricature journal L’Eclipse declared that, “One could, one day, write an exact history of the liberty which we enjoy during this era by writing a history of our caricatures.” This simultaneously wry, but acute, statement reflected the fact that both the existence and nature of nineteenth-century French caricature censorship was extraordinarily sensitive to the seemingly ever-changing nature of that country’s political regimes. Thus, as France transmogrified from Bonapartist dictatorship (1799-1815) to (with outside “assistance”) a constitutional monarchy, first under the Bourbon (1815-1830) and then the Orleans dynasty (1830-1848), then to a short-lived republic (1848-51), back to a Bonapartist dictatorship (1851-70) and ultimately to first a so-called “monarchist” (1870-77) and then finally to a “republican” republic (1877-), the nature of French political caricature censorship (censorship clearly overwhelmingly reflecting “moral concerns,” i.e. perceived or alleged obscenity/pornography are not dealt with here) repeatedly mirrored such shifts: caricature censorship was abolished with the change of regimes in 1815, 1830, 1848 and 1870 (and for good–at least in peacetime, in 1881, with the consolidation of the “republican republic”), and was, in the various interims, reinstated due to changes in either the regime or the political atmosphere in 1820, 1835, 1852 and 1871. Moreover, throughout the nineteenth century (using here the “historians’ definition” of 1815-1914) , the subject of caricature censorship was frequently a subject of lively political debate, and the exact nature of censorship (when it was in effect) or post-publication prosecutions (when prior censorship did not exact) typically closely reflected the changing political currents. Thus, in 1880, during one of the numerous French legislative debates on caricature censorship, deputy Robert Mitchell told his colleagues that :

Drawings which displease the government are always forbidden. Those which have gained official favor are displayed in the windows of all the bookstores, are sold in all of the kiosks. This provides a valuable indicator for the attentive observer, curious for precise information on the tastes, preferences, sentiments, hates and intentions of those who have control and care over our destines. In studying refused drawings and authorized drawings, we know exactly what the government fears and what it encourages, we have a clear revelation of its intimate thoughts.[1]

Between 1815 and 1880 about 20 French caricature journals were suppressed by the government and virtually every prominent nineteenth-century French political caricaturist either had his drawings forbidden, was prosecuted and/or was jailed, most notably perhaps the most famous caricaturist in history, Honoré Daumier, who was imprisoned for six months for his famous 1832 drawing “Gargantua” (other leading French caricaturists whose work was banned and/or who were arrested and/or jailed included Grandville, Traviès, André Gill, Pilotell, Charles Vernier, Charles Gilbert-Martin, Louis Legrand, Aristide Delannoy, Alfred Le Petit and Jules Grandjouan). No doubt the most famous harassment of caricature journals was carried out by King Louis Philippe against Charles Philipon, the editor of the two most famous nineteenth-century such outlets, La Caricature (1830-35) and Le Charivari (1832-93), during the 1830-35 period when theoretically caricature was freed from censorship; Philipon was prosecuted half-a-dozen times, convicted thrice, fined 4000 francs and jailed for 13 months. He later wrote, “I could no longer count the seizures, the arrest warrants, the trials, the struggles, the wounds, the attacks and the harassments of all types, any more than could a [carriage] voyager] count the jolts of his trip.” When the 1835 re-imposition of prior censorship forced him to close La Caricature, Philipon wrote in the final issue that “to break our [drawing] crayons has required a law made specially for us, which makes it materially impossible“ to continue[2].

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to answer, in an admittedly preliminary way, the question, “How was the French experience with censorship of political caricature similar or different to that experienced in other major continental European countries (there was no censorship of caricature in Britain after 1695) during the nineteenth-century?” My attempt at an answer is “preliminary” in at least three ways: 1) there is far more scholarship available on nineteenth-century French caricature and caricature censorship than in other major European countries (which itself probably reflects, as discussed below, an important difference between France and elsewhere); 2) the present author can access textual materials only in English and French, which obviously poses significant constraints (however, as discussed below, the caricatures themselves are accessible regardless of “language” and provide a considerable amount of information, and, given the many English and French sources which survey European caricature, at least the basic outlines of developments in all major European countries are unquestionably available); and 3) due to limitations on space and time, only a basic outline of what is known can be presented here, as this subject unquestionably provides enough information for an entire book[3].

