The Satiric Decade: Satire and the Rise of Republican Political Culture in France, 1830-1840

The Satiric Decade

The Satiric Decade Satire and the Rise of Republicanism in France, 1830–1840

Amy Wiese Forbes

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.lexingtonbooks.com Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2010 by Lexington Books Chapter 1 is reprinted in expanded form from “The Lithographic Conspiracy: How Satire Framed Liberal Political Debate in Nineteenth-Century France,” French Politics, Culture and Society 26, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 16–50, by permission of French Politics, Culture and Society. Chapter 6 is reprinted from “Let’s Add the Stomach’: Satire, Absurdity, and July Monarchy Politics in Proudhon’s What Is Property,” in French Historical Studies, 24, no. 4 (2001) 679–805. Copyright 2001. Used by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Forbes, Amy Wiese, 1964– The satiric decade : satire and the rise of republicanism in France, 1830–1840 / Amy Wiese Forbes. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-2945-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-4327-8 (electronic) 1. France—Politics and government—1830–1848. 2. France—Intellectual life— 19th century. 3. Political satire, French—History and criticism. 4. Republicanism— France—History—19th century. 5. Political culture—France—History—19th century. 6. Popular culture—France—History—19th century. 7. Courts—Political aspects—France—History—19th century. 8. France—Social conditions—19th century. 9. France—History—Louis Philippe, 1830–1848. I. Title. DC267.F67 2010 944.06’3—dc22 2009032410 Printed in the United States of America


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Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

xiii

Chapter One

Conspiracy

1

Chapter Two

Legality

53

Chapter Three

Fraud

85

Chapter Four

Imposture

125

Chapter Five

Charivari

177

Chapter Six

Absurdity

221

Conclusion

247

Bibliography

263

Index

277

About the Author

289

v

Illustrations

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 2.1 2.2 3.1 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10

“The police hold the thread of a plot,” La Caricature, 1832 “Le movement, the juste milieu, la résistance,” La Caricature, 1831 “Soap bubbles,” La Maison Aubert, 1831 “Replastering,” La Caricature, 1831 “The Pears,” Philipon’s courtroom illustration, 1831 “Gargantua,” La Maison Aubert, 1831 “Press of the Streets,” La Caricature, 1834 “The Invisible Hand,” La Caricature, 1834 “We are all honest men . . . ,” La Caricature, 1834 “She’s a cannibal,” Le Charivari, 1834 “La femme libre, elle est trouvée,” La Charge, 1833 “I don’t give a damn about your Mme Sand . . . ,” Le Charivari, 1839 “Le mérite des femmes,” Le Charivari, 1836 “That’s my wife,” Le Charivari, 1840 “Birth of the juste milieu,” La Caricature, 1832 “It’s exceptional! I’ve had four waists . . . ,” Le Charivari, 1840 “The Belly of the Legislature,” La Caricature, 1834 “Hercules,” La Caricature, 1834 “Procurer of spouses,” Le Charivari, 1833

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2 3 12 21 23 27 60 61 99 126 134 136 140 141 143 146 149 150 161

Acknowledgments

In writing this book, I have incurred many debts and am pleased to be able to thank those who have assisted and supported me. My first is to Bonnie G. Smith, my advisor, both during the dissertation and since. I am profoundly grateful to her for guiding me through the intellectual dilemmas of this project, for teaching me about French politics and culture, and for providing delicious dinners while I lived on a graduate student’s budget. Even though I am now far from Rutgers, she continues to share professional wisdom, comment on drafts, and inspire with her standards of excellence. I was fortunate to begin this book at Rutgers University, surrounded by a committee of outstanding scholars. Donald Kelley was a most careful reader and steadfast supporter of this project. His incisive comments about republican theory in particular strengthened it considerably. John Gillis championed the study from the beginning, and I appreciate his unswerving confidence in its merit. I thank him for mulling over old political cartoons, laughing at jokes with me, and pushing me to ask difficult social questions of the documents. Belinda Davis encouraged me through final drafts with her creative vision and practical suggestions for writing about public politics. Jo Burr Margadant’s discerning reading of the full manuscript and expert knowledge of July Monarchy political culture clarified and shaped my thinking in important ways. In addition to the members of my dissertation committee, Jennifer Jones, Matt Matsuda, Phyllis Mack, and Virginia Yans carefully read and provided valuable comments on portions of this project. I am also grateful for the support of Rudy Bell and Stephen Reinert in navigating through matters of funding. Portions of the book have been presented as conference papers and articles, and I am indebted to many people for their insightful comments: the audiences of the 1998 and 2003 annual conferences of the Society for French Historical ix

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Studies, commentators Sara Maza and Lisa Tiersten, and the fellows of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture for helping me to think through satire as an element of political culture. Laura Mason, Michael Kwass, Andrew Milne, Patrick Hopkins, Paula Garrett, and Hollis Robbins, as well as the editors and anonymous readers of French Historical Studies and French Politics, Culture and Society, made invaluable suggestions that sharpened my thinking and helped immensely with revisions. I also received astute criticism from the anonymous reviewer from Lexington Books that pressed me to refine my analysis, especially of satire’s distinctive role in middle-class identity. My editor at Lexington Books, Julie Kirsch, and her staff have generously shared their expertise and patiently brought the book to publication. I thank Susan McEachern for seeing the value in the work and introducing us. Throughout this project I have had the good fortune to work with excellent information specialists who have assisted me along the way. This book could not have been written without the librarians and archivists at the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Archives de la Préfecture de Police de Paris, the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, and the Archives Nationales. I offer special gratitude to Odile Krakovitch for research suggestions and giving me access to valuable materials that were being catalogued and otherwise unavailable. Thank you to the archival and research staffs of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (especially Maja Keech), Alexander Library at Rutgers University (especially Stan Nash), Firestone Library in Princeton, and the Rare Book and Manuscript Collection at the New York Public Library. My greatest debt in this regard is surely to Tom Henderson and the outstanding Millsaps Library staff: Jan Allison, Molly Signs McManus, Elizabeth Beck, Ryan Roy, Debra McIntosh, and Alexis Manheim. When I came to Millsaps, I was told that Tom could work miracles of bibliographic sleuthing and procurement, and indeed he can. Research for this book was supported by grants and fellowships. In its early stages, an Excellence Fellowship from Rutgers University, a Graduate School Doctoral Research Fellowship, and generous assistance from the Schlatter fund of the Rutgers History Department made research for this project possible. In addition, a fellowship from the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture provided a stimulating environment in which to finish the thesis. And for their generous support, I am indebted to the Hearin Foundation and to the Millsaps’ dean’s office for awarding faculty development grants and a teaching sabbatical to finish revisions. Richard Smith’s tireless effort to facilitate the faculty’s scholarly endeavors has been much appreciated.

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I would also like to thank friends and family who supported me during this project. Gena Hahn, Dominique Sotteau, Perrine Poubeau, and Céline Huzard welcomed me to the world of research in Paris and made life run more smoothly, inside and out of the archives. Nikki Shepardson shared research experiences and encouraged me to celebrate even small triumphs. My heartfelt thanks goes to the dissertation group—Rebecca Hartman, Jenny Nelson, Mary Poole, Karen Balcom, and Becca Gershenson—who provided the friendship and intellectual energy that make academic work possible and rewarding. I think often of Becca, my dear friend and fellow graduate student, who died much too soon. Beatrix Hoffman, Kari Frederickson, Michelle Brattain, Andrew Milne, Grace Hale, Sandrine Sanos, and Stuart Gold also provided the camaraderie and exchange of ideas that have meant so much to me. And thank you to Sarah Eilers and family for letting me stay with you in D.C. (so many times). Laura Mason, my master’s thesis advisor and friend, first encouraged me as a historian, and taught me so much about political culture, writing history, and thriving in academe. My initial interest in political humor developed as a thesis about royalist satire in the 1789 Revolution, but truly came to life when she and I (and a few others) collaborated in 1991 on a series of satiric commentaries in a local news magazine. I am grateful to Laura and her husband, Michael Kwass, for years of thoughtful commentary about my work and fine friendship, and for showing us where to find the best duck confit in Paris. This book was completed while teaching at Millsaps College, where I have been surrounded by remarkable colleagues and friends. Fellow historians Bill Storey and Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel helped me to think through intellectual problems and pointed me in the right direction at crucial moments in the publishing process. David Davis, Bob McElvaine, Louise Hetrick, and Sandy Zale encouraged and supported my work with their professionalism. The members of the interdisciplinary Works in Progress group and Friday Forum selflessly gave their time and fresh perspectives to my project. As with so many people, my ability to write this book while teaching and raising a family came in large part from supportive friends. Thank you especially to Holly Sypniewski, Anne MacMaster, Sandra and Julian Murchison, Kristen and Bob Oertel, Melissa Kelley, Bill and Joanna Storey, Darby Ray, Patrick Hopkins, and Elise Smith for the childcare, stimulating conversation, and timely encouragement to stop everything and go do some research. Most of all, I would like to thank my family. My mother, Carolyn Engelhardt Wiese, supported me emotionally and financially. Without her continuing generosity, I could not have pursued an academic career. Her genuine interest in my research over the years has sustained me and I hope she will enjoy the final product. Likewise, my father, John Wiese; my sister, Molly,

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and her husband, David; and my brother, Cavin, and his wife, Danna, have been reliably supportive of this project. Not one of them has escaped babysitting while I worked in some library somewhere. My grandparents did not live to see this book, but their financial contributions and confidence in me made it possible, for which I am deeply grateful. With love, I thank them all. My two children, Alex and Claire, were born while I was writing this book, and spent more time without me than I would have wished. I thank them for putting up with it all. I am most grateful to my husband, Andrew Forbes, who has sustained me in more ways than I can count, including moving first from Britain to the United States, then from New Jersey to Paris, then from Manhattan to Mississippi, acts of love and courage by any measure. A constant source of moral support, he read every word of this project, and his critical eye and nonhistorian’s perspective made every chapter better. It is to my family that I lovingly dedicate this book.

Introduction

In the prospectus for La Caricature, the most important satiric newspaper of the early July Monarchy, editor Charles Philipon argued that “caricature has become a power” in France. The paper’s motto, castigat ridendo mores (“One chastises character [or habits] by laughing”), announced the paper’s raison d’etre.1 The motto called on readers not to rise up in revolution (again), but to castigate French leadership that was failing to carry out its promises. If caricature wielded power, it was the power to call political and social superiors to task. The motto implied that satirists and their readers might judge not just the actions, but the ethical character of political elites. Satire leveled the field of political play by giving voice to the overwhelming majority of disenfranchised people and claiming the right of the public to use it, to use ridicule to redefine themselves as active citizens. In later issues, Philipon explained the vital role that he believed satire played in political debate and education. Satirists, he said, had “an active part . . . in the march of public intelligence”; satire, especially in his papers, allowed them to participate in “the march of the century . . . with their ideas about advancement, philosophy, and liberty.”2 Satire, in other words, spoke to viewers and audiences, nearly all of whom remained excluded from the vote and “official” politics under the Monarchy, about the foundational components of democracy and citizenship: an informed public and protected freedom. The origins of democratic political practices are a concern for modern republics. Yet there are few historical studies of how disenfranchised people actually learn the practices of rights-based government. Scholars who study democratic transition generally agree that a well-developed “civil society” must be in place for such a transition to succeed, one that includes communication networks, dedication to democratic institutions, and a politically informed citizenry.3 But how do such things originate? xiii

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Philip Nord addressed this question in The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France, where he examined the transition from Louis-Napoleon’s Second Empire to an enduring Republic of parliamentary government and universal male suffrage. The Third Republic succeeded, he explains, because by 1870 France had in place “a counter-elite anchored in autonomous institutions and buoyed by an alternative political culture.”4 His study shows how this culture developed from mid-century in an array of social institutions and venues, including freemasonry, the university, the law, and the arts. He concludes that the second half of the nineteenth century produced an elite with a sense of itself, and a vision of a republic based on moral virtue and social order that was able to create the longest enduring French republic to date, lasting from 1870 to 1940. France had attempted republicanism earlier in the century when the 1848 Revolution ended the July Monarchy and established the Second Republic. This republic lasted only briefly, replaced by Louis-Napoleon and the Empire, but what are we to make of this earlier republican effort, sandwiched between the First Republic of the great Revolution and the successful Third? If the communications networks and informed citizenry that sustained the Republic in 1870 can be traced as having developed from mid-century, we might ask what it was in political culture that gave rise to the critical spirit and republicanism that erupted in the 1840s. This book attempts to answer this question by investigating how French republicanism took shape as satire in the 1830s, and how dispute around satire led to the development of a repertoire of practices by which France became accustomed to the habit of representation by the people, and by which it was ultimately able to construct legitimate political authority. In the 1830s, satire exploded on the political scene as France’s most biting form of political criticism. Amid the relaxed censorship and technological advances that followed the Revolution of 1830, the two new journals that would become France’s most famous satiric newspapers, Le Charivari and La Caricature, gave France its first daily, satirical voice in political affairs. They expressed the views of many people who had hoped that the July Monarchy would fulfill the democratic promises of the 1789 Revolution, but despaired as propertied elites perverted liberty and justice for personal enrichment. Similarly, stage characters and plays, such as “Robert Macaire” and Balzac’s “Vautrin,” mocked rampant hypocrisy that seemed to cry out for satiric appraisal. Political tracts, like Proudhon’s What is Property?, brought satire even into the sober environment of the academy to critique the new science of political economy. Many top satirists, including Philipon, Daumier, and Proudhon, were brought to trial, where the justice system attempted to determine whether satiric humor could constitute a meaningful political threat

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to the government. In defending themselves and their work, however, satirists turned the courtroom into yet another venue for performing their political and social critiques. Satire was everywhere in this regime, and with it, a critical public discourse developed under the July Monarchy in newspapers, theater, courtrooms, and street behavior. Satire raised the daunting question of what role public opinion would play in government. In 1830, Louis-Philippe had created a monarchy surrounded by what the press quickly dubbed “quasi-republican institutions.” These included France’s first free press and a Charter issued by an elected assembly. The July government was unsteady from its inception because political compromise between monarchy and republicanism, the central issue of the 1790s, had still not been resolved in the 1830s. Specifically, the role of public opinion in government remained unclear, only a tiny fraction of the population could vote, and contradictions plagued the regime. In the struggle to forge a compromise between monarchy and republic, halting the revolutionary momentum of 1830 and bridging the gulf between the traditions of royalty and the republican principles of 1792 posed endless problems for the monarchy. Conflicts arose immediately over such things as maintaining freedom of speech while preventing criticism of the monarchy. Political talk among the public had to be carefully monitored for lurking government opposition. It was in this unstable political milieu that satirists criticized government activities, exposed ambiguities, and forced administrators to clarify or establish policies. Not surprisingly, heated public controversy surrounded satiric commentary, resulting in an outright ban on political satire in 1835 that forced satirists to devise more cryptic strategies of criticism. Government officials cracked down on their humorous public criticism that challenged state authority through both its form and content. Satire had been a political resource in France for a long time, but the anxious political context of the July Monarchy had unlocked its political power. Satire also taught lessons in democracy. It fit into the July Monarchy’s tense political context as a voice in favor of public political debate. Satiric expression took place in the public sphere and spoke from a position of public opinion—that is, from a position of the nation expressing a political voice and making claims on its government representatives and leadership. Beyond mere entertainment, satire’s humor appealed to and exercised public opinion, drawing audiences into new practices of representative government. I argue that, by doing this, satire became a vehicle of republicanism with powerful democratizing potential. In order to understand and appreciate satiric humor, audiences had to uncover its layers of meaning. The crux of the matter was the particular nature of satiric communication in this moment of political instability and contradiction. This process taught viewers to look behind the

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scenes and between the lines for obscured realities, and to have a critical habit of mind, which, in the particular context of the search for anti-government conspiracies that characterized the July Monarchy, made perpetual observation and public critique into valued practices. Detecting and understanding politically challenging messages hidden beneath surface appearances set up a model of popular political participation. Satirists and audiences analyzed political issues, formed political views, and held representatives responsible for their actions. Satire nurtured a sense of being a citizen through critiquing public representatives and taking action. It offered a civic education in the 1830s that marshaled popular criticism against the government of the July Monarchy, erupted in the Revolution of 1848, and ultimately came to sustain the Republic. Throughout the 1830s, satire defined the middle class as critical, liberal, and moderate republicans, an image that many middle-class viewers apparently liked, judging from their consumption of it. But the tension between criticism of bourgeois society and dependence on it radicalized satire, or at least took on radical implications by pointing to corruption, the solution to which could be heard in the growing calls for universal suffrage. Much of satire’s power lay in the fact that it defied easy definition. In fact, I argue that this definitional dilemma is the key to understanding the 1830s as a moment that formed middle-class political and social identity. Nonetheless, I need to clarify what I take satire to mean. Even now, it is hard to pin down what exactly counts as satire. As Ruben Quintero, editor of the most recent comprehensive history of satire, has said, “we are better able to circumscribe than define satire.”5 Classic definitions emphasize satire’s use of ridicule to expose vice or folly.6 They stress satire’s ethical vision, arguing that in the name of public interest, satirists express dissent in a particular moral direction. Following this line of thinking, Quintero says that “a true satirist must be a true believer, a practicing humanitarian . . . [who] moves heart and mind through building tension and provoking conflict.” Finally, satire has often been characterized as open-ended; “the satirist is not obligated to solve what is perceived as a problem or replace what is satirically disassembled or unmasked with a solution.”7 While these definitions have the advantage of clarity, they don’t tell us all that we need to know about satire; by claiming definitional specifics, they foreclose on the range of ways that satire has operated in particular contexts. At any given moment, these specifics may or may not have been present. Satirists have had a variety of motives for producing their work, which may or may not have been “humanitarian.” For example, mockery of censorship after 1830 furthered freedom of the press, in part because satirists needed to earn a living and satire depended on an open press. While it is impossible for us to know or gauge the sincere humanitarianism of the satirists, the question

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of definition haunted July Monarchy administrators and satirists, who battled over precisely this issue of satirists’ intentions. Representatives of the administration tried throughout the July Monarchy to uncover what sort of harm, if any, satire posed to social and political order. Satire’s meaning eluded them because it was determined not just by the satirists’ intentions but by the context in which works appeared, as well as by the ways audiences interpreted them, police responded to them, critics framed them, and politicians debated them. When moral assertions were made, understanding them required knowledge of the political context that surrounded them. In the 1830s, as we will see, many people “got the jokes,” but was that the sum of satire’s significance? What did getting the joke mean? And what about those who didn’t get the joke or weren’t sure? Traditional definitions offer little to answer these questions that were so crucial to 1830s politics in which legislators, police, political theorists, judges, juries, journalists, and viewers tried to figure out just what satire was, and what difference it made socially and politically. Thus, offering a precise definition of satire runs counter to my fundamental assumptions about how satire worked in the July Monarchy through its fluid boundaries and mechanisms. What I can say is that I include as satire instances of ridicule and sarcasm in a wide variety of media—graphic satire or caricature, written satire in newspapers and political tracts, courtroom arguments, street demonstrations, and theater—that call into question the validity of dominant political and social conceptions. Satire is not obliged to offer solutions to problems it identifies, but I believe that it often did; it brought issues into focus and pointed to answers, which in the particular circumstances of the July Monarchy, often meant ending corruption by expanding the franchise. In the big picture, it offered solutions to political instability and contradictions by educating audiences in democratic political practices and by lessening the impact of modern social fragmentation. If I see satire’s meaning as more complex than some definitions suggest, I follow a fairly standard line on what constitutes satire’s main features: caricature achieved by the grotesque, absurdities, and distortions; a direct object of attack; irony; ridicule; and parody. Like historian Ronald Paulson, I take caricatures to include charged portraits or exaggerated likenesses as well as graphic commentary on political events.8 All of these features appeared in the work of July Monarchy satirists, but they drew particularly heavily on the grotesque, finding especially appropriate an element that uses fantastic or exaggerated form to question the limits of the human. Grotesqueries often involve changing form in a manner that indicates and fits the crimes that one is accused of committing. As Paulson explains, “there has always lingered over the grotesque the suggestion of a violation of integrity, a crossing of boundaries or limits that are supposed to be sacrosanct. The grotesque was,

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of course, in religious terms, an abomination, and so weighted down with the theological discourse of sin.”9 This element appealed to those who saw the regime as a perversion of the republican promise of 1830. Satire generally has not been included in the history of French republicanism. The conventional narrative of republicanism between the First and Second Republics goes something as follows: Modern French republicanism emerged in 1789 from revolutionary efforts to reorder the relationship between society and politics. It is generally accepted that, once political and social tradition lost its “givenness” with the demise of absolutism and divine right, dispute over restructuring gave rise to new ideologies, including democratic republicanism, to provide practical answers to the problem of enacting the social contract.10 In 1792, Revolutionaries declared France a republic, governed by an elected assembly without a king. The new Republic raised questions about social equality and created the pressing issue of the relationship between the people and their representatives. Revolutionary language, symbols, rituals, and gestures became resources marshaled by those claiming to speak to these issues in the name of the nation. Although many believed that the revolutionary efforts of the Republic, including what came to be called the Reign of Terror, had been necessary to protect the gains of 1789, the shared view of the Republic during the Napoleonic period was a negative one of popular dictatorship and violent radicalism. In the early nineteenth century, republicanism widely symbolized the police state and individual oppression. Under the Bourbon Restoration, the conservative monarchy established in 1815, however, liberal historians went far to rehabilitate France’s republican history. Jules Michelet, Professor at the Collège de France, Alphonse de Lamartine, the most renowned poet of the day, and socialist Louis Blanc exalted the Republic. They did so by associating it with the broader revolutionary era and by portraying the actors of 1792 as the defenders of 1789 who came to the aid of the Revolution just when the king and constitutionalists were abandoning it. In this liberal, historical perspective the Republic came to symbolize enlightened reason, political liberty, civil equality, modernized institutions, and national dignity.11 Republicans gradually gained strength and allied underground with Bonapartists in secret societies to overthrow the Bourbon monarch, Louis XVIII. However, under the ultraconservative Restoration, republicanism remained suppressed, and exerted little overt influence on official politics. Rather, it developed primarily through anti-clericalism and popular opposition in the theater.12 An extremely limited franchise, anti-clericalism, and competition for control of the ministries fueled leftist opposition to the Restoration monarchy. In 1830, a political crisis led to a second revolution. When the liberal

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opposition to the Bourbon monarch won the majority of seats in the Assembly during the election of July 1830, government officials responded with the July Ordinances, administrative measures that circumvented legislative consent and called for the dissolution of the elected chamber, a more restricted franchise, and an end to the limited press freedom that still existed. Authorities seized political journals, closed theaters, and destroyed printing presses. They arrested republicans who urged resistance to limits on speech and who caricatured key government figures.13 By July 28th, riots had erupted in Paris. After three days of the barricades, the Bourbon monarchy collapsed and the July Monarchy was created. Republicans and anti-Bourbon monarchists compromised on the successor, the duc d’Orleans, Louis-Philippe, who seemed amenable to constitutional monarchy. Historians of revolutionary France who try to understand the democratic tradition have seen the 1830s as the backwater of republican ideology in which the political goals of 1789 remained suppressed under monarchy, while the critical spirit of the 1840s had yet to emerge. For the past three decades, historians of republicanism, including Maurice Agulhon, John Merriman, William Sewell, and Willi Fortescue, have focused largely on 1848, which most take as the focal point of modern French republicanism,14 mainly because this was the period when the influence of, and connections to, the First Republic were most in evidence. Historians have examined republicanism from a range of perspectives: Georges Weill’s Histoire du parti républicain 1814–187015 analyzed republicanism in terms of party politics and institutions; Ronald Aminzade’s Ballots and Barricades: Class Formation and Republican politics in France 1830–187116 focused on economics; while François Furet’s Revolutionary France 1770–188017 framed republicanism in terms of intellectual history. The July Monarchy has remained understudied in these works largely because historians have tended not to look for republicanism under monarchies. Pamela Pilbeam’s Republicanism in Nineteenth-Century France 1814–1871 stands out for its detailed coverage of the years 1830 to 1835, but remains focused mainly on declared republican organizations.18 Even within the subfield of July Monarchy political history, scholars have highlighted the 1840s, saying less about the 1830s, which have been seen to have relatively little bearing on discussions of 1848 and the lead-up to it,19 largely because histories of the July Monarchy have tended to take a particular view of the political. For example, H. A. C. Collingham’s The July Monarchy: A Political History of France20 and Philippe Vigier’s La Monarchie de Juillet,21 the definitive works on the subject, address politics primarily in terms of political institutions, demographics, and voting. This view, which construes republicanism as a stable ideal or set of issues that individuals accepted or rejected consciously, obscures important processes of politicization, including those

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that developed through satire. It is these processes that are the focus of this study. In the last two decades, the “cultural turn” in political history22 has shifted many historians’ focus from institutional politics to political culture, paving the way for analysis of satire as an element of political culture. In this vein, they have associated the creation of the French republic with the formation of a new political culture at the end of the eighteenth and across the nineteenth century.23 Expanding their notion of the political to include far more than political institutions and elites, they are examining the July Monarchy anew and explaining more fully how such a democratic culture emerged and developed. Historians have come to view the July Monarchy as an important period of political and class identity formation. In addition to traditional political and labor histories,24 we now see scholarship on the role of political culture in constructing political institutions. William Reddy, for example, has analyzed the nineteenth-century press and bureaucracy, anchors of modern French public life, as institutions driven as much by emotional intensity as by rational self-interest. The masculine public sphere was, he argues, a place where feminine sentiment structured individual behavior and the social order.25 Jo Burr Margadant, has examined the institution of the French monarchy through a “new biography” of the Duchesse de Berry, and found that contemporary gender ideology used in public discussions of the duchess helped bridge the gap in the 1830s between an outmoded royalty and an upand-coming bourgeoisie.26 Further, she has shown that satire’s gendered and class-bound discourse fatally weakened the July Monarchy by trapping the French royals in emerging middle-class standards that traditional kingship could not meet.27 But what of satire’s long-term effects on the body politic? What influence did satire exert on the public’s political identity and practices, both in the 1830s and beyond? The 1830s have come to be regarded as something of a historical watershed for middle-class politics and self-definition. David Garrioch has argued that the 1830 Revolution marked the moment when the bourgeoisie finally took the reins of political power, a process that began in 1789. According to Jeremy Popkin, “a whole complex of processes that were to structure French society well into the twentieth century have their roots in the years around that time. Long recognized as the beginning of French industrialization, these years are now also seen as the period when a new kind of consumer economy took root. A distinctive ‘bourgeois’ culture and lifestyle achieved hegemony.”28 Popkin has made a fascinating study of how this happened in Lyon. Press, Revolution and Social Identities in France, 1830–1835 analyzes the role of the press in public life and political culture. Based in an industrial town, his study shows how newspaper images, and the world of

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journalism more broadly, brought social identities into being for a range of “communities” that came to populate industrial society.29 Like Popkin, I am interested in political culture and identity. I hope to show how satire brought new identities into being in the 1830s. One of the most influential works in this regard is Peter Sahlins’ Forest Rites: The War of the Desmoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France.30 Sahlins examines the relationship between pre-modern collective action and modern politics, and between rural and urban practices in the early 1830s, to gain a better understanding of how opposition politics developed in the early years of the July Monarchy. He argues that after 1830, middle-class republican opposition could appropriate and redefine the traditional means of popular protest in provincial towns precisely because their folk origins had excluded them from official definitions of politics. Simultaneously, the new bourgeois political periodicals, Le Charivari and La Caricature, used the language and ideas of the traditional charivari to express political opposition. In sum, the July Monarchy saw a complete reordering of political culture in which the national political culture entered popular politics, and popular political forms entered national dialogue. Taking Sahlins’ link between popular culture and national identity as a jumping off point, my study extends the analysis of satire to examine in depth the mechanisms by which consuming satire defined and unified a political and social cohort through practices of criticism. Satire encouraged middle-class emergence from aristocratic society by providing a way for the middle class to think about itself as it staked out new political and social turf. Sahlins’ work, with its innovative analysis of French popular culture’s intersection with national politics, set the stage for further study of such political activity in the 1830s. Sheryl Kroen, whose work dealt mainly with the Restoration, brought new clarity to the 1830 Revolution by showing how the historically contingent cultural practices that preceded it persisted under the July Monarchy. Her work suggests that “the complex negotiation over legitimate authority” that characterized the Restoration carried on under the new regime. For historians of republicanism, it points not only to the benefit of studying politics through a wide range of cultural practices, but also to the need to turn away from the “big political events (such as the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848) . . . and instead attend to the manifold and surprising practices and venues through which the key ideological issues of the day were exposed and worked out.”31 In the 1830s, satiric practices developed into exactly this kind of crucial place for debating the most pressing political issues of the new monarchy. Following the Revolution, satire took off primarily in visual form. While the visual culture of the July Monarchy—painting and lithographic caricature in particular—has received attention in past decades,32 historians are

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now revisiting it with an expanded notion of popular culture’s political significance. In The Popularization of Images: Visual Culture under the July Monarchy, edited by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Gabriel Weisberg, art historians have shown a new fluidity of boundaries between cultural forms in the 1830s, and have identified a growing trend to see the links between the verbal and the visual across media.33 They demonstrate how the notion of a popularizing visual culture under the July Monarchy played a central role in debates over what the French nation would be and who would participate in it. Their work invites historians to continue to explore relationships between visual culture and notions of citizenship. These works have told us much about the formation of the new political culture in the nineteenth century and the relationship between representation and politics, and my study has benefited greatly from their insights into methods and subject matter. I have attempted to bring these insights to bear on the study of satire and republican practices in order to fully explain the source of the ethos of political criticism and change that ignited in the 1840s and sustained the Republic in the 1870s. Advancing our knowledge of how republicanism is learned is clearly very important to understanding the gestation period of the French Republic and the evolution of what came to be defined as republicanism. Analyzing republican development through humor dramatically reconfigures how we see republicanism developing from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. It widens our scholarly view beyond republicanism as a fixed ideology, beyond ideals of transparent citizenship and civic virtue associated with the republican ideology of Rousseau, for example, toward the critical imagination and skills of political accountability. If scholars of republicanism have traditionally focused on the formal efforts of republican cells and established political organizations like Les amis du peuple, for example,34 recent scholarship has confirmed that thinking about the role of popular culture and less institutionalized forms of political education can provide greater insight into the way democratic political practices and a republican ethos have been acquired. Republican clubs and banquet campaigns may be the best-known sources of republicanism in the July Monarchy, but nothing in political culture taught the skills of rights-based government in the 1830s more than satire. Looking at republicanism through the lens of satire offers a fresh interpretation of the central role July Monarchy politics played in the big picture of French republicanism as it developed throughout the nineteenth century. What sets my work apart from other studies is that, by taking a broadened definition of politics and political actors, it shows how satire defined liberal political questions under the July Monarchy, taught skills of analysis and opinion formation, and became central to the process by which France went from being a divineright, absolutist monarchy to becoming a liberal and democratic polity.

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Satire has a vivid history in the French political arsenal. As Laura Mason has shown, revolutionaries debated satire’s political acceptability and significance as early as 1789, and bridled its incisive critiques in 1792.35 Sheryl Kroen has analyzed satire as a popular political form under the Restoration invoked by the public to assert anti-clericalism and expose efforts to reestablish Bourbon legitimacy.36 Peter Sahlins has examined how satirists relied on the carnivalesque language of popular culture around the 1830 Revolution to create a middle-class political critique.37 Jo Burr Margadant has demonstrated the importance of satire in constructing republicans’ gendered critique of the July Monarchy. Feminizing Louis-Philippe in political caricature undermined the king’s claim to legitimate authority, but the regime’s crisis of legitimacy deepened as masculinized caricatures ensnared the monarch in accusations of fraud and dishonor.38 It is my contention that, with its bearing on questions of appearance versus reality, satire has played a crucial part in France’s transition from divine-right, absolutist monarchy to liberal democracy. From 1789 through the 1830s, a succession of governments tried to meet satire’s challenges. Debates over its meaning allow us to understand the fundamental nature of France’s struggle to forge legitimate authority.39 The satiric press of the July Monarchy built on the traditional wit of the pamphleteers of the old regime, of the libellistes, whose pamphlets slandered every supposedly respectable party and institution in France through stories of sexual intrigue, impotence, and disease, “revealed” in eye-catching snippets.40 Satiric criticism had thrived in the old regime theater and Grub Street press of pre-revolutionary Paris as well as in the press and theater of the early Revolution. Papers such as the Actes des apôtres carried on the tradition of socio-political criticism through humorous attacks. Between 1789 and 1792, satire was relatively free to mock the drama of revolution. Humor through subterfuge, however, seemed threatening and incompatible with later revolutionaries’ pursuit of transparent politics. Thus, satire was outlawed under the first French Republic. Satire resurfaced after the fall of Robespierre. The period 1794 to 1800 saw a gradual build of caricatures that targeted primarily fashion and fads. Although the Directory was more open than the government of the Committee on Public Safety, political caricatures nevertheless worried those who feared destabilization. What freedom existed for satire under the Directory disappeared during Napoleon’s reign. In 1799 Napoleon reduced the number of daily newspapers from seventy-three to thirteen, and then to four in 1811. Oppositional caricatures fell victim to repression enforced by legions of secret police.41 Midway through his rule, Napoleon established a system of theatrical censorship similar to that of the old regime that severely limited satiric performances to a few nationally-subsidized theaters to serve the

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Emperor and his court, and a few small, privately-funded theaters to entertain the populace. Officials restricted the type of presentation offered in popular theaters and allowed no overlap with the prerogatives of national theaters.42 During the Restoration, satire was variably tolerated and restricted. The well-known satirical paper of the Restoration, Le Nain Jaune, was published off and on until the mid-1820s. Loosening Napoleon’s restrictions on the boulevard theaters allowed a number of small houses to reopen, and others to redirect and expand their performances. Performances of Molière’s “Tartuffe,” for example, became enormously popular across the country. Crowds used this satiric play to express anti-clericalism, point up government corruption, and call for political change.43 At the same time, melodrama swept popular theaters and, as the epitome of bourgeois entertainment, provided a natural target for social satire in the 1830s. In July 1830, press liberty had been a rallying cry of revolutionaries, and in fact the press had been an early beneficiary of the Revolution. By August, all press convictions had been overturned, and the new Charter had declared the right of all to publish and have printed their opinions. In October, press laws restricting engravings, drawings, and lithographs were likewise abolished. Even with its long history as a tool of French politics, however, satire under the July Monarchy stands out for its innovative forms of social criticism and its pervasiveness in France of the “bourgeois monarch.” Satire benefited from the new print technology of lithography that for the first time in 1830 made possible daily lithographic caricatures in the press. This meant that satire could now participate in current debates and comment on contemporary issues. Another factor that distinguished satire under the July Monarchy from its predecessors was the domination of print satire by one person, Charles Philipon. Philipon, a satirist and newspaper publisher, created the two most widely known satiric papers of the July Monarchy, La Caricature and Le Charivari. He published La Caricature weekly from 1830 to 1835 in the size of a modern tabloid newspaper. Proclaiming the journal would be “moral, religious, literary, and scenic,” he used it to criticize the July Monarchy from its inception, which became problematic when censorship began reappearing in 1831.44 Philipon was imprisoned several times for printing inflammatory articles and lithographs. While in prison in 1832, he founded the daily Le Charivari. July Monarchy satire has enjoyed a surge of attention in recent years as scholars have realized the distinctive quality of the satire and begun to address the political significance of the era. Thus the story of how Philipon gathered and nurtured a staff of young artists, including Daumier, Monnier, and Gavarni, to produce lithographic caricature for both papers is now well known.45 Through ascerbic quips against “the umbrella monarchy,” Philipon’s journals faulted the regime for its illegitimate origins, crude

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behavior, pervasive egoism, and repressive policies. “With a violence and sometimes an immodesty that stopped at nothing, the satiric press threw itself into ‘a campaign of disrespect,’” overwhelming the king with the most humiliating insinuations, denouncing his stinginess, accusing him of crimes, joking about attacks on his life, and ridiculing his family, his ministers, and his prefect of police.46 Print satire at this time was very much a collective endeavor, and Philipon’s journals succeeded so overwhelmingly in large part because they spoke with a single voice. Scholars have carefully studied the methods of producing satire and the mechanics of its censorship. As Judith Wechsler has described, caricaturists recorded and mocked a range of urban scenes—boredom, social displacement, material display, and self-consciousness. They did so by repeatedly attacking an identifiable set of targets through established artistic codes and methods. The charged portrait exaggerated the features of a recognized individual (often a government official) for satiric effect. The social caricature distorted typical characters, like the bourgeois dandy or the middle-class housewife, in commonplace circumstances such as Paris streets or bourgeois parlors.47 Satiric newspapers generally included one of a series of sketches or satiric designs, some on the front cover, others on the third page, as well as an accompanying article linking it to the day’s political events and to the epigrams that would arise from it (and appear later in the issue). Editors promised typically to situate their mockery in broader context with “a few excursions into the literary world, a glance at the theaters, fashion, etc.” Political satires showed Louis-Philippe and his ministers in compromising positions that violated popular notions of good government, and exposed inconsistencies in the policies of the regime.48 Such ridicule did not go unnoticed, and Robert Goldstein has analyzed the mechanics of censorship across the century, including a thorough discussion of the July Monarchy.49 Because of Philipon’s dominant place in July Monarchy satire, scholars have focused largely on his work. The central question has been whether his satire, like the carnivalesque and ritual inversion to which it is often linked analytically, acted as a motivating force that furthered republicanism or as a political safety valve that deflated it; there have been supporters of both sides. The argument that satire fueled republican opposition to the king has been made by André Blum, among others, in “La Caricature politique sous La Monarchie de Juillet,”50 where he points to the way satire energized republican militants. In contrast, the argument that satire served the status quo has been made by James B. Cuno, among others, in “Violence, Satire and Social Types in the Graphic Art of the July Monarchy,”51 where he sees satire as a way to classify, bring order to, and thereby sustain, a society undergoing the dislocations of industrialization.

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More recently, Sandy Petrey has advanced the debate over satire’s political significance by focusing on the constructed nature of royal authority. Petrey argues that satire undermined the monarch’s logic of legitimacy by calling forth the issue of resemblance, and exposing the dynamic by which Louis-Philippe was constructing a resemblance to a monarchy much as satiric symbols constructed a resemblance to Louis-Philippe.52 The influence of the new cultural history is more than evident in his work, which reaches beyond political elites and institutions to examine popular satire as a powerful artifact of political culture, and points to satire’s power to create political change. Petrey argues that the constructed nature of satire exposed the constructed nature of Louis-Philippe’s power and thereby weakened the regime. While I agree that this dynamic was at work, I see satire as more complex and multivalent than Petrey allows. In the 1830s, satire strengthened the July regime by providing justification for centralizing authority. Yet it also shaped a political aesthetic of public criticism that, in the long run, challenged monarchy and helped establish republicanism. The most thoroughgoing analysis of print satire’s political significance in the July Monarchy to date is David S. Kerr’s Caricature and French Political Culture, 1830–1848. Kerr responds explicitly to the revolutionary/counterrevolutionary debate with the commonsense claim that satire has no single political valence; rather its political charge can only be determined by examining it in the particular circumstances in which it exists. Kerr studies Philipon’s work in painstaking detail, situating it in the bigger picture of opposition politics by analyzing its connections to other institutions and venues of opposition—the non-satiric republican press, republican clubs, and opposition in the Assembly, for example. He concludes that ultimately satire had little lasting effect on French politics other than some minor policy changes and perhaps diminishing respect for the monarchy. In fact, he suggests that satire “served to frighten the middle classes and render them quiescent towards Louis-Philippe,” thereby strengthening the regime.53 While Kerr’s meticulously researched study offers a wealth of information about the place of print satire in July Monarchy political culture, it undervalues the importance of satire’s education in political analysis. Kerr emphasizes satire’s effect on the July regime, which he sees as minimal in large measure because he employs a limited definition of “the political” as official acts of the government—creating legislation, forming policy and changing regimes. If we define politics more broadly to include not just these kinds of acts of government officials but also less obvious changes in public behavior, perspective, and identity, we can see that satire had a significant effect on French political culture. While satire may not have inspired significant policy changes, it set in motion political practices among its targets and the public

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that held critical importance for the development of the republic. My study attempts to analyze this significance. It is my general contention that satire was politicized in the 1830s in ways that were complicated and multifaceted. The argument that satire undermined the legitimacy of the seated regime, thereby making its overthrow more thinkable, is the argument that is usually made in studies of earlier periods of French history, especially in studies of pre-revolutionary satire. If we recall the satire of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, for example, we are accustomed to thinking of satire as having a negative political impact on those who hold power.54 However, what sets my argument apart is the notion that satire also has a positive political impact, playing a role in the development of a critical, republican, and public opinion in the 1830s. Satire depends, I argue, on readers or viewers being able to look for the “hidden” or double meaning of an image or a text, and to understand both the surface meaning of a text or image and the implied or unspoken meaning. Satire is therefore ambivalent and often multivalent, and in this sense contributes to the implication that meaning, and by extension, power, is not fixed and absolute but rather multiple and open to interpretation. Satire is, in other words, inherently “republican” or democratic. My focus on political culture and practices has been influenced by scholarship in cultural studies and literary theory, particularly, Dustin Griffin’s 1994 work, Satire, A Critical Reintroduction,55 which calls for a move beyond old notions of satire as a fixed rhetoric of exaggeration whose fictions forsake the “real world” to a new view of satire enmeshed in sociocultural context. Griffin’s study of eighteenth-century literary satire urges scholars to retheorize satiric aggression—whose victims, after all, do come from identifiable social contexts—as a part of modern “civilized’ society.” Part of what distinguishes satire as a genre is the excitement of knowing or speculating that its targets are real, and Griffin argues that this grounding should not be ignored. Griffin looks at satire as a key element of a Habermasian civil society, a meaningful tool of social discourse, but not in the way that earlier theorists, such as Northrup Frye and Ronald Paulson, saw its meaning. In their version, satire represented an assault on some person or behavior, a judgment that that person or behavior had violated a moral code. Griffin argues that our post-structural perspective undermines such a clear sense of what satire means or has meant. He emphasizes the element of play and pleasure in satire, which would seem to suggest that satire is not driven simply by moralizing tendencies, but by playful, laughing, and self-serving ones, as well. If authors’ intentions are multifaceted, so are audience reception and response, which are also driven by pleasurable and self-serving motives; what satire means may be more complicated than previously thought. Griffin concedes that the moralizing

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may well be present, but suggests that satiric fault-finding might usefully be thought of as a satirist’s beginning point, as less of a definitive statement about something than a provocation to explore that thing and see it—whether a person, an act, or society generally, for example—more clearly. Thus the purpose or meaning of satire is destabilized and open-ended. My study fits well with Griffin’s understanding of satire, and his “rethinking” of satire informs my investigation of nineteenth-century republicanism through the lens of popular satire. My approach breaks down the dichotomous scholarship that sees France mired in stodgy inertia during the 1830s and then awakened during the vital, politically active 1840s, that is a France unaware of republicanism or enthralled by a monolithic republicanism, by showing republican practice in the making. It reveals how French republicanism was taking shape not only under republican regimes, but under monarchies as well. Satire may not have prompted many policy changes (though I would argue that its played a key role in the September Laws and in the expansion of the franchise in 1848), but it had a significant and lasting impact on the public’s engagement in the political. To people who read about satirists’ legal battles in newspapers and heard about them on the street, such cases were lessons in political criticism, surveillance, and resistance. To satirists they were a forum for expressing grievances that exposed the limits of press freedom. To state officials they were occasions to assert government authority. Examining satire as an essential form of republicanism and modern critical politics advances our understanding of French political education from an ideal of citizenship training imposed from the top down to a political aesthetic generated outside official institutions of power. The book develops this analysis by looking at how satirists represented different dimensions of July Monarchy society and how government officials and private individuals debated the meaning of those representations. It is divided as follows: Chapter 1, “Conspiracy,” examines how satire’s political meaning was generated and framed in the 1830s as debate over abstract rights under the new, supposedly more liberal government of the July Monarchy. Following the Revolution of 1830, lithographic satire became connected conceptually to political conspiracy and was argued to be harmful to the new regime. State institutions, including the police, the courts, and the National Assembly, attempted to understand and define satire politically. The effort to evaluate satire’s potential harm to the state had far-reaching consequences because it shaped French liberalism into a contest between rights to free speech and protection from harm. This process of political definition was part of a broader struggle to construct legitimate authority in France. The chapter looks in detail at the search for conspiracy that surrounded satire, situating satire in the context of legal and

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quasi-legal procedures and penalties by which July Monarchy society established and enforced its norms. Usurping the function of judge rendered satirists subject to legal reprisals. Police searched satirists’ homes and offices, increased surveillance on satiric theaters and journals, and routinely arrested satirists for “offenses against public morality.” Government searches for conspiracies on both the left and right not only made a mockery of France’s claim to freedom of the press, but also drove satirists to further critique of the state, and to ridicule of the preoccupation with conspiracies. Government officials, in turn, interpreted satire, built as it was on subterfuges, innuendo, and cryptic messages, as evidence of conspiracy by secret societies, and used satire as reason to escalate surveillance of political clubs and journalists. Chapter 2, “Legality,” analyzes satire’s involvement with France’s legal system. Once satire became connected legally to conspiracy by the September Laws in 1835, satirists were repeatedly dragged into court to evaluate particular works as potentially illegal. Chapter 2 examines how the definitions established in Chapter 1 were put to work in the courtroom and public wrangling of the next five years. As satiric subterfuges inflamed government suspicions of conspiracy, they became an issue around which Louis-Philippe’s administration extended its authority. Government attempts to adjudicate satire’s ungovernable form drove artists and entrepreneurs into the arms of established republican organizations for financial and political support. Simultaneously, satire educated the public to increasing censorship and corruption of republican virtue, and taught audiences new skills of political criticism. Chapter 3, “Fraud,” looks at how satire had democratizing potential in the 1830s because it was a mode of give and take between the government and the public that was potentially open to all, but how in actuality, its democratizing force was not unlimited. In particular, theater satire performed in working-class and popular venues seemed to offer political participation to all people, but in practice its democratizing potential became limited by class. Characters such as the stage-vagabond, “Robert Macaire,” yielded aesthetic “types” usually attached to a particular politician or well-known entrepreneur, and mocked codes of behavior under the “bourgeois” monarchy. Satiric types stripped these middle-class figures of a sense of balance and showed the July Monarchy’s much vaunted mix of progressive and conservative ideas to be out of focus, grotesque, and not what the king and his ministers claimed the regime to be. Ironically, middle-class audiences flocked to the Porte Sainte Martin theater and Paris’s working-class boulevard theaters to see themselves ridiculed in satire’s funhouse mirror, the appreciation of which developed into a sign of bourgeois taste and civic duty. Satire took part in the debate over how to ensure virtue in France’s developing market economy, a question that Victoria Thompson has shown occupied a progressively important place in literary and legal conversation

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beginning in the 1830s.56 Ultimately satire built a function of self-criticism into middle-class identity and bourgeois, liberal republicanism. Satiric subterfuges and grotesque representations were incompatible with transparent politics crucial to the republican tradition in France, yet they taught audiences the skills of political inquiry and became a factor in middle-class self-definition. Chapter 4, “Imposture,” turns to questions of gender. As satire drew new groups into political practices, its democratizing promise was also bounded by gender. During this decade of political renegotiation, satire specialized in unmasking “the feminine” as political impostor, as the sign of the ridiculous and, thus, the illegitimate in public life. Its gendered subterfuges and invocation of the grotesque in the 1830s show both the body politic and, ultimately, a new republicanism taking shape through gendered appeals. As a strategy of degradation, satire played a key role in writing women out of political life in the emerging democratic order. Like traditions of popular justice and myths of feminine culpability, satire’s ridicule of women in public and intellectual life worked to block women from expressing political opinions and prevent them from becoming recognized political actors when republicans embraced the concept of universal suffrage in 1848. Chapter 5, “Charivari,” takes us beyond Paris to the provinces, where we look at satire as a resource for two groups that we have not seen thus far, the working class and provincials. The pervasive satire of popular, “street” criticism, such as charivaris, religious parodies, and street theater, became subjects of great interest to a state trying to strike a balance between popular and elite politics. As Jill Harsin recently argued in Barricades: The War of the Streets in Revolutionary Paris, 1830–1848,57 street politics formed an important part of radical politics in the July Monarchy, and formed the backdrop for the satiric acts that are the subject of my study. State monitoring of such forms brought them into the arena of official political discussion where institutions like the courts, the police, and the press interpreted them for mass audiences. Street politics drew literate and illiterate audiences into political engagement, but were also events around which the relationship between popular and elite politics was defined. Beyond Paris, in provincial government seats, satiric practices worked toward a national republican politics because charivaris and mocking demonstrations grounded national politics in local concerns. Humorous public displays in provincial towns not only generated communal feeling, but also pressed political claims on national representatives, who then took them to the Assembly. Chapter 6, “Absurdity,” turns away from the popular to see how the political aesthetic of satiric absurdity infected even the exalted language designed to educate people in the new science of political economy. The concluding chapter analyzes several tracts, but it is mainly a case study of Pierre-Joseph

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Proudhon’s What is Property? Proudhon’s work asserted in 1840 that property was theft, and reduced established philosophical and legal justifications of hereditary property to absurdity. Its punch lines used to close paragraphs that attacked major thinkers and its sarcastic dialogue between characters in scenes reminiscent of street theater allowed Proudhon to explain consumption and the politics of Louis-Philippe’s regime. Additionally it allowed him to create an answer to his question that both shocked the establishment and ultimately inspired much of the French Left. Stretching the language of political economy to absurdity marked the limit of the satiric decade where satire, always defined by its own instability, pushed public inquiry toward revolution. Finally, the conclusion situates satire in the context of nineteenthcentury republicanism and political development. It emphasizes that the satire of the July Monarchy educated a critical public, and in so doing, built on a long tradition of seditious practices from the Restoration and even the Revolution, by which France became familiar with, and acclimated to, representative government, and developed democratic political culture. Each regime after 1789 faced a crisis of legitimacy; under the July Monarchy, satire was at the center of the crisis. Viewed in the longue durée, this important element of modern French political culture played a part in the process by which France ultimately established legitimate political authority.