How nineteenth-century French political caricature censorship resembled that in other major continental European countries

In many ways, nineteenth-century French political caricature censorship resembled that in the other major continental European countries. All of these countries maintained caricature censorship for at least a major part of the nineteenth century, they were all motivated by similar concerns in maintaining and implementing political caricature censorship, the existence and nature of caricature censorship drastically affected both the number and nature of caricatures that were produced in every country, all of them abolished caricature censorship and then re-instated it at least once due to changing political developments, they all implemented the censorship (and post-publication prosecutions after its abolition) in ways that reflected their general political orientations and concerns, and caricature journals throughout Europe used similar techniques to try to evade and defy the censorship..

Political caricature was especially feared by the authorities in France and elsewhere in nineteenth-century Europe–often even more than the printed word–because visual imagery (like the theater) was accessible even to the especially feared “dark masses,” who were often illiterate, but rarely blind, and who could therefore “read” caricatures (and understand plays) even if they could not comprehend books and newspapers (just as they could understand paintings, sculptures, stained glass windows and the other extensive decorations which medieval churches so prominently featured, transforming them into what the late sixth century Pope Gregory I famously termed “bibles of the illiterate”). Moreover, imagery such as caricatures were viewed as far more powerful in impact that the printed word, to such an extent that European political authorities considered drawings (and the theater) as occupying a category of communications completely different than that represented by the printed word. The clearest evidence that caricature (and other visual imagery including theater–and subsequently the cinema) were viewed as categorically different and were feared far more than the printed word is that in many countries prior censorship of such visual sources was maintained well after prior censorship of print was abolished: thus, in France, print was never subject to prior censorship after 1822, yet caricature censorship was finally abolished only in 1881 (and theater censorship continued until 1906), while in Russia, most prior print censorship was abolished in 1865, while caricature censorship was effectively maintained (with a brief exception in 1905) throughout the entire tsarist regime.

This distinction was clearly expressed when French Minister of Justice Jean-Charles Persil, in successfully proposing the 1835 law which re-introduced caricature and theater censorship (both of which had been abolished in the aftermath of the 1830 July Revolution), explained that the 1830 constitutional ban on censorship only applies to the right to publish and have printed one’s opinions; it is the [written] press which is placed under the guarantee of the Constitution, it is the free manifestation of opinions which cannot be repressed by preventive measures. It would clearly go beyond that goal if the charter were interpreted to accord the same protection to opinions converted into actions. Let an author be content to print his play, he will subjected to no preventive measure; let the illustrator write his thought, let him publish it in that form, and as in that manner he addresses only the mind, he will encounter no obstacle. It is in that sense that it was said that censorship could never be reestablished. But when opinions are converted into acts by the presentation of a play or the exhibit of a drawing, . . . [t]hat is more than the expression of an opinion, that is a deed, an action, a behavior, with which . . .the charter is not concerned [emphasis in original].

During the legislative debate on Persil’s proposal, deputy Paul Sauzet, clearly referring to the notorious explosion of public caricatures portraying King Louis Philippe in the form of a “pear,” backed Persil on the grounds that to put an end to the “great scandals” created by the “outbursts which have profaned the art of illustration” and “everywhere” covered Parisian streets and squares with the “degrading spectacle of a mute, living revolt against the established order,” with the “most gross outrages against the king, the courts and the laws,” action was required by the “imperious commands of the necessities of public order” to end “these outrages which corrupt the spirit of the population in degrading with impunity the royal majesty.” He added that it would “force the meaning of words to consider drawings the same as opinions“ or to “establish a parallel between writings which address themselves to the mind and the illustration which speaks to the senses,” because the “vivacity and popularity of the impressions” left by the referenced caricatures created a “special danger which well-intentioned legislation must prevent at all costs.”[4]

Similar reflections of the perceived power of caricatures and other visual images were repeatedly expressed by French authorities during the nineteenth century. Thus, the French interior minister informed his prefects on September 8, 1829 that “engravings or lithographs act immediately upon the imagination of the people, like a book which is read with the speed of light; if it wounds modesty or public decency the damage is rapid and irremediable,” while the police minister told his subordinates in 1852 that “among the means employed to shake and destroy the sentiments of reserve and morality which are so essential to conserve in the bosom of a well-ordered society, drawings are one of the most dangerous,” since the “worst page of a bad book requires some time to read and a certain degree of intelligence to understand, while the drawing. . . Communicates with movement and life, so as to thus present spontaneously, in a translation which everyone can understand, the most dangerous of all seductions, that of example.” This not-so-subtle reference to the ability of drawings to communicate with “everyone” (i.e., even the illiterate) was frequently remarked upon: thus in an 1880 legislative debate, deputy Emile Villiers declared that while press freedom posed “problems and dangers,” the “unlimited freedom of drawings presents many more still,” since a drawing “startles not only the mind but the eyes” and was a “means of speaking even to the illiterate, of stirring up passions, without reasoning, without discourse.”[5]

Similar views of the particular dangers posed by caricatures can also be found (if perhaps not as frequently) in other countries (where, as pointed out below, in general caricature was not as common or as artistically well-developed). Thus, the Prussian interior minister successfully convinced King Frederick William IV to re-impose prior censorship of drawings (which the monarchy had abolished as a symbol of political liberalization shortly after his 1840 ascendancy to the throne) on the grounds that caricatures “prepare for the destructive influence of negative philosophies and democratic spokesmen and authors,” especially since the “uneducated classes do not pay much notice to the printed word” but do “pay attention to caricatures and understand them” and to “refute [a caricature] is impossible; its impression is lasting and sometimes ineradicable.” (Frederick’s decision to re-impose censorship apparently directly resulted from a caricature which depicted him as a drunken “Puss-in-Boots” seeking to vainly emulate his legendary predecessor Frederick the Great.) Similarly, late nineteenth-century German journalist Maximilien Harden, a leading critic of the authoritarian regime of Emperor Wilhelm II declared that, “No other sort of publication can have such an effect on public opinion as the illustrated satirical magazine, which appeals to the most brilliant and to the simplest mind, and, with its scornful challenge and raucous laughter, attracts attentions everywhere.” In the United States, the notoriously corrupt New York City politician William “Boss” Tweed, who was the frequent target of the brilliant caricaturist Thomas Nash during the post-Civil War period, declared, “Those damned pictures; I don’t care so much what the papers write about me–my constituents can’t read, but damn it they can see pictures!”[6]

While these comments make clear that the desire to protect the existing political, social, economic and, sometimes at least, the religious power structure, was clearly the main motivation behind nineteenth-century European caricature censorship, another common motivation throughout the continent was the fear that political cartoons might offend foreign powers. Thus, France and other European governments on numerous occasions sought to ban caricatures which they feared would endanger their foreign policy goals. Thus, during the 1870s the French government banned caricatures of some foreign leaders entirely and drawings of others without their permission, leading the journal Le Grelot to complain on December 22, 1878 that “we are free to say whatever we want–subject to the inspection of half a dozen French censors and 50 or 75 foreign ambassadors.“ In perhaps the most notorious French incident based on foreign policy considerations, the government, asserting the right to administratively ban the street sales of allegedly offensive caricatures even after the 1881 abolition of caricature censorship, imposed such a ban on the September 28, 1901 issue of L‘Assiette au Beurre, which bitterly attacked the British use of concentration camps during the Boer War and whose back-cover full-page color caricature depicted “impudent Albion“ (i.e. Britain) as a woman “mooning” the world with the features of British King Edward VII drawn upon her naked buttocks. The