NOTES 1. Prospectus, October 1, 1830. 2. La Caricature, May 8, 1834. 3. Philip Nord offers an excellent analysis and summary of transition theory in The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 5–9. Nord cites in particular Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five European Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963); and Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Darmstadt, 1986). 4. Nord, Republican Moment, 7. 5. Ruben Quintero, editor, A Companion to Satire (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 6. 6. See, for example, Ronald Paulson, Satire: Modern Essays in Criticism (New York: Prentiss Hall, Inc., 1971); George, M. Dorothy, Hogarth to Cruikshank: Social Change in Graphic Satire (New York: Walker and Company, 1967); John GrandCarteret, Les moeurs et la caricature en France (Paris: Librarie Illustree, 1888); Gilbert Highet, The Anatomy of Satire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962); and Matthew Hodgart, Satire (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969).

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7. Quintero, Companion to Satire, 3. 8. Paulson, “Pictorial Satire: From Emblem to Expression,” in Companion to Satire, edited by Quintero, 312. 9. Paulson, “Pictorial Satire,” 314. 10. For an early and influential articulation of this interpretation, Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 12–13. 11. Maurice Agulhon, The Republican Experiment, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 2–6. 12. See Sheryl Kroen, Politics and Theater: The Crisis of Legitimacy in Restoration France 1815–1830 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 13. Stuart Kadison, “The Politics of Censorship,” in The Charged Image: French Lithographic Caricature 1816–1848, ed. Beatrice Farwell. (Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1989), 23–27; and Robert Justin Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature in Nineteenth-Century France (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 1989), 119–120. 14. Maurice Agulhon, 1848, ou l’apprentissage de la république, 1848–1852 (Paris: Le Seuil, 1973); John Merriman, The Agony of the Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); William Sewell, Work and Revolution in France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); and Willi Fortescue, France and 1848: The End of Monarchy (New York: Routledge, 2005). 15. Georges Weill, Histoire du parti républicain1814–1870 (Paris: F. Alcan, 1900, revised 1928). 16. Ronald Aminzade, Ballots and Barricades: Class Formation and Republican Politics in France 1830–1871 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 17. François Furet, Revolutionary France 1770–1880, trans. Antonia Nevill (New York: Blackwell, 1992). 18. Pamela Pilbeam, Republicanism in Nineteenth-Century France 1814–1871 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995). 19. See André-Jean Tudesq, Les Grands Notable en France, 1840–1849, 2 vols. (Paris: PUF, 1964); Paul Thureau-Dangin, Historie de la Monarchie de Juillet, 7 vols. (Paris: Plon, Nourrit, 1884–1892); and David Pinkney, The Decisive Years in France 1840–1847 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 20. H. A. C. Collingham, The July Monarchy: A Political History of France (London: Longman, 1988). 21. Philippe Vigier, La Monarchie de Juillet (Paris: PUF, 1982). 22. See Lynn Hunt, The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 23. See Maurice Agulhon, The Republic in the Village (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 24. See Andre Jardin and Andre-Jean Tudesq, Restoration and Reaction, 1815–1848, trans. Elborg Forster. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 25. William Reddy, The Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France, 1814–1848 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

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26. See Jo Burr Margadant, The New Biography: Performing Feminism in Nineteenth-Century France, especially the introduction and chapter 2, “ The Duchesse de Berry and Royalist Political Culture in Postrevolutionary France” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 27. Margadant, “Gender, Vice, and the Political Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century France: Reinterpreting the Failure of the July Monarchy, 1830–1848,” American Historical Review 104 n.5 (December 1999): 1461–1496. 28. David Garrioch, The Formation of the Parisian Bourgeoisis, 1690–1830 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Jeremy Popkin, Press, Revolution and Social Identities in France, 1830–1835 (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). 29. Popkin, Press, Revolution and Social Identities. Likewise, Making the News: Modernity and the Mass Press in Nineteenth-Century France (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), the collection of essays edited by Dean de la Motte and Jeannene M. Przyblyski, examines the political effects of journalism in the transition from elite to mass culture. 30. Peter Sahlins, Forest Rites: The War of the Desmoiselles in NineteenthCentury France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). 31. Kroen, Politics and Theater, 293–294. 32. E. Bayard, La Caricature et les caricaturists (Paris: Delagrave, 1900); Edwin T. Bechtel, Freedom of the Press and l’Association mensuelle. Philipon versus Louis-Philippe (New York: Grolier Club, 1952); Champfleury [Jules FleuryHusson], Histoire de la caricature moderne (Paris Dentu, 1868); Beatrice Farwell, The Charged Image: French Lithographic Caricature 1816–1848 (Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1989); Michael Marrinan, Painting Politics for Louis-Philippe: Art and Ideology in Orleanist France, 1830–1848 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); and Kirsten Powell and Elizabeth C. Childs, eds., Femmes d’esprit: Women in Daumier’s Caricature (Middlebury, VT: Middlebury College, 1990). 33. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Gabriel Weisberg, eds., The Popularization of Images: Visual Culture under the July Monarchy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 34. Pilbeam, Republicanism. 35. Laura Mason, Singing the French Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics, 1781–1799 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). 34. Kroen, Politics and Theater. 35. Sahlins, Forest Rites. 36. Kroen, Politics and Theater; and Jo Burr Margadant, “Gender, Vice, and the Political Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century France.” 37. The role of satire in early modern state politics is gaining increasing attention. See, for example, Sara Beam, Laughing Matters: Farce and the Making of Absolutism in France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007); and Emily Butterworth, Poisoned Words: Slander and Satire in Early Modern France (Leeds: W. S. Maney & Son Ltd, 2006).

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38. See Robert Darnton, “The High Enlightenment and the Low-life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France” Past and Present 51 (May 1971): 81–115. 39. Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature in Nineteenth-Century France, especially chapter three, “Censorship before 1830,” 87–118. 40. Ibid. 41. See Kroen, Politics and Theater. 42. As early as January 27, 1831, he reported ironically the judgment against one François Liberté, born in Paris in 1790, who had just been condemned severely for having participated in the July Revolution. 43. Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature, 120–125. See also Charles Ledré, La presse à l’assaut de la monarchie 1815 à 1848 (Paris: A. Colin, 1960); and David S. Kerr, Caricature and French Political Culture 1830–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 44. Claude Bellanger et al., Histoire générale de la presse française, t. II de 1815 à 1871 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969), 103. 45. See Judith Wechsler, A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 69–71. 46. La Charge, October 21, 1831. 47. Goldstein, Censorship, chapter four, “The Struggle over Freedom of Caricature in the July Monarchy, 1830–1848,” 119–168. See also Ledré, La presse à l’assaut de la monarchie, which did much to bring the battle between Louis-Philippe and Philipon into view. 48. André Blum, “La Caricature politique sous La Monarchie de Juillet,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts (1920), 257–277. 49. James B. Cuno, “Violence, Satire and Social Types in the Graphic Art of the July Monarchy,” in The Popularization of Images: Visual Culture under the July Monarchy, eds. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Gabriel Weisburg, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 50. Sandy Petrey, In the Court of the Pear King: French Culture and the Rise of Realism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); and “Pears in History” Representations 35 (1991), 52–71. 51. Kerr, Caricature, 213. 52. See Dena Goodman, editor, Writings on the Body of a Queen (New York: Routledge, 2003). 53. Dustin Griffin, Satire, a Critical Reintroduction (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1994). 54. Victoria Thompson, The Virtuous Marketplace: Women and Men, Money and Politics in Paris, 1830 to 1870 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 55. Jill Harsin, Barricades: The War of the Streets in Revolutionary Paris, 1830–1848 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

Chapter 1

Conspiracy

In August 1832, the satiric newspaper, La Caricature, published an unsigned lithograph captioned, “The police hold the thread of the plot” (see figure 1.1).1 In the image, a phrygian bonnet, the premier republican symbol from 1789,2 lures republicans into the street where National Guardsmen meet them, guns ready. The bonnet serves as bait in a giant trap that will be activated with the tug of a rope. The rope winds behind a building where viewers can see that it is held by crouching police. The joke rests in the multiple meanings of “holding the thread.” In one sense, the police can be seen as doing their job of catching conspirators, of “having a line,” so to speak, on a conspiracy. However, because republicans follow bait controlled by police, the image can also be read as police “pulling the strings” of the plot, that is, directing the plot from a hidden position. In this sense, the image mocks the notion of a government besieged by political conspirators, and argues instead that the monarchy’s opponents might well be targets of an entirely different sort of plot—that of a monarchy using the rhetoric of anti-government conspiracies to strengthen its hold on power. The idea that Louis-Philippe strengthened his government by manipulating political opponents was not new; shortly after the 1830 Revolution that brought the July Monarchy into being, satirists had begun to claim that the new monarchy needed the threat of political opposition for its own survival. For example, in May 1831, after the government had faced months of anticlerical attacks on monasteries, on one hand, and royalist-supported grain riots in the provinces, on the other, La Caricature published “Le mouvement, le juste-milieu, la résistance” (see figure 1.2), in which the three political positions appeared as caricatured figures, each backed by its supporters. The “juste-milieu,” as Louis-Philippe’s compromise regime 1

2

Figure 1.1.

Chapter 1

“The police hold the thread of a plot,” La Caricature, 1832.

had quickly become known, was shown in a Napoleonic pose and supported by a soldier. He was flanked on the left by “le mouvement,” the broadly defined political group that repudiated the Restoration and sought constitutional reform, and on the right by “la résistance,” the equally broadly defined political group that took the July Revolution merely as a change in head of state and opposed constitutional reform.3 In the image, republicans support the figure of “le mouvement,” but only the lackeys who once carried the royal sedan still prop up “la résistance.” It is the fraillooking figure representing “la résistance” that makes the joke. Portrayed as an aging legitimist and described as a “bandagiste,” he shows off freshly dressed wounds. La Caricature readers would have recognized in the picture an accusation of political plotting, not by the monarchy’s detractors, but by the monarchy itself. The scene suggested that the regime dressed the wounded legitimist because it found royalist opposition useful to have around.4 Conspiracy, in other words, which in this case meant collusion between Orleanists (supporters of Louis-Philippe, a cousin of the ousted Bourbon ruling family) and legitimists (supporters of the Bourbons), could be a useful political tool with which to define and fortify the July Monarchy. The butt of this joke was the monarchy itself, which was accused of manipulating and staging political peril for its own benefit.

Conspiracy

Figure 1.2.

3

“Le movement, the juste milieu, la résistance,“ La Caricature, 1831.

To modern eyes, this sort of political cartoon may seem like tame criticism, but in the years following the 1830 Revolution, the monarchy came to treat satiric political humor as a threat to the regime, cracking down severely on political satire and eventually outlawing it altogether. Between 1831 and 1835, officials seized twenty-eight issues of the weekly La Caricature, the July Monarchy’s best known and most important satiric newspaper, and prosecuted the paper nine times. The paper’s founder and managing editor, Charles Philipon, was prosecuted personally in six cases. In fact, the opening years of the new regime saw all of the biggest names in political satire— Daumier, Philipon, La Caricature, and Le Charivari—on trial for offenses ranging from neglected licensing procedures to high crimes against the state. The spectacular trials were widely followed. Litigants enjoyed few restraints on what could be said at court, and court transcripts were printed verbatim and editorialized upon in the offending satiric newspapers and legal dailies. Legal measures to chasten satirists only inspired more ridicule. One La Caricature article, for example, congratulated police for arresting their

4

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caricatures (they “would have shattered Europe”). It goaded authorities to “sleep calmly” now that they had “grasped this lithographic conspiracy” and escaped “the danger that has been circulating through our bargain government.”5 By 1835, the regime determined that it could no longer tolerate satire’s political humor. Speaking before the National Assembly in 1835, the Minister of Commerce, Charles-Marie Duchatel, implicated satire in an attempted regicide and implored deputies to outlaw this kind of political critique, proclaiming, “There is nothing more dangerous, Gentlemen, than these infamous caricatures, these seditious designs . . . there is no more direct provocation to crimes which we all deplore.”6 Lithographic satire had become linked to political conspiracy. Shortly thereafter, the infamous September Laws of 1835 prohibited political satire altogether, mandated that violators be tried by tribunal decision rather than by jury, and substantially increased penalties of fines and imprisonment for convicts. But why the French monarchy was so worried about this sort of political mockery and reacted in such an extreme manner is still something of a mystery. After all, these were only lithographs, political images created to raise a laugh. What was at stake that led police, censors, judicial officials, and eventually legislative deputies to tie satire to political conspiracy? The problem was, at root, a conceptual one: satire appears to have been tricky to place into political categories. The intense legal scrutiny that satire received shows that the government took political satires, like those above, to be serious business in the 1830s; their irresolute quality could be fickle, or so feared authorities who tried to pin down the meanings of satiric images and fix responsibility for the political opinions they expressed. Political discussion among the public had to be watched closely for lurking government opposition. Did satire’s humor mask some kind of real political danger? Effective policing required monitoring and analysis, which was not always easy. How could censors and police control satire’s political hostility if satire’s meanings were open to question? How could they hold citizens responsible for opinions if they could not definitively determine satirists’ authorship or intentions? In this chapter, I offer an explanation for this mystery and make clear how the question of satire’s political meaning was generated and framed as debate over abstract rights under the new, supposedly more liberal government of the July Monarchy. I argue that attempts to define satire politically through state institutions, including the police, the courts, and the National Assembly, shaped French liberalism into a contest between rights to free speech and protection from harm. The chapter examines the political context of the 1830s, why satire was politically important, why the government feared it, and what effect it had on political culture. It analyzes how the workings of satire, the peering beneath surface appearances for hidden realities, reflected

Conspiracy

5

politics and society in Louis-Philippe’s regime. In the midst of the relaxed censorship7 and technological advances that followed the Revolution of 1830 and creation of the July Monarchy, satire flooded journals, theaters, and street performances as a pervasive form of social and political criticism. France’s most famous satiric newspapers, La Caricature and Le Charivari, gave satire its first daily voice in political and social affairs.8 This chapter is based primarily on these satiric newspapers, independent prints, and the premier legal daily of the 1830s, the Gazette des tribunaux. I have selected examples that show satire turning a critical eye on political behavior and charging the government with duplicitous activities.9 Satire developed as part of the critical politics in the 1830s that would define French liberalism, yet no one has examined satire in liberal debate. Christine Haynes has recently shown that by the mid-nineteenth century, French liberalism had largely jettisoned freedom of speech in favor of “order” sought by political and social elites for commercial growth,10 but how did liberalism come to be framed as a contest between free speech and order? The French emphasis on commercial freedom and order at the expense of free speech, somewhat different from the priorities of Anglo-American liberalism, can only be explained by looking at the battle over satiric political criticism that pitted liberal ideals against each other. Under the July Monarchy, satire posed particular conceptual challenges that had important consequences for the development of liberalism. The hybrid regime of the self-proclaimed “citizen-king” was disparaged virtually from its inception for satisfying neither republicans nor monarchists, and Louis-Philippe’s ministers, censors, and police quickly focused on conspiracy against the monarchy, mainly by the left, perhaps joined temporarily by the right.11 Because “conspiracy” was such a powerful accusation in government hands, and one that some felt was manipulated for political effect (as the examples above show), it became an issue on which anti-government satirists attacked the July Monarchy. Thus, in the political circumstances of the 1830s, satire’s combination of poignancy and instability brought talk of conspiracy swirling to new heights of intensity. The monarchy apparently appreciated the potential of satire to shape public opinion through conspiracy charges, because in 1832 it created its own satiric paper to counter the barrage of ridicule. La Charge began publishing yet another twist on the conspiracy theme in which left- and right-wing opponents of the July Monarchy conspire against the Orleanist regime, going as far as to abandon political differences and join forces in a unified attack. Such a plot, if it existed and were exposed, would frame both sides of the opposition as lacking true political conviction. One image, for example, shows two characters in a dressing room preparing costumes for a masked

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ball.12 The caption reads, “Ball to be held for republicans and legitimists. Huge masquerade ball; come with or without culottes; for both marquis and citizen. At the Catacombs. You’ll dance, you’ll eat cheese.” The left half of the scene shows a man, wearing a powdered wig, well-tailored culottes, and gold-buckled shoes, admiring his face in a heavy mirror decorated with fleurs-de-lis, symbols of French royalty. Beneath the mirror lies a mask with a beard, in a style popular with republicans, to be worn at the ball. As the viewer’s eyes pan to the right, the background wallpaper changes from royalist fleurs-de-lis to republican slogans like “populaire,” while the foreground features a second man, this one seated before a plain wooden mirror, applying make-up and wearing a phrygian bonnet and simple robe. The two halves of the scene form mirror images in which a left-wing republican and a right-wing legitimist are reduced to nothing more than their public disguises, their vast political differences portrayed merely as matters of appearance. The joke in this case was that behind the scenes, conspiring republicans and legitimists prepared together for their public performances. It implied that Louis-Philippe might be justified in beefing up his power to resist a growing menace. La Charge was soon abandoned as monarchy officials increasingly viewed satire with suspicion. Across the decade of the 1830s, a political battle over press freedom between hypervisualist July Monarchists and publicly accused “conspirators” politicized satire and brought it under scrutiny. This dynamic developed over time, in large part because satire’s seemingly ungovernable form was not easy to adjudicate. Satirists’ legal battles inspired detailed argument over the limits of political critique and surveillance. Fighting government authorities in court for the right to criticize the king and corruption, satirists traded accusations of conspiracy with officials not just in their drawings and articles, but also in the justice system, which both satirical and non-satirical newspapers covered for a broad reading public. Until 1834, a certain give-and-take existed between satirists and the government: press laws were rather flexible, associations between satirists and republicans were evolving, and the government lost some of its cases against satirists. In this period, what is important about satire, as opposed to more sober forms of critique, is that satirists used an aesthetic of double meanings to charge the July regime with double-speak of its own, and with presenting a liberal façade, behind which lay powerful centralizing tendencies. In turn, satirists’ struggle to protect their right to political critique taught audiences the skills of rights-based government. In 1834, however, the political landscape changed significantly with uprisings in Paris and Lyons, increasing attempts at regicide, and very notably, a new political definition of satire in the courts. Following years of investigations and confiscations, the September Laws

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7

of 1835 sealed satire’s role as a voice of constitutional government and ultimately of republicanism.

THE LITHOGRAPHIC CONSPIRACY IN THE CONTEXT OF JULY MONARCHY POLITICAL DEBATE The notion of a “lithographic conspiracy” refers to the way that lithographic satire became connected conceptually to political conspiracy and was argued, therefore, to be harmful to the new regime. The story of satire’s conceptual link to conspiracy begins with the July regime’s effort to create a monarchy according to the Charter of 1830, to replace the ultraconservative monarchy of the old Bourbon dynasty with a limited constitutional monarchy. Architects of the new regime faced obstacles to establishing the new power, however. Chief among them was the question of royal legitimacy. If Louis-Philippe’s sovereignty rested in large measure on making a break with the Bourbon throne,13 what would legitimate his authority? Constitutional monarchy opened space in the 1830s, as it had in the 1790s, for sovereignty based on consent of the governed, or as satirists described it, a “quasi-republic.” Indeed, one of the most important differences between the old Charter of 1815 and that of 1830 was that the latter was not a royal gift to the people, as the former had been, but was instead a product of a legislative assembly. The difference was important because it implied the contractual nature of the regime and the sovereignty of the French nation, which had, after all, invited Louis-Philippe to take an uninherited throne. With the new Charter came new political expectations. The July Monarchy was supposed to be a time of expanding civic life, more open politically than the Restoration; what these arrangements would actually mean in practice, however, was a matter of debate. After the Revolution of 1830, republicans emerged as a progressively more powerful force of opposition to monarchy. They advocated political openness through representative government and a greater political role for the people. These ideas enjoyed increasing public appeal, and consequently republicans’ political activities attracted much scrutiny from police. Concerned about the left’s growing popularity, police reported often on the poverty and discontent of the laboring classes that might support a left-wing rebellion. Officials feared that the combination of popular criticism and economic hardship might spark riots or even another revolution. As Louis-Philippe tried to balance the demands of liberty with those of public order, to court a popular base but prevent a popular uprising, semi-secret societies and clubs, such as Les Amis du peuple, acted as pressure groups

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against the conservative direction, or at least the centralizing aspirations, of his government.14 Despite the public rhetoric of political compromise surrounding the 1830 Revolution, Orleanists remained at loggerheads with critics in what Chateaubriand described as “a fight to the death between the two principles of monarchy and republicanism.”15 Moderate republican opposition attracted the support of well-known deputies to the National Assembly, including La Fayette, General Lamarque, and Dupont, as well as many future republican leaders, including Etienne Garnier-Pagès, Godefroy Cavaignac, and Auguste Blanqui. More radical societies, popular mainly with students and laborers, attracted fresh supporters hoping to extend the work of the July Revolution.16 In this context of political dispute and change, real conspiracies did indeed exist, and for our purposes they were important because they lent credibility to official objections to satire. As police spies reported, for example, just one day before the demonstration at the funeral of General Lamarque, a liberal deputy who had fought under Napoleon, the Interior Ministry received “new information on the hostile disposition of the republican and carlist [supporters of the ousted Bourbon monarch, Charles X, then in exile] parties for the events of tomorrow.” Members of Les Amis du peuple were “coming and going from one quarter to the other” and were “proposing violent measures.” Informants said, “they are going to the homes of known leaders and assuring that they can, if necessary, count on more than 20,000 rifles distributed around Paris.” Collusion was reportedly brewing in all quarters: “Law and medical students are working likewise on measures to bring about an explosion which would lead to a change of ministry,” while carlist emissaries were “distributing money to the workers.”17 And for their part in the machinations, members of the National Guard attended the funeral in plain clothes, their pockets “well-supplied with weapons and stones.”18 This was not an isolated incident; in fact, as early as August 1830, just a month after the Revolution, republican groups had already staged protests that fueled talk of conspiracy. In 1830 and 1831, key events, such as the trial of Charles X’s ministers for treason, escalated the ferment.19 By 1831, the Chamber of Deputies named conspiracies against the life of the king as the single largest problem of the July Monarchy.20 Police planned surveillance strategies around it. They watched public opinion closely and monitored the publishing business and affairs of the press, even though these fell outside official police jurisdiction.21 They routinely maintained surveillance of reading rooms, book sales, and window displays of books and engravings. What is especially interesting about the conspiracies that actually existed is that they show how government officials not only dreaded plots against

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9

the king, but also apparently were themselves plotting against political opponents. For example, at the requiem commemorating the assassination of the duc de Berry, Paris’s prefect of police revealed to the widely read newspaper, Le Moniteur universel that, despite having received warnings of civil unrest planned for the ceremony, he had decided pointedly to allow the requiem to go forward. He admitted to setting a trap for the carlist faction, whom he suspected of plotting to return the deposed Bourbon king to the throne. Having learned of threats to disrupt the requiem and stage a riot, the prefect had considered sending police to interrupt the religious service, but had decided against it. Confessing to “an ulterior motive,” the chief explained simply, “a carlist faction exists. This faction conspires,” a right protected by French “devotion to freedom.” Thus, men with a “mind for intrigue” escape punishment. When I was informed of the rumor at the religious service, I said to myself . . . there is going to be a factional demonstration that will be subject to the penal code. The penal code punishes provocation to civil war. Under the current government there are not, nor, I dare say, will there ever be under my administration, agens provocateurs. But when tenacious, perfidious enemies set themselves a trap, must they be prevented from falling into it? . . . I have let it go, vowing to myself if there were any provocation to civil war, this positive event would allow me to catch men who are unstoppable in any other manner.22

In other words, although the chief did not incite an uprising by antigovernment demonstrators, he admitted publicly that he made no effort to stop crowds who opposed carlists from smashing the church of St. Germain L’auxerrois or from parodying the ceremony through the streets in the holy vestments of the church. This type of religious mockery was known to be a powerful weapon; Restoration anti-clerical protestors had used similar mocking and sacrilegious behavior to voice concerns about the failure of political authorities to represent the will of the citizenry.23 Thus, the chief allowed anti-carlist demonstrators to interrupt the politically charged service honoring the father of the duc de Bordeaux, the child seen by French ultra-royalists as Henri V. The police’s inaction was a smart, if duplicitous, defense of the sitting government. The decision not only allowed crowds to interrupt a public ceremony, whose symbolic power could have gone far to unify right-wing opposition to Louis-Philippe’s juste-milieu, it also placed blame for the civil disturbance with republicans. Although republicans attracted far more police attention than any other political faction from 1830 to 1832, police also spied to a lesser extent on neighborhoods where legitimist leaders lived, and seized legitimist newspapers in search of right-wing plots.24 Royalists found much to criticize in the new regime, beginning with the basic premise of politics based on “the nation”

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and other abstractions they believed were too flimsy to uphold a strong government. They objected to the disorder that they believed constitutional government would engender. Mocking deputies’ activities in the National Assembly, they ridiculed efforts to decentralize authority. They warned of left-wing conspiracies that threatened the nation’s future and tried to rally support for monarchy. What is important to see in all of this is that the trajectories of conspiracy suspicions ran in a dizzying number of directions. As we saw in the caricature from La Charge, the monarchy often treated republicans and legitimists as players in a single conspiracy of opposition against the center. Throughout the regime’s early years, police kept surveillance over “the republicans who count in their ranks many disguised carlists.”25 Such a concerted effort of left and right raised special concern because, if true, it would prevent authorities from playing one faction against the other. By 1832, police had pledged “a solemn protest against the factions’ plots and calumnies.”26 Tribunal magistrates cheered efforts against the unified forces of republicans and carlists, “two factions divided by doctrine, by goals, and by interests, but at the moment reunited in a common vision of hatred and destruction!”27 Officials envisioned monstrous possibilities from this political “head of a hydra.”28 To a new constitutional government trying to strike a balance between republicanism and monarchy, political ambiguities were crucial to government functioning, but officials could not easily tolerate them among the public. Government authorities prized political clarity to fix public responsibility for political acts. Daily reports from the police to the Interior Minister indicated a persistent concern for any type of conspiracy. Even when the political scene seemed quiet, police spoke of political maneuvering and conspiracy lurking dangerously beneath surface calm. They observed and reported on opinions and rumors of attacks being plotted against the Chamber of Deputies. “A special surveillance has been organized to spot immediately the meetings that are going to be held for this purpose,” despite the fact that “reports [from officers in the field] are unanimous on the tranquility that has reigned on all points of the capital and on the absence of anything resembling hostility.” The first such bulletin, filed in 1831, opened with what would become the standard proclamation of police competence, “a general tranquility reigns over Paris,” the police in control of the omnipresent “insinuation of enemies of the government intent on new riots.”29 Despite the tranquility, ever-vigilant police nevertheless were monitoring Parisian political culture, “searching for the authors and distributors of a song and an engraving, entitled ‘Le Pelerin,’ that has been widely distributed throughout the capital.”30 Amid this whirlwind of rumor-mongering and intrigue, authorities targeted people whose slippery politics made them suspicious. Typically, authorities

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who monitored printed matter watched for both offensive contents and unclear political affiliation. In one case, for example, police objected to a printer who produced a range of political material. The printer, Barbier, had come before the court where he had appeared once before for having printed brochures for a republican club, and now was charged with printing the legitimist satiric newspaper, Brid’oison. From the very presses that had printed republican propaganda “came later writings inspired by a rather violent hostility, with the only difference being that they served the opposite party. Not bothered from which side came the scandal, they dealt with legitimist excesses as with republican side-stepping.” 31 Officials wanted to punish the printer to counter recent jury decisions in favor of printers (which they said had “exerted influence” on Barbier’s conduct), and to establish responsibility for provocative information with printers and authors, since Barbier had been “under an illusion about the responsibility that he bears in this situation.” Inspired by this political environment of instability and conspiracy fears, satirists who objected to the new government’s failure to extend the franchise as promised and, more importantly, to maintain freedom of the press, launched an attack on the July Monarchy. Satire’s Political Paradoxes While government officials and police worked for individual accountability among printers and authors, satirists pushed for government accountability in matters of press law and policy. Although the July Monarchy had ostensibly abolished censorship by the Charter of 1830, it had quickly begun chipping away at press freedom. The deluge of satire that followed the July Revolution began a legal and judicial contest with censors, the courts, and eventually deputies of the Assembly to determine just how free the press would actually be. Through trials, in which satirists were charged with and connected to politically dangerous behavior, the paradoxes of satire as a form of political criticism came into view and exposed the difficulty of placing satire into existing political categories. The first serious skirmish involved a caricature printed by La Maison Aubert, the printing house of Charles Philipon and his brother-in-law, Gabriel Aubert, in February 1831.32 Published originally as “Mousse de juillet,” it became known as “Les Bulles de savon.” Philipon published two editions of this caricature, both of which were seized by the government. “Soap Bubbles” pictured what its creator, Philipon, called “government power” amusing itself with a bubble-pipe, through which it blew bubbles labeled with promises of the Revolution like “freedom of the press,” “the Charter will be true,” and “popular elections.” The joke, of course, was that each bubble was about to burst into thin air

12

Figure 1.3.

Chapter 1

“Soap bubbles,” La Maison Aubert, 1831.

(see figure 1.3). The message was that “government power,” a figure which viewers at the time would have recognized as strikingly similar in appearance to Louis-Philippe, was plotting against constitutional liberties of the new regime. Officials charged Philipon with “injury to the person of the king,” arguing that the “power” pictured was, in fact, Louis-Philippe, and that the image violated the November, 1830, press law forbidding representation of the king. Philipon, who was also the managing editor of the most popular satiric newspapers of the July Monarchy, La Caricature, founded in 1830, and Le Charivari, founded in 1832, used the satire of his papers to retaliate publicly

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against what looked like creeping censorship. In May, Philipon printed an open letter in La Caricature to Minister of Justice Charles Persil, whom Philipon suspected was preparing a “judicial soaping” of his own. The letter exposed for readers the recent chronology of confiscations and publishing obstacles Persil had inflicted on his satires. Bringing to light the government’s secret subversion of press freedom, Philipon cited a confiscation for a caricature not worth two sous (“Well done!”), followed by the minister’s “extreme politeness” in warning that unless Philipon produced a 30,000 franc caution deposit, required of all political papers, the paper would be seized altogether (“What a marvel!”). And now false accusations (“Sublime!”). Philipon implied that satire received more than its share of judicial attention. Now that he was a “big criminal, an odious perturber of ministerial calm,” he asked, was that any “reason to be accused of a host of attacks one hasn’t been stupid enough to commit?”33 The claims made by the government against satire would change over time, but at this stage, the main argument against this satire was that it represented an affront to the dignity of the king. This claim raised a question for both satirists and government representatives of how they were to distinguish—if they were to distinguish—between the king and the state. Using his paper to defend himself, Philipon showed how the question of his culpability for “Soap Bubbles” turned on the issue of resemblance, on whether the “power” pictured in the image resembled Louis-Philippe and if so, whether the artist intentionally depicted the monarch.34 In his open letter, Philipon satirized the charge to show the room for error in the law against resemblance. He explained that the many bailiffs’ visits that the Justice Minister had so politely ordered to Philipon’s home had filled the house with “assignations, citations, notifications, signification and all the mystifications” addressed to people “whose name more or less resembles mine, such as Philippeax, Philipot de Tayac, etc.” It is worth noting that Philipon presented not only the acts of the Justice Minister, but also Philipon’s own mocking response to them—“well done,” “sublime.” More of a public performance for La Caricature readers than a sincere appeal to the government official, his letter employed humor to bring the techniques of censorship into public view. Philipon joked about how pleasant the Minister found their frequent contact in La Caricature and about how the intimacy of their current relationship led Philipon to dream now only of pleasing the Minister. Summing up for readers, the satirist closed with an oblique appeal for a clear and consistent press policy. Under the guise of explaining his own preference for proper letters over another personal meeting, Philipon told Persil that “the aristocratic insolence of the great lace-adorned rogues who play in your antechamber have completely disgusted me with these visits to which I would not be forced by a

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positive mandate.”35 Philipon was saying that, rather than more confiscations and court appearances, the government should support the press unequivocally. In other words, he was using the charges against him and his impending trial to call for a clear government policy on press freedom, turning a process intended to silence him into the means of further criticizing government policies of repression. Philipon’s “letter” obtained a prompt response. The next issue of La Caricature reported that the day after the letter had appeared, the paper had been confiscated for “injury to the person of the king,” despite the fact that the article had not actually targeted the king, but the king’s minister, Persil. As the true explanation for La Caricature’s legal troubles, the report reminded readers that a few years earlier, the late M. Boileau had warned, “whoever does not like Persil does not respect his king.” Pointing to the unlawful extension of censorship from portraying the king to portraying a minister, editors at La Caricature had ignored this “wise advice,” and had been “punished for it.” Equating the deviltry of satire with the hocus-pocus of legalities under the July Monarchy, the paper surmised that “the conjurer has been conjured away!”36 Beneath the humor lay a damning indictment of a cabinet ostensibly surrounded by republican institutions but actually intolerant of public criticism that might hold political representatives responsible for their legislation. In the context of conspiracy, this exchange was important because it raised the question of resemblance as a political loophole through which satirists could circumvent the law and criticize the government. Crucially, the anti-government critique behind “Soap Bubbles” was hard to pin down due to the very nature of how satire worked. Identifying, classifying, and monitoring this political critique was difficult because satire—by definition—contained hidden meaning. It operated through an aesthetic of concealment and detection. To government officials interested in finding concealed critique, satire was an inherently suspicious and worrisome form of communication. Both “Soap Bubbles” and Philipon’s letter about it, like satire generally, worked by positing a secret joke or criticism—a message of political opposition—in a deceptive surface appearance. Uncovering political critiques embedded in satiric texts like these—that is, learning to detect meanings hidden in mock-up letters between the Justice Minister and the king or in mock transcripts of fictitious trials, to “read between the lines”—drew readers into a realm of political engagement and critical analysis. That is what happened when subscribers read the bubbles in “Soap Bubbles” and when they read the subsequent articles that mocked the government for charging Philipon with criminal behavior.

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Thus, one factor that led to satire being connected to conspiracy was a similarity in the overall structure of satire and conspiracies. In both cases (of satire and conspiracy), success depended on having an attractive, inoffensive, “hard-to-suspect” façade behind which lay something negative and possibly dangerous to the regime. Satire’s ambiguity was part of what made it seem suspicious. It could appear innocent but potentially do great harm because it was about expressly political claims.