French street

sales ban was imposed after Edward personally complained to French ambassador to London Paul Cambon, who wrote to his brother than the design was “scandalous” but displayed an “exact resemblance” to the king. The French action enormously increased interest in the issue, which eventually went through ten reprinting and sold 250,000 copies, which the journal termed a “success without precedent”; apparently in response to government pressure, each printing increasingly literally “covered up” the woman’s bottom, at first with a semi-transparent purple slip which allowed the king’s features to peek through, but eventually with a completely opaque dark blue skirt. The French authorities also banned street sales of at least threes other issues of L’Assiette au Beurre in 1905 alone, including one portraying Portuguese King Carlos I as a pig-like figure (November 25, 1905) and two which brutally attacked Russian Tsar Nicholas II, including a cover portray the tsar in a blood-spattered magnificent white military uniform in the aftermath of the January, 1905 “Bloody Sunday” massacre which touched off the 1905 Russian revolution[7].

Similar actions were taken by other nineteenth-century European governments. Thus, in 1901 the German authorities confiscated an issue of the leading journal Simplicissimus which featured a cover caricature depicted a towering, obese British King Edward VII trampling Boer War concentration camp inhabitants while complaining, “This blood is splashing me from head to toe. My crown is getting filthy.” In another case involving Simplicissimus, leading caricaturist Thomas Theodor Heine was fined for a May, 1903 cartoon which depicted German diplomats as subordinate to the United States by portraying their training process as including a voyage through a large torso embellished with an American eagle, starting with their insertion into its anal cavity (of course this action may have reflected anger at criticism of the German government as well as a desire to avoid offending the United States, a motivation which, of course, only demonstrated the point of the caricature)[8].

As already mentioned with regard to France and Russia, offending caricature journals were often suppressed and their artists and staff often prosecuted and jailed. This was also true in other European regimes: thus, in an especially infamous case, Simplicissimus caricaturist Heine, along with two other staff members, were sentenced to six month jail terms for an 1898 cartoon which ridiculed Emperor Wilhelm II. As with the “Impudent Albion” incident in France, the primary result of the prosecution was to increase demand for the journal: one staff member wrote that after the prosecution “our circulation rose within four or five weeks from 15,000 to, I think, 85,000.” Similarly, a Munich official advised in 1903 against prosecutions which “could only serve as an advertisement for Simplicissimus,” apparently keeping in mind a “successful” prosecution which had yield a small fine against Heine and another staff member, as well as the court-ordered destruction of all confiscated copies–which turned out to total less than 1,500 of a total press run of 80,000! In other German cases, the director of the Hamburg journal Die Reform was jailed for 40 days for an 1849 drawing depicting “democrats” decorating Christmas trees with ornamental puppets of German princes, the Munich journal Leuchkugeln was forced to close in 1851 following repeated prosecutions and the Hamburg journal Mephistopheles (which had been revived during the 1848 revolution after being suppressed in 1847), was prosecuted and suppressed for an 1852 depiction of Napoleon I caning his nephew, then-French president Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, for the latter’s imperial pretensions. Already by 1849 the post-1848 German caricature holocaust was so severe that one of the survivors, the journal Kladderadatsch published a drawing depicting its iconic representation visiting a graveyard for satirical journals; the following year two of its editors were jailed for criticizing the Russian tsar, and the journal was confiscated almost a dozen times during the 1860s and its editors were jailed in 1877 and again in 1897. In Italy, the leading socialist caricaturist Guiseppe Scalarini was prosecuted at least three times for his drawings between 1898 and 1914[9]

As with the Prussian abolition and then re-instatement of caricature censorship between 1840 and 1843 and the repeated elimination and re-introduction of such controls in France in reflection of broader political currents, all major European countries witnessed similar developments at least once: in Germany, the Hapsburg Empire and Italy, as a result of the temporary success of the 1848 revolutions, and in Russia due to the essential collapse of the regime for a period during the 1905 revolution, caricature censorship was either formally or effectively abolished, but, in each case, it was re-imposed after the regimes regained control (one exception was the Italian state of Piedmont [Sardinia], which continued to allow freedom of caricature after 1848 and then extended this to the rest of Italy after the other Italian states joined Piedmont to form a re-united Italy between 1860 and 1870)[10].