SATIRE ON TRIAL As important as lithographs and written texts were to landing satirists in court, we would see only part of the picture if we were to see satirists’ trials as wholly focused on the power of printed media and its potentially ungovernable meaning. At trial, Philipon and others used in their testimony and strategies of defense the same technique of double meanings they employed in their written work. The courtroom became a stage on which satirists performed political criticism and claimed innocence before the public. The jury trial became an extension of the satiric project. And above all, it became the prime venue for debating satire’s political definition and place in the new regime. Through courtroom argument, questions about satire were framed as concerns over individual rights and public harm: was satiric criticism an individual right to be protected, as satirists argued, or was it a public threat to be protected against, as prosecutors would claim? Let’s look at how this worked in Philipon’s case. In May 1831, Philipon went to trial for “Soap Bubbles” at the assize court in Paris. This is important because the assize court was the only court to reach decisions by jury, as opposed to a panel of magistrates. What became a public showdown over the meaning of the new regime produced clear evidence of the state’s interest in controlling what appeared in print. Ironically, though, bringing satirists before the court actually increased opportunities to consume satire. Trials were recorded verbatim and their transcripts made available to the public in several newspaper sources. The public could read about the trials, including extensive verbatim excerpts from the transcripts not only in the satiric papers, Le Charivari and La Caricature, but also in La Gazette des tribunaux, the premier legal daily that covered crimes related to the press, as well as a few others. All of these papers published accounts and transcripts of trials, and frequently included descriptions of incriminating visual images. From trials and their coverage developed another aspect of the government’s frustration over the slipperiness of satire: fighting it actually nurtured it and spread it. For satiric papers, describing a confiscated caricature was a

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way to get a censored image to the public. By presenting not just the satiric material but also the strategies of the defense and prosecutions, the articles of the Gazette drew readers into position as judge and jury, and reaffirmed links between actual juries and the public that they represented in the courtroom. Legal trouble, then, was not necessarily bad for satire. Fines and arrests did make publishing more difficult, but trials provided new venues for satiric work. In fact, simply being accused of a press crime and headed to trial gave satirists like Philipon new opportunities to remind readers that the Revolution had promised a free press and to argue publicly against growing censorship. In the case of “Soap Bubbles,” La Caricature appropriated official language and called the trial a “contemporary conspiracy,”37 exposing and making fun of the government’s preoccupation with conspiracy by describing the trial as a covert effort to silence political opinion. As was typical, the newspaper published much of the transcript verbatim, naming its subscribers as “collaborators” in the proceedings since they shared an interest in the outcome. La Caricature situated the trial in the context of popular public concern, explaining that at issue were the high stakes of freedom of the pen and of the measure of truth the government would permit subscribers to see. Quite simply, the seizure of “Soap Bubbles” was “the first attack on lithographic liberty” since the beginning of “the quasi-republican era.” Referring to “the satire that has filled the streets for nearly a year,” La Caricature cast its satiric work, what it called a “daughter of the barricades,”38 as the proof of Revolutionary progress. Protecting the gains of the Revolution meant protecting the right to produce satire. Talk of conspiracy and hidden political agenda peppered the trial. Philipon’s lawyer, Etienne Blanc, refuted the charges against his client first by confessing that Philipon had indeed been guilty of conspiring years ago under the Restoration government, then by arguing that his client had conspired in his own way “as an artist who above all wants to laugh, and laugh at everything.” His “conspiracy” consisted of little more than a carnival prank in Lyon. During the festivities, local commerce was predictably “dead,” and Philipon and some others staged a “burial.” Police shut down the mock funeral cortège by throwing the young participants in jail. With this example, Blanc deflated Philipon’s “entry into politics” to frivolity, worthy of attention only insofar as it illustrated Philipon’s penchant for humor. Since then Philipon had always seen things and people “by their ridiculous or joking side,” said Blanc. Satire was simply a point of view, a benign filter through which Philipon saw the world and made people laugh. Blanc ridiculed government fears of a puny caricature. “This political giant is frightened of a drawing, of a penned satire, and has just fought hand to hand with a caricature. What an adversary

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the government chooses for its noble battles!!!”39 Breathless appeals to the prosecutor’s office for vengeance made the government look weak. Like the government of the citizen-king, Louis-Philippe, Blanc, too, walked a fine line of argument that was working to define satire in political terms. Blanc’s arguments encompassed several positions; his claims first made it sound as though satire might really be seditious, but then turned satire’s criticism into an abstract right, divorced from its consequences. To protect his client, he insisted that satire was fanciful and trivial, but in seeming contradiction, he cast Philipon’s work as a powerful and necessary part of the post-Revolutionary regime. Blanc argued that “in a country where ridicule has a mortal venom, caricature is a power because it is anathema dramatized in pen.”40 Philipon had done nothing more than dramatize the foolish behavior of a few government officials. La Caricature’s mission consisted of rooting out the ridiculous and hypocritical, and bringing perpetrators to justice. Government officials needed to face the fact that mockery was a risk of their jobs. Ultimately, Blanc argued, Philipon had a right as a taxpayer to complain about the government’s performance. Blanc refuted charges of portraying the king by claiming that Philipon meant to show only “power personified.” He argued that the charges against his client had more to do with the government critique than with resemblance to the king, since there would surely be no charges had the drawing praised the king. “It is the poetry, the sense of the drawing that incriminates.”41 In other words, there seemed to be something inherently threatening about the form of satire itself, about the concealed meaning that delivered political criticism as political humor. Blanc insisted on the citizen’s right to criticize the government in this manner as a foundation of the post-Revolutionary order. Ever since 1830, Blanc reminded jurors, when the people had decided that the “sacred bulb” of the king’s body might be just “a fat body” and divine right just “a joke,” and had produced a king who was not a god, they had believed themselves free to speak to him frankly. “These promises [portrayed in ‘Soap Bubbles’] have not been kept, these hopes have not been realized. This fact is an overwhelming truth. I have a right to say it and I said it.”42 These arguments emphasized the individual rights of satirists to express political criticism, and deemphasized the political consequences of doing so. This was key because this line of reasoning could side-step a second argument used by officials to control satire, a psychological one that prosecutors would make claiming that satire incited political turmoil and bad public behavior. Blanc’s defense, then, had the effect of moralizing satiric criticism by making it into a political right, while minimizing its negative political consequences. In fact, while Blanc argued that satire was crucial to quasi-republican politics in which the people have a right to criticize and thereby to influence

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government policy, he even went as far as to claim a positive effect for satire because it functioned as a sort of safety valve through which the people might let off steam and thus the sitting government might strengthen itself. “Better the sketches of Philipon than periodic riots,” Blanc pointed out. Through courtroom debate, satire was taking on political definition. The trial situated satire in the space between public critical discourse and anti-government threats, and between important political work and fanciful entertainment. Educating the court and the public how to think about Philipon’s designs, Blanc instructed his audience to “laugh at his drawing turned bogeyman of the government and hand on the conscience.”43 He needed to convince jurors that government criticism in satiric representation was simultaneously powerful and powerless, valuable and unimportant, art and politics. The fact that satire was both critical and entertaining might win the case because it meant that commenting on the monarchy in satire might be seen as a right in need of protection, and one that the new government could afford to protect without jeopardizing itself. The situation created quite a conundrum: in attacking satire through the courts, the government actually furthered satire’s reach. For their part, satirists had to denigrate their work to escape legal trouble while simultaneously politicizing their work to seem significant. Blanc had argued skillfully to the court, but it was Philipon who became the star of his own defense by performing the type of entertaining critique he was so famous for writing. Standing before the court, he acted out an impassioned send-up of the prosecutor’s arguments, pretending to be a prosecutor prosecuting himself. In a mock tirade against defense “deceptions,” he urged jurors to do their part in the battle against the liberal conspiracy exposed by the trial. “Fight, Gentlemen . . . you must avenge society imperiled by one of the implacable enemies of the government who hide profound hatred for our institutions behind the mask of disgruntled liberalism.”44 He used the courtroom to jeer the real prosecution’s claim that he, Philipon, had intentionally portrayed the king in a ridiculous light. Posing as a prosecutor like this, he was able to point out the larger issues at stake in the trial: Philipon “argued” to jurors that the accused (who was actually himself) was not content to manage his own rights, but “wants outrageously to restrict ours,” that is, those of the court. He reminded jurors that the accused had admonished them that never were they to assume an image to be the king unless it was designated so by royal insignias and regalia. “And if we invoke the resemblance, Gentlemen, he says it is we who do injury, if injury there is, in recognizing it.”45 Philipon’s mock tirade against liberal conspiracy accomplished a couple of things. First, it made fun of government officials who actually leveled

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this kind of charge against left-wing critics and who argued the need for censorship. But second, in this comic attack on the serious issue of censorship, Philipon questioned the soundness of the law that prohibited images resembling the king. He raised doubt about government claims that criticizing royalty destabilized the monarchy to the nation’s detriment (“. . . if injury there is . . .”). He also pointed out the absurdity of enforcing such a law. Through the subterfuge of impersonating the prosecutor, he pretended to marvel at the outlandish defense of the accused. “What kind of reason is this, Gentlemen . . . resemblance will always be arbitrary, it will exist for some and not for others.” If a jury finds royal resemblance in a portrait, will everyone not then be forced to recognize the same thing, whether or not they see it? Yes, Philipon pretended to advise the jurors, this was, in fact, the type of thinking to embrace because if someday the people found themselves faced with “a very insulting caricature,” but could not be sure they saw the king, it would be the ultimate gallantry for this jury to help them clarify with certainty that which the people themselves doubted they saw. Philipon illustrated satirically how courtroom quibbling over caricatures made a farce of the royal dignity that legal procedures claimed to uphold. “All grotesque, satiric and offensive images must be dragged before the bar, and placed side by side with the king because it must be gravely debated whether this is his nose, his mouth and his eyes that are being ridiculed. From this continual conflict will be reflected onto the throne the radiance with which it shines. This, after all, is why you raise it above the crowd and exalt it so.”46 By using satire, Philipon had not only entertained courtroom observers and jurors, but also transformed the court into a venue for his political agenda, that is, for acting out the argument that the press was under attack despite government claims to the contrary. The court itself valued the performative aspects of the defense strategy and tried to capture them in the trial record, which would be reprinted in the Gazette. Throughout the transcript, the court reporter noted audience reaction to Philipon’s performance. Jurors, observers, and even presiding magistrates responded with “laughs” and “prolonged hilarity.” In mock scolding, for instance, Philipon asked jurors whether they actually believed that, finding state finances squandered, commerce destroyed, and people bent under the weight of taxes, the duc d’Orléans [King Louis-Philippe] would forego asking for a civil list47 because he has an immense personal fortune and could do without one. “You know the human heart better than that, and on that I compliment you! (Laughs).”48 When the courtroom president, despite the rowdy pleasantries, admonished Philipon not to stray from the issue at hand, the accused justified his political speech, “I believe I am within the question in defending, one after the other, the Bubbles that have been attacked

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individually.”49 The satiric voice opened up space to turn court appearances to political advantage. In his “closing argument,” Philipon-as-prosecutor, having himself been accused of conspiracy, mockingly defended the government he was pretending to be a representative of against satirists’ charges of conspiring against individual liberty and press freedom. Given the “flimsy” evidence, he said, that French prisons are loaded with the crowds of citizens arrested by the July Monarchy for press violations, surely “no one can accuse us of having engaged in conspiracy.”50 It was like asking jurors not to think of a pink elephant; the vision of the July Monarchy as government conspirators against free speech had been conjured for all to imagine. Beyond entertainment and legal defense, the courtroom performance was a call to action. Philipon pointed out that jurors had the power to influence the law on press issues. Parodying prosecutors’ warnings against acquittal, he argued, “An acquittal will only be an encouragement to speak the truth . . . ,” which only makes people angry. Worse, absolving the accused would send a signal that jurors “regard the person of the king as above the reach of a lithograph.”51 He warned that acquittal would establish definitively that, without royal insignias and titles, it is not evident that the power pictured in the caricature is the king. Gambling on his acquittal, and eager to derive maximum insult to government censors from it, Philipon implored jurors under no circumstances to vote this acquittal unanimously; he wished to spare the Ministry of Public Works any affront. After the real prosecutor’s closing argument, Philipon finished by sincerely endorsing the Charter to the court: “I hope very much that the Charter is true; if I did not believe it was, I would do something other than caricature.”52 It had been a witty and biting performance. After a brief deliberation, jurors acquitted Philipon to boisterous applause. Philipon and Blanc had performed a brilliant defense, but how do we explain its effectiveness? Taking on conspiracy charges directly, Blanc had deflated the government’s charge by acknowledging his client’s conspiracy as the silly stuff of juveniles. The real bully turned out to be the government bearing down on mere drawings. Caricatures embodied justice; they carried the citizen’s right to political debate, and prosecuting satirists only made officials look foolish. Remarkably, Blanc had managed to finesse the question of satire’s power. Satire held power because, in the scheme of constitutional, representative government, such criticism theoretically was crucial to proper government functioning. The July Monarchy had made some claim to enacting this kind of government in 1830, and this was certainly what La Caricature’s satirists advocated, not surprisingly since their profession depended on a certain level of press freedom. But Philipon’s trial showed that no clear

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consensus actually existed on the issue of press freedom or on the representative, constitutional system it would serve. Satire had to look weak in the individual case so that satirists would not appear to be part of any serious challenge to—that is, any conspiracy against—the July Regime. As a form of criticism, satire stood ambiguously

Figure 1.4.

“Replastering,“ La Caricature, 1831.

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on the margin between categories of appraisal. On the one side it broadcasted a complete lack of reverence for the reign of Louis-Philippe. On the other side, it directed enormous attention to the monarchy and, in this way, perpetuated a grotesque reverence for Louis-Philippe, or at least for French political leadership. We might say that satire decentralized political power by trading in public opinion and degrading Louis-Philippe’s authority, but simultaneously increased Louis-Philippe’s importance as a symbol. On the border between respect and disrespect for their subject, satirists exposed the political difficulty of constructing this constitutional monarchy. Throughout 1831, government attention to plots provided fodder for satirists, who poked fun at the government’s focus on a conspiracy of caricatures in light of France’s larger issues of national concern, many of which involved real conspirators. Justice officials looked like buffoons obsessed with trivia. After the eighth confiscation of La Caricature, for example, the paper roasted the government’s detective work. “Courage, Gentlemen of the public prosecutor’s department! The Vendée is taking up arms, the Midi is organizing . . . the Prussians have repelled our cordon sanitaire, the Russians are scornfully rejecting our slack intervention, the English have made us evacuate Belgium, riots are in Paris, terror at the ministry. Courage! strike, strike at images! You must show force!”53 This sort of appeal in double-speak epitomized the “we are weak” part of satire’s paradox and fueled official suspicion. Satirists, officials, prosecutors, and jurors continued to wrangle over the concept of resemblance and issues of press freedom, government legitimacy, and conspiracy fears. On November 14, 1831, Philipon appeared again before the assize court of Paris in the eleventh legal action against the paper for a lithograph entitled “Replastering.”54 The main character, who resembled Louis-Philippe, was dressed as a mason and charged with effacing inscriptions of the July Revolution from a public monument with a mortar of “Dupinader,” named for “Dupin,” president of the Chamber of Deputies (see figure 1.4).55 When government officials charged Philipon with injury to the person of the king, La Caricature quickly blamed the mason’s costume for the crime and framed the infraction as a question of social class and legal equality: “. . . that in 1831 the clothes of a laborious, useful, and honorable class should be an injury to he who wears them is, it must be admitted, a strange application of the popular understanding of equality before the law.”56 In a familiar move, satirists countered government attacks by accusing the regime of its own political duplicity. Philipon defended himself in court much as he had previously by arguing that no one intended to evoke the monarch, which was against the law. Rather, the artist had drawn the traits of the monarchy merely to symbolize governmental power and to critique its acts. Philipon asked the court rhetorically if he had

Figure 1.5.

“The Pears,“ Philipon’s courtroom illustration, 1831.

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to stop portraying resemblance, how else could he work with caricature? He then showed the court what became a famous series of drawings that, beginning with a face similar to Louis-Philippe’s, progressed in four drawings, each slightly altered from the previous one, to end as a pear (see figure 1.5).57 Again, Philipon’s defense centered on whether physical resemblance could prove identity in the absence of recognized indicators like titles and insignia. Philipon claimed that it was the more abstract concept of power, not the king himself, that he was representing. “And is the king designated in our drawings by his name, by his titles, or by his insignia? Not at all! You must therefore believe me when I say it’s power I’m representing by a sign, by a resemblance that can just as well belong to a mason as to a king; but it’s not the king.”58 The quartet of devolving pears illustrated his point: though resemblance might connect the first image to Louis-Philippe in the minds of some, stripped of its mutton-chop sideburns and human facial features, it was not the king, but a pear. If the courts were to rely on physical identity to determine press offenses, they would have to prosecute all drawings of fruit, which Philipon argued would “sink into absurdity.”59 After deliberating for fifteen minutes, jurors acquitted the image’s publisher and printer, but sentenced Philipon to six months in prison and a 2000 franc fine for “grave offense to the person of the king.”60 While these courtroom battles took their meaning from the particular context of July Monarchy politics, it is important to note that they built on earlier forms of sedition, especially Restoration satire. Anti-clerical critics of Charles X had caricatured the king’s image as a Jesuit in songs, puns and posters, and even gingerbread cookies. Their images, like Philipon’s pears, addressed the Restoration monarchy’s crisis of legitimacy in its particulars. Like July Monarchy satire, they invited viewers to think twice about the veracity of the king’s appearance, questioning the “whole system organized around him.”61 Very importantly for the development of liberal democratic politics, they challenged (albeit in different ways) the right of state leaders to act without popular approval. Despite the conviction, Philipon continued to find new ways to critique government power and expose political hypocrisy. The November 24th issue of La Caricature, for example, reproduced the courtroom demonstration of the king’s head transforming into a pear, and was confiscated by authorities. By 1832, the state had condemned La Caricature twenty times.62 In June 1832, Philipon presented a “project of an expia-pear monument” that was to be built at the Place de la Revolution, the site on which Louis XVI had been guillotined four decades earlier. It proposed a massive statue of a pear that would sit high upon “a very simple, very bourgeois pedestal.” The pedestal would read: “27, 28, 29; result: zero,” suggesting the lack of political impact made by the July Days. The pun is in the word “expier,” meaning “to atone,”

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so that this monument would allude to the many monuments built under the previous government of the restored monarchy in atonement for beheading divine monarchs, an ungodly offense.63 The image of the pear atoning atop a column at the site of the 1793 regicide offended the religious and royalist of the political right. Many government officials did not appreciate the humor and claimed it was a call for the death of the current king. Drawing a pear at the Place de la Revolution linked Louis-Philippe to Louis XVI, and was interpreted as itself a provocation to regicide. Philipon responded that the statue would be at most “a provocation to make marmalade.”64 Once again, Philipon went to trial, and once again, he defended his inspiration for satire as anything but political, trying as he had previously to finesse the questions of satire’s political power. Instead, he described himself more like an “artist” at work “composing.” Satiric projects originate, he explained, when a “crazy idea passes into our head.” 65 Rather than logically constructed anti-government critique, Philipon portrayed satire as ideas “seducing us.” His defense attorney furthered the image of satire as more thoughtless pleasure than reasoned criticism: “It is silliness! Atone-o-pear [“Expiapoire”], that seems funny to me! I’ve laughed at that idea; I believed that the whole world laughed.”66 Indeed, pleasure played an important part in the trial. Philipon’s defense depended on bringing a feeling of enjoyment into the proceedings. A sort of carnival atmosphere bolstered defense claims that satiric pears were wholly capricious. Defense attorneys joked with judges, and newspapers—both the satiric and the sober press—reported on judges’ near inability to maintain straight faces during satiric descriptions. The shared humor of deflating the monarchy could transcend political divisions by creating a sort of “in-crowd” feel. By laughing at satirists’ humor, judges implicated the court itself in the subversive activity being prosecuted. Written reports of the trial tried to capture something of this mood and performance. They described the courtroom scene, not just the verbatim testimony of witnesses but also reactions of magistrates and jurors. Both newspaper coverage and trial transcripts commented on the effect of Philipon’s act on jurors and others present to observe the trial. If attempts at censorship extended the satiric project to the courtroom, legal reportage brought satire back to the public. Jurors acquitted Philipon and his publisher, Aubert, of inciting murder, but this was an important moment for defining satire politically because for the first time, officials linked satire and regicide in public discourse. Mocking the July Monarchy as a conspiracy against individual liberty and ridiculing the government search for conspiracy at large—in other words, accusing government officials of manipulating public opinion through conspiracy charges—was labeled

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by some as proof of satirists’ own anti-government plots. That this satire had been seen to have the power to incite real action suggests that satire had come to be viewed as effective psychological persuasion, not just a sort of veiled directive or harmless criticism. But what this meant politically remained unclear. Satire eluded easy political interpretation because satirists claimed that doing the work of political criticism was a right, and therefore a serious matter, but also a form of communication that was humorous and therefore not a weighty issue. The court had to figure this out. Satire had an innocent, harmless appearance, but could it do harm to the individual or the state? Legal debate of this point intensified with the next great confrontation between government power and satiric critics over the issue of conspiracy: Honoré Daumier’s satire, “Gargantua,” spurred controversy over what could be seen in satire, how truth could be distinguished from deception, and who would decide these issues. Angry government officials charged the artist, Daumier; the publisher, Aubert; and the printer, Delaporte with “provoking hatred and scorn against the government of the king” and “offense to the person of the king.”67 The prosecution’s case attempted to throw satire’s potential power to cause harm into sharp relief. The “Gargantua” ordeal revived the issue of distinguishing between king and government. The parties involved disagreed fundamentally over what the image showed (see figure 1.6). Daumier maintained that the lithograph did not portray the characteristics of the king, but only “the Budget personified and absorbing taxes.” Vehemently denying any portrayal of the king himself, the basis of the charge against him, Daumier claimed as proof of his true intent the crowd of “little characters grouped around the principal figure who have the same clothes, the same shape, and the same physiognomy.”68 In other words, Daumier asserted his innocence in part by reiterating his intentions, which he argued censors had misconstrued. But he also based his innocence on the very notion of resemblance that prosecutors used against him. Daumier wished to deny the resemblance of the man on the throne to the body of the king, and affirm resemblance of the man to the crowd of tiny characters below the throne.69 The public prosecutors’ office, however, claimed to see something else entirely. In its report to the Justice Minister, the Minister’s main source of official information on the case and of a recommendation for or against the condemned, the prosecutor’s version of events dismissed explanations from the accused. Daumier had maintained that as “a young man of twenty-three” he had “placed no importance on a design which to him seemed inoffensive,” arguing, like Blanc and Philipon previously, that satire was a youthful folly, a light-hearted and politically innocent endeavor. In sharp contrast, the

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Figure 1.6.

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“Gargantua,“ La Maison Aubert, 1831.

prosecutor stated that Daumier’s apparent goal “was to portray, in exaggerated and monstrous characteristics, the person of the monarch,” whom the artist showed “devouring before the eyes of his people” the food of a Rabelaisian feast in the style of Rabelais’ giant consumer, Gargantua.70 Despite the great difference in the two analyses, government officials expressed no doubt about the real threat of “Gargantua”; the viewing public would certainly see in the satire the king himself. In other words, the prosecution claimed that the public would be affected in a particular way regardless of the satirists’ intentions. The Gazette published an account of Daumier’s trial, including what became the most widely available public description of the incriminating lithograph: It shows a man in whose immense mouth rests the upper part of a ladder that stretches down to the ground. The rungs are covered with valets busy using wheelbarrows. Down his throat go sacks of ecus (coins) that a multitude of poorly clothed people carry to his feet. All around them can be seen other characters who, positioned under the ladder, greedily seize hold of all that falls out of the wheelbarrows. Finally, a sizable group of people, dressed in finery, is present around the armchair of Gargantua and applaud with ecstasy.71

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It is important to see that, in this description, the public did not read that this was the king on his commode passing money from the poor to the rich, as prosecutors charged, but learned only of a man on a chair symbolizing the passing of coins from the poor to the rich. The Gazette left it up to readers to draw their own inferences. In fact, the Gazette commonly invited readers to develop their own analyses. It regularly printed verbatim extracts of the “Gargantua” trial transcript since it had a vested interest in exciting cases that attracted readers’ attention and exposed the subversion of the July Monarchy’s free press. Satire was emerging to a wide audience as a litmus test to decide who was conspiring against French welfare, and if viewers missed the test in satiric journals, they could read about it in the Gazette. The arguments in the case failed to work as they had earlier for Philipon, and the satirists were convicted. Daumier, Aubert, and Delaporte each received six months prison sentences and 500 franc fines. After appeals, however, only Daumier’s sentence stood, and the satirist served time in the Ste. Pélagie prison. The reasoning behind the appeals focused on the issue of satirists’ intentions, which Justice officials were keen to determine. The Ministry recommended clemency for Aubert and Delaporte based on the idea that the artist (Daumier) ultimately bore responsibility for the caricature. Delaporte had appealed on the grounds that responsibility for the caricature lay with the artist and the publisher. Printers, he argued, had to be free to print whatever material they were hired to print; after all, printers were not censors. He did not believe that “a printer can be condemned without creating a new censorship, one thousand times more dangerous because it is more ignorant and entrusted to unskilled hands.” Aubert had appealed on the grounds that he was not in fact a publisher but merely a merchant with a family to feed. Daumier had appealed on the grounds that he never intended to portray the king, only the budget. In a move that suggested more concern about satire’s political effects than the publisher’s intentions, the ministry revoked Aubert’s sentence since the merchant had offered to destroy all copies of the print as well as the original plate, and had vowed to sell no more political caricatures. It showed Delaporte the same clemency since he had quit the printing business and had recommended to his successor to stop printing La Caricature. But in language suggesting concern for the artist’s intent, the ministry decided, “regarding Daumier, whose seditious pen drew the culpable image,”72 to refuse to reduce the punishment. If the “Gargantua” episode revealed government interest in intentions, it also showed satirists pressuring the monarchy to address several important issues. First, petitioning on Daumier’s behalf, Philipon appealed to the monarch’s fear of public opposition, arguing that the sentence was

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“contrary to the ways followed until now and even under the Restoration.”73 Returning to the “no effect” argument, Philipon claimed that the king’s “harshness for a miserable caricature” would not only be “ignominious” but would be going so far as to “give such grounds for criticism to his enemies. . . .” Philipon made a good point: overreacting to a “miserable caricature” might well spark criticism of the monarch, but clearly the citizen-king found the ambiguous drawing too damning to ignore. Second, the trial explicitly raised the question of press freedom in the quasi-republic, and cast the fate of the three defendants with France’s free press. Returning to the “rights” argument, Delaporte wrote to Louis-Philippe that surely the king would not allow circumstances “to efface the article of the Charter that protects the liberty of the press, a liberty most dear to the French who have named you their king.”74 Recalling the constitution this way reinterpreted charges that Delaporte was an enemy of the monarchy and made Gargantua into a test case for the promises contained in the Charter. Clemency appeals for the three satirists had established liberty of the press as a gauge of popular sovereignty. And third, by reminding the king that it was the French people who authorized his sovereignty, Delaporte linked the ambiguities of the citizen-king to the ambiguities of the satiric representation. Satire was threatening to Louis-Philippe’s regime because it showed the destabilizing potential of representation, whether representing the budget as a man, the king as Gargantua, or Louis-Philippe as simultaneously a citizen chosen by the French for office and a monarch protected as a royal from criticism.75 Throughout the early 1830s, satire repeatedly challenged the July Monarchy’s claims to a free press and even to legitimacy itself. The Gazette publicized trials, arrests, and confiscations, and satirists learned of their colleagues’ tribulations in letters and even in shared prison quarters. Such trials made room for audiences to render verdicts on not only the individuals in question, but also the judicial system that appeared to prosecute artists merely for expressing “the truth” as they saw it. Officials were sensitive to the ways in which the involvement of the press required special handling. One official summarized that “when certain papers of the republican or carlist opposition” made use of “excited and calumnious language, discrediting themselves even more through their cynicism,” leniency might seem to be “a vexing indulgence,” but “in press matters, one should consider the effect of lawsuits on public opinion,” especially given the “spirit of factionalism” which animated the parties.76 As long as the public expected press freedom, attacking producers of political humor made officials look like the ones maneuvering behind the scenes against liberty.

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ART OR POLITICS: SATIRE’S CONSPIRACY DEFINED AND ELABORATED In all of this, satirists and satiric papers on trial for anti-government activity were working to define the meaning of “the political” in the July Monarchy, and the question arose explicitly whether satire was art or politics. The crucial moment in this process of definition occurred in 1832 when prosecutors hauled La Caricature into court to prove officially that satire was circumspect because it was politically threatening, or “conspiratorial.” The state prosecutor read several articles that, as the Gazette reported, were “proof that the newspaper La Caricature was, under the light veil of the allegoric, devoted in the majority of issues to political matters.”77 Etienne Blanc, defense attorney once again for La Caricature, focused jurors’ attention on “the light veil,” that is, on satire’s ambiguity, which he said clouded attacks on powerful political figures. La Caricature dealt with humor, not politics; his client had been “far from expecting to fight on terrain from which his title [La Caricature] alone seemed to remove him.” The court wanted to see Philipon as a politician who concealed his true motives by “pretend[ing] that he is the most apolitical of the newspapers,” Blanc maintained. Rejecting the court’s view of his client, Blanc argued rather that Philipon’s great crime was acting on his belief that “all truth is worth telling.”78 In each legal battle, the key to Philipon’s defense was the laughing tone of La Caricature. French law required the payment of caution money as a safeguard imposed on papers that were devoted to “news” or “political matters.” Blanc distinguished between political matters and political doctrines, setting the latter off as esoteric theory, while the former were part of everyday life, issues that overlapped with “all that is not news.” The light mode of satire disqualified it from handling weighty matters: “Where does one see political doctrines, that is to say, consistent and serious reasoning in the designated articles?” Blanc asked rhetorically, “Who would ever think to look for elements of political convictions in mocking articles, in loaded likenesses of such and such a character?”79 Satirists tried to frame their work as the absence of reason, the realm of emotion. Seduced by crazy ideas, as Philipon said, satirists fashioned fragmented works of artifice, the farthest thing from the reasoned politics required even of the July Monarchy’s institutions. Blanc’s strategy rested on his ability to cordon off the political, to claim that ridicule was an acceptable form of truth-telling precisely because it was not political. His argument asserted that satire’s status as art exempted it from official monitoring of the political. In a familiar twist, Blanc turned government surveillance efforts into an indictment of official behavior, ridiculing attempts to exact a security deposit from Philipon as a strange habit of the government currently under the spell of a “mania for deposits.”80

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The strategy failed. The court ruled against Philipon, claiming that nearly all the issues of La Caricature that it inspected contained allusions either to the events of the day or to political matters. The ruling became a landmark decision because it defined satire’s discussion of everyday life as political. The decision threw open the definition of the political by judging officially that the levity of mockery would not establish the limits of meaningful politics. It institutionalized satire as an act of meaningful opposition and it meant that satirists would no longer be able to wriggle free of legal trouble by claiming they were “just joking.” Furthermore, the ruling brought satire into the orbit of republicanism in a new way. In the past, republicans had called for transparency in politics, based their political work on an ideal of sober reasoning, and clearly articulated goals and policies. Satire had been outlawed under the first French republic because subterfuge, allusion, and double entendre were said to be anathema to the reasoned and transparent republican man. Sweeping away masquerades, artifice, and cryptic messages was intended by republicans to ensure a virtuous citizen whose will would be unfettered by the distractions, desires, and questionable loyalties that had plagued the feminine world of old regime politics.81 But here was a case where, in the process of searching for antigovernment conspiracies and monitoring public criticism, the state was defining the machinations of satiric humor not only as political, but also as republican political criticism. Satirists on trial had defended themselves by arguing that, in the climate of press freedom promised in 1830, they had a citizen’s right to criticize government performance, a critique that urged the July Monarchy toward the political left by emphasizing the citizen’s yet-unsettled role in constitutional monarchy. It was only because republican politics had long rejected the murky methods of satire as legitimate public discourse that, in the early 1830s, satirists could pitch their political opinions as art, beyond the pale of the political. Court trials, however, changed all of this by defining satire as political in order to subject satiric papers and images to closer government scrutiny. Judicial interpretation of satire as potentially threatening legitimated it as political discourse and brought the non-transparent and artificial into the workings of representative politics. Even though courtroom scenes depicted Louis-Philippe’s government making war on the freedoms promised by the Revolution, or perhaps because of that, authorities increasingly associated satire’s government criticism, ambiguities, and subterfuges with anti-government conspiracies. Consequently, throughout 1832 and 1833 conspiracy rhetoric escalated. The Gazette, for instance, paralleled the courtroom’s associations of satire and

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political threats when it reported to the public that satirists had been implicated in the riots of June 1832, following the funeral of General Lamarque. The article, “The Case of the Red Flag,”82 began by recapping earlier events at the general’s funeral that eventually grew into the first major insurrection since the July Revolution, describing the elaborate funeral proceedings as a political demonstration in which thousands of leftist mourners followed the cortège through the streets of Paris. It reported that the funeral turned to riot as a small group of republicans sparked an insurrection. For two days, republicans and army forces sniped at each other across barricades. Eight hundred people had died or been wounded when army forces finally overpowered the insurgents.83 The article outlined the “rather bizarre case of M. Peyron, who, just as the funeral procession was finishing, climbed onto his black horse and galloped through a central square, waving a red flag with the motto, “liberty or death.” This cavalier, whom police described as a suspicious man of “pallid color, eyes somber and fixed,” could not hold the horse’s trot for long, “suffering since he was clad all over in poultices of linseed flour following a long illness. His horse threw him off and disappeared,” and Peyron was apprehended.84 The paper reported that in the hands of authorities, Peyron named as his accomplice M. Sugier, a lawyer and publisher of the satiric newspaper, Mayeux. The story thus linked satire publicly to the disorder of extremists, an association reaffirmed when it was revealed that the demonstrator, Sugier, and the satirist, Peyron, had met in the republican organization, La Amis du peuple. Newspapers may have associated the sinister with the absurd, but were satirists actually conspiring with republican cells against the July Monarchy? In the absence of clear evidence for satirists’ heartfelt political sympathies, what can be said is that during the struggle between satirists and government institutions over not just what was seen (the caricatures) but what might be passing unseen in the political milieu, satirists did, in fact, form ties to anti-government organizations. As prosecutions and fines mounted, satirists turned to republican resources to battle government censors. In July 1832, a month after the Lamarque funeral, a legally embattled La Caricature published the prospectus for the L’Association de la liberté de la presse,85 a shelter from “new blows” sure to come from the “implacable enemy of the press.” It called for monetary pledges to build reserve funds needed to pay the legal expenses that the paper expected to incur. Philipon and the founding members asked readers to put their money behind the values of the Revolution. What’s crucial to see about the Association is that it explicitly linked the satire of La Caricature and other Philipon enterprises to the project of republican politics. In defense of the 1830 Revolution, the prospectus explained, “We are calling all the friends of La Caricature to this association, all the

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citizens who think that we served the cause of liberty with some strength and some courage, all those who would like to defend it as well.” The creation of the Association educated readers about the tenuous position of press liberty under the July Monarchy: “Twenty confiscations, six judgments against us, three convictions, more than 6000 francs in fines, thirteen months of prison, persecution, numbers which required 24,000 francs of caution money. All of this in one year is incontestable proof of the profound hatred of the powers that be against us.”86 In other words, the prospectus drew battle lines between satire and government power, and framed that battle as a contest that pitted satirists and citizens who were upholding the Revolution against the monarchy that was betraying it.87 At the same time, particular satiric works inflamed government suspicions of hidden political threats. Louis Sebastian Peytel’s 1832 book, Physiologie de la poire, a pseudo-study of the horticulture of the pear, looked on first inspection like a work of botany.88 Early chapters promised nothing extraordinary: “Description of the Pear,” for example, or “Etymology of the Pear.” But Peytel explained in his introduction that, as a gardener, man of letters, and distinguished botanist, he intended his book “to produce a great sensation in botany and even in politics, who knows if the king’s people will not find therein material to indict! Because today on what does one not indict?” Why was a botanical study of the pear potentially indictable? Peytel’s work satirized the juste milieu as the realm of poires and poirivores, and used the behavior of types of pears as a way to analyze the behavior of French kings. Peytel’s humor ultimately seemed to advocate regicide in a final chapter outlining the “total eclipse of the pear.” This satire appeared to have a politically dangerous message hidden behind its superficial, botanical meaning. Moreover, Peytel’s invitation to regicide could be interpreted as a call for a republic because his work appeared to be part of a network of July Monarchy critics who were increasingly linked to republicanism. In his introduction, Peytel cited the impact on his thinking made by the famous court case of Philipon and the pear, and the rise of “the pear” as the name for LouisPhilippe. “We all remember the series of courtroom sessions when, to defend himself from the accusation of having shown the king dressed as a mason, the witty manager of La Caricature improvised a series of rough sketches the first of which resembled Louis-Philippe, and exclaimed on arriving at the last: ‘In short, if you are logical, you will see that you must acquit this PEAR which resembles the preceding sketch.’ ”89 Peytel described his own satire as an heir to Philipon’s work, meant to call attention to the faults and the qualities of this fruit. He advertised his ties to La Caricature, acknowledging the great inspiration he found in the work of fellow satirists at La Caricature, and Physiologie de la poire referred explicitly to many of La Caricature’s

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lithographs. Publicizing similarities between the journal’s satire and his own, he pointed out that “the article Pyrus, Pear grower, in Le Dictionnaire des sciences naturales, is signed LD—you remember that this scientist’s initials are also those of the editor in chief of La Caricature. No doubt, I think, that the two writers are one and the same.”90 He argued that, like himself, “the editors of this important collection are evidently great naturalists. They were very concerned before us with the culture of the Poirier and with the physiological history of the Pear.”91 By drawing connections between his work and La Caricature, Peytel aligned the journal with satiric calls for regicide in 1832, and promoted a vision of a larger body of satire implicated in crimes against the nation. What is more, Peytel’s work promoted an image of left and right aligned against the July Monarchy, of a network of plotters that, as we have seen, LouisPhilippe’s government feared from its inception. The satirist pointed to the praise all newspapers have given him, “without distinction of party,” for his just treatment of the pear. As he explained, the journals of both “carlists and republicans all come together to make the pear into compote or marmalade,” a particularly grim image of the July Monarchy’s king as an eviscerated fruit. When legal accusations of offense to the sovereign, debates over satire’s slippery political messages, ties to republican societies, and veiled calls for regicide left satirists open to charges of anti-government conspiracy, satirists rallied against the idea with more ridicule and disrespect. Caricatures pictured overzealous police so eager to uncover imagined conspiracies that they swept up innocent people just to make arrests. La Caricature published “the police hold the thread of a plot” (see figure 1.1 earlier in the chapter),92 the street scene in which police conspire to trap republicans. One article laughed at the way police saw assassination attempts everywhere in Paris, but were short on actual assassins. It suggested that 80,000 francs could surely buy a traitor of the best quality: “an innocent assassin,” just what they are looking for.93 Alluding to its own exposé of police duplicity, the article warned that the search may be long since virtue is making a comeback in France. Jokes like this ridiculed the government’s search for conspiracies that entrapped liberty and encroached on the lives of citizens. Throughout 1832 and 1833, satirists implicated all levels of government in what they saw as the ludicrous pursuit of conspiracy. In a mock-up letter from the Interior Minister to the eighty-six French prefects of police, La Caricature had the Minister warn his men of a “new black deed of the political opposition” uncovered by his spies: a plot to eclipse the sun. In a series of puns, the “minister” told of “shadowy maneuvers” designed “to obscure public happiness” on the anniversary of the 1830 Revolution. This “gloomy machination” is part of a “plot against the government” meant to show the

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people that after “the arrest in France of so many patriots,” the “beautiful July sun has lost its shine!” After listing police resources (candles, flares, and Argand lamps) to repress the “automatons of the opposition,” the minister vowed that “this time, at least, the scoundrels will not be able to claim that a long pre-meditated eclipse, with such black intentions, is still part of constitutional opposition.” On one level, this parody of a police memo was meant to rouse a public laugh at police efforts to monitor conspiracy by watching satirists. Its ridicule also revealed satirists’ awareness of just how much they were under police surveillance. The parody told readers about the politically suppressive function that surveillance was supposed to accomplish. We can see this in the minister’s counsel to his prefects. Marshalling as much light as possible, the minister advised, prefects will not only develop a “preventative means” of deterring opposition, but “will announce to the factions that the authorities have their eyes on them.”94 Satirists mocked these growing institutions of surveillance. In the example of the eclipse, the minister urged police to “deploy all rigors possible,” including arresting the sun itself. Admittedly, this was an extreme measure, unprecedented in French history, but the farcical minister reassured his subordinates, “It should be very easy for us to execute now with the innumerable coercive means that the state of current society, and especially the modern organization of our national guard, can put at our disposal.” The satiric punch came when the “minister” conceded that there are policemen and municipal guards who “rather than have nothing to grasp hold of,” that is, who in search of conspiracy lack legitimate crimes and suspects to investigate, “will grasp hold of the sun, moon, stars, planets, and comets,” these latter, perhaps like the propertyless classes of Paris, being especially popular targets due to their “vagabond qualities.”95 We can summarize the memo’s impact as follows: the eclipse satire mirrored officials’ obsession with conspirators and claims that conspirators concocted anti-government schemes at every opportunity. It ridiculed what its writers saw as overblown police efforts and misguided behavior. But in making light of government fears of conspiracy, it also undermined the effectiveness of the term “conspiracy” itself as a charge against government critics. In other words, when satirists questioned the pursuit of conspirators, they challenged the idea that conspirators existed as the threat claimed by the July Monarchy. By mocking the grave notion of conspiracy, that is, by using the concept in their humorous writing, satirists diminished the power of the charge by diminishing the power of the word. Satirists’ jokes about conspiracy theories reached remarkable levels in this period and resulted in satirists’ exaggerated descriptions of the ring of political opposition encircling the government. “Horses are getting involved,”

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along with shovels and tongs, caldrons and casseroles, indeed the whole universe. “Involved in what?” asked one piece. Government opposition. “Hear the charivaris and tell me, please, what is the current mode of thinking of casserole and cauldron, tongs and fryer? Political Opposition!”96 In “M. Parterrieu-Lafosse, Louis-Philippe, and the Conspiracy of the Horses,” horses act as political critics of the notion of royal inviolability that, the article charged, was not constitutional. In this piece, a rogue horse rears up against the current government and, “oh, horror!” against the person of the head and his spouse, both of whom have declared themselves inviolable “by the basic pact,” that is, by the Charter of 1830 and its stated relationship between the people and the king. “But the horse mocks, in effect, the basic pact.” Critical of the Charter written by a body not called specifically to do so and of the disappointingly tiny franchise after 1830, “the horse thinks back that he himself has not been called to consent to this pact, and from this he concludes naively that this pact does not hold him under any obligation.”97 In terms of content, the piece raised the twin issues of royal inviolability and consent of the nation as the source of royal sovereignty, which were widely disputed ideas after the Revolution. What is especially interesting about it, though, is what it said about the relationship between the people and the sovereign: committing a “hideous attack,” it [the horse] “violated the basic pact,” that is, the inviolability of the king and queen, “as if their majesties were responsible for something,”98 and the infamous quadruped was hauled before the assize court. There he whinnied with such wit and reared up so during the accusation that the Minister of Public Works was completely thrown. In the story, the horse not only disputed royal inviolability, it suggested that the monarchy was accountable for its actions to the French people. This kind of political criticism challenged the monarchy because it implied that public opinion had an important role to play in relations between the government and the governed. Two things were going on here. One is that the article was undoubtedly drawing on a real event. In spring, 1832, the king and queen were nearly run over by the carriage of a known legitimist while walking in the Tuileries.99 But the second is that satirists were using the incident to mock how police interpreted it as evidence of conspiracy. The tale concluded that, although it was never proven that the horse actually had bad intentions toward France, “thanks to the police, we have a new type of conspiracy.” Until this point there had been conspiracy by pistol, rifle, canon, club, knife, and dagger, even by stone and boiled potato. Now, however, “we have conspiracy by horse.” It advised that, should you wish to take down a chief of state, you take in hand none of these traditional tools. Rather, take a horse harnessed to a carriage, “like a blade is to a handle, and then you begin to gallop, and you stab said

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chief with said horse; you drive the horse into him, in the chest, just up to the hilt, that is up to two wheels. This is extremely ingenious.” And to whom does the article attribute the idea? Ever vigilant against conspiracy of any type, “only the police could make up these sorts of inventions.”100 Mocking police accusations of conspiracy at every turn, satirists charged police with making up plot stories where none existed. With the government battered by the satiric press since 1830, the court ruled in 1833 that officials could censor a paper’s contents before they were published. The ruling came in a case brought by Justice Minister Persil against Le National, and made the courtroom into a forum for the outraged personnel of Le Charivari, who were slated to follow Le National on the court docket, to question the health of France’s free press in the juste-milieu. Le Charivari’s defense counsel confessed to what he thought now looked like a naive belief that censorship had been abolished, having just been “cruelly disappointed” by the verdict against Le National. The verdict allowed officials to censor the paper’s reports before they were published “whether or not they were innocent,”101 he said, meaning without specifying what political infractions were suspected. In a turn of sarcastic rhetoric, the Gazette reported, “the defense asked itself, then, how it was that no one had ever investigated Le Figaro, which daily exposed the notables of the political opposition to public ridicule: the Duponts, the Lafayettes, etc.” The acceptability of faulting government opposition in Le Figaro made a mockery of any future claims to objective or equal enforcement of the ruling. The counselor’s closing remarks struck a somber tone: “As condemned papers, we place hope in appeal, and we do not doubt that the magistrates who have outlawed the exceptional Tribunals of the state of siege102 will render the same sound justice to a law which, if it is not abrogated, is nothing other than censorship, now accompanied by confiscation.”103 The remarks served two purposes. One, they called magistrates to action on appeal. And two, they called the reading public to action by asking it to look further at a law that had been presented as a necessary measure of government protection and to see it as “censorship, now accompanied by confiscation,” a clear violation of the Charter that had been written by their elected assembly. Although authorities hoped the rulings would stamp out public ridicule of the government, the opposite actually happened: satire thrived on government conspiracy fears. Satirists continued to attack government censors as traitors to the Revolution, and satiric images continued to educate the public, giving the lie to government claims to a free press. In December 1833, for example, La Caricature published a vicious scene by the caricaturist, Grandville, “Descent into the workshops of the Liberty of the press.”104 The scene of a press workshop shows a woman, representing French liberty, pinned against a printing

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press by a figure resembling Louis-Philippe, as censors smash presses and other tools of the printing trade. The accompanying text explains that the woman press worker had just finished laying out several jobs, including Le Charivari, La Caricature, the publications of the La Société des droits de l’homme, and the prints of an association for republican propaganda, “when all of a sudden the smooth running of things was interrupted in the workshop.”105 The image ridiculed earlier court rulings on resemblance and held the monarch responsible without naming him directly. Clasping the mouth of his captive, “the material personification under which satirists were obliged to represent the government,” as the text explains, stifled cries of Liberty with his hand. With Guizot and Barthe looking on, Minister of the Interior Antoine-Maurice d’Argout, who once reportedly burned a tricolor flag, an important symbol of revolutionary France, brandished a huge pair of censor’s scissors in the background. To the right of the press stood a gaggle of Restoration magistrates who, now totally co-opted by the new Regime, played a role in renewed censorship. The text identified a few of these players by name or deed: he “who eradicates the press with his club of 22,000 franc fines”; “the prosecutorial decree slinger.” Near a second press stood Minister Soult, ripping up patriotic writings, while the police prefect, Henri-Joseph Gisquet, stood commanding his henchmen, the muscled “Gisquetaires,” to destroy the press, while workers watched. This “historical painting” showed the “implacable war . . . against the liberty of the press, a war up until the present totaling two centuries of prison and 200,000 francs in fines.”106

SATIRE, CONSPIRACY, AND THE POLITICAL TURMOIL OF 1834 In this storm of conspiracy charges and heightened legal debate, satire’s destabilizing effect on political culture grew especially problematic in 1834 when Louis-Philippe’s government faced a series of uprisings in key cities, including Paris and Lyon. The April riots expressed the growing demands of the working class after the 1830 revolution. The government interpreted these varied riots, in which the working-class struggle fused with middleclass and student protest, as a general conspiracy against the government, at the heart of which was the republican club, La Société des droits de l’homme. Based on the government’s insistent vision of conspiracy, hundreds of people accused after the uprising came before the court of peers, the court used for crimes of high treason and vaguely defined “attacks on state security.” Public discussion cast the riots generally as revolutionary events. Leftist newspapers exalted rioters regularly, arguing that the 30,000 people of Lyon had declared

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a revolution and were awaiting reinforcement from other areas.107 Government officials responded by seizing papers’ presses and arresting editors.108 Authorities were anxious to control the insurrection’s threat to public order. The same month, as part of the government’s mounting surveillance of political opposition, legislators passed a law on associations, creating a new jurisdiction for the high court, which would adjudicate any infraction committed by members of political associations. Following on the heels of a new stamp tax and tightened requirements for hawkers’ permits, the law restored criminal tribunals and placed cases of assaults on state security, a charge frequently used against satirists, under the jurisdiction of the court of peers. The legislation gave government much greater power to monitor political organizations than had the earlier penal code. Previously limited to surveillance of gatherings of more than twenty people, legal restrictions now prohibited political meetings of fewer than twenty people and claimed the power to prosecute not just political leaders but club members as well. In clear defiance of the Charter, the accused would no longer receive jury trials but would be subject to criminal tribunals, and in cases of attacks on state security, to the court of peers.109 Not surprisingly, given government suspicions about their work, satirists numbered amongst the earliest victims of the new repression. Under the new laws, institutions like the police and the courts further interpreted satiric activities and defined what would be considered a political act in such a volatile environment. In 1834, both Le Charivari and La Caricature landed again before the court for politically charged press violations. Le Charivari was convicted once more of offending the king in an article published that March,110 its manager (gérant responsible), Isadore Cruchet, sentenced to three months in prison and a 300 franc fine. The timing of the sentence was unfortunate for Le Charivari. When the manager appealed to the king for clemency, the Justice Ministry’s report on the case came not four months after the Paris and Lyons uprisings, and was part of a government crackdown on press violations. Cruchet defended himself not by claiming that satire was not political (that would have been impossible in 1834), but by alleging that financial necessity had forced him to accept the job of manager of Le Charivari, and that he had resigned as soon as he could from the perilous post that he had accepted “despite himself.”111 However, Justice officials reportedly did not even bother to examine Cruchet’s claims because they were not willing, in any case, to entitle the manager to any indulgence. Determined to make a public example of Cruchet, the prosecutor reasoned, “the licenses of the press would be sooner and more surely repressed if political men who directed the newspapers were forced themselves to assume responsibility for their writings” [emphasis in the original]. Distinguishing between those who cooperated in editing and publishing

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the journal and those who did not, he continued, encouraged clemency for those who presented themselves merely as publishers of political material, personally uninvolved with political factions. “(T)his [process of parsing types of cooperation] will again unsettle the weak barriers that prevent the excesses of the periodic press,” argued the report.112 The prosecutor’s opinion pointed again to a central problem of the July Monarchy: the desire to control political discourse in a context of proclaimed press freedom, however limited. Denying Cruchet clemency suggested that, by 1834, authorities had come to confirm the ambiguities of satire as evidence that activities, once characterized as outside of the political, indeed had political consequences.

SATIRE’S EFFECT ON POLITICAL CULTURE Satirists’ trials had become a powerful public forum for political debate that exposed assaults on press freedom and engaged in the very criticism that is crucial to representative government. As in earlier cases, the Gazette quoted from the 1834 trials and, educating satire readers and trial watchers about failed government promises, positioned the public as jurors deciding the fate of satirists and press freedom. Arguing over caricatures raised complicated questions about the citizen’s relationship to the community, the individual’s right to dissent, and the state’s power to ensure political homogeneity. To what extent would the French populace have a critical voice in government? To what degree would the citizen-king be accountable to citizens? Who would interpret and enforce the promises of 1830? The Gazette was an important source of information about these questions, since it was there that a wide audience learned of the government’s belief that satire was connected to anti-government plots. With Le Charivari on trial again in 1834, the Gazette reported how one prosecutor admonished the court in his closing argument not to accept the idea “that all is permitted in these frivolous rags.”113 Explicitly articulating government fears of satire, the prosecutor cited it as a step in political revolution: “Before you can overthrow a government,” he explained, “you undermine it through sarcasm, you heap contempt on it.”114 It was a stunning appeal for censorship from an officer of a constitutional government that had been born amid calls for free speech and that had legally abolished censorship. It signaled that, by 1834, it had become plausible that satire had the potential to topple governments; Gazette readers and trial jurors could be expected to believe that Le Charivari, a satiric newspaper, was a locus of anti-government conspiracy. Publicizing satirists’ trials had shaped free expression into a civic norm that was increasingly under attack.

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Importantly, audiences who laughed at the satires on trial could place themselves as actors in the political system that wanted to censor them. Presenting prosecutorial and defense strategies not only positioned readers as public jurors, but also legitimated the role of public opinion in political matters. Satire involved its consumers in political processes of public debate and implied a role for them in resolving political issues. Revealing the gap between liberal political rhetoric, like that of press freedom in 1830, and actual centralizing practices, like those of censorship in 1830 to 1834, satire was educating a new critical public by teaching readers how to see beneath political appearances. Satire worked on the assumption that public consumers would look closely at an image or text and see through subterfuge to a deeper truth, in the cases presented here, a political truth about monarchy, and then make political judgments based on what they detected. As these cases show, institutions of the July Monarchy government defined satirists as conspirators not for violent overthrow, but rather for the ticking time bomb of public critique, opinion, and scrutiny. These were the citizens’ duties under contractual government and they harbored democratic potential. The state’s attack on satire embued satiric criticism with new political power as a recognized government threat. In liberal political rhetoric, individual freedom was limited by the concept of harm to others, and from these debates in 1835, a third argument emerged against satire: that it degraded not just the people who wrote it but also those who read it. Deputy Garnier-Pagès, debating the problem in the National Assembly in August 1835, declared that French society was under attack not only physically from rioters in the streets, but also spiritually from the press. “Here’s how the press proceeds to destroy the moral strength of the government: you talk about terror, it is the press that has created a type of terror, if not against life, at least against citizens’ honor. Thanks to the press, we have been free at the cost of defamation, ridicule, and insults.”115 Deputies called for France to resist the “daily calls to assassination, to regicide, to revolt; to resist the deluge of insults, calumny, and ridicule” that threatened French society.116 In September 1835, deputies of the National Assembly took decisive action against the French press, creating a body of legislation that dramatically curtailed freedom of expression. The September Laws came as a direct response to the satiric activities following the July Revolution: they outlawed political satire altogether and changed the way many of the crimes used to charge satirists would be adjudicated. Legislators designated as criminal not only “any offense to the king” but also offense to “the basis for and the form of the government.” In a direct attack on satire’s slippery irresoluteness, Minister of Justice Persil announced to the National Assembly that the press would no

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longer have the right either to mention the name of the king or “to indicate it indirectly by allusions or by some conventional expression.” Moreover, citizens would no longer be allowed to call themselves republicans or legitimists, or even to “express views or threats relative to these types of government.”117 The infractions, “using the press to incite insurrection, hatred, or scorn against the government” and “attacking royal authority,” were reclassified as crimes against state security, punishable by up to five years in prison and a 50,000 franc fine.118 Importantly, accused satirists would no longer be tried by citizen juries in the assize court but by professional magistrates in the court of peers. Accordingly, the number of jury trials declined substantially during the remainder of the century.119 The new laws’ impact on satire can hardly be overstated. Moving satirists out of the assize court to the court of peers meant that far fewer satirists would have the chance to make their political arguments to juries. Magistrates, it was claimed, would be less easily moved by satiric performance. In sum, the law denied satire its courtroom audience. In the early years of the July Monarchy, satirists had won and lost cases—Philipon won his “Soap Bubbles” case, but lost another case just months later. Yet, even when they lost, satirists had succeeded in turning courtrooms into venues for ridiculing government inconsistencies and weaknesses. Nor would the new law permit publication of verbatim transcripts, which denied satirists another important public audience. Denying satirists jury trials underscored how satire’s political ridicule held the power to create alarm at the highest levels of government. Philipon’s papers correctly interpreted the new law as a bid for more press convictions. As satirists were tried more often at the court of peers, articles increasingly emphasized the relative silence of that court—how defendants sat quietly until spoken to and trials unfolded along strict rules of interrogation—in contrast to the more raucous discourse of the assize court.120 They habitually reported verdicts reached by magistrates as being without the assistance of a jury, which was bad not just for satirists but for the people generally. The logic behind this argument was that satire and the jury trial were supposed to accomplish similar things. Both were meant to provide for public participation and guard against secrecy in legal and judicial processes. They arose from similar political motivations: a desire to create active citizens in a more open political world. They both placed trust in the people to make judgments based on their own observations. Deputies recognized these similarities and named Le Charivari specifically in their debates over the September Laws that reduced the place of the jury in French justice.121 Both satire and the jury came under attack because they were seen as uncontrollable, potentially subversive, and threatening to entrenched—or entrenching—authority.

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La Caricature and Le Charivari had, at times, been able to dig their way out of punishing fines with the help of money raised by republican societies, lotteries, and special issues. This, too, was outlawed. Persil explained that legislators intended “to ensure that the punishment will be done by the punished, and that it will not become the occasion for a party demonstration. You understand, Gentlemen, that we are talking about subscriptions that are meant only to annul the effect of judicial punishments and to ensure that the fine, the main punishment for these sorts of infractions, is not paid by the one who incurred it. We have seen these punishments become, with the aid of subscriptions, a means of support for the newspaper.”122 The minister urged his colleagues to stop “this scandal” that threatened to render judicial decisions “illusory.” For Persil, the alliance of satire and republicanism had produced “one of the most distressing signs of demoralization” under the July Monarchy. The Justice Minister, who had jurisdiction in 1835 over matters of the press as well as attempted regicides, sought extended legislation to control attacks on the government and to ensure social morality. Naming caricature as the biggest offender, Persil argued that, “the spectacle offered in our streets” had been injuring public decency for a long time. Obscene engravings, images which shame our morality, caricatures that attack the citizens even in the sanctuary of private life, insolent lithographs that heap derision, ridicule, and scorn on the person and the authority of the sovereign and on his family, theater pieces that one cannot look at without blushing, that cannot be heard without indignation, and that, basing their success on party spirit, audaciously attack in the most indecent manner, the foundation and form of our government, all of this side-stepping points accusingly to the insufficiency of our legislation.123

Persil presented a picture in which public opinion faulted government authorities for weakness in the battle against satire. “Everywhere it has been said,” he claimed, “that we were not sufficiently armed.” He seemed to suggest that it was by public mandate that he “run back to the legislature” and ask it to “put the government in a state to resist this torrent of immorality and sedition.”124 From the minister’s perspective, satire was a weak point at which criticism out-flanked government control, and Persil claimed that national security required laws against it. Apparently some legislators feared new laws that would lump together “odious, obscene” caricature and other types of engravings and drawings. “What about the works included in the law,” asked one deputy, “that have nothing in common with caricature or obscenity?” Deputies expressed concern over the swelling power of the Justice Ministry. “Nothing would be

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able to appear without having passed under the yoke of the censor,” warned another, or “without the authorization and at the pleasure of some minister or department head.”125 These concerns paled, however, when legislators made accusations linking satire explicitly to assassinations and conspiracies. In the heated debate of 1835, Minister of Commerce Duchatel argued that subversive caricatures gravely endangered public welfare. Speaking of caricatures, he asserted, “there is no more direct provocation to crimes that we all deplore.” Legislators claimed caricatures threatened public order by circumventing reason and targeting emotions. According to Deputy Eugene Janvier, they “do not address opinions, they address passions, and generally bad passions.” Satiric drawings “deprave those who look at them, address themselves only to the low chord of the heart, play with crime, and frolic with assassination!” Underscoring the seriousness of charging satire with complicity in regicide, Janvier assured the Chamber, “I choose these last words very carefully.”126 Satire was said to corrupt the moral sense, as deputies had now linked it to both aesthetic and ethical sensibilities. Not everyone in the Chamber favored censoring satire. Deputies who opposed the measure fought against this direct violation of the Charter, and feared legislation that granted ministers such enormous power to control the flow of political debate. However, prevailing opinion repeatedly linked satire to assassination. Like Lemercier, most deputies ultimately accepted that press attacks on the throne produced conspiracies, riots, assassination, and civil war. In fact, deputies found it unsurprising that there would be conspiracies, riots, and armed assassination attempts threatening “bloody Revolution,” when “certain newspapers” routinely showed the July government as an unjust, despotic, intolerable regime that could not be changed soon enough. “Is it surprising that there would be fanatics and assassins when everyday infamies, offensive caricatures, represent our constitutional king, the best and the most royal of princes, the most honest and the most virtuous of men, as a frightful tyrant, as a monster greedy for the laws and the blood of his fellow citizens?”127

CONCLUSION Throughout the early 1830s, satire repeatedly challenged the July Monarchy’s claims to a free press and even legitimacy itself. The Gazette publicized trials, arrests, and confiscations, and satirists learned of their colleagues’ tribulations in letters and even in shared prison quarters. Such trials made room for audiences to render verdicts on not only the individuals in question, but also the judicial system that appeared to prosecute artists merely for expressing

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“the truth” as they saw it, a phrase invoked by satirists and their legal representatives which simultaneously appealed to objective truth and protection of mere subjective expression. Officials were sensitive to the ways in which the involvement of the press required special handling. One official summarized that “when certain papers of the republican or carlist opposition” made use of “excited and calumnious language, discrediting themselves even more through their cynicism,” leniency might seem to be “a vexing indulgence,” but “in press matters, one should consider the effect of lawsuits on public opinion,” especially given the “spirit of factionalism” which animated the parties.128 As long as the public expected press freedom, attacking producers of political humor made officials look like the ones conspiring behind the scenes against liberty. However, for government censors, court prosecutors, and deputies to the National Assembly, “conspiracy” referred to the search for small groups of people hiding beneath the surface of politics and society, much of whose power came from their hidden positions. The government’s search for what was not readily apparent in politics—for “conspiracies”—was intertwined with a burst of anti-government satire, made possible by the abolition of press censorship in 1830. This satire did its work by positing a secret joke or criticism, a message of political opposition, in a deceptive surface appearance. Its very form shadowed the conspiracies (real and imagined) that the July Monarchy feared as well as the conspiracies that the monarchy itself seemed to be engaged in. The government’s trouble with satire’s conspiracy was not simply a matter of combating secret societies, at least not initially. More fundamentally, its problem lay in its inability to tolerate broad criticism even in a government based only in a limited way on the social contract—a “quasi-republic.” Lacking the legitimacy of an inherited monarchy, the July regime could not abide internal opposition. All opponents were labeled, therefore, as outside enemies, traitors to the nation, or “conspirators.” It was within these basic constraints and duplicitous context that satire took shape as a political aesthetic with profound implications for French liberalism. Satire was linked to conspiracy first because it appeared to present an affront to the dignity of the king. Investigating this possibility led the state to a second reason for associating satire with conspiracy: through both its form and content, satire seemed to hide, behind a laughing façade, real political danger in its power to critique the monarchy and incite the public. Determining whether this was the case led to a third attempt to categorize satire politically, this time in terms of harm—whether harm to the individual who produced or consumed satire, or harm to the state. Throughout the trials, satirists asserted that their work was artistic, entertaining, and a political right under the July Monarchy. Debating satire’s nature in the courtroom led to a political argument, centered

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on admittedly liberal concepts that satire was harmful to the public and to the government; state institutions determined that it did indeed cause public harm and did not illustrate a right to free speech. With conceptual issues resolved and institutionalized in new laws by 1835, satire had become connected to conspiracy. Over the next five years, public wrangling continued. Following each attempted regicide or large public disturbance, satirists were investigated for the role it was assumed they had played in the conspiracy. We turn now to the realpolitik of policing satire and negotiating France’s judicial system from the era of September Laws to 1840. NOTES 1. La Caricature, August 16, 1832. 2. See Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 3. Collingham, The July Monarchy, 24. 4. I am paraphrasing an interpretation offered by Jean-Paul Clément in Caricatures politiques, 1829–1848: de l’eteignoir a La Poire (Conseil general des Hauts-deSeine, Maison de Chateaubriand, 1994), 80. 5. La Caricature, September 22, 1831. 6. Archives parlementaire de 1787 à 1860: Recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des chambres françaises (Paris: Dupont, 1967), v. 98, 741–742. 7. Article 7 of the Charter abolished censorship, stating that “censorship can never be established.” Despite this protection, however, prosecutions began immediately as the regime sought to limit the assaults of the free press. See Charles Ledré, La presse à l’assaut de la monarchie 1815 à 1848 (Paris: A. Colin, 1960). 8. La Caricature appeared weekly beginning in 1830. Le Charivari appeared daily beginning in 1832. Readership is difficult to specify precisely for these journals. Based on partial circulation records for Le Charivari and references to audience by social commentators and in the journals themselves, the typical reader has been identified as a property-owning male. Subscription lists show that the journals reached the provinces. Cost was prohibitively expensive for many, although the journals would have likely reached beyond individual subscribers via public reading rooms and group subscriptions held collectively, for example, by an apartment building. In addition, lithographs for the papers could be viewed in the window front of the Aubert published house in the Passage Vero-Dodat in Paris. See Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature, and Kerr, Caricature and French Political Culture. 9. Although a small number of centrist and royalist satiric papers existed, (Le Corsaire, Le Figaro before 1832, Les Cancans, La Charge, Brid’Oison, and La Mode), by far the most widely read and influential satire promoted a political agenda of free speech and powerful public opinion, the satiric defense of which fueled a republican sensibility. The satiric press was dominated overwhelmingly by Charles Philipon and his papers, Le Charivari and La Caricature. See below. I have used examples of work from these journals where appropriate.

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10. Christine Haynes, “The Politics of Publishing During the Second Empire: The Trial of Madame Bovary Revisited,” French Politics, Culture and Society, 23, 2 (2005). 11. See Kerr, Caricature and French Political Culture, 95. For an example of such an accusation, see Le Figaro, September 16, 1832. 12. La Charge, 1834. 13. This is the argument of François Furet. Revolutionary France, 1770–1880 (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992). 14. See Pilbeam, Republicanism in Nineteenth-Century France. 15. In a letter addressed to the duchesse d’Angoulême in 1833. Letter quoted in Clément, Caricatures politiques, 26. 16. Collingham, The July Monarchy, 35. 17. Archives nationales; Paris, France (hereafter abbreviated AN) F7.6783 dr2 June 4, 1832. 18. At the Lamarque funeral, the National guard was instructed to attend the funeral in plain clothes, their pockets “well supplied with weapons and stones.” AN F7.6783 dr2 June 4, 1832. 19. Collingham, The July Monarchy, 34–37. 20. Jean Tulard, La prefecture de police sous la monarchie de juillet. (Paris: Imprimerie Municipale Hotel de Ville, 1964), 78–85. Archives de la Prefecture de Police As421. Compte rendu du débat a la Chambre, February 18, 1831. 21. Press offenses came under the jurisdiction of the Minister of the Interior, except from March 1831 to April 1834, when they were directed by the Ministry of Commerce and Public Works. 22. Le Moniteur, February 19, 1831. 23. Kroen, Politics and Theater, 218–221. 24. Tulard, La prefecture de police sous la monarchie de juillet, 80–85. 25. AN F7.3885. Bulletin de Paris, November 14, 1834. 26. AN BB17a.80 dr5 “octobre à mai 1832.” 27. Letter to Louis-Philippe from Tribunal de Lyon ANBB17a.80 dr 5, “octobre à mai 1832.” 28. Letter, June, 1832, from the judges of the commerce tribunal at St. Valery-surSomme to Louis-Philippe. AN BB17a.80.dr 5. 29. AN F7.3885. Bulletin de Paris, February 17, 1831. 30. AN F7.3885. Bulletin de Paris, February 17, 1831. 31. AN F7.3885. Bulletin de Paris, February 25, 1831. 32. On the publishing house, see James B. Cuno, Charles Philipon and La Maison Aubert: The Business, Politics and Public of Caricature in Paris, 1820–1840, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1985. 33. La Caricature, May 12, 1831. 34. The issue of resemblance has been well-analyzed by Sandy Petrey in “Pears in History,” Representations 35 (Summer 1991): 52–71. 35. La Caricature, May 12, 1831. 36. La Caricature, May 19, 1831. 37. La Caricature, May 26, 1831.

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38. La Caricature, May 26, 1831. 39. La Caricature, May 26, 1831. 40. La Caricature, May 26, 1831. 41. La Caricature, May 26, 1831. 42. La Caricature, May 26, 1831. 43. La Caricature, May 26, 1831. 44. La Caricature, May 26, 1831. 45. La Caricature, May 26, 1831. 46. La Caricature, May 26, 1831. 47. The civil list was the roster of royal family members and expenses to be supported by state funds. 48. La Caricature, May 26, 1831. 49. La Caricature, May 26, 1831. 50. La Caricature, May 26, 1831. 51. La Caricature, May 26, 1831. 52. La Caricature, May 26, 1831. 53. La Caricature, September 22, 1831. 54. La Caricature, June 30, 1831. 55. Goldstein attributes the name to a popular vaudeville character, but the political reference claimed by Kerr seems more likely. See Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature, 134; and Kerr, Caricature, 79. 56. La Caricature, July 7, 1831. 57. On the trial and four pear sketches, see Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature, chapter four, “The Struggle over Freedom of Caricature during the July Monarchy, 1830–1848,” 119–168. 58. Trial transcript, La Caricature, November 17, 1831. As quoted in Sandy Petrey, “Pears in History,” 52. 59. La Caricature, November 17, 1831. Cited in Petrey, “Pears in History,” 53. 60. La Gazette des tribunaux, November 14, 1831. 61. Kroen, Theater and Politics, 220–226. 62. Between March 1831 and September 1835, officials seized twenty-eight issues of La Caricature, most between March 1831 and June 1832, and prosecuted the paper nine times. The paper’s managing editor, Charles Philipon, was prosecuted personally in six cases, for four of which he was acquitted. (See Ledré, La Presse à l’assaut de la monarchie, 232) At the Cour d’assize de la Seine, between 1831 and 1833, Les Cancans was prosecuted and convicted ten times, Mayeux five, La Caricature and Brid’Oison four, and Le Revenant and Le Corsaire twice. (See AN BB18.1388) During the single month of December 1831, thirty-four complaints were registered at the prosecutor’s office of the Criminal court of the dept of the Seine for cases concerning politics or infractions by the press, most often for offense to the king. 63. La Caricature, June 7, 1832. Discussed in Ledré, La Presse à l’assaut de la monarchie, 142; and Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature, 128. 64. Quoted in Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature, 128. 65. Trial description in La Caricature, January 31, 1833.

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66. La Caricature, January 31, 1833. 67. Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature, 139. 68. AN BB21.373.s.8.4172 Letter from Daumier, Aubert, and Delaporte to Louis-Philippe, 1832. 69. For an in-depth discussion of resemblance, see Petrey, “Pears in History,” Representations. 70. AN BB21.373.s.8.4172. Rapport du parquet de la cour royale de Paris au ministre de la justice, March 15, 1832. 71. La Gazette des tribunaux, February 23, 1832. 72. AN BB21.373.s.8.4172. Rapport du parquet de la cour royale de Paris au ministre de la justice, March 15, 1832. 73. AN BB21.373.s.8.4172. Letter to Louis-Philippe, 1832. 74. AN BB21.373.s.8.4172. Letter to Louis-Philippe, 1832. 75. On the destabilizing effects of representation, see Petrey, “Pears in History.” 76. Parquet de la Cour Royale de Dijon, procureur générale to ministre de la justice, August 23, 1833. AN BB21.408.s9.8821. 77. La Gazette des tribunaux, November 19, 1832. 78. La Gazette des tribunaux, November 19, 1832. 79. La Gazette des tribunaux, November 19, 1832. 80. La Gazette des tribunaux, November 19, 1832. 81. On satire in the Revolution of 1789, see Laura Mason, Singing the French Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics, 1781–1799 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), chapter three, “Songs of the Street: Newspapers, Theaters, and Satire,” 61–92. 82. Gazette, November 19, 1832, “Justice criminelle.” 83. See Henri-Joseph Gisquet, Mémoires de M.Gisquet, Ancien préfet de police, écrits par lui même, tome 2 (Bruxelles: Meline, Cans et compagnie, 1841), 130–131; and Collingham, The July Monarchy, 132–133. 84. La Gazette des tribunaux, November 19, 1832, “Justice criminelle.” 85. La Caricature, July 26, 1832. 86. La Caricature, July 26, 1832. 87. Philipon would later discuss this as an important time of transformation in his personal politics. Kerr quotes Philipon’s autobiographical sketch for Nadar in which the satirist describes his decision to turn La Caricature into an opposition paper as resulting largely from the government’s attempt to censor “Soap Bubbles.” See Kerr, Caricature, 81, note 37. 88. Louis Benoit (pseud. Sebastien-Benoit Peytel) Physiologie de la poire (Paris: Chez les librairies de la Place de la Bourse et ceux du Palais Royal, 1832). 89. Peytel, Physiologie. 90. “LD” for Louis Desnoyers, editor during Philipon’s incarceration at Ste. Pélagie. 91. Peytel, Physiologie de la poire, unnumbered introduction. 92. La Caricature, August 16, 1832. 93. La Caricature, January 3, 1833. 94. La Caricature, July 26, 1832.

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95. La Caricature, July 26, 1832. 96. La Caricature, May 10, 1832. 97. La Caricature, May 10, 1832. 98. La Caricature, May 10, 1832. 99. My thanks to Jo Burr Margadant for identifying this connection. 100. La Caricature, May 10, 1832. 101. La Gazette des tribunaux, August 13, 1830. 102. A reference to the provision in the Charter of 1830. 103. La Gazette des tribunaux, August 13, 1833. 104. La Caricature, December 5, 1833. 105. La Caricature, December 5, 1833. 106. La Caricature, December 5, 1833. 107. See for example, La Tribune, April 12 and 13, 1834, silenced until midAugust. 108. Ledré, La Presse, 153. 109. James M. Donovan, “Magistrates and Juries in France, 1791 to 1952,” French Historical Studies 22 (Summer 1999): 388–389. 110. Le Charivari, March 22, 1834. 111. AN BB24.155–156.s9.1262. 112. AN BB24.155–156.s9.1262. 113. La Gazette des tribunaux, April 16, 1834. 114. La Gazette des tribunaux, April 16, 1834. The public could read about the trials, including excerpts from the transcripts, in Le Charivari, La Caricature, Le Moniteur universel, and La Gazette des tribunaux. In this case, the accused received six months in prison and a 2000 franc fine. 115. La Gazette des tribunaux, April 16, 1834. 116. La Gazette des tribunaux, April 16, 1834. 117. Archives parlementaires, v. 98, 256. Caution money was raised from 2400 francs to 100,000 francs. Violations of the preliminary authorization provision were subject to fines from 100 to 1000 francs as well as one year in prison. 118. Donovan, “Magistrates and Juries in France,” 388–389. 119. At the same time, magistrates responded to jurors’ high acquittal rate by redirecting minor infractions—violations of caution money and stamp laws, for example—away from the cours d’assises to tribunaux correctionnels, misdemeanor courts where panels of three judges decided cases with much higher conviction rates than jury trials had produced. Donovan, “Magistrates and Juries in France,” 388–389. 120. Discussion of restrictions at the court of peers actually began in 1834 when the accused of the April 1834 strikes and anti-government conspiracy were tried in that court. See, for example, a mocking dialogue between two characters in that court in La Caricature on May 29, 1834: “M. Martin [procureur général, in a low voice to the members of the low court: ‘Let’s go, let’s go gentlemen, have a little courage, I will say it again. What on earth? If you continue to quiver in front of the accused, he will be taken for a judge, and you for criminals.’ (Great hesitating movement and silence.) M. Marrast [editor in chief of the leftist newspaper, La Tribune]: ‘Ah! Gentlemen . . .

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I suppose the pleasure of contemplation is not the only one that awaits me here . . ..’ M. Martin: ‘Silence, Sir! You may ask questions only when you are answered. I mean, I made a mistake, only respond when you . . . oh, you know what I mean.’” 121. Archives parlementaires, v. 98, 256. 122. Archives parlementaires, v. 98, 257. 123. Archives parlementaires, v. 98, 257. 124. Archives parlementaires, v. 98, 257. 125. Archives parlementaires, v. 98, 541. 126. Archives parlementaires, v. 98, 541., 741–742. Janvier quoted in Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature, 6. 127. Archives parlementaires, v. 98, 543. 128. Parquet de la Cour Royale de Dijon, procureur générale to ministre de la justice, August 23, 1833. AN BB21.408.s9.8821.

Chapter 2

Legality

The September Laws of 1835 quieted political satire as they were intended to do, but in May 1839, an attempt on the life of Louis-Philippe fueled new recriminations against the press for inciting public disorder and brought new calls to crack down on anti-government activities. As with the attempted regicide in 1835, the 1839 attack sparked much interest in suspicious characters, and, armed with powerful new legislation, authorities began seizing documents. Through these searches, police once again linked satire to opposition politics. Let’s look closely at an example of how this happened. On May 14, 1839, Paris police entered the home of Charles Blondeau, an advertisement broker and suspected accomplice in the most recent assassination attempt against King Louis-Philippe.1 Arrested for the latest of the anti-government conspiracies police were uncovering with growing efficiency, Blondeau had been confined in the Conciergerie, the infamous prison where Marie-Antoinette and Maximillian Robespierre had awaited execution less than half a century before. Arriving at no. 8, rue de la savonnerie with their suspect in tow, agents found that Blondeau’s landlord had already dismantled the suspect’s quarters and had piled Blondeau’s effects in another room, to which police were led. The accused watched while officers executed their search warrant. Thoroughly investigating his papers, police saw nothing suspicious. On the contrary, they remarked on Blondeau’s many issues of the Bulletin d’annonces, a newspaper that police had been surprised to observe openly repudiated republican politics of opposition. As they would later note in the report on the search, Blondeau’s reading material appeared to prove the suspect innocent of republican sympathies that might link him to any anti-government conspiracy of the left. Nevertheless, police asked the landlord to show them 53

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to the room occupied originally by the suspect. As they walked through the door investigators were shocked to discover Blondeau’s four walls covered by lithographic prints of republican scenes. The agents stood confronted by a roomful of damning characters, many wearing the instantly recognizable phrygian bonnet of the republicans of 1792.2 Or at least that is what they thought. Upon closer inspection, investigators realized that the images were not straightforward scenes of republican revolution. One scene, for instance, showed a republican and legitimist in a dressing room preparing costumes for a masked ball [discussed in chapter one]. In the climate of concern over satire’s instability and potential danger that had been building in the nine years since censorship had been abolished and satire had saturated French politics, Blondeau’s caricature was damning evidence. Even though the image had been published in the government-sponsored journal, La Charge, police reported the image to superiors as a satiric reference to a much-dreaded conspiracy of legitimists and republicans against the supposedly more centrist, constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe.3 They saw that beyond ridiculing characters of both the right and left, the scene alluded to collusion between legitimists and republicans, a terrifying prospect to a regime still working to strike a balance between traditional monarchy and representative government. Most seriously for Blondeau’s immediate predicament, the satire could be (mis)interpreted as mocking the government, an act which, by 1839, was classified as a crime against the state to be tried by tribunal decision and not by jury, and potentially punishable by five years imprisonment and fines up to 50,000 francs.4 Agents tore the incriminating lithograph, along with two others, from the wall as evidence to carry back to police headquarters. The operation ended with Blondeau imprisoned once again at the Conciergerie and police filing the three satires, search warrant, and police report with the court.5 As had happened in the opening years of the July Monarchy, satire continued to confuse police, but now a powerful legal apparatus existed to control it.6 The September Laws were especially useful around times of attempted regicide because they enumerated crimes aimed at newspapers in cases involving accusations of offense to the king, such as faulting the king in times of government attack, and assaults on the government established by the Charter. Laws had been created in 1834 and 1835 to muzzle political satirists because, as we saw in chapter one, satire had walked a line between art and politics and had come under suspicion, as it repeatedly eluded official definition by claiming to be one or the other as needed. This elusiveness was unacceptable to a regime that itself eluded definition by appearing one way for the left, another for the right, and still another for its heartfelt supporters. As an object of high profile trials, satire had called the regime into question

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by calling for it to establish positions on key issues such as press freedom, royal inviolability, and the limits of political criticism, issues that would define the nature of the “citizen king’s” government. Because the instability and inconsistencies of the July Monarchy on these issues provided satirists with material, anti-government satire had escalated as the monarchy reached for self-definition. While satire was being defined conceptually as “political” and, later, connected legally to conspiracy by the September Laws, satirists were repeatedly questioned by police and summoned to court to evaluate particular works as potentially illegal or even threatening to the government. This chapter examines how the definition of satire as political in nature and the subsequent ban on political satire were put to work in the courtroom and in public debates. Tracing the events and ideas that surrounded the September Laws through to 1840, then to 1848, the Second Republic and the Second Empire, it takes a deeper look at how the paradox of satire—the notion that satire was less “serious” than other types of speech, yet a significant right that had to be protected—was resolved in realpolitik. We begin with a close look at the mechanics of policing satire, at how and why police confiscated political satires. Confiscations are important because they help us to see the process by which police situated satire in relation to other aspects of political life. As satiric subterfuges inflamed government suspicions of political conspiracy, satire became a rallying point around which Louis-Philippe’s administration extended its authority legislatively. The chapter looks at how satirists responded politically to the legislation that made prosecuting satirists easier, and how government attempts to adjudicate satire’s ungovernable form drove artists and entrepreneurs into the arms of established republican organizations for financial and political support. It then examines the influence that satire had on France’s political and judicial systems, and ends by suggesting what we might conclude from the July Monarchy’s distinctive pattern of policing satire.

CONFISCATIONS Satirists were policed in large measure through confiscations of certain types of material. Confiscations began to increase after the 1834 uprisings and continued to do so following the 1835 legal changes described in chapter one. Police confiscated papers from both satirists themselves and suspected participants in political clubs. They held interrogations and reported on people whose politics they considered dubious or questionable in some way. These papers, confiscated at the homes, offices, and prison cells of the accused, were interpreted by police and government officials as proof of the

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frightening popularity of writings, pamphlets, and songs that mobilized opinion against the regime. Depending on the case, satire could be an initial cause for suspicion, or proof that someone already suspected of political opposition was indeed worthy of concern. Many of these cases involved the press or the distribution of apparently subversive publications. To some extent, the September Laws simply facilitated more of the same kind of confiscations and investigation seen in previous years. Printers of satire, for example, had been prosecuted for their work before.7 But the 1835 laws established new legal formalities required of printers and distributors, and thus expanded possibilities for prosecutions.8 Typically, in cases where satirists were not themselves the suspects, such confiscations occurred after field officers reported to superiors that something noteworthy had been discovered among a political suspect’s effects. In their reports, police highlighted particular confiscated papers for special attention. Satires were signaled for special police attention, as was correspondence with known satirists.9 For example, when ten papers belonging to law student Claude Charles Crebassan were confiscated, police signaled for the court’s attention Au Roi, deuxième satire and Aux Ministres, premiere satyre, by Louis Bastide.10 When Jean Marie Donsel, an employee of the Paris mint, had thirty-nine papers confiscated, police alerted the court’s attention to nineteen issues of the satiric Cancan series.11 By categorizing satire as worthy of special police attention, confiscations painted a picture of consistent and close ties between satire and government opposition. The connections were made from two directions: confiscated material from homes of identified republicans or legitimists included party propaganda and satires, while confiscated material from offices of Le Charivari and directors of satiric theaters offered up oppositional political matter. Police examined confiscated papers for information about societies that the government considered threatening, such as l’Association de la liberté de la presse, l’Association de la presse patriotique, and l’Association libre de l’éducation du people, and for news about patriotic lotteries and banquets held to rally political support. The most commonly confiscated documents included pamphlets, libelles, statutes and rules of associations, songs, and poems, as well as incriminating letters that explicitly linked the destabilizing work of satire to that of political clubs. For instance, at the offices of La Tribune, police seized a letter from Charles Philipon, editor of Le Charivari and La Caricature, to the editor of La Tribune, Armand Marrast, that discussed ways to raise caution money and debated the issue of responsibility for a newspaper’s contents.12 Along with the letter, police took from Philipon’s office a satiric poem, a song used at republican banquets, and letters from acknowledged republicans who wanted to help pay the papers’ fines or use

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the papers to publicize political causes. A letter from one such reader urged Philipon to publish a political dialogue that the reader had written: “At a time when sentences to infamous and even to capital punishments are striking those accused of political infractions, I would very much like for this script, entitled ‘the Republicans in Prison,’ to contribute to the reduction in rigor of the current laws.”13 Letters like this confirmed for police that the public saw Philipon’s satiric newspapers as a venue for their own political opposition, and that the papers were developing into a rallying point for political issues. In sum, the satiric papers responded to government accusations and censorship in part by becoming the vehicle of political opposition that the government initially accused them of. Through confiscations, police formed connections between particular satirists, including Philipon, and political activists. Philipon’s name appeared at times in the papers of accused members of republican associations. When police confiscated the papers of Antoine Raphael Gilbert Mizan, the managing editor of the paper Le Patriote, in January 1834, they flagged letters from Philipon and a circular from republican club, l’Association de la liberté de la presse patriotique.14 Police reports claimed that informants had named Mizan as a leader of a republican “section,” and Mizan was among those tried later by the court of peers for the insurrections of 1834. Searching Mizan’s house, agents of the gendarmerie found two small caliber pistols inside a desk, and a bag of gunpowder. Despite Mizan’s explanation that he bought the pistols because of personal interest and had had them a long time, police arrested him for “complicity in the plot against State Security,” apparently unfazed by his insistence that “the association has never conspired against the current government, much less wanted its overthrow.” For his crimes he was sentenced to five years prison and “all his life under police surveillance.”15 The connections between satirists and political activists that were made through confiscations, whether through uncovering actual relationships or simply flagging satire as evidence that needed special scrutiny, worked to confirm satire’s association with political conspiracy. As we saw in chapter one, mocking the government’s search for conspiracy fueled government surveillance efforts; similarly, the battle between satirists and censors energized republican associations. Police routinely kept republican associations under surveillance, and they learned about so-called “patriotic” press associations’ pledges to support satirists in the fight against censorship through documents they confiscated from these associations. For example, Philipon’s confiscated correspondence to Mizan explained that Le Charivari had been sentenced to fines of 5000 francs, which it could not afford, so the paper was calling for help from its supporters in l’Association de la liberté de la presse patriotique in the provinces, an organization created

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for the financial support and distribution of republican papers throughout France.16 Promising republican support for the satiric cause, the association responded, “The patriots of the provinces will not allow Le Charivari to be crushed, a journal which in its small way has been able to render service to the popular cause.” Philipon appealed to his “dear concitoyen” to tell his [Mizan’s] associates to lend aid as soon as possible, thanking him in advance, not only on his own behalf, but in “the name of his collaborators.” The appeal apparently moved the provincial association to action; André Marchais, spokesperson for the organization, responded in his handwritten notes on the letter that “the central committee of l’Association de la liberté de la presse thinks that its ‘concitoyens’ in the provinces should cooperate with all their power to cover Le Charivari’s absurd fine.”17 Philipon received 100 francs from the association. After appealing to the provincial sections the sum totaled an additional 100 francs.18 What is important to see in all of this is the way that police were situating satire in political context. They routinely tagged satires along with republican tracts as signs of suspicious activity and grounds for further investigation. This is what happened, for example, in the case of Claude Charles Leconte, a pharmacist and member of La Société des droits de l’homme, who was interrogated after the 1834 riots. The police inventory of items confiscated from his house typifies the kinds of papers that interested police generally: four lithographic satires; tracts from this society and from L’Association républicaine de la liberté de l’individue et de la presse that stated goals and positions on key subjects; a list of the political prisoners of the June 1832 uprisings; and information on the state of aid to the political detainees.19 Certain notations on the papers seemed imputable, according to police, and agents used a line of questioning with Leconte that connected revolutionary politics to political satire. When asked if he had been ordered to substitute the Revolutionary calendar for the Gregorian, Leconte said no, never. Police asked why then had he “signed as president a paper dated 26 nivose Year 42?” Leconte explained that it had been a sort of joke made by someone else whose name he did not know. Apparently unsatisfied by the reply, authorities pressed Leconte, “What was the real goal of La Société des droits de l’homme?” Leconte replied that the society had always been an organization of republican propaganda. Still suspicious of political humor, they then asked, “For how long have you had, and who gave you, the four caricatures, injurious to the king, which were seized at your house?” Leconte replied vaguely that they had been given to him previously. Officials then reported that the accused refused to discuss each of the images, although he did admit that they had come from his house. Wary of their possible threat to public order, but not able to specify precisely what that threat might be, police filed the caricatures as evidence for later use.

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In the uneasy political context of 1834, the mere presence of satire became sufficient justification for increasing government surveillance. In one incident, the captain of the gendarmerie of the Seine reported to the Interior Minister an incident that occurred outside the offices of La Caricature and Le Charivari in the Passage Vero-dodat. At about five o’clock in the evening the captain observed a crowd, including five or six artillerymen, gathering outside the shop. Approaching the group, he realized that what had attracted their curiosity were several caricatures of the king. He caught the crowd laughing and making jokes about their superiors. The officer approached the artillerymen and chastised them for their improper conduct. He admonished them that, as part of an elite corps, they had a duty to set an example and, “especially in public, to express their respect for the king and not permit undignified jokes from the French military.” He concluded that the incident was important enough to report to the Minister because, “as political circumstances require great surveillance, I believe it my duty to make you aware of this little incident.”20 What is interesting about this case is that the content of the satires in the window and of the soldiers’ jokes was not reported, only the officer’s belief that observing satiric images had led to other types of behavior, and that that behavior was considered harmful to two powerful institutions of government, the monarchy and the army. Mockery was increasingly interpreted as a challenge not only to royal dignity but also to proper military function. As a potential impetus to insubordination, it warranted surveillance.

SATIRIC RESPONSES TO THE LEGISLATION OF 1834 AND 1835 Satirists retaliated against legislation that made publication more difficult by ridiculing the various new laws and their consequences in satiric images. For example, in 1834, in response to a new law regulating the sale of printed material, the Gazette des tribunaux reported that at a time “when the law regulating public hawkers has just been promulgated and when a deplorable duel has deprived the Chamber of Deputies of one of its members, La Caricature has published two lithographs which seem to the public ministry to contain an infraction of offense against the king.”21 The paper described the first as a parody of a painting by Prud’hon (see figure 2.1). In it a man with hair resembling Louis-Philippe’s was shown fleeing with a knife in his hand. Above him figures representing “Vengeance” and “Justice” held a sword suspended over his head. At his feet lay an assassinated woman wearing a phrygian bonnet with the inscription: “Press of the streets.” The editors of La Caricature explained

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Figure 2.1.

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“Press of the Streets,“ La Caricature, 1834.

the image in the paper itself: “Justice and Vengeance divinities are prosecuting the crime. The criminal is the system materialized as is customary for us; the victim is the popular press that the system just murdered by the law on public hawkers.”22 The law had increased control over public sales of printed matter by requiring a sales permit that could be revoked and by taxing publications of two sheets or more. Furthermore, it specified that trials for violators would no longer be by jury but by a correctional tribunal, in direct contradiction to the 1830 Charter, which had ensured all trials would be by jury. The second image (see figure 2.2), “The Invisible Hand,” referred to an actual duel in which General Bugeaud had killed the republican deputy Dulong after an argument in the Assembly.23 The opposition press had reported on the duel and the long-standing political connection between Louis-Philippe and Bugeaud. The Journal des Debats, a paper closely tied to the monarchy, escalated tensions with an inflammatory response, after which the republican press accused the king of purposely inciting the duel.24 The scene in La Caricature illustrated these sentiments. It showed the duel in the Bois de Boulogne along a road marked “royal route.” Behind the victorious

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Figure 2.2.