That controls over caricature drastically affected all aspects of caricature production was clearly evident in such circumstances: in each case, the collapse or end of caricature censorship was accompanied by an explosion of caricature journals, and in each case the re-imposition of controls was accompanied by a massive suppression and/or collapse of the offending journals. Thus, in Germany, according to scholar William Coupe, the caricature business developed from “virtually nothing” to a “minor industry in a matter of weeks” in 1848, with 35 illustrated satirical journals founded in Berlin alone, but following the suppression of the revolution most German caricature journals reversted in the 1850s “to the status of innocuous joke books, more concerns with mothers-in-law and drunks than political issues.”[11]

In Russia, whereas fewer than 100 caricature journals had been published during the entire 1815-1905 period, with the collapse of censorship amidst the 1905 revolution perhaps 500 such journals erupted (including 50 in Yiddish and 20 in Ukrainian), some of them crude leaflets of a few pages which had brief lives (sometimes due to government suppression), but many of which were sophisticated journals of high artistic quality. The newly-freed journals often featured brutal pictorial attacks upon the notoriously repressive regime of Tsar Nicholas II, as was reflected in the comment of the first issue of the journal Payats (Clown) in December 1905, which declared, “Now that we have the right to laugh, we’re going to laugh boldly, loudly and mercilessly.” But, as was the case with more than a dozen of these journals, Payats was soon suppressed by the police, and in numerous instances their artists, editorial staffs and even their printers were jailed. Thus, the caricature journal Vampire, which was closed after nine issues, lamented in early 1906 that the true state of Russian civil liberties was that, “The press can publish what it wants and the police can ban what they want.” In perhaps the most notorious cases associated with the 1905 revolution, Pulemet (Machine-Gun) editor Nikolai Shebeuv was jailed for a year for “insulting his imperial majesty“ and his journal was suppressed for publishing a drawing depicting a bloody hand-print over Nicholas’s October 1905 so-called “Reform Manifesto” and the journal Bugbear was temporarily suppressed and a number of its contributors detained for publishing a drawing portraying a donkey surrounded by tsarist regalia. Artist Evgenii Lanser wrote to a friend about this incident :

You know about the extinction of “Bugbear,” the imprisonment of [editor and artist] Zinovii Gzhebin, the 16-hour imprisonment of [Isaac] Bilibin [the famous artist of the donkey print], the interrogation of [well-known artist Boris] Anisfeld and [artist Dimitri] Kadovsky and the closure of the press (now reopened). And all because of that donkey.[12]

No doubt the single most spectacular and politically significant governmental action directed against a caricature journal was the so-called “Cu-Cut! Incident” in Barcelona, the capital of the northeastern Spanish region of Catalonia, in November, 1905. Strict controls enforced preceding the passage of the 1883 liberal press law had largely suppressed Spanish caricature before then (in 1875, an American embassy official in Madrid reported that Spanish caricature had apparently been completely non-existent until the 1868 revolution, which was overturned a few years later, had briefly relaxed the press laws). After 1883, several Spanish journals emerged, of which the Barcelona journal Cu-Cut! was especially influential and beautifully produced. It had been prosecuted on several occasions before 1905 for its frequent attacks on the notoriously inept Spanish army, and that year it published a number of cartoons ridiculing the Army, such as a September 21, 1905 drawing portraying a Spanish officer reporting that after observing the 1905 Russo-Japanese War that he had learned only “what we knew already: how to lose battles.” On November 25, soldiers and local police, acting without either military or civilian authorization, ransacked the Cu-Cut! Offices, along with those of a leading Barcelona daily, in the process destroying furniture and printing presses and inflicting (mostly minor) sabre wounds on almost 50 civilians. The Cu-Cut! incident provoked a major political crisis, eventually leading the government to resign and its replacement to capitulate to military demands to make verbal and written attacks upon it subject to military jurisdiction and to implement martial law in Barcelona. According to historian Carolyn Boyd, the so-called “Law of Jurisdictions” was repeatedly used during the following 25 years to “stifle criticism of the military, not only in Catalonia but wherever it occurred,” thus creating a “permanent exception clause” to constitutional free speech guarantees. Even more significantly, the Cu-Cut! affair and its aftermath unquestionably helped to widen the divide between Spanish society and the military, further inflamed an already-blossoming Catalan regionalism and helped grease the skids towards the 1923 military takeover and, ultimately, the 1936 military uprising which buried Spanish democracy (which had been restored in 1931) for 40 years.[13]

One final similarity between French and other European nineteenth-century caricature censorship was that in both cases the censorship attracted repeated and thunderous denunciation, both in print and drawings, from those who were affected (and often stifled) by it. Caricature journals and their artists bitterly complained when they were subjected to stricter controls than the print press and about the arbitrary and thought-stifling nature of governmental controls. Thus, the French caricature journal Le Grelot asked, “By what right can one prevent the crayon from saying what the pen is allowed to?” (February 3, 1878) and lamented that censorship bans were made with “no trial, no conviction, just an order” of the interior minister (September 9, 1871) and that “what is forbidden today was authorized a week ago and perhaps will be allowed tomorrow” (March 10, 1872). Not surprisingly, caricaturists in France and elsewhere also repeatedly attacked their persecutors with drawings, which often were extremely similar from one country to the next (and clearly not only by chance: the Portuguese journal La Parodia published on March 2, 1906 a clearly plagiarized version of a caricature originally published in France by L’Eclipse on November 26, 1871, depicting an artist metaphorically shackled by the censorship by having to walk blind-folded through an egg-minefield of forbidden subjects and penalties). An 1898 Simplicissimus cartoon reacted to the Prussian’s government’s ban on its sales at state railway stations by portraying railroad officials holding a copy of the journal at arm’s length with a pair of tongs while it dripped blood, while French caricature journals repeatedly depicted government officials as wreaking all sorts of havoc upon them, such as cutting them to ribbons with scissors, shackling them with a ball and chain and smashing lithographic stones. Following his 1898 jail sentence, Simplicissimus caricaturist Heine drew a picture of himself shackled in jail to portray how he would “be doing my next drawing,” and French caricaturist Aristide Delannoy, in a drawing published in L’Assiette au Beurre in 1908, similarly depicted himself (along with his jailed editor) chained up in jail after receiving one-year prison terms for publishing a caricature of a French general as a bloody butcher for his role in the French conquest of Morocco.

How Nineteenth-Century French political caricature censorship differed from elsewhere in Europe

Most differences in nineteenth-century political caricature censorship between France and elsewhere in Europe were basically related to the facts that French caricature was a more common and prominent phenomenon than elsewhere, especially before 1848 (largely because, unlike any other major continental regime, French caricature periodically enjoyed freedom before then) and that, no doubt partly as a result, it was more artistically developed and therefore more powerful earlier than elsewhere. These developments made French caricature more politically powerful and controversial elsewhere than in Europe, and combined with the extraordinary level of French political instability, resulted in more frequent debates about caricature censorship and more frequent changes in the regulations than elsewhere, with the result, that, to a far greater degree than any other major European country, French caricature, as noted at the top of this essay, reflected with uncanny accuracy the nature of nineteenth-century French politics.