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“The Invisible Hand,“ La Caricature, 1834.

duelist, two hands emerged from the clouds to nudge him along. La Caricature explained, the newspapers have spoken at length on the occasion of the recent and fatal proceedings, of an invisible hand that, to them, seemed to have controlled a horrible plot. La Caricature has no need to demonstrate the relative likelihood of this fact, but it would fail in its duty if it did not take it upon itself to reproduce, in its way, the physiognomy given by the press to this sad episode. Here is the scene rendered as La Caricature conceives it. Under our pen, as under the plume of our brothers, the invisible hand has retained something vague and indeterminate, something quasi-fantastic, that pushes without the knowledge even of those whom it pushes. These circumstances limit the artist to be a truthful translator.25

As La Caricature said, the image was by no means definitive, but remained “vague” and “quasi-fantastic.” Both of these caricatures seemed to accuse the king, or at least the government, of working secretly against the July Monarchy’s liberal institutions. Indeed, Jo Burr Margadant has shown that these accusatory pictures were not isolated cases, and that in 1834 satire’s imagery grew more violent in response to the harsh government repression in Paris and Lyons. Louis-Philippe

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increasingly appeared to be attacking not just the people’s rights but the people themselves.26 Yet both images were also purposely indeterminate; typical of satire, neither made an unambiguous assault on Louis-Philippe, but remained circumspect in their charges. Satirists wanted to render an accusation about the episode, yet be political only about “the system,” not the king. At trial, arguments over the scenes focused precisely on the ambiguity of what many believed showed the king conspiring to murder. The prosecutor, Partarieu-Lafosse, argued that in the first lithograph and accompanying text “it is impossible not to see that the authors wanted to show the king.”27 In the second, he argued not only that the king was pictured, but that the calumnious scene somehow implicated Louis-Philippe in the recent death. Defense strategy emphasized the satire’s vagueness to argue that the prosecutor was mistaken to think he saw the king in the two incriminating lithographs. The defense attorney, Etienne Blanc, insisted that the man fleeing after having killed the popular press is “the system materialized, the essence of the system submitted to critique and in which the authors of the lithograph call not on popular justice but divine justice. To see in this system a real man, the king, is to attribute to the authors an idea that they did not have.” In other words, defense strategy once again drew clear distinctions between satirists’ intent and satire’s effects. In the second image, they argued, the invisible hand was merely symbolic of political passion that blinded the two men to the fact that, as deputies of France, they should not resolve a political quarrel through a duel to the death. “No one had the idea that the king wanted the death of a deputy!”28 After deliberating only thirty minutes, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty for all defendants. Defending satire’s subterfuges in court continued to offer occasions throughout 1834 to accuse authorities themselves of duplicitous behavior. Defense attorneys, arguing on behalf of their clients, turned the climate of suspicion, characteristic of satire on trial, to their clients’ advantage, and seized every opportunity to expose how the government itself relied on ruse to do business. In a case against La Charivari, which was charged with offending the king in two separate issues, the paper’s director, Philipon, appropriated charges of conspiracy as a weapon against authorities. When issues of Le Charivari were confiscated, he argued that the true motive for the paper’s confiscation lay not in the criminality of the articles but in the signed denunciation made by a French stage actress in the second of the two issues. The articles, entitled “Handbook of the Dauphin, the royal prince . . . , dedicated by a potentate and his heir apparent: follow up to manuals of the Confessor, of the apothecary, of the druggist, and of the re-caner of chairs,” had appeared on September 5th and 8th. The Gazette’s excerpt of the trial record focused on Philipon’s charge that “the articles under attack have been merely the pretext and not the cause of the confiscation.”29

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To prove it, Philipon pointed out that the confiscation order came only on the 8th, even though the first offending article had appeared three days earlier. This suggested that only the second article actually contained questionable material. To cite the parody of the “Handbook” as the reason for the confiscation, authorities had to extend their complaint back to the issue of September 5th, where the first half of the article had appeared. The deputy prosecutor conceded that that was “strange,” but Philipon responded that it was actually quite logical. “I want to show to the jurors that, in principle, the article of September 5th did not appear to be criminal and that it only began to appear so because it had to—[in order] to seize the article of the 8th, the article of the 5th had to be [labeled criminal] also.”30 The defense counsel for Le Charivari seconded Philipon’s claim, and charged the prosecution with targeting Le Charivari and trying to cover that up. During the annual horse races at the Champ de mars, the Gazette reported, “a mare had entered the race under the name of Dejazzet.” The journal had run a mock letter from the well-known actress, Mlle Dejazzet, to an unnamed prince complaining that giving her name to a horse had insulted the actress. Dejazzet took the joke badly, but eventually dropped the charges rather than face the ordeal of court, leaving prosecutors with an embarrassingly fragile case. The lawyer charged that, deprived of the aid of the sole person with some right to complain, the state prosecutor’s case was in a bind. “It was then that the ‘letter of the actress was replaced by the articles being incriminated today.”31 Having accused the state of plotting against the satiric paper, Le Charivari’s defense attorney seized the opportunity to define for the court the significant role of satiric newspapers like Le Charivari in national political culture. He focused on the ambiguous meaning of the satiric mode to claim a role for satire in public discourse that was at once important to politics yet not overtly, or dangerously, political. The Gazette reported, “‘Gentlemen,’ said the lawyer in concluding, ‘the smaller papers are becoming a necessity to our statesmen and provide a happy diversion to political preoccupations; also, a spirit of nationalism has taken them under its protection. . . . ’ ” The defense counselor linked the vitality of political levity to that of the July Monarchy itself: “Mazarin,32 absolute minister of an absolute master, was inclined toward song and did not bother those who sang . . . as long as they paid. ‘You,’ said the lawyer, in addressing the prosecutor, ‘you, the man of a constitutional monarch, have at least the tolerance of Mazarin. Let the facetiousness of Le Charivari pass, respect the liberty of these three statesmen, and in exchange, they will pay.’ ”33 Even though the court had earlier classified the paper’s satire as “political” in nature, the defense continued to insist that the ambiguity arising from satire’s artistic claims—the way satire turned serious matters into a laugh—exempted satire from political prosecution. It

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maintained that the legitimacy of Louis-Philippe’s constitutional monarchy depended on the government’s tolerance of this kind of artistic expression. The court was being forced to address satire’s paradox, the fact that in its silliness it was politically significant. Prosecutors countered that the July Monarchy did indeed defend satirists’ press freedom. After all, “ . . . joking is not prohibited, said one, “and liberty leaves Le Charivari to prove it daily. But there are limits!” In protection of royal authority, they argued that “there is one person against whom jokes are not made. This person is the king, declared inviolable by the constitution.”34 But then, pointing to the legally defined political nature of satire, the prosecutor proclaimed that no one in a free country was above the law, not even jokesters. The prosecutor’s argument for limits to satirists’ right to expression rested on an accepted legitimate principle that all rights have limits. What was unclear was what defined the limits in this case. As we saw in chapter one, satirists and their attorneys had long argued that the right to satiric expression was limited by harm to others when they claimed they had never intended harm in their work. But in this case, the prosecutor was arguing that there was another standard to consider, one that rested on the special nature of the king.

“THERE’S MORE THERE THAN JOKES”: SATIRE’S POLITICAL POWER In pitting freedom of expression against royal inviolability, the prosecutor had cut to the heart of the supreme political problem of the July Monarchy. Called to the throne, which had been arbitrarily declared vacant by a joint declaration of the Chamber of Deputies and the Chamber of Peers, LouisPhilippe was not a legitimate monarch in the traditional French sense of ruling an inherited throne. Yet the notion of the “citizen-king” was an ambiguous alternative. How could one be both a citizen and beyond the law? Louis-Philippe had not been elected, but the Charter had been imposed on him by an elected assembly. The relationship between the king and the people was therefore contractual, and Louis-Philippe was a constitutional monarch limited by the revolutionary doctrine of national sovereignty. The Charter had decreed that the revolutionary tricolor would replace the monarchist white fleur-de-lys as the national flag, creating a symbolic link between the July Monarchy and Revolutionary France. Louis-Philippe’s chosen title, “King of the French,” symbolized his break with traditional French monarchy and linked his reign to the constitutional monarchy of the French Revolution.35 The Charter’s indeterminate language seemed to hold

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patriotic citizens responsible for protecting the new rights it guaranteed, including press freedom. For the government, this meant that the problem with satire was not, as the court prosecution argued, that jokesters were above the law, but rather that, as Sandy Petrey explains, kings, by definition, are so, while citizens are not.36 In part this was a semiotic problem: oppositional symbols like the pear pointed to the way political meanings were constructed, to what Lynn Hunt calls their “fictionality.”37 As Petrey argues, this was potentially threatening because it exposed how the July Monarchy was itself in the process of constructing its own authority, and threatened to derail the whole process.38 But I want to argue that what seemed potentially destabilizing was not only a monarchy aware that its power was a fiction or a monarchy cut adrift from Bourbon history, but also a monarchy constructing its legitimacy—its validity and right to rule—through its ties to a particular vision of French Revolutionary history. The Revolution of 1830 had empowered an Orleanist monarch who wanted to distance himself from the old dynasty and, in this sense, start anew, but 1830 was not the politically clean slate that the July Monarchy claimed it was. On the contrary, the very idea of a clean slate had a specific history in France as a direct reference to the 1789 Revolution, the 1792 Republic, and the 1793 regicide. Those who wished to remake France in 1830 had to overcome the memory of republicanism in the previous revolution. After 1830, republicans, buttressed by their victory at the barricades, had been set to end monarchy altogether and to establish a second French republic, but had yielded to moderates’ push for constitutional monarchy. But the nature of constitutional monarchy had not been resolved definitively in the 1790s and was yet an open question in the 1830s. Constitutional monarchy held potential for both republicans and traditional monarchists, and the struggle to shape the malleable, unsettled, and promising July Monarchy was the most deeply seeded conflict of the decade. Skirmishes between satirists and government officials over conspiracy— over the power to name who was conspiring against the July Revolution, and how—were, in fact, contests over competing visions of the nation. And in this struggle, satire, on trial before the public eye, became a deeply incisive weapon of political culture because, by appealing to public opinion, it insisted on the Revolutionary and republican aspects of the July Monarchy.39 Its impact on politics was unclear, however, because there was no unified republican program in the 1830s, and no consensus on the legacy of the 1789 Revolution or how to continue it in the 1830s.40 Republican clubs had coalesced in opposition to Louis-Philippe’s intolerance of dissent, but, according to Pamela Pilbeam, republicanism meant different things to different people. For some, republicanism meant direct democracy, although for most it meant

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parliamentary government. Some associated republicanism with notions of fraternity. Generally speaking, most republicans held goals of a broadened electorate, economic reform, and universal education, all elements of a state where the law expresses the general will. As heirs to the 1789 Revolution, they saw themselves as “patriots,” that is, as defenders of popular sovereignty and constitutionality. Lacking clear definitions, the ends of liberal critique lay unresolved. Would those who accused the monarchy of killing off liberal institutions embrace insurrection? Egalitarianism? Political repression? These questions loomed large against the fresh memory of the 1830 Revolution. In this constitutional monarchy, where citizens like Philipon were taking responsibility for upholding guaranteed rights, public criticism of the monarchy could be seen as either an act of patriotism or an act of treason (in which case jokes about the king’s demise could be prosecuted as crimes against the state), depending upon how one interpreted the king’s sovereignty. As we see in satirists’ developing relationships with recognized republican organizations, the process of defending satire unified government critics around the goal of alerting the public to Orleanist inadequacies. Publicity was key to satirists’ campaign of ridicule. Prosecuting satire endowed it with new political significance and institutionalized it as something powerful that needed to be controlled. But at the same time, elevating satiric criticism institutionally to the level of potential political threat—to conspiracy—also elevated the importance of public opinion in constitutional government. We can see this especially clearly in the fact that, when Le Charivari’s satirists appeared before the courts, the political education satire provided the public was often the crucial matter to be controlled. The case involving Le Charivari in September 1834, exemplified how prosecutors’ arguments had come to rest on the fear that satire had a real psychological effect and could start something dangerous. “Even if the small papers are a necessity of our age,” cautioned the prosecutor, Partarieu-Lafosse, “there is no need to violate the law, and above all to teach the people a language, pleasant perhaps, but marked by a rude cynicism! You say that you are only making jokes. But watch out, Gentlemen jurors, there is more there than jokes. When one wants to bring a man down, one begins by tarnishing him with ridicule, as does the incriminating article of the revolutionary manual, and then people talk.”41 Talk about what? The reason ridicule was powerful was because it emphasized to the public the contractual nature of government under the “citizenking.” With the nature of constitutional monarchy still an open question in 1830, “bringing a man down” through satire threatened to bring down the existing sociopolitical hierarchy, or at least called it into question. The problem with “people talking” was they might begin to talk about the king in a less reverent way, as they had in the 1790s, or about their own rights in a

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monarchy surrounded by supposedly republican institutions. Thus, courtroom arguments show that, for the government, satire caused harm through the political education it offered the French people.

SATIRE AND THE ISSUE OF THE JURY IN THE FRENCH JUDICIAL SYSTEM Satire also raised concerns about the French judicial system. At the same time as satirists like Philipon were turning the court into political theater, many judicial observers worried that in the interplay of entertainment and justice procedures, truth about real crimes was being lost. Juries were the issue: could ordinary people set aside personal bias and reach truthful verdicts? Those who doubted the efficacy of the jury in the French judicial system charged that juries acquitted a problematically high percentage of defendants, especially those accused of press crimes. To some extent they were right: the jury, used only at the assize court in the 1830s, did acquit a higher percentage of cases than did the correctional tribunals, for example.42 From 1830 to 1841, juries of the assize court produced 244 guilty verdicts, compared to 340 of the correctional tribunal.43 Yet, despite this relative leniency, many saw the jury as crucial to French justice. The jury trial had been demanded by the people in 1789 as an assurance of justice and demonstration of popular sovereignty. The thinking had been that if jurors could see defendants, hear their testimony directly, look into their eyes and scrutinize their gestures, they would be able to see truth about guilt or innocence.44 Satirists presented an interesting challenge to this process because they asked jurors to consider that the truth about the case before them could be found in subterfuge, in satiric performance. And in their defense, they purposely invoked humor to make both political and defense claims. So here was another instance of satirists teaching people to look beyond surface appearances for the truth. The high acquittal rate led critics to call juries incompetent, lenient, and worst of all, impressionable.45 With few rules to limit what evidence could be presented or how, courtroom procedures often grew animated and complex. Adding to the fray, the presiding judge had the right to express his own opinions during the closing summation and instructions to the jury.46 Critics feared that judges’ behavior might influence juries. Transcripts from Philipon’s trials say that judges were laughing along with the defendant. Judging by impression may have troubled opponents of the jury system, but proponents valued juries precisely for their ability to listen to testimony and evaluate defendants according to individual sensibilities. The instruction placed on the wall of the jury chambers in the assize court for the department of the Seine,

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where Philipon had appeared for “Soap Bubbles,” told jurors to “search in the sincerity of their conscience for the impression [my emphasis] that has been made on their justice by the proofs against the accused and the means of defense.47 Impressions were, in fact, at the heart of the jurors’ task. Satirists at Philipon’s papers, La Caricature and Le Charivari, were strong advocates of the jury system. They saw possibilities for legal reform and political progress in jurors’ use of individual conscience, and they looked to juries to act on impressions in ways that would benefit the people. They argued that unlike English counterparts, French juries had not fully realized their mission under the July regime. In an article entitled, “There Are Two Excellent Things in England: the Jury and Flannel,” Le Charivari urged French jurors to take an example from Englishmen who had recently not only acquitted a man accused of murdering a policeman, but also launched a public investigation into police behavior during the uprising in which the death had occurred. The English jury had found police conduct brutal and provocative enough to justify the murder. “Rarely does [the French jury system] render verdicts that do more than absolve the accused, and nearly always [the verdicts] are conceived . . . in a manner that avoids as much as possible expressing even indirect blame against authorities.”48 The article argued that French juries were timid about faulting authorities, and encouraged juries to take the power to influence the government and shape the law. This had been the message of Philipon’s courtroom battle over “Soap Bubbles.” Satirists mocked claims that juries were too emotional to reach reasonable verdicts with character sketches of absurdly emotional jurors, hands over heart and backs bent from the weight of social responsibility they carried.49 Yet at the same time, articles in La Caricature emphasized that jurors were not impartial. Their opinions were the opinions of individuals. “We say that the jury expresses the nation’s opinion, but this is a gross stupidity. The jury only expresses the opinion of the majority of its members.”50 In other words, jurors as individuals had to be swayed, convinced of the truth, which satirists did by putting on a good show. Even liberal deputies, who saw juries as the voice of the nation, worried about the rowdy effects of such a show in the assize court. Louis Marie de Cormenin lamented how each morning, the people “rush in,” they “press each other, they elbow, they jostle, they stand on tiptoes, and look from a distance like a black living mass, which sends forth rude exclamations, stifled cries, coarse jokes.”51 Raving rhetoric, he argued, prevented jurors from doing their duty to a defendant to “question his every feature . . . anxiously scrutinize his answers—his contradictions—his manipulations—his emotions—his smiles—his pale countenance—his chill shudders” in search of the truth.52 Cormenin objected to the presence of the public watching the witnesses, saying that opinions expressed from the audience turned the courtroom into a theater.

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“Is the prisoner there to play a part?” Cormenin asked. “Is the dock a stage?”53 If rhetoric and entertainment influenced justice negatively as Cormenin feared, then Philipon’s mocking defenses, structured as they were by rhetorical flourish, and designed to entertain the court as a central feature of Philipon’s strategy, could only have confirmed satire’s challenge to the justice system. Tension grew around solutions to perceived press problems and the ability of the judicial system to handle them. Deputy Garnier-Pagès, debating the problem in the National Assembly in August 1835, agreed, “the jury . . . is indulgent, it does not make for jurisprudence, or I should say, because it doesn’t interpret the laws, and jurisprudence is about interpreting the laws in such and such a manner, the jury does not convict often enough.” The justice system had to be strengthened to face urgent social problems. 54 If deputies feared that satire thwarted the legal system and that citizen jurors failed to protect society from satire’s conspiracy, satirists only exacerbated their fears in 1835. Undaunted by legal entanglements, on July 26, 1835, Le Charivari published a daily news report about the king escaping death, joking that Louis-Philippe had returned to Paris “with his superb family, without being in any way assassinated along the way.”55 Then on July 27, 1835, the fifth anniversary of the July Revolution, Le Charivari published its issue in red ink, a color associated with blood and bloodshed, and featured an article on the “monarchical catacombs.” The issue contained, as “evidence of the good works which have resulted from the order of things” established in 1830, accounts of disorder and repression, like the Lamarque funeral riot, published in other newspapers since the Revolution, and “a little table of the deceased subjects of his Majesty” who had died at the hands of the regime. The list detailed the uprisings of Lyon and Paris, focusing particularly on the victims of the rue Transnonain, a scene which had been depicted in a famous Daumier lithograph. The civilian death toll had topped 500, with thousands more injured or arrested. Hailed as “victims of public order,” the dead subjects of Louis-Philippe were to serve as “notes for the history of the pacifying system under which we have the honor to die.”56 An accompanying caricature, entitled, “Personification of the sweetest and most humane system,” showed a shadowy Louis-Philippe stepping through a field of cadavers. Officials immediately confiscated the issue and condemned it. Later, with tongue in cheek, the journal’s editors claimed not to know that, according to the Charter, “black ink partook of royal inviolability, that it was the only legal ink, the only constitutional ink.”57 The timing of the jokes could not have been worse. Amid the tension of prosecutions and confiscations, conspiracy fears merged with an actual attempted regicide in 1835. After reviewing troops all morning of July 28th, the king, his sons, and staff rode in their cavalcade down the Boulevard du Temple.58 Near the Jardin Turc, a well-known cafe in the theater district, there was an

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explosion and gunfire hit the royal party, seven of whom had died, while eight suffered wounds, and a bullet grazed the king. One commentator remembered the dramatic event: in a dazzling theatrical display, the king emerged from the fray, waving his plumed hat in the air and shouting triumphantly, “Here I am,” to the crowd of spectators around him.59 The shooter, a man named Fieschi, who was more thug than politico, lacked a well-articulated political agenda, but had acted with two accomplices, Pepin and Morey, who were known members of republican organizations. The fracas prompted a huge police inquest into the republican ranks, which had already been hit hard by intensified police efforts after the legislation of 1834. Fieschi’s mercenary lifestyle reportedly led some to suspect the legitimist party had armed him for the attack.60 Nevertheless, members of La Société des droits de l’homme and many newspaper editors that had been investigated and implicated in 1834 were investigated again, including Louis Desnoyers of Le Charivari. The Fieschi assassination attempt struck a blow at satiric criticism by turning police attention toward anyone whose politics seemed left-leaning or were considered ambiguous, which by 1835, included Philipon, Daumier, and other well-known newspaper satirists. Increasingly, pervasive satire signaled pervasive conspiracy. Police bulletins reported tightened enforcement of press regulations, and reassured the Interior Minister that police were in control of the press, “despite the efforts of the anarchists of Le Reformation, of Le Bon Sens, of Le National, of Le Charivari, of Le Corsaire, and other violent papers trying to agitate the mind.”61 Increasingly, police work involved controlling the violence that seemed to lurk behind certain publications. The prefect’s reports linked newspapers to violent opposition, and showed police identifying themselves as adversaries of the press. According to David Kerr, police issued arrest warrants for Philipon and Desnoyers, but both men evaded arrest and went into hiding.62 Just four days after it occurred, the Fieshi attack was explicitly linked to Le Charivari. An eavesdropping police prefect, kept current by police informants, alerted the procureur general that The 28th of July [the day of the attack] about 11:30 in the morning Mr. Desnoyers, editor of Le Charivari was on the Champs-Elysées, talking with a young sous-lieutenant of the 12th dragoons named Vaillant near the roundabout. Desnoyers said to Vaillant, “I’m going to sleep tonight at your place.” Vaillant responded, “You know that inconveniences me.” “That doesn’t matter,” said the other, “I must go there because something is going to happen that will not permit me to sleep at my house tonight.”63

By August 1st, police had turned the office of Le Charivari upside-down searching for incriminating evidence, and sent a carton of confiscated papers to the prosecutor’s office.

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We can get some idea of how the investigation proceeded from the search warrant that ordered the seizure from Le Charivari’s office of “all papers, writings, prints, correspondence of a suspect nature, arms, munitions, and generally all objects subject to examination.”64 According to the police report, agents searched the offices of Le Charivari to find papers about the journal and to interrogate the managers about their roles in its production. They went to the single-room office and found one person there, Jean François Caron, the paper’s lawyer, who had come simply to read a message; he was, in any case, uninvolved in editing decisions. Noting that Philipon had been out of town for several weeks, agents gathered a box of items, including a quarter kilo of hunting powder, and brought it to the Tribunal of the Department of the Seine, where police interrogated Caron.65 Police claimed to have confiscated the entire documentary contents of the offices of Le Charivari. Leaving no stone unturned, they took lists of subscribers and letters to Desnoyers about future articles. There was correspondence from Philipon, as well as appeals from job seekers, notes on upcoming projects, rough drafts of articles, notes on the publication of portraits of the judges of the April proceedings in La Caricature, a draft of a letter to Philipon on the organization of the journal, and a manuscript for a work of satirical proverbs. Confiscated letters from readers addressed to editors Desnoyers, Altaroche, and Philipon proposed articles, caricatures, songs, and poems for the journal.66 Considering what they found, it is easy to see how police could associate Philipon and his papers with political conspiracies. Among the papers seized at Le Charivari, police found a cache of incriminating documents. A prospectus for a “Biography of the accused of April, their defenders, peers, judges, ministers, and prosecutors” promised to recount the events of April in four issues, complete with lithographic portraits by well-known artists. “All eyes are fixed on the court of peers,” it said, where several men stood accused of trying to enact a new revolution in France. The Minister of Public Works claimed that among them were several leaders of the republican party, “captivating orators, skilled writers”; they have proved in their assemblies, before the tribunals, in newspapers, and in their battles how much they are against the established order of things. “Even locked in prisons, they inspire serious fear in the government.” The pamphlet promised to meet a popular need: “The people would like to know the truth about these insurrections of 1834, where the Public Minister sees a vast plot against the state . . . the people are asking for the facts to be related impartially: they want to know these men designated by the government as leaders of the revolt.”67 It implied that some people doubted official accusations of anti-government plots. In other documents, police learned about ideas for upcoming satires in Le Charivari, including several dealing with the peers who were judging the

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accused satirists, republicans, and workers of April 1834. Punning on the word “pairs,” Philipon proposed, “We are going to give a last name to the peers [pairs], fathers of fear [pères-peurs].” On the difference between the pairs found on roulette tables in public gambling houses and those of the palais du Luxembourg, he offered that gaming pairs might win or lose, but Luxembourg pairs always lose. In any case, Philipon concluded, “Private and public morals cry out for the abolition of these shameful dens.”68 Advertisements were confiscated for a raffle being held to pay the 5000 franc fine of Le Charivari. As added publicity for the event, winners were to receive two lithographs of their choice from among the series “caricatures of public life,” one of twenty-four engravings done for the Association for the Liberty of the press by Grandville, or subscriptions to La Caricature or Le Charivari. Big winners would receive a complete collection of La Caricature, nine volumes valued at 300 francs. The editors made notes on characters to be satirized (the duc de Montbello, the comte de Segur), advertisements for other works (those of Voltaire, for the newly published Voyage Pittoresque en Grande Bretagne par Dupressoir), and correspondence from political prisoners. Police even bothered to take a small notebook of poems and songs: “L’Homme rouge: satire Hebdomadaire,” by Berthaud and Veyret; an anonymous “Complainte; invocation au seigneur; “Couplets hostile to Bugeaud;” and “Complaint on the horrible attack against His Majesty the King Louis-Philippe of the French.” 69 Rifling through confiscated satire, police scrambled for clues to the political scene.70 Whether through their language or the identity of their authors, many of the seized documents linked Le Charivari directly to republicans. For example, one letter from an employee at La Revue Republicaine to Desnoyers reminded the editor of his promise to print an article from the Revue in Le Charivari. Another expressed appreciation for Le Charivari as an inspiration to the author’s own anti-government satire. “Among the writers whom I appreciate most in our time, I have always, according to standards of taste, distinguished the fellow statesmen of Le Charivari.” From these fellow statesmen, the correspondent got the idea for a satirical song called “The Thing Sold,” about a “clever lad” who has “sold his pen” and fills his coffer with state funds while his friend fends off creditors.71 Not surprisingly, conspiracy fears proliferated in the summer of 1835. The prefect of Police, M. Guisquet, described in his reports a new vigilance among authorities watching for suspicious and subversive activities. He feared that the information police received had been somehow manipulated behind the scenes, and old suspicions of the left and right conspiring against the centrist monarchy persisted. The day after the Fieschi attack he wrote, “The republicans have passed the word around to spread all sorts of rumors to shift

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the responsibility for this horrible crime to the carlists.”72 Police monitored information that seemed to present official activities as being somehow conspiratorial: “The republicans, either by fear or by delight, to agitate the workers, are spreading rumors that tomorrow the National Guard and government agents are going to go to various newspapers hostile to the government to pillage them and break their presses.”73 As suspected conspirators, satirists responded to office raids in their customary manner, by ridiculing the attempted regicide and charging the monarchy with contriving conspiracy threats. August issues of La Caricature brimmed over with mockery of the “new horrible attack” that “villains, who, by the way, were impossible to identify,” intended to inflict on the person of the king. They reported that, very happily, “the odious attempt” was detected in time, and people have been arrested by the thousands. To suggest that the entourage of “the imaginary assassins” and all of the stories of attacks had affected the political milieu, La Caricature parodied the 10 commandments: Once per year you will assassinate yourself To ensure that you will live longer.74

If conspiracy fears and police efforts to detect plots had created a political culture that was vigilant against sources of possible subversiveness, satire exposed the way the government used the image of threats against it to shore up its power. Therein lay one of satire’s chief threats to political stability: it revealed government efforts to centralize monarchical authority. For the regime, self-protection seemed to justify extending the power of the monarchy, but government officials wanted this to happen less contentiously.

SATIRE AND THE NEW LAWS, 1835 TO 1840 AND BEYOND In creating the September Laws, the government used the threat of conspiracy, through both satire and assassination attempts, to suppress opposition, name enemies of the state, and strengthen its own authority. In August, just weeks before they were promulgated, La Caricature reported that Justice Minister Persil himself had said that, in regard to the satiric press, legislation was needed “to put the government in a position to resist this torrent of immorality and sedition.”75 Debating the laws, the Minister had stated flatly that “the government is not going to tolerate the republican or carlist press,” and that the new law would fail to achieve its goal if, after its promulgation, “any press other than that of the constitutional monarchy,” whether overtly oppositional or not, “could circulate freely.”76

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The September Laws of 1835 became the core of repressive measures being established by the government to control public criticism. In addition to regulating the caution money of the press, it enumerated a series of new crimes aimed at the newspapers in cases involving accusations of offense to the king, such as faulting the king in times of government attack, assaults on the government established by the Charter, or public acts of adherence to all other forms of government. With satirists prudently turning away from political commentary, officials perhaps anticipated that the September Laws would diminish political violations and raise the number of press convictions for breaking the laws regarding publication (caution money and the like). But surprisingly prosecutions for defamation also shot up. Where the first half of the decade had seen only 85 cases of press violations prosecuted, between 1835 and 1841 there were 250.77 The sets of legislation in April 1834 and September 1835 extended government surveillance and control of political culture enormously by making it possible to condemn both political associations and the press that spread their ideas and doctrines. The July government could now pursue two avenues of recourse against perceived opponents of the regime. Under these laws, 2318 people were charged with some form of government opposition.78 The legislative rally had a huge effect on political culture. Newspapers no longer published details of trials. Satirists, printers, bookstores, newspaper vendors on the streets, cabaret owners at whose places the republican-minded gathered, cabaret performers, and street singers all went underground or were affected in some way by the crackdown on criticism. After the new censorship of September 1835, satire turned its criticism away from the overtly political toward criticism of the society of the bourgeois monarchy that benefited from the lack of press freedom and political critique. La Caricature folded because it could not survive its lithographs having to pass the censor each week. Le Charivari continued in a new vein of social criticism and enjoyed increased sales. In general, republican associations and their sympathizers became more clandestine after 1835. The law prohibited open criticism of the government, and censors directed special attention to images that questioned the regime’s dubious legitimacy. Nervous censors prohibited an average of about fifty drawings annually during the tense period of 1835 to 1837, compared to about twenty-eight annually during the calmer years after 1840. From 1835 to 1848, Le Charivari was either the sole existing caricature journal or one of only two or three.79 A new journal, La Caricature française, appeared in London in 1836. Filled with drawings from Philipon’s papers, the journal named the July Monarchy as murderers of French satiric criticism, “killed under the savage laws of intimidation” that served the July regime.80 Where satire once attacked the

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French government directly, it now targeted the social inequality, corruption, and pomp over which it ruled.81 The turn away from political satire took place against a background of escalating regicide attempts and uprisings. From 1835 to 1840, four serious attempts were made on the life of the king.82 After each, police rounded up known political individuals and confiscated “suspicious” materials. As assassination attempts made police especially keen to find clandestine information, investigations focused heavily on republican societies.83 Even though political satire had given way largely to social ridicule, authorities remained vigilant in the search for conspiracy in satire. The prefect of police reported in 1837 that “the public spirit has been uneasy and under the influence of the bad rumors that the press, more hostile than ever, never ceases spreading.” Economic downturn in Paris was “exploited assiduously by the forces of opposition, the republicans, the carlists, and the journalists who advocate the greatest tragedies in spreading a thousand new absurdities.”84 With most political journals tamed or out of business altogether, censors stepped up surveillance of social satire in boulevard theaters. Social satire made a laughing-stock of moral order under the bourgeois monarchy and threatened the July Monarchy’s image.85 Agents reported to the Interior Minister on the cancan and other “obscene” dances imitating orangutans. The prefect of police regularly linked anxiety in the city to a combined republicanlegitimist political conspiracy and satire: “The enemy parties are on a great mission to exploit this disposition by all means possible. The legitimists are very active and neglect no means to create embarrassment for the government. They recruit by all means possible and exploit the republicans that they stir up.” Referring to recent legal wrangling, he added that “the acquittal of Le Charivari has been a triumph for the republicans and, in a word, for all the enemies of the government.”86 Government officials continued to use satire to sound alarms against political factions that they feared were united in disorder and malfeasance. The author of the satiric Physiologie de la poire, Peytel, who had joked years earlier about chopping the nation’s pear into fruit salad (see chapter one), was sentenced to death for killing his wife and house servant. Though Peytel’s guilt was never properly proven, the affair perpetuated an image of some association of the world of satire with murder and regicide. Peytel’s most vocal advocate, Balzac, had written articles for La Caricature and several satiric novels and plays, and had once served as the paper’s editor; Peytel had penned a violent satire calling for regicide; and now not only Balzac, but the well-known satirist, Gavarni, visited Peytel in prison and appealed on his behalf for clemency to the Ministry of Justice. Did Peytel’s history as the author of a satire about regicide make this legally irregular conviction

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possible by giving him a reputation for duplicity?87 When officials rejected calls for an appeal, Peytel was executed. Beyond the world of satirists, administrative officials, and police, others noted and commented on a pattern of escalation in the way police and authorities addressed satire and on satire’s growing power with its readers. In his retrospective, “Quelques caricaturistes français,” Charles Baudelaire looked back at the marked changes under the July Monarchy, describing “the stubborn persistence of legal prosecution, the hardening of the government’s attitude” toward political satire.”88 The increasing influence of satiric papers had captured public attention. In 1832, the newspaper, Le Corsaire, commented, “La Caricature grows larger under persecution; it continues its witty and vigorous exploitation, its parading pillory puts on paper all the resentments of public opinion. Philipon and Grandville formulate sarcasm with an annoying truthfulness for those who are attached to this iron collar of mockery and indignation. . . . This paper is becoming popular; it has now taken the floor in the cafes.”89 That same year, Le Temps commented similarly on satire’s effect on political culture; referring to La Caricature’s images it stated that “this is how the arts contribute to progress and how satire is useful to morals.”90 Others observed how satire was teaching audiences to see differently and in new ways. In 1832, shortly after Philipon’s famous courtroom sketches of Louis-Philippe as a pear, German poet Heinrich Heine said of the monarch that “the halo has gone from his head, which his enemies can now see only as the form of a pear.”91 The escalation of policing and response to satire’s remarkable popularity in the 1830s stand apart from those of the 1820s. Censorship under the Restoration monarchy decisively prohibited virtually all overtly political satire. According to Robert Goldstein, during the reign of the ultraconservative Charles X, “it became impossible to publish drawings which were viewed as posing direct political threats, such as those clearly ridiculing the monarchy, glorifying Napoleon, or threatening France’s diplomatic relations with other countries.”92 Similar attitudes prevailed about written satire. Of course, satire by no means disappeared in the 1820s. As Sheryl Kroen shows, performances of Moliere’s Tartuffe played to great political effect throughout the decade.93 But the declaration of press freedom in 1830 changed the rules for imposing censorship. In the context of a free press and the regime’s desire to court public opinion, the July Monarchy was more obliged to justify its prohibitions. Thus, over the next five years, authorities struggled over whether satire would be censored and why. This involved ever increasing surveillance, confiscations, and prosecutions, and by 1835, the government’s view that satire posed a political threat to the nation prevailed. The September Laws quashed political satire. Not only did

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La Caricature fold, but by 1840, satire was so heavily monitored that the government decided not even to allow into the country the English satire, Punch.94 “There was virtually no reference to French politics in Le Charivari from 1835 until the 1848 Revolution.”95 After the 1848 Revolution, the new Republic again abolished censorship. The new freedom of expression allowed satirists to create a record number of new papers: eight in the first year alone, as opposed to just one or two that had existed at any given time from 1835 to 1848. The public had learned their value. Knowledge of satire’s efficacy reached beyond bourgeois audiences to France’s working class. In April 1848, socialist leader Louis Blanc, who had opposed Louis-Philippe and now sat on the Republican governing council, wrote to Le Charivari that he had had to “intervene strongly with many workers, who in response to an article directed against me wished to break the presses of Le Charivari.” He explained that “the people are indignant to see the same sarcasm which was launched only two months ago against royalty as rewards for those republicans whose zeal in serving the interests of all has only been crushing fatigue and frightful perils.”96 With satire’s political utility so widely recognized, it is no surprise that after the demise of the Republic and return of monarchy in 1852, Napoleon III moved quickly to silence satiric criticism. The law of 1852 reinstated the laws of September 1835, but with the additional requirement of prior approval of any living subjects of political caricature. The experiences of the July Monarchy with satire and censorship had taught important lessons in controlling public opposition, and the new patterns of policing that emerged in the 1830s set the course for subsequent regimes. As expected, the new laws worked. Goldstein reports that almost no political or social caricature appeared for the fifteen years following 1852, and the number of prints forbidden exceeded even that of 1835 to 1848.97 The distinctive way that police and authorities discussed and responded to satire in the 1830s suggests their mounting concern for satire’s effects on readers and viewers. Occasionally, satirists openly acknowledged their efforts to school the public in political opposition, precisely what administrators feared would further destabilize the government. Philipon, for example, ended his written commentaries on his political caricatures with “Voyez . . . voyez . . . voyez,” calling on his readers to see truth in satire and act on it, to form political opinions and judge the acceptability of their government. His call implied that satire’s language of ridicule placed readers on a par with the administration in political debate and urged them to find their political voice. It suggested that, despite their exclusion from any recognized political role in government, readers should see themselves not as political inferiors, but as legitimate political actors.

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This new way of seeing politics clearly took hold. Later, in his memoirs, caricaturist Charles Gilbert-Martin said that using subterfuge and political allusions in his satire at the end of the Second Empire had worked because, over the years, “tyranny had habituated the public to understand the halfword, to read between the lines, to seize in flight the intention dissimulated in the arrangement of a sketch.”98 While Gilbert-Martin is talking about a later period, I believe that this education in “reading between the lines” and looking beyond superficial appearances for political truths began earlier, under the July Monarchy, when satiric criticism reached its height of political influence, targeting first political matters, then the social world that sustained them. While I have found no direct statements of this from actual readers, no “smoking gun” evidence,” the way that the government responded to satire with escalating confiscations, closer analysis of its contents and mechanisms, new political definitions, evolving legal arguments about its harm, links to political conspiracy, and ultimately draconian legislation to stop it altogether suggests more than government paranoia; it suggests real fear about a changing public, perhaps one that had learned to think like citizens, as satirists claimed.

CONCLUSION Philipon’s politics evolved and grew more radical over the course of the decade as events deepened his opposition to the regime. His early work in La Caricature faulted the king for violating the constitution and for political opportunism (see “Soap Bubbles” and “Replastering”), and the ministers and deputies for furthering the hypocrisy of his constitutional government, but did not openly advocate replacing the monarchy with a republic. Whether intentionally vague on this point or not, Philipon’s early work left room for legitimists as well as republicans to appreciate its opposition to LouisPhilippe’s juste milieu and to buy his newspapers. But the vigorous battles with censors in 1831, time spent in St. Pélagie with dedicated republicans, and increasing financial need brought Philipon to republicanism and politicized his newspapers. For many, including Philipon, the uprising surrounding the funeral of republican general Lamarque was a galvanizing moment, as the government’s trickery and repressive measures belied the July regime’s claims to openness and constitutionality. Philipon continued to use the language of the absurd to target the political absurdities he saw around him, but now with a clear political vector. Yet by 1840, both Philipon and Aubert were no longer perceived by the government to threaten disorder. When Aubert applied for a license to open a book shop, the police prefect reported to the Interior Minister

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that, regarding moral behavior, Aubert “had generally acquired a good reputation.” As for his political opinions, “those have been known for a long time to be republican,” although they were said only to reflect those of his brother-in-law and associate, Philipon. However, there had been “a great improvement in the conduct of M. Philipon” and consequently in that of Aubert. The prefect wondered whether this constituted a “sincere turn toward more moderate opinions” or perhaps a reaction to financial losses and embarrassments suffered by the Maison Aubert publishing house. In any case, the activities of Aubert and Philipon seemed by 1840 “to concentrate on commercial operations completely disengaged from politics.” The September Laws had apparently done their job where Philipon and Aubert were concerned. Their license approved, however, Aubert and Philipon were still under surveillance in 1840, despite the change in their political activities.99 If satiric criticism remained a potential threat, the government seemed to believe that changes in policing and adjudication made it strong enough to contain outbursts of ridicule. The definition of satire as conspiratorial was repeatedly confirmed through the mechanisms of searches, confiscations, and trials from 1834 to 1840. Police found it difficult to interpret satire reliably, so increasingly all satire discovered in searches was confiscated and marked for special scrutiny as potentially harmful to the state. Thus, police and legislators addressed satire in the 1830s ultimately by preventing it; its meaning was simply too slippery to control otherwise. The legislation to control satire had multiple effects, especially after 1834. It led satirists to closer ties with republican associations in an effort to pay fines and other expenses caused by the new laws. Police also created a sense of satire as politically dangerous by seeing connections between political satire and high crimes, including regicide. Political satire declined as many artists and writers turned their attention away from thorny political topics, which were legally off limits after 1835, to mock instead the society that sustained so many political absurdities. It is to social satire on stage and in print that we turn next.

NOTES 1. ANCC 743 dr. Blondeau. The police report offers no information about why Blondeau was suspected initially. 2. ANCC 743 dr. Blondeau. 3. “Trois lithographies satiriques saisiés chez Blondeau...faisant allusion à la collusion entre certains éléments légitimistes et républicains sous la monarchie de juillet.” Police report, ANCC 734. no. 80.

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4. Pilbeam, Republicanism in Nineteenth-Century France, 126; Collingham, The July Monarchy, 166; and Donavan, “Magistrates and Juries in France,” 388–389. 5. AN CC 743 dr. Blondeau. 6. Elsewhere, agents took from the suspect, Valentin Duclos, for example, a red cotton phrygian bonnet and “Tisiphone, satire populaire” by the well-known satirist Louis Bastide, as well as two satiric lithographs from Le Charivari, and several other incriminating articles, including a notebook of political writings, a song called “Le Proletaire,” an 1838 convocation of L’Assemblée générale des actionnaires du socialisme, and an extract of L’intelligence, journal de la reforme sociale. Authorities combined satiric and oppositional material as evidence and, in 1840, Duclos was sentenced to ten years in prison and life under perpetual government surveillance. Duclos was tried along with François Piefort, a carpenter, from whose house police had confiscated forty-two documents, among them Peytel’s Physiologie de la Poire. He, too, got ten years prison and perpetual surveillance. AN CC 729.n.473. 7. For example, the printer, Jean-Baptiste Grossetête, had been given six months in prison for incitement to hatred and scorn of the government publishing the satiric newspaper, Mayeux, in 1832. Gabriel-André Dentu was sentenced to six months in prison by the assize court on February 5, 1833, for having printed Les Cancans. AN F18.1837; AN F18.1754. 8. In a typical case, Louis-Etienne Herhan was charged with violating the stamp laws for printing 6000 copies of the satiric paper, Les Cancans ressuscites. AN CC 612–618. 9. In every case I examined where satires were listed among confiscated papers, satires were always signaled for special police attention. 10. AN CC 605. dr.1.no. 178. 11. Cancans fletrissans, Cancans inflexibles, Cancan persécutés, Cancans courtisans, etc. AN CC 605.dr.1 no. 184. 12. AN CC 582.dr4 Cour des Pairs estrait des minutes deposées au greffe, December 28, 1835. 13. AN CC 617.dr 3. 14. AN CC 582.dr 4. 15. AN CC 582.dr4 Cour des Pairs estrait des minutes deposées au greffe, December 28, 1835. 16. Gabriel Perreux, Au temps des sociétés secretes. La propaganda républicaine au debut de la monarchie de juillet (Paris: Hachette, 1931), 58–67. 17. AN CC 582.dr4. 18. Kerr, Caricature, 53. 19. AN CC 597.dr1.no.13. 20. AN F7.6783.dr4 April 2, 1834. 21. La Gazette des tribunaux, April 5, 1834. 22. La Caricature, February 13, 1834. 23. La Caricature, February 13, 1834. Bugeaud, the victorious deputy in this duel, commanded Blaye during the imprisonment of the duchesse de Berry, the rebellion leader and mother of the legitimist pretender to the throne. (See chapter

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four, “Impostors.”) The insult to Bugeaud had come from a legitimist colleague in the Chamber of Deputies who referred to Bugeaud’s “dishonorable” role in that affair. The king’s face appears behind that of Bugeaud in the caricature because of this link to the affair of the duchess. One of the duc d’Orléans’ personal attendants served as Bugeaud’s second in the duel. My thanks to Jo Burr Margadant for providing the political context of this image. On the duchesse de Berry, see Margadant, “The Duchesse de Berry and Royalist Political Culture in Post-Revolutionary France,” History Workshop Journal 43 (1997): 23–52. On satire and dueling in the context of street politics, see Robert Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 24. For coverage of the duel, see Kerr, Caricature, 109, note 8. 25. La Caricature, February 13, 1834. 26. Margadant, “Gender, Vice, and the Political Imaginary in Postrevolutionary France: Reinterpreting the Failure of the July Monarchy, 1830–1848,” The American Historical Review December 1999, 1460–1496. 27. La Gazette des tribunaux, April 16, 1834. 28. La Gazette des tribunaux, April 16, 1834. 29. La Gazette des tribunaux, January 15, 1835. 30. La Gazette des tribunaux, January 15, 1835. 31. La Gazette des tribunaux, January 15, 1835. 32. Cardinal Jules Mazarin (1602–1661), royal chancellor under Louis XIV who rose to the height of French government. Known for his ruthless statecraft. At his death, he left the largest private fortune ever amassed by a French citizen. 33. La Gazette des tribunaux, January 15, 1834. 34. Le Charivari, “Affaire Dejazzet,” September, 1834. 35. Edgar Leon Newman, ed. Historical Dictionary of France from the 1815 Restoration to the Second Empire. (NY: Greenwood Press, 1987), “Charter of 1830;” F. M. Anderson, The Constitution and Other Select Documents Illustrative of the History of France, 1789–1901, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis, 1904). 36. Sandy Petrey, “Pears in History” Representations 35 (Summer 1991): 52–71. 37. Lynn Hunt, “Hercules and the Radical Image in the French Revolution” in The French Revolution and Intellectual History, ed. by Jack R. Censer. (Chicago: The Dorsey Press, 1989), 166–185; and Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 38. See Petrey, “Pears in History,” Representations. 39. To be sure, there were right-wing satirists at work in the 1830s. Their work, however, never enjoyed anything near the publicity of Le Charivari or La Caricature, nor did their press crimes generate the same sensational coverage. With the fall of the Duchess de Berry in 1833, legitimism declined as a viable force in July Monarchy politics. See my chapter four below. 40. See Pilbeam, Republicanism in Nineteenth-Century France, 93–119. 41. Le Charivari, September 5, 1834. 42. Philipon and other satirists appeared before the assize court, the only court in the French judicial system to try cases by jury. The prosecution was always conducted

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by a procureur-general, avocat-general, or their subordinates. These prosecutors formed an official legal class called gens du parquet, and were the salaried officers of the crown. On the assize court on the jury debate, see James M. Donovan, “Magistrates and Juries in France, 1791 to 1952.” French Historical Studies vol. 22 no. 3 (Summer 1999): 379–420; Frederic R. Courdert, “French Criminal Procedure, “Yale Law Journal 19 (1910): 326–340; James W. Garner, “Criminal Procedure in France,” Yale Law Journal 25 (1916): 255–284; Jean Cruppi, La cour d’assises (Paris: 1898); Adhemar Esmein, A History of Continental Criminal Procedure with Special Reference to France (New York: 1968); Bernard Schnapper, “Le jury français aux XIX et XXème siècles,” in The Jury in England, France and Germany, 1700–1900, edited by Antonio Padoa Schioppa (Berlin: Duncker u. Humblot, 1987): 165–240; and Pierre Lecocq and Joel Bourgeois, “Le jury et les process de presse,” in Les destinées du jury criminal, edited by Renée Martinage and Jean Pierre Royer (Paris, 1990): 203–234. From 1825 to 1831, juries in the assize court, the court in which Philipon appeared, acquitted 40 percent of all defendants (compared, for example, to a current rate of 18 percent in the American federal system), even though French defendants had been through two levels of magistrates before trial to determine that a felony trial was warranted. In French courts only eight of twelve jurors were required for conviction; the number was reduced to 7 in 1832, but returned to 8 in 1835. Donovan, “Magistrates and Juries in France, 1791 to 1952,” 379–380. 43. Lecocq and Bourgeois, “Le jury et les procès de presse,” 212. 44. Donovan, “Magistrates and Juries in France,” 379–380. 45. Donovan, “Magistrates and Juries in France,” 381–383. 46. Henri Berr, “Ce qu’est le jury criminel ce qu’il devrait être: notes et réflexions d’un juré,” Revue Politique et Parlementaire LIII (Sept. 1907): 487–491. Quoted in James M. Donovan, “Justice Unblind: The Juries and the Criminal Classes in France, 1825 to 1914” Journal of Social History 15 no. 1 (Fall 1981): 90. 47. Donovan, “Justice Unblind,” 90. 48. Le Charivari, May 25, 1833. 49. See La Caricature, June 19, 1834. 50. Le Charivari, September 25, 1833. 51. Louis Marie de la Haye vicomte de Cormenin, “The Cour d’assise,” in Pictures of the French: A series of literary and graphic delineations of French character by Jules Janin, Balzac, Cormenin, edited by L. Curmer. (London: Wm. S. Orr and Co., 1840), 133. 52. Cormenin, “The Cour d’assise,” 135. 53. Cormenin, “The Cour d’assise,” 129. 54. Archives parlementaires, v. 98, 631–632. 55. Quoted in Archives parlementaires, v. 98, 618. 56. Quoted in Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature, 149. 57. Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature. 58. On the boulevard theaters, see my chapter three below. 59. Georges Cain, Anciens théâtres de Paris (Paris: Fasquelles, 1906), 59–60. Quoted in Baldick, Lemaître, 141.

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60. Jeannine Charon-Bordas, Cour des pairs proces politiques, t. III: “La Monarchie de Juillet 1835 à 48,” (Paris, Archives nationales, 1984). 61. AN F7.3888 Bulletin de Paris, August 24, 1835. 62. Kerr, Caricature, 115. 63. AN CC 678.dr31. 64. AN CC 678.dr31. 65. AN CC 678.dr31. 66. ANCC 696. 67. ANCC 696. 68. ANCC 696. 69. ANCC 696. 70. In addition to papers from Le Charivari, police confiscated from Victor Bohain, editor of the well-known newspaper, Le Figaro, and former prefect Eugene Briffault, a man of letters by 1835, thirteen papers they thought were politically relevant, signaled for attention among them 55e satire, by Louis Bastide. Among the various papers, manuscripts, and prints seized at the home of Beury and Leon Bourla in the quartier de la Porte Saint Martin were the satires, Litanies of saints of the ministries and of France under the Juste milieu, a “verse addressed to the police of the juste milieu and chief bureaucrats in the minesteries, and an “epistle to a pear, December 1831.” AN CC 678.dr5no35; Musée de l’histoire de France AE.V.73.91. 71. AN CC 696 “Charivari: Lettres à répondre.” 72. AN F7.3888 Bulletins de Paris, July 29, 1835. 73. NAN F7.3888 Bulletins de Paris, August 4, 1835. 74. La Caricature, August 16 and 23, 1835. 75. La Caricature, August 23, 1835. 76. Quoted in Ledré, La presse, 168. 77. AN BB 18 1388, dr.1214. See Ledré, La presse, 232, note 83. 78. Ledré, La presse, 232. 79. Goldstein, Censorship, 154–156. 80. La Caricature française prospectus, March 1836, discussed in John GrandCarteret, Les moeurs et la caricature en France, (Librairie illustrée, 1888), 204, 562; cited by Goldstein, Censorship. 81. See my chapter three below. 82. Those of July 28, 1835, by Fieschi, Pepin, and Morey; June 25, 1836, in the Tuileries by Louis Alibaud; the riotous “attack on state security” of May 12 and 13, 1839, an insurrectional attempt to overthrow the monarchical government and to install a republic; and the assassination attempt of October 15, 1840, by Darmes. 83. The Paris prefect noted “This morning I arrested 80 individuals all part of the Republican faction who, since the crime of Alibaud, have distinguished themselves by the violence of their insurrectional language, by the frightful threats against the king’s days, by projects of assassination and arson.” AN F7.3888. Bulletin de Paris, July 23, 1836. 84. AN F7.3889 March 24, 1837. 85. See my chapter three, “Fraud,” on satiric criticism and middle-class social identity.

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86. ANF7.3889 Bulletin de Paris, March 15, 1837. 87. In September 1839, the Gazette des tribunaux published a letter from Balzac defending his colleague to the journal’s readers. After recounting their early work together on the journal, le Voleur, Balzac argued that Peytel had been condemned by a court that was uninterested in hard evidence of guilt and that had denied Peytel’s right to speak in his own defense. Against Peytel the court had neither incontestable facts nor reliable witnesses, and Balzac asked readers to consider that if the accusation could not be proven, then was the unsupported charge not offensive to the public? He drew attention to the rigors of the law. For justice to prevail, he reasoned, only those who had been properly condemned in a correctional Tribunal could be called criminals. He charged that by accusing Peytel with impunity, the judicial system had not only defamed his colleague but had made a sport of wielding the right to accuse, a right which individuals do not have. Debate dragged on, and the following week the press was still talking about the affair. 88. Charles Baudelaire, “Quelques caricaturists français” Le Present (1 and 15 October, 1857), 555. The essay later appeared in the more important review, “l’Artiste,” in 1858. 89. Le Corsaire April 1, 1832. Quoted in Kerr, Caricature and French Political Culture, 84. 90. 17 August 1832. Quoted in Kerr, Caricature and French Political Culture, 171, note 56. 91. Heine, de la France (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1857), 113. 92. Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature, 111. 93. Kroen, Politics and Theater: The Crisis of Legitimacy in Restoration France. 94. Kerr, Caricature and French Political Culture, 211. 95. Bechtel, Freedom of the Press: Philipon versus Louis-Philippe, 40. 96. Le Charivari, April 20, 1848. Quoted in Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature, 171. 97. Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature, 180. 98. Charles Gilbert-Martin, Le Don Quichotte, June 4, 1887. 99. AN F18.1728 August 19, 1841.

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Fraud

In 1834, the most famous satiric play of the decade, Robert Macaire, opened at the dingy Folies-dramatiques theater on Paris’s infamous Boulevard du Crime. All of the leading critics interpreted Robert Macaire as a representation of bourgeois society under the July Monarchy. Arsene Houssaye, for example, musing who “Macaire” might be, wrote “he is you, me, everybody—even the king; indeed, I am very much afraid that in him, Frédérick [Lemaître, the actor who played Macaire] has painted the portrait of his age.”1 The portrait was hardly flattering to France’s leaders and notables. The conservative statesman Chateaubriand is quoted as saying that “Robert Macaire’s vulgar taunt—’You old humbug!’—is addressed to everybody in France: to the king who grants the Charter and the minister who violates it; to all those who have betrayed their faith and their principles since the Revolution; to old M. de Tallyrand and young M. Thiers: to the man who speaks from the tribunal and the man who preaches from the pulpit—for neither believes what he is saying.”2 Robert Macaire charged that France’s political and religious figures, responsible for national justice and morality, were hypocrites. In this satirical critique of the July regime, the rot reached right to the top. Louis-Philippe, his constitution, and his administrators ruled over a corrupt society, and like bourgeois businessmen, they had sold out the political vision of 1830 to make their fortunes. In the world of Robert Macaire, the liberal political rhetoric of the July Revolution was a sham, and those who spoke of social and political virtue were frauds. This chapter looks at the role of satirists’ stage renderings of commercial society and the bourgeoisie in middle-class identity. When censorship eased after the 1830 Revolution, in theaters as well as in print, satires of social 85

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types, like Robert Macaire’s version of the bourgeois entrepreneur, burst onto the French cultural scene as the main way for the growing middle class to turn a critical eye on itself. Throughout the 1830s, scores of satiric characters packed the dozen or so theaters of Paris’s Boulevard de Temple and filled the pages of new satire-oriented newspapers. Upright audiences flocked from posh society theaters to seedier venues to laugh at themselves as uproariously funny. They joined (and sometimes crowded out) working-class patrons to praise satire’s cutting commentary on life in the July Monarchy. Bourgeois viewers could not get enough of themselves as sneaky stockjobbers or overblown consumers, and gazing at themselves in the fun-house vision of satire became a thoroughly middle-class experience. Satire in theaters and newspapers grew out of popular traditions and language as the way to point a finger at corruption and lack of virtue thought to be rampant in the “juste milieu,” Louis-Philippe’s attempt at political balance between monarchist tradition and republican progressiveness. Satires yielded definite aesthetic “types” usually attached to a particular politician or well-known entrepreneur. Balzac’s stage-swindler, “Vautrin,” for example, performed criticism central to developing media and culture of the middle class.3 It was a vision of materialism run amok and of society turned askew that satiric stage characters like “Vautrin” and “Robert Macaire” captured. The 1830s have often been seen as a decade plagued by social ills. Tocqueville, among many others, commented on apparently growing social problems stemming from material greed and waning religious faith.4 The public and police grew more vigilant and mindful of crime. Satirists commented on these issues with farcical types that stripped middle-class figures of a sense of balance and showed the July Monarchy’s much vaunted mix of monarchist and republican ideas to be out of focus and ridiculous. They charged the king, the middle class, liberal pretenders, consumers of satire, and everyone in this regime with misrepresenting themselves. Using satire to identify such fraud resulted in complex processes of class formation and political practice that were based upon self-criticism, and I want to analyze here how, in seemingly paradoxical ways during the 1830s, the satiric gaze on bourgeois society became simultaneously a critique of middle-class life and a nexus of it. Satire had democratizing potential in the 1830s because it was a mode of political criticism that was potentially open to all, but its democratizing force was not unlimited. Theater satire performed in workingclass and popular venues seemed widely accessible, but in practice it spoke to socially-mobile, middling sorts and worked to call its object—a middle-class cohort—into being. Analyzing satiric theater reveals the degree to which bourgeois society came to be defined by a function of criticism that became one of the elements of what might be called republican liberalism in the 1830s.

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Robert Macaire debuted in 1834, a year before the September Laws outlawed political criticism. After 1835, stage satirists, like those who worked in print, turned to social satire, trading mockery of the king for ridicule of the society that supported his reign. Censors repoliticized theater’s social satire, however, by seeing it as an attack on Louis-Philippe. On stage, plays, too, like Balzac’s Vautrin, linked social criticism to high politics by seeming to shift from targeting society to targeting the king and back again. Robert Macaire and Vautrin show us that, examined through the lens of stage satire, what has looked like a time of depoliticization can be seen more clearly as a moment of intense political maneuvering with radical implications for the republican ethos of the 1840s. The chapter begins by setting the stage, outlining satire’s social context of industrialization and class formation under the July Monarchy, then narrowing the focus to satire’s theatrical context. Satire was part of larger cultural efforts to adjust to market society, and the chapter examines how particular satiric works, like Robert Macaire, assumed importance as cultural artifacts that defined new codes of middle-class behavior. Over time, the concerns of industrial society, with its increasingly complex class relations and challenges to traditional ideas of virtue, prompted changes in how theater portrayed questions of morality. Satire played the key role in what has been called the “embourgeoisment” of popular theater, the unexpected interest of wealthy and entrepreneurial, but politically disenfranchised, people in mockery of themselves. The chapter analyzes why this occurred and what it meant socially and politically. Satire’s popularity with the very people it targeted suggests that criticism became a defining feature of middle-class identity, a feature that highlighted the promise of mobility embedded in satire of society and politics. The chapter thus situates satire in the context of bourgeois efforts at self-definition. Satire attracted attention from censors in no small measure because of its implied potential for social and political change. The chapter delves into censors’ evolving concerns about satire and how, by the end of the decade, they came to include expanded fears of harm, this time to France’s economic institutions; satire taught audiences to see doubly against fraudulent social and political transactions, and censors did not like it. Finally, the chapter ends with a brief analysis of the impact on the satiric message of the media in which satire appeared—the stage and print that shadowed non-satiric, “sober” theater and journalism. The focus throughout is on two characters that dominated stage satire in the 1830s, “Robert Macaire” and “Vautrin.”5 Robert Macaire exemplified the cross-fertilization of press and stage characters that flourished in the 1830s, mocking politics and society with his cynicism and trickery. While Macaire brought new audiences to satire, Vautrin turned satire to new directions by the decade’s end, giving bourgeois audiences a new vision of life in the juste milieu.

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SATIRE’S SOCIAL CONTEXT: INDUSTRIALIZATION AND THE MIDDLE CLASS The satire of “Robert Macaire” and “Vautrin” took shape in a context of intense social and economic change that shaped the world of the July Monarchy. It was during the 1830s that France really began to experience the social effects of industrialization. Factory-based industry took root and created an expansive textile industry. With new industry, railroads came to crisscross the country during Louis-Philippe’s reign. France was governed by a wealthy, landowning elite, the country’s wealthiest bankers, industrialists, lawyers, and a few intellectuals. The right to vote was restricted to this tiny subset of the population. Beneath this haute bourgeoisie was a range of middling types, including notaries, doctors, factory owners, merchants, and small landowners, many of whom had benefited from new industry and technology. The Parisian bourgeoisie ranged from elite financiers to successful merchants, to small retailers and functionaries. Conflicting interests divided the heterogeneous society. Protectionist industries, for example, such as the coal industry, opposed free trade industries, such as the wine industry, that competed in international markets. An industrially advanced northwest region clashed with a stagnant southwest. Given this complex fragmentation, bourgeois status became to no small degree a matter of manners and education. 6 Although cultural lines between artisans and urban workers blurred at the lower end of this social category, this diverse group was unified by certain social practices. For example professionals and entrepreneurs tended to create family businesses, make conservative investments and pursue higher education. Under the July Monarchy, bourgeois families set themselves apart socially and culturally from laborers and aristocrats by training their sons for careers in state administration, teaching, business, and the law. They decorated their homes with consumer goods that announced their social position and style of living. Such cultural practices worked to unify and define this internally disparate group.7 As it grew increasingly aware of its role in sustaining French industrial society, this population also grew increasingly resentful of its exclusion from politics under the July Monarchy. The small expansion of the franchise in 1830 (see chapter one) had left it without a political voice. Sandwiched between the upper reaches of the bourgeoisie, which had the vote, and the ranks of laboring classes, which expressed a political will in strikes and popular demonstrations, the politically disenfranchised middle classes found a voice and created new political practices in the 1830s through satiric theater and newspapers.

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Under the new regime of the July Monarchy, no one knew exactly what power Louis-Philippe would hold or how it would be defined. While it was true that a Charter limited his authority, historians have emphasized the instability of this transitional moment in French history when a growing middle class was developing an identity politically, socially and culturally. In problematizing the notion of the bourgeoisie, some have found that satire helped to construct a middle-class identity in the 1830s. Jo Burr Margadent has demonstrated the increasing use of values associated with the emerging middle class to evaluate the royals of the July Monarchy, values based not on their political accomplishments and failures, but their personal virtues and vices. In particular, she argues that Louis-Philippe’s reign ended when public images of him—particularly satiric images—trapped him between traditional aristocratic values of kingship and emerging bourgeois notions of morality, dooming him according to both measures.8 Similarly, satire played an important role in another political context, England’s Queen Caroline Affair. Thomas Laqueur argues that radicals’ use of farce and melodrama, what he calls “theatricalization of politics,” depoliticized and undermined their political cause by turning political discussion to the royals’ private lives. In contrast, Anna Clark argues that farce and melodrama heightened agitation and actually politicized the affair by drawing new populations into political discussion.9 These new roles for satire as expressions of moral codes increasingly constitutive of a growing bourgeoisie carried enormous political implications for the July Monarchy. The political compromise of labeling Louis-Philippe “the bourgeois monarch,” implied that he might be held to these standards. Following the compromise, the title, and accompanying assumptions, new models of morality began to be applied not just to the monarch, but to politics and public life more broadly.

SATIRE’S THEATRICAL CONTEXT: THE EVOLUTION OF BOULEVARD THEATER IN THE 1830s The Robert Macaire character made its July Monarchy stage debut on the Boulevard at the Théâtre Porte Saint Martin in the 1832 production, L’Auberge des adrets, the precursor to Robert Macaire.10 No satiric character of the juste-milieu wrung out the bourgeois image of itself like “Macaire,” played on stage by Frédérick Lemaître and drawn for newspapers and independent sales by Honoré Daumier. The play tied knots in the bourgeois theater of the 1830s, spoofing in three acts nearly every convention of melodrama. The plot begins with the bandit Macaire in an inn near Grenoble. Macaire, who is mortally wounded by his accomplice, Bertrand, and overcome with remorse for

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his crimes, confesses to his most recent murder. In doing so, he rehabilitates the pure reputation of his virtuous wife, who has been falsely accused. At a time when melodrama had grown stale, Lemaître revised and reinvigorated melodramatic conventions of tearful recognition scenes, labored dialogue and unlikely endings by playing Macaire in an unexpected way. Rather than a typical melodramatic villain stalking on stage with arms raised to his face and dressed in black, he portrayed Macaire as a laughing trickster,11 an amoral manipulator guided gleefully by self-interest. Immediately, critics praised Lemaître’s innovative performance as genius, and lauded performances of L’Auberge as high entertainment. Anne-Gabrielle de Cisternes de Coutiras, Vicomtesse de Poilloue de Saint-Mars wrote of the play, under the pen-name “the Comtesse Dash,” that “‘Frédérick Lemaître and Serrès [who played Bertrand] were splendid. Frédérick had found certain gestures and intonations which I feel sure the bitterest grief would have been powerless to resist. Whether you liked it or not you had to laugh.’”12 The parody of bourgeois theater was first of all humorous. Lemaître’s move from old style melodrama to cynicism and trickery was part of something new in the 1830s, an example of larger changes in the content and form of stage offerings on the Boulevard du Temple, or as it had become known for its theatrical mayhem, the “Boulevard du Crime.” Before its destruction by Baron Haussmann in 1862, the Boulevard du Temple stretched across the Right Bank between Paris’s northeast wall and the faubourg St-Antoine. The Théâtre de la Gaité, the Ambigu-comique, the Folies-dramatiques, the Théâtre Lyrique, the Théâtre du Cirque, the Funambules, and the Petit Lazari lined the thoroughfare which continued on past two of the city’s secondary theaters, the Théâtre Porte Saint Martin and the Variétés. The antic repertoire of the boulevard theaters embraced mime, acrobatics, puppeteering and animal shows, but it was the ubiquitous melodrama that associated the row in the early nineteenth century with fictional crime. Popular with the working classes, audiences trooped in to see the sensational murders, robberies, and suicides enacted nightly on Boulevard stages. The Almanach des Spectacles reportedly counted up the number of stage crimes that had been committed on it in the last twenty years: “Tautin has been stabbed 16,302 times, Marty has suffered poisoning of one sort or another 11,000 times, Fresnoy has been done to death in various ways 27,000 times, Mlle Adèle Dupuis has in her innocence been seduced, abducted or drowned 75,000 times, 6,400 capital charges have tested Mlle Levesque’s virtue, while Mlle Olivier, who has only recently embarked on her career, has already drunk 16,000 times from the cup of crime and vengeance.”13 By the 1830s, the city of Paris had incorporated into its periphery the muddy fields of this one-time commercial fair. The traditional precinct of

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entertainment had become an avenue filled with theaters, cafes, and street performers. Since the eighteenth century, the Boulevard area had been a popular promenade with an impressive display of popular life. Amid the hubbub and hustle, however, was much unemployment, poverty, and crime. Many entertainers could barely earn a living. Police tended to leave the area alone because it provided recreation for the potentially disruptive inhabitants of the neighboring Faubourg St-Antoine, one of the most densely populated working-class neighborhoods in the city.14 Boulevard theaters were places of entertainment, but they also had a history of political wrangling. The space of the Boulevard du Crime was characterized by volatility and unpredictability as the carnival atmosphere of the Boulevard flowed between the street and the theaters themselves, and continued eighteenth-century practices of blending entertainment with politics. During the Revolution of 1789, for example, theater audiences had amused themselves between curtains with Republican songs or had given statistics on the day’s guillotine victims.15 Mutually hostile factions had contested each other at the theater. After the turn of the century, audiences sometimes united in damning a particular play for its offensive political message or for authors’ political associations. By the 1830s, the hey-day of the claqueurs,16 the atmosphere before the curtain rose was animated, rowdy, and chaotic. Although such overtly political practices slowed in many theaters in the 1830s, ending nearly completely in state-sponsored theater, the satiric theater of the Boulevard remained politicized throughout the early nineteenth century with audiences actively expressing their views. When working-class Bonapartists objected to a parody of Napoleon, for example, they lobbed sausages on stage in protest and stuffed police under theater seats. Ridicule played a big part in this. It was used extensively before performances to comment on people in the audience and to express what audience members observed about each other. Audiences often jeered actors. Musicians and students practiced wild animal cries, and working-class patrons shouted sarcastically about flirtations occurring in the audience or mocked parents who could not control their noisy children. With few reserved seats, crowds arrived about an hour before the curtain went up, and there was always a risk that theater-goers would find themselves involved in violent incidents.17 By the 1830s, boulevard audiences had a long history of politicizing seemingly non-political content. As Kerr explains, “audiences were adept at seizing political allusions in unlikely places and, in collusion with the dramatists, could outwit censors without difficulty. Equivocal lines met with ostentatious applause and requests that they be repeated or alternatively, prompted whistles and demands that they be suppressed.”18

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July Monarchy satire developed in this rowdy tradition of popular critique, but by the 1830s, important changes were afoot on the Boulevard. For one thing, stage and print media began to share banks of well-known satiric characters. The best known, including Daumier’s “Robert Macaire” and Balzac’s “Vautrin,” crossed media boundaries and could be seen in both theater and print. Audiences could see them in subscriptions to new satiric journals like La Caricature and Le Charivari, in Balzac’s novels (Le père Goriot), on stage at the Porte Saint Martin and boulevard theaters, printers’ storefronts, and reading rooms. After the September Laws, when both La Caricature and Robert Macaire had been censored, 120 lithographs of “Robert Macaire” appeared in Le Charivari. In addition, formal aspects of theatrical productions were evolving. As theater historian John McCormick explains, most productions in the secondary and boulevard theaters through the 1820s were either social melodramas or vaudevilles, both of which frequently drew on satire to criticize life under the July Monarchy. In the melodrama of these theaters, virtue was always rewarded and vice punished. Expanding from three acts to five in the nineteenth century, melodramas taught simple moral messages in keeping with the eighteenth-century view of theater as a school for virtue; poisoners always met their punishment, for example, and illegitimate children always turned out to be products of secret marriages. But what had once been the latest fashion in theatrical entertainment was by the 1830s falling out of vogue; against the social complexities of industrial society, melodramatic plots looked increasingly vapid and simple.19 Turning away from traditional heroines who personified feminine virtue under threat, 1830s melodrama became concerned with the complexities of morality. In Les infidélités de Lisette, for example, performed at the Gaité in 1835, the heroine lived happily unmarried with her boyfriend for a year.20 Sex in the church became a popular topic after the July Revolution, as in L’Abbesse des Ursulines. Even “Robert Macaire” once found himself in criminal’s heaven, a vehicle for the author’s ridicule of religious ideas. In the relatively free expression of the early July Monarchy, conspiring Jesuits and libidinous nuns demonstrated anti-clerical opposition to the deposed Charles X and his supporters.21 Productions like these that challenged social prejudice against illegitimacy or granted tacit acceptance of adultery piqued the interest of censors, who recognized the destabilizing potential of questioning moral codes.22 The theaters’ new focus on morality extended to politics, as well. Actors punctuated satiric performances nightly with new topical references. In one scene of L’Auberge, Lemaître chased a fake gendarme into one of the theater boxes, shot him, and threw his corpse on stage. At a later performance, before a scant audience, Lemaître had the curtain raised during an intermission,

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bowed to the few present and vowed that during the next night’s performance he would kill two gendarmes. Crowds reportedly packed the house the following night in anticipation.23 This kind of performance that mocked the swollen authority of the July Monarchy grew increasingly popular. With the success of L’Auberge des adrets, “Robert Macaire” began to blanket Paris in printed versions of his exploits, a famous series of Daumier satires, satirical broadsheets, and even a dance.24 Imitators staged further productions in which the two bandits mocked the moral authority of priests and apostles.25

SATIRE’S SOCIAL IMPACT: ROBERT MACAIRE AND THE CRITICS In the early years of the July Monarchy, the humor of boulevard theaters drew mainly working-class patrons, but that changed in 1834 with the opening of Robert Macaire, the most successful satire ever to appear on the Boulevard du Crime. Set in Paris, the plot of Robert Macaire has two rogues, Macaire and his accomplice, Bertrand, opening a company that offers insurance against theft. Thriving business draws the attention of a third character, Baron de Wormspire, not actually a baron but a con-man, and his “daughter,” Eloa, not actually a relative but a prostitute the Baron recently met. Wormspire is duped by Macaire’s display of wealth and honesty, while Macaire falls for Wormspire’s boasting of grand estates, and proposes marriage to Eloa. Following the wedding, at which two completely non-existent fortunes have merged, son-in-law and father-in-law discover each is crooked while playing cards when each man turns up an impossible hand of all kings. Police arrest Bertrand, Wormspire and Eloa, but the pajama-clad judge who hears their case is Macaire incognito. The crooks hurl abuse at each other, then join in mocking the recognition scene of traditional melodrama, as Bertrand recognizes Eloa as his own daughter, and the Baron recognizes Macaire as the son he abandoned decades earlier in a spinach field. The tireless police then chase the criminals into a city square, where Macaire and Bertrand escape in a hot-air balloon. At the tiny Boulevard house, the Folies-dramatiques, “Robert Macaire” pointed up greed and hypocrisy in the new bourgeois order. His rendering of the lust for wealth and the obsession with capital venture that clutched France in the 1830s provided a grotesque vision of an avaricious society. “Macaire” seemed to capture the viewpoint of workers who were not benefiting from France’s new industries, old-guard critics of the emerging market economy, and anyone who saw through government double-speak. Police worried about the play’s impact on workers, fearing that the mocking critique would stir up working-class discontent.

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Yet, unexpectedly, not just working-class but wealthy, entrepreneurial audiences flocked to see Robert Macaire. This shocked the world of theater since the play laid siege to bourgeois society as it was developing in the 1830s. The peculiar popularity of Robert Macaire made its mark immediately; the play changed the course of French theater by bringing the bourgeoisie to the Boulevard, and by establishing boulevard theater as fashionable.26 Gabriel Weisberg has shown this kind of “slumming” to be central to middle-class identity at the end of the nineteenth century, as well-heeled patrons invaded the traditionally working-class dance halls of Montmartre.27 But Robert Macaire suggests that this practice began decades earlier. While working-class audiences saw their own strength in ridiculing and denigrating materialist corruption, so, it seems, did the developing bourgeoisie. Why this would be so is not immediately apparent. Scholars have pointed to the way that Robert Macaire contributed to the popular wisdom of boulevard theaters in the 1830s that the rich are necessarily “evil and dishonest” and the poor necessarily “pure and honest,”28 an uncomplimentary representation of the wealthy bankers and stockbrokers in the audience. The mystery begins to unravel somewhat, however, if we investigate the fault-finding of Robert Macaire, and satire generally, as part of the debate over how to ensure virtue in France’s developing market economy, a question that Victoria Thompson has shown occupied a progressively important place in literary and legal conversation beginning in the 1830s.29 Like literature and the law, satire addressed important concerns about society in flux. Blurring the ethical distinctions of earlier melodramatic theater, in which virtue brought rewards and crime punishment, Robert Macaire suggested that crime, not virtue, brought financial gain, and that, in fact, the rich were necessarily duplicitous. This social insight was expressed through the play’s social types. Audiences were meant to be surprised by “the prostitute who glorified moral virtue and the cheat who talked of honor.”30 These were the fraudulent double faces of the juste-milieu, characters who behaved with glaring insincerity. As parodies of types that audiences would recognize, they made room for audiences to participate in the performance as insiders who “got the joke.” They also invited audiences to fault public naiveté that accepted the real-world political and social hypocrisy represented in satire. Satire addressed these important issues in a pleasurable and satisfying way. As Robert Macaire became a surprise hit with middle-class audiences, swarming to what had been a mostly working-class theater, the greasybenched Folies-dramatiques became all the rage with “the carriage set.” Trips to the smelly theater represented what Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have called a “refined mimicry,” a more upscale version of popular practices carried out by the middle class to take sensory pleasure in acceptably channeled

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ways.31 Wealthy patrons used boulevard satire’s grotesque characters as symbols with which to display a bourgeois subject, to show “bourgeoisness” to themselves, while at the same time rejecting the social milieu in which boulevard theater developed. The distance between “Robert Macaire’s” popular origins and the new consumers of boulevard satire was expressed aesthetically and accommodated in the theater’s refurbishment. Not long after the arrival of the bourgeois on the Boulevard, the owners cleaned up the Folies-dramatiques. Posh new seats and fresh paint appropriated the theater as a bourgeois space. Critics played a key role in this process of social change because they framed satire as offering a meaningful analysis and evaluation of July Monarchy society. Initially, the new bourgeois presence on the Boulevard amazed critics, who marveled at the mingling of classes at performances of Robert Macaire, “the satin shoe alongside the clog.”32 Every night Lemaître entered the packed house of the shabby Folies-dramatiques, so different from the gilded and lavish theaters of le monde. “Elegant young women come to sit on the benches, leaving their silken divans for this hall where the atmosphere is suffocating.”33 The fashionable Opéra was deserted by those distinguished by their appearance, the “pale youth of stage front and foyer, so vain about their hair style, about the cut of their clothes, about their polished boots, their yellow gloves, and their canes with chiseled gold knobs.” Critics wondered how to explain the “irresistible force of attraction” of “the world of good manners” for the “risqué” Robert Macaire, where “more than one rip in clothing reveals nude flesh!”34 Critical commentary drew connections between the socially mixed audiences of Robert Macaire and the potentially blurring boundaries of social stratifications more generally. It cited the special “magnetism” of this satire that “communicates electricity to all the links of the Paris chain, twisting it, folding it on itself, and rolling it, willingly, unwillingly, toward the same place: the grande dame like the tart, the man of the salon like the man of the people.”35 Moreover, bemused newspaper critics seemed fascinated by the influence of the boulevard satire phenomenon on their own profession; they wondered rhetorically why they had set aside the thrill of reporting on opening nights to “support for so long this Robert Macaire,” and why they continued to discuss “the astonishing popularity attached to the tatters of this man who will end up living in gilded salons.”36 Part of the reason for so much critical attention lay in the play’s satirical message. A “sublime buffoon,” “Robert Macaire” was compelling to audiences and critics alike because he gave flesh to a critique of society under the July Monarchy. “What one comes to see is the actor, the Prometheus who gives movement and speech, color and life to this character in which he

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makes a satirical tract of skin and bones.”37 By glorifying dishonest social and political practices in satire, Robert Macaire faulted those who had sold out their ideals, failed to uphold political trust, and profited from saying things they knew they did not mean, an indictment that resonated with bourgeois audiences, despite the fact that they were one of its central targets. Like Prometheus, who, when offended by the gods’ power over mortals and tired of sacrificing to them, cleverly tricked the deities, Robert Macaire seemed to pull a fast one, so to speak, on moral order. But Robert Macaire was more than a satiric attack on current abuses; almost immediately it became a cultural artifact by which audiences were defining themselves as social cohorts. Again, critics played a leading role by confirming that Robert Macaire was culturally and socially significant, even though it ridiculed bourgeois society and was playing in a down-market, working-class theater. Up to this point in the 1830s, critics had described the carnival atmosphere of the Boulevard du Crime as a working-class milieu that intrigued middle-class readers mostly from a distance. In this way, critics had contributed to middle-class identity by specifying middle-class cultural parameters and by defining what lay beyond them. This was part of the way that they interpreted the world of theater for audiences, telling them what to think, and how to think, about representation. With the theater poised between aesthetics and commerce, critics passed judgment carefully, developing a communications network for their army of consumers about what was offered, to which tastes products catered, which products would satisfy consumers, and which should be ignored. Their reviews could themselves be entertaining. For example, a review of the Théâtre Vaudeville’s Contre-fortune-bon-coeur asserted, “We have respect for the dead; we are not speaking therefore of a vaudeville which had the honor a few days ago of an evening performance at the rue de Chartres; Peace be with the Illustrious Gaudissart, born dead, burying his brother the dying Contre-fortune-bon-coeur. The public has . . . declared itself little satisfied.38 This sort of criticism worked to delineate a middle class both culturally and geographically. Such well-known critics as Jules Janin and Théophile Gauthier were teaching viewers to read and critique culture and working to establish a cultural identity for their audiences based on reading and viewing habits. But what is interesting about Robert Macaire is that deceptively it appeared to confound this process of class definition and separation by attracting middle-class audiences to working-class theater. Bourgeois audiences who went to see Robert Macaire were “breaking the rules,” crossing traditional cultural and social boundaries. Largely newcomers to the Boulevard theaters in the 1830s, they paid to see themselves ridiculed by a buffoon in satire because the image of a ridiculed middle class, while unflattering superficially,

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was not necessarily undesirable. It identified theater goers not only as a cultural cohort (in the identity of which theater played a great role) but also as a critical public, people with a discerning eye and informed opinion who might just as easily reject as accept a performance. Why would mocking humor be such an attractive mode of self-representation? Historian Edward Lucie-Smith argues that satire attracted middle-class audiences because it was a forbidden pleasure, especially in the later years of the decade.39 But the situation was more complex than that. Political satire may have been outlawed after 1835, but social satire was not, and the latter continued to attract audiences of the very type that were its target. Rather, we might consider how caricature allowed audiences to view themselves from a distance. In Paulson’s words, caricature “stops short of complete confrontation of self. . . . For there is still the barrier of art, the line that brilliantly catches the essence of a figure, that last bastion of witty distance between spectator and object, between man and monster.” As audiences tried to reconcile new and contradictory aspects of modern life, caricature offered an especially appropriate mode of analysis and self-examination. If Paulson is right, caricature posed the question of just how monstrous humans can become and still be human. It carried audiences “to the very limit of its power as wit, to confront, if only momentarily, the hideous, and to arouse, if only in mild form, a kind of fascinated horror.”40 If Paulson is right, caricature was thus both useful and engaging to its targets. In this period of economic and political change and class formation, Robert Macaire and Vautrin exemplified what Walter Benjamin later called “Baudelarian allegory,” a type of metaphor which, as Michelle Hanoosh explains, simultaneously embodies and exposes “the division and fragmentation of the modern subject, representing and revealing the terrifying otherness of modern experience.”41 Yet, ironically, in the specific political and social circumstances of the July Monarchy, Robert Macaire and Vautrin offered a sense of “wholeness” to satirists (who were Baudelaire’s primary concern), and, I argue, to their audiences by creating an experience of “entering fully into the dualism of self and other, subject and object, embracing it, maintaining it in the extreme, demonstrating the limitations of self and redefining it in its relation to others.” In other words, seeing themselves ridiculed ultimately pleased middle-class audiences because it was reassuring; middle-class patrons enjoyed understanding a joke that they were the butt of because paradoxically “offering an image of division and fragmentation [were] a means of overcoming these, a modern solution to the alienation of modern life itself.”42 Thus the 1830s were a key moment in the development of French theater and of bourgeois culture when critical practices came to hold tremendous

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social importance as markers of middle-class identity. The popularity of the Robert Macaire satire shows us criticism—in particular, self-criticism— becoming a pleasurable pursuit and defining feature of class distinction. While the social aspect of going to the theater was a means of identifying with the group, it was coupled with self-criticism, which also announced an identity; satire proved that bourgeois audiences had a sense of humor about themselves. Just as bourgeois men and women went to the theater to be themselves part of the spectacle, to be seen, they also went to see themselves on stage, to see themselves portrayed. Middle-class audiences came together around satire of the boulevard theater that shadowed grand theater, unified by a vision of themselves as critical and by the promise of a sort of self-fashioning mobility.

VIEWING THE MIDDLE CLASS THROUGH SATIRE’S DOUBLED VISION To understand this promise, it is important to see that satire—whether on stage or in print—was part of the larger drive to specify social types, and it worked in part by classifying the body as an element of social mobility. As playwrights, satirists, and social critics, Balzac, Charles Philipon, Joseph Monnier, and many others were concerned with the relationship between the bourgeois preoccupation with social mobility and the manipulation of bodily movement, representation, and discipline. They analyzed and abstracted bourgeois manners and institutions, classifying Parisian types and their particular social milieux.43 Balzac explained his enterprise in Théorie de la dimarche: Pushed also, no doubt, by a first love for a new subject, I yielded to this passion: . . . was it not necessary to analyze, abstract and classify? To classify, so as to be able to codify! To codify, to draw up the code of dimarche . . . so that progressive men, and those who believe in perfectibility, can study to appear amiable, gracious, well-bred, educated instead of vulgar, stupid, boring . . . And is this not the most important thing in a nation whose motto is “All for display?”44

From this imperative to classify emerged a repertory of Parisian types: the bureaucrat, the confidence man, the social climber, the banker, the journalist and the commercial writer.45 If what mattered in the new social milieu of the July Monarchy’s market culture was the appearance of honor and respectability, then the types could be studied and imitated. The distorted and exaggerated bodies of satire played a growing role in analyzing society, isolating social types for public examination. Satiric newspapers, like L’Ours, ran “Physiologies,” short character sketches like

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that of the “Parisian Voter,” for example, who was typically forty years old with a big stomach and little black dog (who had a matching big stomach) named “Bousingot.”46 The trend to navigate through a rapidly changing society by identifying types included theater critics in that they classified stage representations as social types. As theater critic for the Journal des debats and Le Figaro in 1832, Jules Janin noted the artist’s duty: “to describe the new roads to fortune: the bank, the stock exchange, advertisements, prospectuses, joint-stock companies, rises and falls, disaster and bankruptcies, the endless speculations on nothing, on the vacuum . . . [France had become] the Grand Nation of grocers, [the Charter of 1830] had created among us an entirely new set of characters, of strange and incredible manners.”47 One key to caricatured “typing” of this new set of characters was an awareness of perspective and the possibilities of multiple perspectives. We can see this in one of satirists’ favorite targets: the duplicitous politician, driven by the same greed that motivated bourgeois society as a whole. Many satires of bourgeois men mocked the moral bankruptcy of the bourgeois society of entrepreneurs and their leaders. Consider, for instance, Daumier’s scene of a crowd of cabinet members embracing each other publicly in which the front pair of men includes the king, Louis-Philippe (see figure 3.1). The caption

Figure 3.1.

“We are all honest men . . .,“ La Caricature, 1834.