No doubt because, unlike any other major nineteenth-century European continental power, French caricature experienced several periods of freedom from prior censorship before 1848 (i.e., 1815-1822 and 1830-35), it obtained a “head start,” both in terms of quantity and quality, over other major European countries, which it never relinquished during the nineteenth century, and which made French caricature comparatively both more important and more subject both to the general attention of the ever-changing authorities and, especially, to repeated changes in regulatory procedures. A catalog of French caricatures journals (not all politically-oriented) published between 1860 and 1890 includes over 160 such periodicals; another such listing, covering the partly overlapping period of 1870-1940, includes over 300 caricature journals. Although, unfortunately, no comparable data appear to exist with regard to other major European countries, no one familiar with the literature could seriously doubt that the French figures far exceed those for other countries (with the sole exception of the above-discussed eruption of hundreds of often brief-lived caricature journals with the collapse of Russian censorship control during the 1905 revolution). One clear indication of how much more important caricature was in nineteenth-century France than in other comparable European powers is the amount of scholarly attention that has been devoted to it: a late October, 2008 search of the electronic data base “World Search,” a massive, multi-lingual combined catalog of holdings of thousands of (mostly college) libraries (primarily, but not only, in North America and western Europe), using the search terms “France,” “caricature” and “nineteenth-century” yielded over 700 entries (mostly books but also including audio-visual and other materials), almost five times as many as the other five leading continental European powers (Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain and Austria) combined. A 2008 French publication listing articles and books on the “satiric image,” which overwhelmingly concentrates on material about France, contains over 2100 French-language entries. So many caricature journals were published in nineteenth-century France that separate scholarly studies have appeared focusing solely on caricature in Lyon, Toulouse and Marseille, and between 2005 and 2008 alone about two dozen studies of nineteenth-century French caricature have appeared (a figure no doubt inflated by the ten or so books published in association with the 200^th anniversary of Daumier’s birth, which was also the occasion for major exhibits at the French national library and other venues).[14]

But nineteenth-century French caricature not only exceeded that in other major continental European countries in quantity; before mid-century at least (when prior caricature censorship began to fade away elsewhere), French caricature unquestionably was, at least in general, of a better artistic quality and therefore probably packed more of an artistic punch. No caricatures published elsewhere in Europe before mid-century even came close to the full-blown artistic masterpieces of Daumier and other artists like Grandville that were regularly published, for example, in Philipon’s journals; indeed many, although certainly not all, caricatures published elsewhere before mid-century often include what appear, at least comparatively, more like stick-figures and/or only the basic outlines of characters and objects which are typical in modern American editorial cartoons[15].

It was clearly the combination of both the numbers and the high artistic quality of French political caricature which made caricature censorship so frequent a subject of debate and regulation in nineteenth-century France; thus during the 1835 legislative debate, in clear reference to the “pear” caricatures produced or inspired by Philipon’s journals which proliferated all over Paris, Commerce Minister Paul Duchatel declared that “there is nothing more dangerous, gentlemen, than these infamous caricatures, these seditious designs,“ which “produce the most deadly effect.”[16] It was both the magnitude and perceived impact of nineteenth-century French political caricature, both of which were unparalleled elsewhere in Europe, combined with the similarly unparalleled extraordinary instability of French politics, that led to the repeated abolition and re-imposition of the caricature censorship, developments which were only faintly echoed in other European regimes, most of which went through this cycle only once (or in the case of Prussia, twice) instead of the four or five times experienced by France. It was precisely this repetitive cycle, plus the nature of censorship when it was enforced, that makes studying nineteenth-century French political caricature so revelatory and reflective about broader currents of French politics. But even if the lesser importance of political caricature elsewhere in nineteenth-century Europe made caricature censorship less frequently a subject of debate and changes in regulation, and its study as a result less important as a general indicator of broader political trends, examining political drawings in other countries can still pay high dividends: thus, Russian author Leo Tolstoy declared that “for the historian of the 22^nd and 23^rd centuries who describes the 19^th century, [the German caricature journal] Simplicissimus will be the most valuable source, enabling him to become familiar not only with the state of our present-day society, but also to test the credibility of all other sources.”[17]