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reads, “We are all honest men—let us embrace and put an end to our disagreements,” a line from Robert Macaire.48 The privileged viewer sees, however, that as each pair embraces, each man secretly picks the pockets of his partner. The image mocked the supposed ministerial reconciliation after the crisis of 1834. Pointing up the rewards of examining society from many perspectives, the image suggests that the hypocrisy of the bourgeois monarchy is there for all to see, and laughed at the notion that the regime’s leaders, like bourgeois businessmen, could approach events and each other with an eye to anything other than economic opportunity and deception. Daumier’s type-figure, “Robert Macaire,” was precisely this type of incorrigible swindler who epitomized business ethics in the new bourgeois regime. In the scene of the pick-pockets described above, “Macaire” was the figure embracing Louis-Philippe in a show of political support based on financial self-interest. Daumier drew several series of “Macaire” representing the politics of such an operator in bourgeois society, and there were others; like “Macaire,” Monnier’s “Joseph Prudhomme” was based on a theatrical character Monnier had created in 1831 before he surfaced as the quintessential, pretentious bourgeois in printed images such as “Théâtre du Vaudeville,” from La Caricature.49 The joke in the image required knowledge of the theatrical plot from which it comes. In the play, Prudhomme, the central character tries to get out of a marriage engagement by having his friend create relatives his future in-laws will find unsuitable. With his double-chin, high white false collar and spectacles, “Prudhomme” looks down his nose and stands, paunch protruding, as one of the unsatisfactory kin, a bourgeois windbag unacceptable to decent people. But, in a move of doubling back on itself, so typical of satire in this period, even this incessant observation and social critique—satirists’ stock in trade—came in for scrutiny and mockery. The images of La Caricature and Le Charivari, frequently targeted the character of the flaneur, the bourgeois man-about-town known for casting his desirous gaze on the modern city. Striking at the corrupting role of urban materialism on this version of bourgeois masculinity, one scene pictures a shabbily dressed father reunited in the city with his dapper son, the flaneur. “—Ah! there you are my poor fellow! how handsome you are! come and kiss your father!—The son, whose heart and soul were formed in Paris, answers with spirit: I don’t know you!!”50 Scholars point to the way this scene addresses the social estrangement that mass migration to Paris wrought in the 1830s.51 But more important for our purposes is the method by which it draws attention to these social costs, the way it cast a critical, mocking eye on a new social type defined by his habits of observation and critique.

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In this atmosphere of self-critique, even bourgeois theater became a target of satire. The sober drama, Richard Darlington, about English political life, met mad success, and less than a month after it opened, became the subject of the mocking parody, Piffard Droldeton. The ambitious scoundrel-hero of this mock up arranges an advantageous marriage for himself, then beats his wife and tries to get rid of her. When he locks her in a cellar, she escapes with the help of a protector, confounding her would-be executioner. The production ended with a vaudeville of predictions for the coming year. Bourgeois audiences took pleasure in this self-reflexive vision of their artistic taste. After 1835, with the advent of the September Laws, satirists who turned their attention from politics to society regularly trained their eye on theatergoing and theater-goers. In this kind of doubling move, they took as their objects the very people who consumed Boulevard theater. Louis Huart, for example, put “emotions at the theater” on display in his Le musée pour rire, a self-described “encyclopedia of bizarre and funny aspects of humanity,” by satirizing the benevolent moralizing of “sensitive souls” who cry rivers at performances and appear “to sympathize continually with the wretched and with the suffering of their fellow creatures.”52 Mocking renderings of such sympathizers showed a secret pleasure in terrible catastrophes. They featured characters who were consoled in seeing someone much unhappier than themselves. “A grocer who previously saw himself as the most unfortunate man on earth, and even on the rue Saint Denis, because he had sold for 11 francs that day 12 sous worth of prunes and brown sugar, no longer feels sorry for himself as much when at night, he sees at the Ambigu an unfortunate prince stripped of all his realm, his eyes gouged out and tongue extracted by a barbarous enemy with bad manners.”53 After such an epiphany, what could the sale of a few prunes more or less matter compared to the unhappiness of the prince in question? Huart’s caricature of Boulevard theater patrons deflated audiences’ “touching spectacle” and “tender reflections” by devaluing emotional displays that were based ultimately on superficialities. We can see this in the vexed grocer, for example, who, vowing never again to be unhappy, renounces any idea of suicide, “an idea that he had only held very vaguely, after all, and only because it would have flattered his pride to cause the papers to speak about him. Nothing flatters the pride of a man of our times like the power to say: tomorrow, everyone will read about me in the papers: ‘M. Berlingot, grocer, rue Saint Denis, shot himself in the loins last night with a pistol. This suicide is attributed to a mental disturbance!’ And boom! you become very famous . . . for 24 hours!”54 Satirists of new theater trends portrayed in the caricatured theater-goer an oversized drive for status that had completely

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eclipsed virtuous emotion. For them, theater exposed a sort of emotional corruption, a fraudulent display of sympathies and concerns. Similarly, satirists criticized an unthinking public by showing theater-goers to be unseeing people easily duped by stage performances. If naive devotees could see a performance from behind the scenes they would not shed as many tears: At the theater, the moments that are the most pathetic in the room are those that are the most comic behind the scenes. Thus, when at the end of a terrible fifth act a young Spanish or Italian princess is killed in a dastardly way by a husband who has all sorts of reasons to be jealous, the victim collapses on the ground like all princesses of the Ambigu, at this supreme moment, after having murmured a sigh, she finds just enough strength to cry to the stage hand, “Georges, you have not swept the floor today, I will have you fined 20 sous!”55

Satire mocked theater patrons by highlighting the commercial context of theatrical pleasure. Satire’s vision of bourgeois culture encompassed politics, too. Caricatures like “Robert Macaire” and the popular icon, “M. Mayeux,” showed the political life of the July Monarchy to be not just malleable, but bent out of shape. Chateaubriand would write later that “the caricaturists and the smaller papers, in the year of grace 1831, made of the hunchback Mayeux the grotesque type of our political versatility, and they have put on his back all the blunders, all the ridiculousness of the Paris bourgeois.”56 Through distorted and exaggerated bodily appearance, caricatures objected to the French citizen who had made a mess of the juste-milieu. They also insisted, however, on the mutability of society and politics. Chateaubriand saw Mayeux’s “true occupation” as politics, the hunchback representing the laughable image of “the willing and free enterprise of public opinion” under the July Monarchy. Mayeux suggested that in the turmoil of politics after 1830, political identity was ever-changing and always under negotiation. “Mayeux was everywhere at once, with the uprising and against it, here wearing a polished hat, there wearing a cloth bonnet, one by one republican, bonapartist, juste-milieu.”57 For Chateaubriand, satire illustrated the breakdown of political order in which political life had become a matter of putting on a costume. But, to continue the metaphor, this costume could always be changed. On the surface, satire seemed to destabilize bourgeois identity by exposing and criticizing its foundations. In this satiric vision, bourgeois entrepreneurialism and politics rested on fraudulent transactions. The bourgeois monarch was a crook who cheated the people out of honest government. He reigned over the bourgeois subject whose political identity was up for sale. But satire also took part in stabilizing a new identity of the middle class as keen cultural participants

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who go to theaters and read newspapers, and more fundamentally, as critical observers who are themselves both the subject and object of their critical public discourse. Satires of middle-class life at boulevard theaters looked as though they disturbed the sober bourgeois world by exposing and ridiculing it as what it defined itself against, as licentiousness, pleasure, and deception, yet bourgeois crowds flocked to boulevard theaters to see themselves mocked this way. Paradoxically, “playing” in the “low” world of the boulevards defined satire as part of the “high” realm of proper bourgeois culture. Embedded in satire’s appeal was bourgeois society’s fascination with itself and obsession with distinguishing what it was not in a seemingly perpetual cycle of vogue and obsolescence. If it identified itself by what it discarded, “Robert Macaire” manifested this well. As theater historian Frederick Brown described it, “Macaire’s” costume cobbled together what capitalist society cast off; patched pants, bedroom slippers, a dirty white vest, tattered green coat, decorative cane, and crushed gray hat worn to one side were a visual combination of poor man’s clothes, and bourgeois trappings suitable for a character who critiqued the monarchy on stage in the informal language of the streets.58 The satiric way of seeing society brought together theater and print satire in an exaggerated vision of middle-class cultural consumers. Like theater satire, written satire contributed to a notion of theater and to a middle-class identity. Louis Huart’s Le musée pour rire typified compilations of character sketches and images of social types. The entry, “Emotions at the theater,” mocked enraptured spectators at the Gaité and the Ambigu-comique who were moved to swoon, overcome by nerves, and made to faint. “The spectators who are not nervous enough to achieve this refinement of pleasure . . . say to themselves in seeing a fainting woman, ‘I’ll never be that happy! I just don’t have the luck.’”59 Ridiculing a passion for emotion at the theater may have cast audiences in a foolish light, but it was part of how the taste for boulevard theater was constructing a social type. Like theatrical satire, in other words, print satire was self-referential. It took the bourgeois subject as an object and showed it in the act of representing itself. In the form of bourgeois self-criticism, satire, in turn, became an act of bourgeois representation. If audiences were abandoning the critical distance of proper bourgeois theater-goers, they could regain the distance of critical perspective by looking at themselves in satire.

STAGE SATIRE AND CENSORSHIP July Monarchy censors grew increasingly uncomfortable with satire as popular theater began to focus in more complex ways on social matters and morality. The language of Robert Macaire worried them; the slang of

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the working classes (alternately called “the poor” and “the dangerous” by authorities) seemed a threatening departure from the proper French customarily performed on stage. Theater historian Odile Krakovitch explains that the play, La Libérée, ou cinq ans de surveillance, was banned in 1836 because authorities felt the lead character was “a female Robert Macaire” who opposed authority and used a popular vocabulary.60 In another case, this one at the cour royale de Paris, the prosecutor (procureur général) alerted the Minister of Justice that he had seen a brochure at the Tribunal de la Seine, entitled “The Testament of Robert Macaire,” which was riddled with press law violations, offense to public morals, inflammatory statements of hatred between the classes, and disrespect for the law.61 Prosecutors argued typically that such publications were unequivocally “conceived for culpable ends,” but authorities censored material concerning “Robert Macaire” somewhat ambiguously according to legal questions that had to be negotiated. In an 1835 case involving Robert Macaire in a satiric song, for example, a music publisher and a music vendor were each fined 1000 francs by the cour royale de Paris ostensibly for selling a piece of music that did not bear the printers’ names, as was required by law. The defendants argued that the relevant legal statute dealt only with written text and therefore did not apply to their case.62 Authorities conceded that pieces of music often appeared without authors’ or printers’ names, but they nevertheless singled out this piece, entitled “Electoral Reform, or political discussion between Robert Macaire, proprietor, state advisor, deputy and colonel in the National Guard, and his friend, Bertrand,” for special attention. The problem, they claimed, was that interspersed with the song’s couplets were long reflections in prose that made the piece “a true written work in which music was only an accessory.”63 When the defendants appealed, however, authorities suggested other reasons for banning the work that had more to do with the form and content of satire than the lack of a printer’s signature. “It was a work of wit which hints of thoughts full of malevolence toward authorities, the musical accompaniment was only the wrapping in which it was covered.”64 Authorities did not want the aesthetic form, that is, the music, to smuggle political messages to popular audiences. The prosecutor argued that punishment should fit the crime of “putting up for sale a song that contains the most offensive and grossest allusions to the person of the king. These offenses would have been subject to prosecution and severe punishments. The writing itself thus does not include any inoffensive character that would render the violation excusable.” Censors were aware of the opportunity before them to extend their authority over satiric criticism: “To vanquish resistance opposed to this point of the application of the law it is important to uphold the previously announced sentences.

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Never has the occasion been more favorable.”65 This satiric piece of music, like satire generally, raised questions of who bore responsibility for it and became a site of dispute over satire’s critique. As censors scrutinized satire, questions also began to emerge about satire’s potential impact on the French economy. Satiric concern for social matters had intensified across the decade, and by 1838 to 1840, satire had leveled its sights directly against a bourgeoisie increasingly focused on speculation. “Robert Macaire” entered the world of the stock market, transforming himself from a vulgar criminal to a financial wizard. He became a master speculator and launched into vogue criticism of banking and high finance.66 Censors bore down on satires of bourgeois entrepreneurism that laid bare “the greediness of stockholders and the scandals of stock trading.”67 The censors’ report on the 1838 play, La Bourse, for example, the story of a rich merchant engaged in stock market mania, cited this type of con-artist character for “a double impropriety.” First, censors felt that, as an escaped convict turned industrialist, this type of swindler displayed an “ironic immorality” in a story of “humorous thievery.” Second, and more importantly, they feared that this work of satire portrayed an image of the July Monarchy that audiences would take for the “real” story. (A)lthough the fable of this comedy is purely imaginary, it is the same in a great many details as what it borrows from current society! Most of the businesses that it draws attention to are real and exist in commercial operation. The place where the second act takes place is the Paris Stock Exchange where we see the attorney general and the treasury agents serving as intermediaries in the most bizarre transactions. Now, the introduction of Macaire, of Bertrand, these personifications of cynicism in swindling, to the milieu of commercial life, in the middle of the Stock Exchange, and in the industrial speculations expressly designated by the name that they have in reality, appears to us to exceed the limits of dramatic satire. It undermines the credit of certain industries, of certain well-defined professions, ultimately to condemn stock trading in general. This pushes comedy to the point of defamation.68

In other words, although satire lived in the imagination, censors felt it had crossed into the real by ridiculing commercial operations. Pointing to satire’s power, authorities warned that mocking corrupt stockbrokers had the potential to “undermine the credit of certain industries.”69 This report is important because it shows that remarkably, by 1838, it had become credible that satire held the power to harm the French economy. With their reports, censors, in this case and others, were drawing distinctions between aesthetic practice and the market, and were trying to keep the two separate. They sent a message that ridiculing capitalist pursuits exceeded the

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bounds of allowable aesthetic practice. The reign of the bourgeois monarch appealed to society’s most prosperous who wanted to protect their wealth. Despite periodic downturns, industry had flourished under Louis-Philippe’s leadership and many people had become wealthy, though only a small percentage actually reached the property requirement for voting. State leadership would support this commercialism; the market would be protected from mockery. Censors saw this kind of blurring of fiction and reality as the main problem with many plays that resembled Robert Macaire. Following the September Laws, censors had been quick to ban Robert Macaire, and the play had become the touchstone against which censors measured later satires. They guarded vigilantly against any work that resembled Robert Macaire in form or content. In reviewing André at the Variétés in December 1835, for example, censors found the subject of the play about “the manners and misfortunes of an honest working family” to be “irreproachable,” but objected to characterization of the young soldier, “André,” duped by his sergeant, “Christien,” while trying to protect his family honor and going eventually to prison. Like many plays that attracted censors’ attention, this one contained a prison scene concerned with the business of crime, and it was this view of “the interior of a prison with the hideous picture of degradation and cynicism of the convicts, set against the brutality of the guards” that upset authorities. Peering in at this “ignoble and odious” scene of “wretches scratching the walls with their chains” while “laughing at their crimes, the situation and even the beatings,” censors saw a character who “seems to treat theft as his profession, crime as his destiny, and prison as his natural home.” They objected that audiences would see, as they had, that the development of the two main characters “recalls a few scenes of Robert Macaire.” For the play to go on, producers would have to modify it, getting rid of “the examination of the leg irons, the games, laughs and jokes, the convicts and the blows with the cane.”70 Similarly, censors found in 1838 that in the play, L’enfant trouvé, the main character, Taspin, “carries out his project of exploitation with a buffoonery and a cynicism that recalls the ironic paternity scenes of Robert Macaire.” In this case, the issue was hierarchy. Censors did not allow “the unseemly derision by which every minute a man parodies the most sacred sentiments and acts of paternity.”71 Like the market economy, the hierarchical, paternal order of society and politics, of the family and monarchy, would be protected. In these examples and others, censors feared that audiences would not see a laughing fiction in this satire, but a true picture of society, and with it perhaps a call to action. Of course, censors did not go unopposed. Satirists like Balzac, Maurice Alhoy, and Charles Philipon used ridicule to retaliate against state

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administrators and functionaries who threatened to shut down this vision of enterprise and society. They faulted “Saint-Divine-Worship-Thiers,” for instance, who damned the souls of theater directors for staging “a shadow of a grimace that might be regarded as hostile to the chief grimacers of the day.”72 Against those who wanted to end the business of satiric theater, to outlaw vaudeville, they depicted the battle of “an entire legion of vaudevillists,” in which “the archers of vaudeville” with their “projectile of epigrams,” battled police who sought to amend satiric works, to render “the sharp arrows rounded and devoid of powder.” Satirists argued that their right to put forward their views was guaranteed by the 1830 Charter and should not be a contested issue. “A gratuitous fight has become a trial of skill,” they wrote of their efforts to shape the July Monarchy through satire, “it has had to be a gay vaudeville . . . and it smells with a strong odor of treason.73 Thus, following the popularity of Robert Macaire in 1834, and its imitators thereafter, censors who monitored theater for potentially corrupting material kept a close eye on where satire placed the blame for social ills. They grew especially concerned in 1839 with the appearance of Balzac’s Vautrin, a widely discussed production that seemed to have a new social message. This satire focused not on traditional ideas of virtue but on achieving justice. The style was familiar; the language and exploits of Vautrin recalled Robert Macaire. However, the play marked an important turning point in the history of stage satire as its culprits were not brigands but those in positions of social authority.74

SOCIAL SATIRE REPOLITICIZED: VAUTRIN On March 14, 1840, Balzac’s play Vautrin opened at the Théâtre Porte Saint Martin on the Boulevard du Crime. The play’s eponymous protagonist, who had appeared earlier in the author’s novels, Le père Goriot and Illusions perdues, made his stage debut on this night as the powerful tempter and protector of a young man unknown in society. The audience watched as the ingenious thief, “Vautrin,” mustered his sinister resources to provide for his protégé, “Raoul de Frescas,” whom he both loved and exploited. In an effort to isolate Raoul from the shameful world of crime, Vautrin employed his former prisonmates in dubious financial schemes. The play was set in Paris just after the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1816. In the shuffle of titles and families that accompanied the change of dynasties, Vautrin fabricated false titles to broker a matrimonial deal with nobility for his charge. Purely by chance, these semi-benevolent manufactures work out well: Raoul escapes peril with his honor and finances intact, while Vautrin achieves an

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easy life of pleasure and prestige. Although Vautrin ultimately lands in the hands of the law, critics celebrated the character’s victorious emergence from this accumulation of infamies as “a galley slave breaking free of his bonds,” a roguish “philosopher teaching society a lesson.”75 There had been no guarantee in the preceding weeks that this performance would ever take place. Even though a sensational version of Vautrin’s exploits had promised to solve the financial problems of both Balzac and the Porte Saint Martin’s Director, Charles-Jean Harel, the worry and work of rehearsals distressed the author noticeably.76 Twice government censors rejected Balzac’s cynical script,77 fearful of the subversive potential of this social satire. When the Interior Minister, Charles-François Rémusat, finally agreed to permit its production, he warned Harel that his authorization would be revoked immediately if the performance sparked any disorder whatsoever in the theater.78 To ensure that no changes would be made to the approved version, three censors monitored the play at dress rehearsals. On opening night, the best known comedic actor of the day took the stage as Vautrin. Just five years earlier, Frédérick Lemaître had played “Robert Macaire,” the most celebrated satiric character since Molière’s “Tartuffe.” Vautrin provided the actor’s first opportunity since Robert Macaire had been prohibited by the censors to showcase his talents as a satiric hero who made jokes as he committed crimes, a dramatic type Lemaître himself had done much to create. Officials fretted over the possibility that audiences would respond enthusiastically to Lemaître in the familiar role of social critic. When they decided to permit the play, they did so only with the condition that the ban would be reinstated if analogies between Vautrin and Robert Macaire caused any disturbance at the theater.79 The opening-night crowd packed the Porte Saint Martin to asphyxiation, despite strong competition from a farewell performance at the Opéra that night and a Scribe première at the Gymnase.80 Léon Gozlan would observe years later that, “not since the great first nights of Victor Hugo’s dramas had the public’s curiosity been so aroused.”81 Audiences received the first act coolly, and Lemaître, seeing that the play was going poorly, suddenly changed direction and began to play the role with more physical buffoonery. Throughout the play’s complex plot twists, the conspiring Vautrin wore many elaborate disguises, including one, in the fourth act, of a Mexican ambassador. During rehearsals, the three censors had noted nothing disturbing about “General Crustamente’s” sparkling uniform and cone-shaped wig, but reportedly the stage manager and Harel had observed an irregularity.82 No one on the theater’s staff, however, warned Lemaître of the resemblance between Crustamente’s wig and King Louis-Philippe’s instantly recognizable mutton chops and pear-shaped coiffure (widely ridiculed in satiric journals

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throughout the 1830s and the subject of Philipon’s famous court battle over censorship in 1831—see chapter one). In the fourth act, Lemaître’s “Vautrin,” bedecked in the wig and uniform, walked into an uproar of catcalls and hisses. The bewildered actor soon heard whispers about the wig making him look like the king, Louis-Philippe.83 The audience erupted in a frenzy of ridicule: it “had lost all dignity, all calm, all respect; every box was a mouth of a great volcano, the crater of which was the [theater] pit: a volcano of laughter and mockery, blasphemy and abuse, and also threats.”84 That evening it was reported that the king was being played at the theater. “M. de Rémusat,” wrote Le National, “will not allow this infamous parody to stain the French stage for long.”85 The play was banned immediately. Critics pummeled the play as an affront to morality, though they praised Lemaître’s performance. Lemaître sent out black-edged cards to friends and theater people: “Frédérick Lemaître regrets to inform you of the loss which the most productive of our novelists has just suffered in the person of Monsieur Vautrin, alias Trompe-la-Mort, ex-convict, who has died suddenly at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint Martin, where he has been buried in the prompter’s box.”86 Balzac suspected Lemaître of sabotaging the play. He wrote to Mme Hanska that “the business of the resemblance to Louis-Philippe may have been a deliberate attempt to bring about Harel’s fall, which he [Lemaître] wanted in order to take his place as manager of the Porte Saint Martin.”87 However, after the play was banned, Lemaître appealed in person to the Ministry of the Interior to have the ban repealed. Ministry officials laughed. Refusing to reverse the decision, François Cavé, the Director of the Beauxarts division of the ministry, is reported to have responded, admiringly, “in years to come they will say that Louis-Philippe lived in the reign of Robert Macaire.”88 The play’s closure proved costly; the loss reduced Harel to bankruptcy, and shortly after the demise of Vautrin, the Porte Saint Martin closed its doors. Balzac, disgusted by the turn of events, threw himself into two new plays, in the hope of helping himself and the actors who were now out of work.89 The first was Richard Coeur-d’Eponge. The second was a more ambitious project, which he told Lemaître was to be “a new Robert Macaire, a compound of Vautrin and Tartuffe and anything else you like, provided it personifies what is going on around us.”90 For Balzac, as for so many others in the July Monarchy, the language of mockery and the absurd offered the truest means of commentary on the juste-milieu. Vautrin marked an important evolution in the criminal type that took place during the 1830s from the indisputably evil villain of melodrama to a more ambiguous character who manipulates and swindles, but who loves and

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protects. Krakovitch argues that this ambiguity signaled trouble to censors because it rendered audiences sympathetic to Vautrin’s plight and suggested that his crimes were justifiable.91 Censors objected to the thieves and killers who “recalled through the cynicism with which they speak of their crimes the ‘Robert Macaire’ type that has been banned from the theater by ministerial decision.” They noted that, in light of this cynicism, Vautrin’s admirable affection for his foundling “is perhaps one of the biggest dangers of the work because it invests our interest in a villain resolved to stop at no crime.” Furthermore, after Vautrin enriches his charge by theft, claims to give him a name through forgery, and saves him through assassination, the exaggerated affection for Vautrin displayed by Raoul’s duchess mother during the recognition scene with her son seemed “to justify all the crimes of this miscreant.” Such were the “moral and social dangers” that prevented censors from authorizing the work.92 But beyond sanctioning criminal activity, Vautrin also pointed to crime rampant in the specific context of capitalist business, which alarmed government officials dedicated to protecting the national economy and capitalist milieu in which their political fortunes had been made. Both Robert Macaire and Vautrin mocked authority. Based as they were on a premise of class opposition, their idealized visions of the working class challenged the authority of bourgeois officials by suggesting that vice was always located amongst the wealthy. The characters “Robert Macaire” and “Vautrin” personified a view of corrupt society where one tried to get rich without working. They suggested that standards of merit and genius had given way to ignorance and mediocrity. Authorities accepted traditional stage villains who carried weapons or were clearly identifiable as criminals by their gestures, long beards, and wide-brimmed hats. But to government censors, thievery and pillage turned to disgrace and immorality when “Robert Macaire” and “Vautrin” appeared in the clothes of the bourgeois, strolled along boulevards, traded on the Stock Exchange, founded newspapers and married their mistresses.93 Authorities feared satire that broke down strict definitions of villainy, and suggested that villainy was at large in society, not restricted to obvious melodramatic characters and criminals. By prompting audiences to sympathize with villainy in the marketplace, these satiric characters called into question the moral foundation of society and politics in the July Monarchy. Part of the effectiveness of these satires, and part of the problem they posed for censors, lay in the way their satire of bourgeois types linked aesthetic form to ethical concerns. Robert Macaire, André, Vautrin, and many other productions dealt with swindling, thievery, and perceived immorality. Their plays built around subterfuge and parody, satirists represented bourgeois life in self-conscious, labored language and images. In other words, they drew

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attention to their work as art. Paradoxically, this self-consciously aesthetic portrayal of bourgeois life offered what satirists saw as a true picture of the social and political constructions of the bourgeois monarchy. Robert Macaire taught audiences to see in their own society that honor and virtue were jokes. Revered values of philanthropy and civic-mindedness were being manipulated behind the scenes by those who wanted to climb to the top of society. In satires like Vautrin, humor through subterfuge was being used in the name of virtue to show virtue’s absence, to point up the corruption underlying social mobility, to catch bourgeois society in the act of dissimulation. As it did this, satiric criticism was becoming vital to civic life. It was instilling habits of thinking that assumed fundamentally that all things could be different than they were, that identity had become a matter of outward appearance and that society based on the virtuous citizen was being subverted. Audiences had to learn to be vigilant against such fraud—to see doubly, ambivalently—lest they leave their fate to rogues and scoundrels. Censors worried precisely that people would see in satire a fraudulent but real July Monarchy. Authorities feared audiences would apply lessons learned at the theater to their own milieu. Paris’s prefect of police wrote of the dress rehearsal of Félix Pyat’s Ango, performed the Ambigu in 1835: The play contains such direct and incisive allusions that it is generally felt that performances should not proceed without some cuts. In the first act, there is a court scene which one might think had been taken from the Luxembourg trial: it is a question of a huge plot! In act III, Ango attacks royalty in the person of the Portuguese ambassador, and in act IV he treats the king of France with contempt by trampling him under foot. Audiences cannot fail to apply what happens in these scenes to important people of our own period.94

Satiric portrayals of the pretenses of government officials or the gulf between rich and poor worried censors often without giving them exact words in the actual text to fault specifically. In many cases it was the political context in which a play was performed as well as the sensibilities of an audience that gave it a political charge. Some commentators who professed interest in governing moral standards disapproved of satire’s populist turn. Theater critic Victor Hallays-Dabot claimed that, “under the reign of Louis-Philippe popular theaters have propagated an unhealthy and pernicious literature against which censorship has unfortunately been unable to construct a powerful enough barrier . . . Poverty, calloused hands, rags, these are the marks of virtue.”95 According to the logic of popular theater, the noble, the bourgeois, the cultured sophisticate

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and the rich industrial possessed all vice, were guilty of all real crimes. Among the “unhealthy and pernicious” works cited by Hallays-Dabot were Le Pacte de famine, Le Riche et le pauvre, and Vautrin. Baudelaire was among the first literary figures to recognize satire’s abilities not just to satisfy and unify audiences socially, but to instruct and educate, as well. He pointed to the way that caricature’s visual puns and use of symbols to stand in for others had constructed a new language and a new way of discussing political matters with the public. “The symbol,” he said, “was enough. With this type of pictorial slang, one could say and make people understand anything one wants.”96 It is precisely this training in symbols and communications that I believe inculcated the value of, and skills to, scrutinize politics critically and see what was not immediately apparent. This seems to have been the line of thinking of Etienne Arago, owner of the Théâtre du Vaudeville, the site of dozens of satirical plays in the 1830s. Arago, a dedicated republican who changed the theater’s name to the Théâtre National, wanted to educate theater audiences about current politics. He expressed his faith in theater’s didactic function in “Le Théâtre considéré comme moyen révolutionnaire”: In every époque through which society has moved, in every époque where it has cloaked itself in new forms, the theater has been the most active stimulant in determining the actions necessary for these transformations . . . tireless in its metamorphoses like revolution itself, theater preceded it [revolution] in its transformations because its [theater’s] principal merit is formulating the thought that develops in the masses.” 97

THE MEDIA CHALLENGE SATIRE’S MESSAGE In the media of both the popular secondary theater and the new daily paper, satire provided stinging commentary on the most current events that challenged the emerging bourgeois social order by attacking important means of bourgeois self-representation. But in the specific historical circumstances of the 1830s, satire’s meaning depended not just on the critical eye of the artists and theater critics, but also on the media in which satire appeared. As noted earlier, one of satire’s innovations in the 1830s was the appearance of characters across media, both in print and on stage. At this point, it is worth looking more closely at satiric characters and images in the socioeconomic context of representation in the commodity forms of the daily newspaper and bourgeois theater. In the 1830s, the newspaper began its evolution into a true mass medium. Page one of newspapers featured a section of “editorial publicity,” which

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consisted of advertisements disguised as “objective” information. To readers, papers seemed to divide information from an identifiable section of advertisements on page four. One way that newspapers maintained the fiction of impartiality was by arranging articles, advertisements, and commentary in columns that fractured what was being presented. No article seemed to relate to any other, and each made sense on its own. The form of the paper itself schooled readers in the seemingly indisputable fragmentation of daily experience, which contributed to the idea of fragmentation as normal, and in this way acclimated readers to social fragmentation generally. With no explicit political directive, the commodity form became the underlying principle of organization of the daily paper. In other words, each detached article was related to the paper as a whole only in that at any given moment it was available to be marketed and consumed. Insofar as the form of the paper undermined connections between articles, the newspaper of the early nineteenth century undermined the idea of connectedness in society as a whole.98 Newspapers presented readers with greater possibilities for interpretation and explanation than had books. Where books unfolded in a linear development of plot or argument, newspapers pieced together many separate and unrelated reports. Newspapers affected perceptions of time, as well. Reporting of news from the world communicated a sense of time reduced to the instantaneous and upset existing conceptions of time as a unique chronology. As Donald Lowe has argued, by suggesting a vision of the present as fractured and eclectic, newspapers called on readers to supply connections behind the news items. “With the speeding up of communication, perception of the present became more disconnected, begging for explanation or interpretation.”99 Within these general trends, the tendency of the French press in the 1830s was for each faction across the political spectrum to publish its own journal d’opinion. Readers either subscribed to them or read them in public reading rooms—they were not sold individually as they are today. Over the course of the 1830s some publishers lowered subscription prices while maintaining the same advertising prices as their competitors. Less expensive papers were more attractive to both consumers and advertisers. Dropping prices and increasing competition for advertisers challenged the political basis of a paper’s circulation. Such papers began to appeal to audiences beyond one parliamentary faction or another, which contributed to the creation of a mass audience outside of factionalism. As Richard Terdiman has explained, through this process the depoliticized citizen was becoming the consumer. 100 Satiric newspapers like La Caricature and Le Charivari parodied the form and style of the daily paper, and this mimicry had an impact on journalism generally. As satirists borrowed schemes of arranging elements on a page, an

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expository tone, and separate editorial and advertising sections from “serious” journalists, specific styles could no longer be considered those of either the satiric or the sober press; both types of paper reported the news. The satiric press undermined the safety of journalistic forms that made claims to honest or unbiased reporting of information by proving that even forms used in straightforward reporting could be deceptive. 101 In this way, then, the form of the satiric journal and the very nature of the information and images that appeared therein were subverting bourgeois strategies of representation. In the struggle over styles and forms, invading the bourgeois store of literary weapons was a powerful move. Doing so promised satirists a medium in which not only to voice their opinions but also to undermine the literary effectiveness of those under critique. Playing on the assumption that the style and form of the daily paper could prove themselves politically faithless, satirists pointed up the uncertainty lurking in middleclass representation of any sort. Similarly, the theatrical performances in which satire appeared parodied the form and style of melodramatic theater. As satirists borrowed schemes for presenting clashes of good and evil, for instance, or traditional recognition scenes of comedic theater, specific styles could no longer be considered those of either satiric or sober theater. Satiric theater challenged theatrical forms that made claims to represent information without subterfuge by revealing that even forms used in non-satiric performances could be illusive or fraudulent. Once critics of the middle class appropriated a style of representation (the broken columns of informational reporting and advertising as in the daily paper, for example, or the recognition scenes of sober drama) for satire, that particular style no longer offered a guarantee that it would behave in an expected way. This sort of displacement threatened to reduce the persuasive force of middle-class stylistic sincerity, that is, bourgeois writers’ use of certain styles of representation which they chose as expressions of their historical and psychological circumstances. As Margaret Doody suggests, ridicule in a public forum renders a style less effectual by making it less comfortable and acceptable “even to a mind which wants to think in that style, or in terms of the beliefs and attitudes that style customarily conveys. There comes to be no easy way of thinking, no mode of discourse, or of self-presentation, in private or public speech that won’t cause a twitch of the mind.”102 After the July Revolution, satirists attacked the corrupt and the pompous in the coalescing bourgeois society to reveal artistically the social ills and the mutability of the political and social environment. The vehicle of satire challenged bourgeois identity by exposing the multiplicity of meaning inherent in key forms of bourgeois representation. This aspect of the satiric project asserted that “everything can be Other, and every way of doing anything can

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be replaced by countless other ways.”103 This message of multiplicity found reinforcement in the medium of the daily paper. Images in satirists’ daily papers had infinite meanings because they were viewed in infinite contexts. Unlike paintings, the uniqueness of which stemmed from the authority of an original work residing in a unique place, satires in Le Charivari and La Caricature were produced by the hundreds and consumed in multiple settings, each of which could influence the meaning of the image.104 Yet the production of satire in the 1830s was not simply a subversive enterprise. Paradoxically there is a sense in which the form of the satiric journal undermined the persuasive force of the satire therein. Using the language and modes of the people caricaturists were targeting was risky because it was never really clear that they were outflanking bourgeois culture. To some extent satiric papers could not break with middle-class dailies because their form was still promoting fragmentation. Although the lithographic caricature on page three broke up the traditional layout of the informational press, pages one, two, and four were the same as serious dailies. The back pages of La Caricature and Le Charivari even included advertising.105 Similarly, satiric theater revealed the ways in which serious theaters influenced their viewers’ perceptions of the social world. Satire played on incongruities, citing the speech of the bourgeoisie but using visual images to mock them, and vice versa. Likewise, situating satire in theater, and theater in the culture of the 1830s, suggests also that no matter what went on in the contents of the images themselves, non-satiric theater, a dominant form of middle-class culture, was shaping the communicative power of the satiric performance. Moreover, everyone involved in the production of satiric theater, including writers of texts and critics of them, was firmly embedded in the process they criticized. The work of creating satire and shaping opinion about it meant learning to work with the economic vicissitudes of artistic production in Paris that set limits on satiric critique. For example, when Balzac’s L’Ecole des Menages was rejected, the writer then secured a theater for his work in advance of writing Vautrin. Harel, manager of the financially strapped Porte Saint Martin, eagerly accepted Balzac’s work on trust.106 This was another way that the theatrical form in which satire appeared undermined the persuasive force of the criticism therein.

CONCLUSION Across the decade of the 1830s, satire worked to create a bourgeois identity around practices of criticism. The content of visual satire faulted the intrusion of money into human affairs that lay at the core of bourgeois society and

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that politics sustained at the highest level. In plays like Vautrin,107 the villain was not a murderer or a nobleman, but a banker. The media in which satirists delivered their criticism of bourgeois society mattered. Satire encouraged audiences to look beyond the surface of what they saw before them by exposing the unreliability of middle-class representation and self-representation. It attempted to interrupt the power by which bourgeois ideology represented itself, put forward its self-evidence, and became naturalized. By appropriating elements of non-satiric theater and journalism, satiric performances undermined the stylistic integrity of the media through which the middle class represented itself. Satiric images and theater called into question the way sober plays and reports influenced bourgeois perceptions of society. But no matter how critical satirists were of bourgeois society, the vehicle in which they presented their work contested its contents; using the format of the boulevard theater and daily paper loyally confirmed patterns of production and consumption underlying bourgeois society even as it criticized them. Displaying ideals in a medium that pointed up the mutability of representation emptied out those ideals even as it illustrated them. Satirists like Philipon, Monnier and Balzac participated, then, in what might be thought of as a ritual of criticism that evacuated much that it discussed: the commercial contingency of the newspaper and theater rendered both satiric and sincere productions somehow fraudulent.108 Bourgeois audiences embraced satire in papers and plays because it gave viewers what they wanted: a ritual of information dissemination, of self-representation, and of social criticism that remained within the central system of values in French society. Satire constructed a bourgeois identity that not only allowed a critical public discourse, but that was defined essentially by this new criticism as a central political practice of the reasoning individual. At a time when materialism and interests seemed to be eclipsing old aristocratic notions of taste,109 satire simultaneously exposed this transition and smoothed it over. It ridiculed the bourgeois obsession with accumulation and the hypocrisy of making a virtue of wealth. At the same time, it provided a vehicle by which the criticism was contained without challenging the process in any revolutionary way. Satire, then, was part of the process by which French liberalism embraced the cause of order in the 1830s. Through satire, bourgeois society could incorporate self-examination and self-criticism into the code of proper manners and fashionable behavior. Amazingly, laughing at raging materialism itself became a sign of culture and intelligence that went far toward defining the bourgeois cohort of industrializing France. Satire in the theater and newspapers of the 1830s produced a tension that was important to critiquing bourgeois society and increasingly to shaping representative politics. That is to say, satire appears to have been a form,

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a category, and a strategy with which to critique corruption and bourgeois practice under Louis-Philippe in that it faulted bourgeois morality, presented usually as an overriding concern with acquisition and social mobility. Yet the commodity forms of theatrical satire and commentary about it benefited from and relied upon the very system they criticized. Satire asserted a vision of the artist as crucial to society while attacking the society that underwrote public criticism. Not just bourgeois society but satire, too, could seem fraudulent. Though satirists denigrated bourgeois leaders and entrepreneurs as corrupted by the market, they themselves were bound by it. Satire in working-class theaters and small newspapers carved out space for opposing official practices of the July Monarchy, but as commodities, they were also vehicles for stimulating new commercial desires. Throughout the 1830s theatrical satire challenged distinctions based on genre, urban geography, and cultural convention that were so crucial to bourgeois leisure. Officials attempted to maintain the Napoleonic system of dividing theaters geographically, that is, of relegating independent theaters to the margins of the city along the Boulevard du Crime, and subsidizing larger, national theaters at the city’s center. The system had promoted a corresponding division of genres, with each theater specializing in work of a particular sort that promoted distinctions between “high” culture of national theaters and “low” of the boulevard.110 (So, for example, in 1830, arrivistes might avoid some boulevard theaters and attended in great numbers the ComédieFrançaise to portray themselves in a particular way as much as to see dramatic productions.) The satires, Robert Macaire and Vautrin, were part of a new dramatic style that departed from the traditional models of rhetorical elegance and the lengthy orations of much theater under Napoleon and the Restoration in favor of language and imagery from popular life. Why did audiences enjoy seeing popular imagery of vice victorious? Satires like Vautrin showed bourgeois entrepreneurs as farcical characters whose corruption and self-interest stretched accepted concepts of virtue beyond recognition. The combination of playfulness and outrage seemed simultaneously to expose transgression of boundaries (of both theatrical genres and social morality, where evil is cheered and vice is virtue) and to call for some limit to the transgression. For at least a century, a key part of constructing the bourgeois public sphere had been naming and banishing the popular, the absurd and the grotesque from the realm of pure reason; enlightened, bourgeois sensibilities had been defined against the low desires of the bodily and personal interest.111 Satire defied this definition by embracing popular forms of absurdity and the grotesque in order to expose the conflict between undisciplined self-interest and liberalism’s social virtue. By the 1830s, satiric papers dissented from and attacked bourgeois society from within. They complicated

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the search for “the corrupt” to expel and by doing so improve the condition of the individual, and they grew increasingly interested in the tension between individual goals and social demands. In this light, Gauthier remarked on the appreciative reception of Robert Macaire as social satire: Robert Macaire was the great triumph of the revolutionary art which followed on the July Revolution. It is the masterpiece of that chance literature, born of popular instinct and pitiless Gallic wit, which seemed to contain the seeds of the comedy of the future. There is something special about this particular comedy, and that is the bold and desperate attack it makes on the social order and on mankind in general. For the character of Robert Macaire, Frédérick Lemaître created a truly Shakespearean type of humor. . . . What a strange and profound satire this is, in which the criticism of society is made by a brigand! And what a weird dualism we have here, with Orestes and Pylades dressed in convict garb and the perpetual antithesis of mind and body translated into slang by Robert Macaire and Bertrand, the Don Quixote and Sancho Panza of crime!112

Satire left audiences with a rendering of French society under the July Monarchy in which the relationship between bourgeois subject and object seemed ever more conflicted. Even though stage satire criticized bourgeois society and politics, it became in the 1830s a central locus of middle-class identity formation. Criticism lay at the heart of an emerging bourgeois republican liberalism. In industrializing France, satire gave voice to the growing middle class that had been excluded from political life. What would become the most popular satiric play of the decade, Robert Macaire, drew middle-class audiences to satire’s boulevard venues with its commentary on life in the new market economy and under the new “bourgeois monarch.” Its analysis turned audiences into insiders who got the joke and could fault those too naïve to see the absurdities that surrounded them. Boulevard satire developed into an acceptable pleasure. As critics told middle-class audiences that Robert Macaire was socially significant, the play offered a new definition of society, a clearer picture of life in the juste-milieu. On its surface, Robert Macaire’s critique of middle-class life seemed to defy an existing dynamic of theater criticism and class construction in which bourgeois audiences went to the theater to see themselves praised. Yet Robert Macaire showed criticism to be a defining feature of middle-class identity and foundation of a political way of thinking. Criticism promised mobility, both social and political, which was a key reason why the middleclass liked it. Satiric “types” clarified society in flux. They seemed to expose real “truths” behind deception and dissimulation, and to offer a means of uncovering hypocrisy. In other words, satires like Robert Macaire and Vautrin offered solutions to social problems by defining them and showing that

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society and politics were mutable and could be manipulated. It implied that middle-class audiences, too, could remake themselves. Censors grew concerned over where satirists placed the blame for social ills. Even after satirists turned away from overtly political statements in 1835, censors continued to see satire as potentially subversive. They worried about what might follow from teaching people to look doubly at the fraud satire exposed. Yet at the same time as satire held potential to challenge the existing order, it also worked to entrench middle-class culture and define a middle-class cohort, both in its critical practices and in the media in which it appeared. Similarly, satire worked to define gender order in the 1830s, and it is to satire and gender that we turn next.

NOTES 1. Houssaye is referring to the actor, Frédérick Lemaître, who played Macaire on stage. Arsene Houssaye, Les Confessions, (Paris: Dentu, 1885–91), II, 253. 2. Houssaye, Les Confessions, 253. 3. These caricatures were part of what many scholars see as a decade of increasingly spectacular culture and vigilant cultural criticism. See Margadant, “Gender, Vice, and the Political Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century France: Reinterpreting the Failure of the July Monarchy;” Patricia Mainardi, Husbands, Wives and Lovers: Marriage and Its Discontents in Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); and Victoria Thompson, The Virtuous Marketplace: Women and Men, Money and Politics in Paris, 1830–1870 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 4. Collingham, The July Monarchy, 341. 5. Robert Macaire and Vautrin were but two of many satirical performances on the Boulevard du Crime. Many of these, too, featured characters who could be seen across media. See Kerr, Caricature and French Political Culture; Hemmings, The Theater Industry in Nineteenth-Century France; and Charles Marc Des Granges, La Comédie et les moeurs sous la Restauration et la Monarchie de Juillet (Paris: Albert Fontemoing, 1904). 6. See Fernand Braudel and Ernest Labrouse, eds. Histoire économique et sociale de la France (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1970–1982); Francois Caron, Economic History of Modern France, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); Roger Magraw, France 1815–1914: The Bourgeois Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Pamela Pilbeam, The Middle Classes in Europe: 1789–1914: France, Germany, Italy and Russia (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1990); Roger Price, A Social History of Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1987); and A–J Tudesq, Restoration and Reaction 1815–1848 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).

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7. See Elinor Accampo, Industrialization, Family Life and Class Relations (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University, 1989); and Bonnie G. Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). 8. Margadant, “Gender, Vice, and the Political Imaginary in NineteenthCentury France.” 9. Anna Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Thomas Laqueur, “The Queen Caroline Affaire: Politics as Art in the Reign of George IV” Journal of Modern History 54 (1982), 432–452. For a thorough analysis of this literature and the affair itself, see Margaret Dykes Swanson, “George & Caroline: The Gendered Discourse of a Royal Scandal” Master’s Thesis (University of Georgia, 2007). 10. The play ran originally in 1824 at the Ambigu-Comique before being banned. See John McCormick, Popular Theatres of Nineteenth-Century France (London: Routledge, 1993), 106. 11. For a full discussion of the performance, see Robert Baldick, The Life and Times of Frédérick Lemaître (Fairlawn, NJ: Essential Books, 1959). 12. The Comtesse Dash, Mémoires des autres, Librairie illustré, 1896. Quoted in Baldick, Lemaître, 103. 13. Almanach des Spectacles, 1823. Quoted in Henri Beaulieu, Les théâtres du Boulevard du Crime (Paris: H. Daragon, 1905), 5–6. 14. John McCormick, Popular Theatres, 15–16. 15. Jeffery S. Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680–1791 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), especially chapter one, “Parterre Practices in Eighteenth-Century France.” 16. Members of the audience who applauded at prearranged points in productions and attempted generally to rouse audience enthusiasm in exchange for pay or free admission. 17. F. W. J. Hemmings, The Theatre Industry in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 77–86, 126. 18. Kerr, Caricature and French Political Culture, 181. 19. McCormick, Popular Theatres, 180–182. 20. McCormick, Popular Theatres, 129. 21. See L-Henry Lecomte, Frédérick Lemaître, étude biographique et critique d’après des documents inédits I (Paris: chez l’auteur, 1888), 165–166. 22. McCormick, Popular Theaters, 107. 23. The Comtesse Dash, Memoires des autres, quoted in Baldick, Lemaître, 103. 24. McCormick, Popular Theatres, 106. In 1833 a 4-volume, anonymous work of L’Auberge des Adrets, manuscrit de Robert Macaire trouvé dans la poche de son ami Bertrand was published by Baudoine (the author was actually satirist Maurice Alhoy). 25. Charles Potier, for example, produced a farce at the Théâtre du Pantheon called The Continuation of L’auberge des adrets.

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26. On what has been called the “embourgeoisment” of the boulevard, see Hemmings, The Theatre Industry. 27. Gabriel Weisberg, Montmartre and the Making of Mass Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001). 28. McCormick, Popular Theatres, 106–107. 29. Thompson, The Virtuous Marketplace. 30. Baldick, Lemaître, 138–139. 31. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 103–104. 32. Jules Janin, Histoire de la littérature dramatique, I, 406–7. Quoted in Hemmings, The Theater Industry, 125. 33. Mery review quoted in Frédérick Lemaître, Souvenirs de Frédérick Lemaître, publiés par son fils (Paris: Ollendorf, 1880), 191. 34. Lemaître, Souvenirs de Frédérick Lemaître, 191. 35. Lemaître, Souvenirs de Frédérick Lemaître, 191. 36. Lemaître, Souvenirs de Frédérick Lemaître, 191. 37. Lemaître, Souvenirs de Frédérick Lemaître, 191. 38. L’artiste, 4eme livraison 1838, 52. 39. Edward Lucie-Smith, The Art of Caricature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 77–78. 40. Paulson, “Pictorial Satire,” 316. 41. Michele Hannoosh. Baudelaire and Caricature: From the Comic to an Art of Modernity (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1992), 5. Hannoosh cites Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (New York: Verso, 1983), esp. 170ff. 42. Hannoosh, Baudelaire and Caricature,” 5. 43. Judith Wechsler, A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 20–39. 44. Honoré de Balzac, Théorie de la dimarche, La Comédie humaine: études analytiques, Paris 1968, vol 19, 228. Quoted in Wechsler, A Human Comedy, 31. 45. See Wechsler, A Human Comedy, Chapter 1: “Parisian Panorama.” 46. The name given to young republicans after the 1830 Revolution. They were distinguished by their shabby outfits and distinctive, wide-brimmed, leather hats. 47. English edition of L Curmer, Les Français peints par eux-memes, ‘Encyclopédie morale du dix-neuvième siècle’, 1840–2, 8 vols, Pictures of the French, London, 1840, xiv. Quoted in Wechsler, A Human Comedy, 37. 48. Le Charivari, November 13, 1834. 49. “Théâtre du Vaudeville,” La Caricature, July 14, 1831. 50. Le Charivari, April 9, 1840. 51. Beatrice Farwell, The Charged Image: French Lithographic Caricature 1816–1848 (Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1989), 63. 52. Louis Huart, Le Musée pour rire, “Emotions au theater” t.2, no.51. Paris, 1835. 53. Huart, Le Musée pour rire, “Emotions au theater.” 54. Huart, Le Musée pour rire, “Emotions au theater.”

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55. Huart, Le Musée pour rire, “Emotions au theater.” 56. F. A. R. Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe, Paris: Librairie Garnier Frères, n.d., t. V, 421. 57. Chateaubriand, Mémoires, 421. 58. Frederick Brown, Theater and Revolution: The Culture of the French Stage (New York: The Viking Press, 1980); and Lecomte, Frédérick Lemaître, 47–48. 59. Huart, “Emotions at the theater.” 60. Odile Krakovitch, “Robert Macaire ou la grande peur des censeurs,” Europe (November-December 1987), 57. Cited in McCormick, Popular Theatres, 107. 61. AN BB18.1387.a9.1000 June 26, 1840. 62. AN BB24.170–186.s.2961 Frère and Meisonnier to the Minister of Justice, August 27, 1835. 63. AN BB24.170–86.s.2961. Rapport du Ministère de la Justice, direction des affaires criminelles et des graces, 2e bureau à M. le Garde des Sceaux, July 1, 1835. 64. AN BB24.170–86.s.2961. Rapport du Ministère de la Justice, direction des affaires criminelles et des graces, 2e bureau à M. le Garde des Sceaux, July 1, 1835. 65. AN BB24.170–86.s.2961. Rapport du Ministère de la Justice, direction des affaires criminelles et des graces, 2e bureau à M. le Garde des Sceaux, July 1, 1835. 66. Krakovitch, Hugo censuré, 146. 67. AN F21.988 Procès-verbaux of La Bourse at the Variétés, May 14, 1838. 68. AN F21.988 Procès-verbaux of La Bourse at the Variétés, May 14, 1838. 69. AN F21.988 Procès-verbaux of La Bourse at the Variétés, May 14, 1838. 70. AN F21.988 Procès-verbaux de censure, Théâtre des Variétés, December 10, 1835. 71. AN F21.988 Procès-verbaux de censure, Théâtre des Variétés, December 10, 1835. 72. L’Ours, June 25, 1834. 73. L’Ours, June 25, 1834. 74. McCormick, Popular Theatres, 107. 75. Victor Hallays-Dabot, Histoire de la censure théatrale en France (Paris: Dentu, 1862), 319. 76. Balzac wrote to Mme Hanska on January 20, 1840: My situation is horribly precarious. . . . I am about to be ruined for a second time. I am taking my life back through theater work. There is something fatal in dealing with money. It is now the 20th of January, and my play, Vautrin, which is in rehearsals at the Porte Saint Martin, will open February 20, and it appears that I can count on a great financial success, which is why I did it. Then in February: Vautrin is an exhausting business; I have a rehearsal every day. . . . In a single evening I shall be playing for a fortune in money and fame. Frédérick Lémaître guarantees that it will be a success. Harel, the manager, believes in it. As for myself, I began to despair ten days ago; I thought the play was stupid and I was right. I have completely rewritten it and now I think it might do. Honoré de Balzac, Lettres à Madame Hanska. (Paris: Les Editions du Delta, 1967), tome I: 1832–1840, 662–667.

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77. Vautrin was refused January 23, 1840 and February 27, 1840. Authorized March 6, it played March 14. 78. Hallays-Dabot, Histoire de la censure, 320. 79. Lemaître, Souvenirs de Frédérick Lemaître, 247–248. 80. Baldick, Lemaître, 179. 81. Léon Gozlan, Balzac intime (Paris: Librairie illustrées, 1886), 51. Quoted in Baldick, Lemaître, 178. 82. Etienne Arago, L’Avenir national, April 5, 1869. Cited in Baldick, Lemaître, 178. 83. Lemaître, Souvenirs de Frédérick Lemaître, 247–8. 84. Gozlan, 55. Quoted in Baldick, Lémaître, 179. 85. Quoted in Hallays-Dabot, Histoire de la censure, 317. 86. Louis Schneider. “Deux amours de Frédérick Lemaître.” Le Temps, August 16 and 17, 1830. Quoted in Baldick, Lemaître, 180. 87. Balzac, Lettres à Madame Hanska, March 1840, 673. 88. Baldick, Lemaître, 81. 89. François Cavé, who had obtained from Remusat the authorization to produce Vautrin, came to offer Balzac an indemnity of 5000F and a promise of future payments. Balzac refused; this was just a pittance compared to his debts. “The director of Beaux-Arts, Cavé, on leaving said to me in great admiration, ‘That is the first time I have been refused.’ I replied, ‘too bad.’” (Balzac, Lettres à Madame Hanska, May 10, 1840, 673) 90. Lemaître, Souvenirs de Frédérick Lemaître, 251–252. 91. Krakovitch, Hugo censuré, 146. 92. AN F21.975. Procès-verbaux Porte Saint Martin, Vautrin, February 27, 1840. 93. Hallays-Dabot, Histoire de la censure, 318. 94. Letter to the Minister of the Interior, June 28, 1835. AN F21.1134. Quoted in McCormick, Popular Theatres, 197. 95. Hallays-Dabot, Historie de la censure, 319. 96. Baudelaire, “Quelques caricaturistes français,” 550. 97. Etienne Arago, “Le Théâtre considéré comme moyen révolutionnaire”Paris révolutionnaire, I (1833), 62. 98. Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), chapters 2 and 3. 99. Donald Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982, 38. 100. Terdiman, Discourse/Counterdiscourse, 117–131. 101. For an earlier example of this dynamic, see Margaret Anne Doody, The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). See especially chapter two. 102. Doody, The Daring Muse, 47. 103. Rivers, Transmutations, 250.

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104. See John Berger, Ways of Seeing (New York: The Viking Press, 1973), 19; and Rivers, Transmutations, 230–231. 105. Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counterdiscourse, 85–115. 106. Baldick, Lemaître, 175. 107. This trend continued into the 1840s, with productions such as Pyat’s Le Chiffonier criticizing society again in the spirit of Robert Macaire. 108. On the role of commercial contingency in representation see Stephen Greenblatt, “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. (New York: Methven, 1985), 163–187. 109. Collingham, The July Monarchy, 342. 110. See McCormick, Popular Theatres. 111. Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. See especially chapter five, “Bourgeois Hysteria and the Carnivalesque.” 112. Théophile Gauthier, Histoire de l’art dramatique, V, 260–261.

Chapter 4

Imposture

On December 11, 1834, the satiric newspaper, Le Charivari, featured a fullpage caricature, just as it had daily since its debut in 1832. The highlight of each issue, these scenes made fun of some aspect of politics or society that seemed askew under the July Monarchy. Like many of the paper’s satiric pictures, this one focuses on women (see figure 4.1). It shows a horse pulling an enclosed wooden cart down a Paris street, out of which a woman peers directly at viewers, her head tipped to one side and her short skirt revealing bare legs. Near the cart, a male barker calls passers-by to step up and see the “savage.” To entice viewers to a closer look he informs them, “she’s a cannibal.”1 Although the caption identified the figure as Canadian, the commentary that accompanied it placed this wild woman closer to home by explaining how she typified the “curiosities” that traveled along Paris’s Boulevard du Temple, the theater strip known famously as the “Boulevard du Crime.” The name referred to the melodramatic murders and robberies enacted nightly on stage, but, in truth, the boisterous space of the boulevard itself also saw much unemployment, poverty, and crime.2 Thus the scene’s caption linked the woman savage to France’s prostitutes and other “dangerous women” who reputedly prowled the street and entrapped vulnerable men.3 For readers who laughed at this picture, the woman’s femininity was the punch line of the joke. With the woman advertised as being a cannibal, literally “a man-eater,” the image asserted that her voracious sexuality threatened to consume viewers on Paris streets. In this depiction, though, she has been caught and confined, and her potential to devour the public exposed and contained. Reduced from a menace to a curiosity, in this condition she invited viewers, both those pictured in the image and those looking at it in Le Charivari, to cast their gaze on women and see the feminine as public spectacle. 125

Figure 4.1.

“She’s a cannibal,“ Le Charivari, 1834.

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If the “canadienne” was a metaphor for the Parisian boulevard woman, then the joke was not just on the female spectacle; the joke was also on any viewer who would regard the Canadian woman as a spectacle while ignoring similar French women on display daily in Paris. In a single scene, this satire communicated several points: it identified women in public as a problem; it reminded viewers that the laws of female decorum remanded women to the private sphere; and it flattered viewers who were witty enough to get the joke. New lithographic techniques meant that images like the female savage could be produced quickly and economically, and as we have seen Le Charivari and La Caricature, along with a host of smaller publications, gave satire a daily voice in political and social affairs.4 One striking aspect of the outpouring of ridicule after the 1830 Revolution is the importance of gender.5 What exactly was funny about these satirical images of women? What, more importantly, was their political goal? It is well established that strict notions of gender boundaries have frequently been invoked to reestablish order following political upheaval.6 Victoria Thompson, for example, has analyzed how gender was used to redefine the marketplace after the July Revolution, explaining that contemporaries appealed to gender to solve the key conflicts of economic and social change, tensions between self-interest and public good, for instance, or making money and personal honor.7 Like ideas about gender, the ridicule of satire, too, worked to resolve new tensions; thus, the combination of the two created powerful social messages. Scenes like that of the “savage” woman brought pressing political and social issues into focus and prompted people to analyze them. But what political conclusions followed from satire’s representation of sexual difference in the unstable political context of the 1830s? And, if satire’s ridicule played a role in the cultural construction of gender in this period, how did that construction relate to the experiences of real women and their participation in the political public of the July Monarchy? This chapter offers an analysis of how the leading newspaper satirists working in this extraordinary moment in French satire manipulated concepts of femininity and masculinity to define the political public under the July Monarchy. Specifically, it examines how images like that of the “savage” created a gendered discourse of political and social criticism that identified and offered solutions to problems of regime change and industrialization. “Exposing” and “unmasking” were common themes in satire. Philipon frequently used the unmasking device to comment on the king’s royal ambition, hidden behind republican rhetoric, or the legislature’s moral failings, masked by apparent rectitude.8 I am using the concept somewhat differently to analyze the role satire played in unmasking and exposing the feminine as an illegitimate or incorrect presence in public life, and to examine why the search for such political imposture seemed necessary in the 1830s. As the July Monarchy promised expanded political and social

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opportunities, satire provided discursive management of both the female and male forms, and placed conceptual limits on the emerging political public that would have significant consequences for French republicanism. As scholars have come to recognize the importance of political humor to modern republics in recent years, there has been an increase in scholarship on the historical role of gender in satire. Cindy McCreery’s The Satirical Gaze: Prints of Women in Eighteenth-Century England, for example, surveys how satirical images illustrated and influenced debates over women’s place in English society.9 Most studies of French satire have focused on politics, and debated whether satire weakened the constitutional monarchy of LouisPhilippe,10 but recently these readings have been broadened by considering gender in July Monarchy satire. Margadant has shown how the king, caught between competing codes of public and private masculinity, that is, between demands to protect the nation and to provide for family, came to look hopelessly corrupted according to both standards,11 leading to his fall in the 1848 Revolution that created the Second French Republic. Indeed, the use of gender in satire has much to tell us about the July Monarchy, particularly about the development of a political public, for if, as Margadant shows, the monarchy was more fragile than previously thought, the populace, in contrast, was gaining strength as it used satire to practice the political skills of analysis and opinion formation. However, while satire offered new political possibilities to some people under this constitutional monarchy, it denied them to others. Clearly one of the goals of using images of scantily clad women in satire was to invite readers into this crucial venue for defining and limiting this new political public, an important task at this pivotal moment in France’s transformation from conservative monarchy to a more democratic polity. New definitions of the political public were needed in the rapidly changing social world of July Monarchy France, in which women were more visible in society than ever before. At the same time as institutions like the art salon, which attracted an astonishing one million viewers in 1831, expanded public venues for women, gave them greater visibility,12 and brought them under increased public scrutiny, the practices of ridicule invaded and shaped these new public spaces. Art critics ridiculed women artists, for example, for producing amateurish work and neglecting household duties, while social observers, like Frances Trollope, poked fun at “ragged blouses” seen at the “spectacle at the Louvre.”13 Society women argued that salon portraits, so crucial to constructing a proper bourgeois image, now subjected women to the mocking crowd, whose critical gaze upon the bare shoulders of the women portrayed would mark the boundary of women’s acceptable ventures into public places.14 Thus, while women had more opportunities to be in public in the 1830s, ridicule set limits on women’s freedom there, in this case, their freedom to show flesh in public.

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The effort to define women’s place in French public life reached back a hundred years. As Joan Scott has famously shown, eighteenth-century theorists argued that the fundamental differences between men and women necessitated different spheres of influence, a “public” realm of politics for men, and a “private” realm of domesticity for women. Against liberalism’s assertion of equal rights for all, republicans had legislated in the First French Republic that women would be excluded from public, political life. Their decision reflected the popularity of Rousseau’s model of a “republic of virtue” in which women’s moral sense qualified them uniquely to shape future republicans in a world of feminine domesticity. At the same time, republicans argued that women’s reputedly weak and uncontrollably sexualized bodies left them susceptible to emotional and sexual excesses and rendered them unfit for political debate and authority.15 So vivid was this picture of feminine excess that, as Joan Landes has argued, the First French Republic depended on women’s political exclusion for its legitimacy.16 In part, republicans hoped to distance their new politics from the old by repealing the power exercised by aristocratic women, but more than that, republicans were enacting new notions of revolutionary virtue. As Susan Grogan explains, “male virtue rested on disinterestedness, on adherence to abstract principles, and pursuit of the general good whatever the personal cost. Female virtue lay in fostering the happiness of those near and dear to the woman and in the emotional connectedness that ran counter to dispassionate public decision making. Whereas man asserted his virtue by his actions within the public sphere, woman’s presence in the public arena was deemed to destroy her virtue.”17 Women, in other words, could have no place in the ideal political universe.18 The July Monarchy gave new urgency to the question of women’s “fit” in the political public when the 1830 Revolution, and the constitutional regime it brought to power, reopened the battle between republicans and monarchists for control of French political life. Under the July Monarchy, women’s place was still defined largely by the 1804 Civil Code that subordinated women to men’s authority, both in the family and in public. The Code barred women from voting, holding public office, acting as jurors, or transferring property without a husband’s permission. The Code was rounded out in 1816 when lawmakers outlawed women’s right to initiate divorce.19 But in 1830, the new king, Louis-Philippe, had attempted to combine monarchy with liberal institutions, and compared to his ultra-conservative predecessor, seemed open to the possibility of increasing political participation. Not only had he abolished censorship in 1830, he had accepted a Charter from an elected assembly and proclaimed himself the “citizen king,” all of which implied a yet undetermined measure of receptivity to republican demands for more inclusive civic and political life. Granting the freedom to criticize

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politics and society and to hold political representatives responsible for their actions once again raised questions of who would have the power to voice criticism and who would be silenced. If democratization was a political possibility for men in 1830, what, if anything, would the July Monarchy mean politically for women, both as flesh and blood creatures and as objects of cartoon representation? Both the logic of liberal citizenship, based on natural law, and real-life experiences of women outside of domesticity contradicted idealized divisions between men and women in public life, and in the life of satire. What kind of citizens, moreover, were newly emerging women writers, like Delphine Gay de Girardin and George Sand,20 who held political opinions, exposed public wrongdoing, and shaped debate on the regime’s most pressing issues? Immediately following the 1830 Revolution the “woman question” took a new turn as it became clear that the struggle for political rights, for both men or women, was far from over. The democratization that many revolutionaries had anticipated slipped away as a tiny number of elite males solidified their political hold on France. In 1831, legislators extended the franchise from approximately 94,000 male property owners under the Restoration to 166,583, or from about .3 to .5 per cent of the French population.21 Despite wide dissatisfaction, even republican societies—the loudest advocates of voting rights—opposed women’s suffrage as a violation of gender norms. However, and this is key to understanding satire’s political meaning, because the franchise continued to expand (if only incrementally) in the 1830s, and because women were participating more influentially in public life, their place in the public sphere remained unsettled. Thus, as republicans campaigned for political rights, the July Monarchy saw a simultaneous campaign of ridicule to specify just how and when women would have access to public life. I want to argue here that once the Revolution made it necessary to redefine the political public, satire played an essential role in the reconstruction process because its ridicule provided political culture’s most biting means of representing, and thereby justifying and helping to enact, political exclusion. During this decade of political renegotiation, it specialized in unmasking “the feminine” as political imposture, in showing when “feminine” behavior was lurking, hiding, or invading public life. Satire accomplished this in a variety of ways, most often by portraying women with a particular type of sexuality that showed them to have animalistic or infantile qualities. This was the type of sexuality asserted in the “savage” image. In these depictions, satire established femininity as the sign of the ridiculous and, thus, the illegitimate in public. Once the feminine was defined as animalistic and infantile, it could be used as a tool to discuss and discredit actual people.

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Satire thrived on anxiety over what art historian Griselda Pollock has called “the frontier of the space of femininity,22 an imagined border between a publicly sanctioned ideal of femininity and a fantasized realm of the immoral, the dangerous and the ridiculous. It served as a site for the inscription of sexual difference where ideas about femininity and masculinity were produced and arbitrated, and in the 1830s, was a crucial locus of negotiations over the division between women as legitimate public actors and women as unmasked civic impostors. As such, it stood at the center of the effort to achieve political order through gendered order that characterized the 1830s. Of course, newspaper satire was not the only political art form to analyze women and gender in this period. In literature, Balzac’s La comédie humaine featured an appearance by George Sand, while his Les illusions perdues treated les bas bleus. Michael Marrinan has examined how painting, too, was employed for political purposes.23 Satire, however, provided the public with daily doses of political commentary and mockery. Its lithographic images circulated through a sizeable segment of the population via subscriptions held by coffee houses and apartment buildings, as well as by private individuals. It delivered political humor about current events with a speed and regularity that other media could not match. This chapter opens with an examination of how satirists responded to women’s new roles with a barrage of ridicule. As part of their commentary on the political public, satirists also scrutinized the male citizen, and the chapter looks next at how they used notions of the feminine as synonymous with the ridiculous and incorrectly political to criticize certain male behavior. In particular, satirists questioned the male citizen’s virtuous disinterest, thought to be required of civic life, in the modern commodity culture of 1830s France. Satire’s double face meant that even when an image featured femininity, men as well as women could be the object of discussion. The chapter proceeds then to an examination of satire’s implications for the body politic and ultimately for a new French republicanism. Representing femininity and masculinity in satire affected political culture in two related ways. First, by engaging viewers or readers in criticism, satire instructed people to take a public voice. This public experience of fault-finding and opinion formation democratized July Monarchy political culture by drawing new people into the realm of analysis and debate. But, second, satire also communicated to audiences that taking a public voice should be limited by gender. As fears of revolutionary upheaval were expressed through representations of women’s bodies, whether as desexualized figures or as sexualized bodies for sale, women were shown to be laughable as public people. Finally, the chapter concludes with a look at satire’s role in the

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political downfall of one of the July Monarchy’s most powerful women, the duchesse de Berry, and with her, the demise of right-wing opposition to Louis-Philippe’s regime.

SATIRIC IMAGES OF WOMEN (AND MEN): POLITICAL, INTELLECTUAL, AND COMMODIFIED IMPOSTORS At their most general level, satire’s gendered images were part of social change underway in the 1830s as France experienced the upheavals of urban and industrial expansion. As an industry, the press flourished due in part to new lithographic technology and Louis-Philippe’s relaxed censorship, but also to urban society’s rising literacy rates and increasing number of consumer products.24 Very importantly for the study of satiric criticism and gender, this decade of industrialization and social change brought women into activities that challenged the domestic ideal, gave them greater visibility, and intensified female activism. In the 1830 Revolution, for example, women had fought on the barricades. Praised for working to overthrow the Restoration monarchy, these mostly artisanal and lower middle-class women had entered the public domain through street politics. At the same time, the July regime’s abolition of censorship meant that middle- and working-class writers and activists were finding public voice for the first time since the 1790s in new magazines and newspapers, like the Journal des dames et des demoiselles. Middle-class women, including George Sand and Daniel Stern, became novelists and playwrights, and others worked outside the home in family businesses and charitable organizations.25 Rising socialist movements, like Saint-Simonianism and Fourierism, gave voice to middle- and working-class women who sought political equality and sexual freedom. Intellectual women in literature and politics, like Hortense Allart, used their new public voices to argue for the redistribution of legal and economic privilege in this post-revolutionary moment of political and social flux. They sought education and work opportunities, reform of the Civil Code’s marriage laws, and in some cases, the vote.26 Critics of women’s new public activities attacked literary, artistic, and politically vocal women for abandoning domestic life. To many people, women’s campaigns for legalized divorce and an end to arranged marriages made the middle-class family seem vulnerable to social pressures and escalated concern over women’s role in the changing public sphere. Highly publicized cases of adultery and illegitimacy in high-profile political circles, like that of the duchesse de Berry,27 fueled such fears, as did new modes of economic independence for women. According to Claire Goldberg Moses, as employment opportunities increased in 1831 and 1832, growing numbers of

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young, single, “new women” supported themselves financially and expected to do so in the future. Financial independence made it possible to challenge women’s subordination to men in marriage, that is, to seek sexual freedom, or “love without marriage.”28 Drawing on old ideas of family order as the foundation of political order, satirists responded to these social changes by portraying women as public actors who lacked reason and self-control, particularly an inability to control their own bodies. This idea was frequently applied to socialist and intellectual women. No group drew more fire from satirists than Saint-Simonian women, perhaps because the Saint-Simonian social vision so thoroughly challenged nineteenth-century French social and sexual order. To address the turmoil of the 1820s and 1830s, the followers of Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, had developed alternative visions of gender and class relations, and created a plan to restructure French society. Their plan gave a critical role to women in a society free of monogamy and its sexual repression. To overhaul France’s violence and inegalitarianism with a program of sexual equality and emancipation of the poor, Saint-Simonians searched for an androgynous leader who would be half man and half woman. The Saint-Simonian principal, Prosper Enfantin, had named himself as the male half of this “divine symbol of union,” the “Father of Humanity,” and Saint-Simonians searched for a “Mother” in the early 1830s. Despite the rhetoric of female authority, however, many real Saint-Simonian women objected to the lack of leadership opportunities for women within the movement. They broke from the group in 1832 and created La Femme libre, a women’s paper which they produced at their own cost. The paper’s mission was to reveal the shared natural bonds between common and privileged women, expose how class and sex oppression worked together, and analyze male-constructed codes of sexual morality.29 Perhaps because they were in the newspaper business themselves, satirists focused their critique of Saint-Simonianism on the new paper. Through their humor, they worked to reveal how the paper was a threat to bourgeois marriage and family, a microcosm of a larger disturbance in gender relations. Much of the mockery turned on the double meaning of La Femme libre, “the free woman,” as both a declaration of liberation and an offer of sex. An image entitled “La femme libre, elle est trouvée,” which appeared in the government-sponsored satiric paper, La Charge, in 1833, shows a meeting between Enfantin and the long-sought “Mother,” who turns out to be an amorous chimpanzee (see figure 4.2). Though Enfantin resists her advances, the scene at once trivializes the activist work of La Femme libre and reunites the splinter group visually with Saint-Simonian male leadership. Art historians have shown that this vision reassured viewers that socialists were a unified and containable threat to French social stability.30

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Figure 4.2.

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“La femme libre, elle est trouvée“ La Charge, 1833.

Beyond that, however, the image is interesting not only for its mocking of socialists, but also for what it said about women in the process. It is important to see that, at a more basic level, the humor of the chimpanzee image lies in the fact that the chimp is disguised in a woman’s bonnet, dress, and shoes. This ape, dressed as a woman, was funny because it said that women activists were apes in disguise. Its humor rested on its

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assertion that women were dissembling and not fully human, and men could be caught off guard by women’s hidden, animal-like nature. Pleasure for the viewer resulted from recognizing the hidden “truth” about women and from the comforting promise of controlling the danger of this newly exposed animalistic femininity. Making fun of Saint-Simonian women did more than make the socialist plan look laughable; equally importantly, it countered the socialist vision with satirists’ own responses to social upheaval. This satire, in other words, like satire generally, could bring social problems into view and propose their solution. In this case, the anti-Saint-Simonian satire suggested that social order might be regained by preventing animalistic women’s participation in public life, that is, through reasserting a gendered division of public space and political life. One reason why satire so dominated political culture in this period was precisely this power to cast social conflicts as gender issues that could be resolved. We can see just this kind of framing occurring in satire of socialists, literary women, and what would later be called “feminism.” Bolstered not just by Saint-Simonianism but also by other utopian socialists, including followers of Charles Fourier, campaigns for women’s rights gained momentum in the early 1830s. Like the Saint-Simonians’ Enfantin, Fourier viewed women’s emancipation as a necessary condition for human progress. But unlike Enfantin, Fourier had located the need for women’s liberation not in women’s special virtues but in the natural equality of all humans. Denying women rights equal to men’s, Fourier had argued, could only be called “savagery.”31 As we have seen, in the early 1830s, satirists were turning such ideas about savagery upside down and showing not women’s oppression but women themselves as savages who threatened social order (see figure 4.1). These ideas intensified later in the decade as women’s participation in literary life expanded; with growing literacy rates, a new female reading public, and new women’s genres developing, satirists mocked women for their progressive roles both as writers and simply as readers. Their portrayals of women as apes and savages were attempts to unmask women’s wild nature and unsuitability for the civilized world of thinking and writing. Daumier, Gavarni, and other top satirists targeted women who were involved in the French literary industry in the 1830s as serialized novelists, as editors or publishers of literary or political magazines, and as courted readers of competing journals. Daumier’s series, “Moeurs conjugales,” which appeared in Le Charivari in the late 1830s, showed women so engrossed in reading that they neglected home, sex, and family life. Ridiculing literary women as a type, the “blue-stocking,” the series advocated a specific concept of middle-class femininity that rejected women’s political and literary

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achievements. Women of ideas appeared to be deviant creatures that ignored children and enjoyed aberrant sexual appetites. In particular, the “Moeurs conjugales” series bemoaned the influence of George Sand, the well-known novelist and critic who mocked gender conventions by dressing publicly in men’s clothing. In one famous scene, published in 1839, a husband stands holding his pants in front of his wife, who lounges in a chair engrossed in a Sand novel (see figure 4.3). The husband recoils in dismay at his unmended trousers and his wife’s lack of attention. His bedraggled hair and irregular features show him to be a misfit in domestic life. In

Figure 4.3.

“I don’t give a damn about your Mme Sand . . .,“ Le Charivari, 1839.

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the caption he says, “I don’t give a damn about your Mme SAND who keeps women from mending pants and darning socks! . . . We must reestablish divorce or suppress those authors!”32 Sand is absent from the image above, symbolized only by her corrupting book. The woman reader, consuming Sand’s work in her own home, is herself not correctly domestic. The image offered a window onto a hidden “truth” first, that Sand’s public voice reached women in private, and second, that the domestic setting merely masked the way this woman (and by implication many real women) had abandoned her family duties for other intellectual concerns. Two culprits were being identified and mocked for their problematic forays beyond the familial: Sand, whose books led women to read instead of mend, and women readers, who might still be in the home, but were now indulging their personal desires at the expense of their dependents. The scene trivialized women’s intellectual pursuits by showing them as mere distractions from women’s proper household activities. Clearly, the right thing for the woman in this image to do would be to put down the book and uphold her responsibilities. Scenes like Daumier’s went beyond mocking women’s professional aspirations; they conjured images of the grotesque, of the defeminized woman writer as well as the feminized man who defaulted on middle-class standards of masculinity by failing to provide financial support for his family. Daumier’s domestic scene is in disarray not only because women are in public but because men are not. Satiric images warned of damaging, disorderly consequences of intellectual women’s behavior for both women and men. Where women are not present correctly in either public or private settings, both femininity and masculinity suffer. Satire asserted to viewers that, by spoiling women’s virtue, intellectual women were corrupting both feminine domesticity and masculine publicity. Ridiculing intellectual women suggested that women who pursued their desires beyond domesticity upset gender order; men appear as emasculated and ineffectual, while women look neglectful and misguided. Satirists may have attacked women writers to counter their professional competition, as some have argued33—certainly press laws and competition increased tensions between female and male writers—but they were likely responding to other important challenges that women writers posed to the status quo that had to do with the political implications of women’s intellectual life. For nearly two centuries, elite French salon women had read and judged work produced by men,34 and while there had certainly been women writers in the eighteenth century, by the nineteenth century, increasing numbers of women were not just hosting salons but becoming writers themselves.35 This affected how women were treated in satire. Authorship identified woman writers as speaking subjects and defined them by their

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intellectual rather than nurturing sensibilities. Satire portrayed these sensibilities as binary opposites; women who pursued intellectual life defied the domestic ideal by definition. Satire showed women’s claim to intellectual, social, and even political authority based on reason, not emotion, as too unnatural for society to bear insofar as a reasoned, self-sufficient woman challenged the economy of relations between men and women. This kind of heightened authority for women raised prospects of female celibacy36 and of the middle-class female as a subject whose sexuality eluded commodification in marriage. This way of thinking about women’s sexuality and their voice as intellectual people formed the logic behind so much of satire’s assault on women’s political activity, and explains satirists’ infantilizing portrayals. As new women’s newspapers, like Marie-Madeleine Poutret de Mauchamp’s Gazette des femmes, for example, worked to educate women about legal issues and civil rights, satirists at Le Charivari ridiculed feminist rhetoric as empty, frivolous, and beyond the pale of reasoned discourse. From 1836 to 1838, Poutret de Mauchamp’s liberal republican paper appealed for clearly specified institutional changes, including women’s admittance to the Institut de France, divorce rights, and deletion of the Civil Code’s provision that wives owed obedience to husbands.37 Each issue of the Gazette published legal petitions addressed to the king and to the Chambers of Deputies and Peers. Written in a sophisticated legal style, the petitions argued in the manner of legal briefs for women’s political and civil rights. They routinely cited articles of the 1830 Charter that proclaimed the equality of “Frenchmen” under the law and in matters of taxation. Many petitions demanded women’s political equality to men based on the fact that women, too, paid taxes.38 In contrast to the paper’s substantive arguments, satirists’ portraits of women activists evacuated women’s goals and operations of serious content. This is typically the point of satire. For example, one parody of a politically active woman described her vacuous political acts: “Madame read the novels of George Sand, she cried at performances of ‘Marie,’ and she was up-to-date on all of the demonstrations and insurrectional activities recently publicized by women through the voice of the press and popular theater.”39 Feminism looks more like a social calendar than a political agenda, and this feminist more of a passive observer who breaks down in public than a political person who functions well in public space. Mocking women of ideas extended to ridiculing women political leaders like England’s Queen Victoria and Spain’s Queen Marie Christine, shown to be incompetent politically through satirists’ portrayals of these women’s unnatural sexual relations with men.40 This type of ridicule reached across political boundaries, with similar mockery appearing in the legitimist journals La Mode and the Journal pour rire.41

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Despite the ridicule, women’s newspapers and petitions succeeded in requiring French legislators to consider women’s issues, but only to draw more mockery. Like satirists, legislators confronted women’s efforts with the powerful force of ridicule. In 1836 the Gazette des femmes petitioned against Article 213 of the Civil Code (“The husband owes protection to his wife; the wife obedience to her husband”). The Journal des debats records that, when the Chamber of Deputies learned of the petition, they reacted with” hilarity,” “more hilarity,” and “new laughter.”42 Ridicule provided the first line of defense against “la femme libre,” and both satirists and legislators used it to quash women’s political voice. Satirists berated women of ideas not just for a dearth of sexual desire, as in Daumier’s “Moeurs conjugales” image, but also for an over-reaching sexuality, both of which reduced femininity solely to sexual behavior that violated satirists’ normative parameters of acceptability. In a typical scene from Le Charivari, a night-shirted man rushes to his wife’s bedroom with a pistol (see figure 4.4). Believing he has heard a man’s voice, he stands relieved to see his wife reclining in a chair, eyes closed, holding a book—Ernest Legouvé’s Le Mérite des femmes, a popular treatise on feminine virtue. In the caption under the picture, the husband regrets his failure to appreciate his virtuous wife, discovered engaged not in adultery but in the solitary study of feminine virtue. The joke is made as the viewer looks beyond the couple to the background, where a man’s hat and shoes reveal the woman’s paramour secreted behind a curtain. This image has been interpreted as an indictment of the woman for her lack of virtue, for breaking the bonds of marriage. 43 And indeed this kind of scene conceptualized women’s virtue as superficial, a cover behind which lay adulterous behavior. But I want to suggest that the image goes further in its indictment. This satire is unmasking an animalistic sexuality, shown as voraciousness in this case, by portraying women engaged in secret sex. Virtue, symbolized by the manual, is a mask not only for women’s disloyalty, but for a base nature that meant that women could never be loyal, whether in private or in public. In the public arena, women’s sexual self-indulgence could promise only chaos and unpredictability. Up to this point, we have been looking at the types of activities that satire targeted, the sexual, intellectual, and political activities by women who ventured into public life. Satirists used them to express fear of a femininity that had run amok. Satire further charged that once women abandoned proper domesticity, as many people believed they were doing in the 1830s, they were not only oversexed, animalistic, and in need of control (recall the “savage” woman on the Boulevard du Crime), they could also be perversely powerful in that their behavior could cause men to look ridiculous in public, too. In “That’s my wife,” for example, that appeared in Le Charivari in 1840,

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Figure 4.4.

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“Le mérite des femmes,“ Le Charivari, 1836.

a male figure rushes out of a barbershop when he sees a female figure—his wife—stroll by with her dapper lover (see figure 4.5). The woman and her lover appear much smaller than the man, and are sketched in less detail. The man stands in the foreground, the shock on his face underscored by the kerchief around his neck, the knot and drape of which on closer inspection

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Figure 4.5.

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“That’s my wife,” Le Charivari, 1840.

resemble the head of an ass or perhaps the horns of the cuckold.44 Satire of adultery that portrayed women as calm and purposeful in their behavior also commented on cuckolded men, as satirists charged women with making men look emasculated and ridiculous in public. These images portrayed bourgeois anxieties about women’s empowerment. Satirists understood the power of ridicule, and their work warned of women’s ability to make men look absurd.

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This ability extended to the world of economics. What is interesting about satiric condemnation is that its broad reach could show women simultaneously as sexualized bodies and savvy professionals able to use their sex to powerful economic advantage. In a typical image, a young actress in costume leans close to a mirror over a dressing table to put on her makeup. As viewers, we see a corpulent male gazing lecherously at her from behind. At its most obvious level, the scene is meant to be funny because the woman, whose face we see reflected in the mirror, is not looking at the man and cannot see that he is staring openly at her sexualized body. The caption, however, reveals a second level of humor. She reassures him about a potential rival, “Me, ever have anything to do with that little journalist! . . . Oh, Edouard! . . . oh, no! I detest them too much . . . and do you think I have it so bad that I have to be nice to thugs like that! . . . but they could ruin you, damn it!”45 The humor turns on the viewer’s knowledge about the vicissitudes of the acting business and the way that business mirrors the terms of the couple’s relationship. Just as the woman must consider her economic self-interest and the balance of power in her dealings with journalists, so she must strategize in her relationship with her protector, empowered by the threat that she could pit one lover against the other. Both relationships necessitate a performance, a fact that is revealed in the image and is central to the joke.46 The caption works against the desirous gaze of the male with the possibility that he is being cuckolded by a dissembling woman in the name of economic survival. Such machinations discredited women as public people by showing them to be self-interested materialists who entered into public affairs at the cost of masculine dignity. As a dangerous public woman who made her way preying on the fortunes of men, this woman represented the antithesis of the civic virtue good citizens needed. Instead, such images cast women as symbols of soiled virtue. In all of this, satire was creating a definition of femininity as the opposite of civic virtue. It argued that women are illegitimate in public because they have a corrosive effect on public life, and on men. These arguments framed possibilities for real women in the July Monarchy by visually justifying real women’s exclusion from political life. In perhaps their most comprehensive act of defining and discursively limiting women’s public voice, satirists used women as allegories in political satire. “Birth of the juste-milieu,”47 for example, shows the emergence of the balanced politics intended to characterize Louis-Philippe’s reign (see figure 4.6). A worn-out mother “Liberty” slumps against pillows after the painful delivery, while Louis-Philippe holds up for onlookers the newborn that the caption tells us is a “monstrous embryo.” The piece has been identified as a parody of Eugène Devéria’s “The Birth of Henri IV,” a salon showpiece in 1827.48 As early as 1832, dissatisfaction with Louis-Philippe’s regime raged

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Figure 4.6.

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“Birth of the juste milieu,“ Le Caricature, 1832.

on both the Left and the Right, and journalists, both satiric and otherwise, were particularly outraged by the persistence of censorship, despite official claims to the contrary. Playing on popular dissatisfaction with the regime, the joke lies in the assumption that Louis-Philippe’s monstrous hybrid of “bourgeois monarchy” would be at all related to “Liberty,” which is the point that scholarly interpretation of this image has focused on.49 But looking at how gender operates in this scene deepens our understanding of its humor and political implications. In allegories, as in other types

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of satire, the gender dynamics of the scene often sparked the humor. The allegorical “Liberty” in this case is the only female figure in the room, and her role in creating the new regime is the bodily role of childbirth. Her bare breasts establish her femininity and guarantee her exclusion from the realm of public reason. Thus excluded by maternal virtue, she can then act as an icon of civic virtue. In the post-childbirth scene, her work for the new regime is done. “Liberty” is shown surrounded, however, by top political officials of the July Monarchy, men who actually existed with fully formed political identities. Casimir Perier, the Minister of the Interior in early 1832, known for oppressing popular associations and excluding the king himself from Cabinet meetings, “wants to lend a hand to the mother.” Minister of Public Instruction, François Guizot, staunch advocate of an elite franchise, holds the forceps. A. M. J. Dupin, procureur général and president in 1832 of the Chamber of Deputies, an unpopular figure known to oppose workers’ demonstrations and political clubs, poses as the doctor and rubs his hands together with pleasure. Six other named political figures participate in the birth. The main point for our purpose is that in the image, public men enjoy active political identities; their political acts give meaning to the image and inform the humor. The woman, in contrast, bears only an allegorical identity; her biological performance, her only political act, is actually a performance of political imposture, a demonstration of women’s unsuitability for the political arena, and it, too, is part of the humor. In other words, the image’s humor encoded masculinity as the realm of the political and femininity as the realm of the biological, and confirmed motherhood as women’s proper task. What is important to see is how the humor argues for gender division in public life. The men, feminized as midwives assisting the birth, look ridiculous because they are maladroit in their approach to liberty. And as we can see from the image, the female “Liberty” is exhausted as a player in civic life. These humorous incongruities can be seen to cast real women as civic impostors because using women in allegory reasserted women’s status as nonpolitical beings. In an historical moment when women were venturing into political life in new ways, representing “Liberty” or “France” or “Justice” as a woman reaffirmed actual political arrangements in which real women had no formal political power.

SATIRE OF MEN (AND WOMEN): IMPOSTURE AND VIRTUE In the early years of the July Monarchy when the press was ostensibly free to satirize politics, creators of satire like “Birth of the juste-milieu” could get away with naming names and featuring actual politicians like Guizot and

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Perier. But after draconian new press laws prohibited political satire in 1835, satirists were forced to find more circumspect ways to comment on the political world. With stiff fines and jail time ruling out overt political humor, satirists targeted a materialistic society and commodity culture that they believed upheld Louis-Philippe’s government. In this, they grew more explicit in their portrayals of women as commodities, which enabled them to talk about both women and men in public. Consider the scene from Daumier’s “Emotions parisiennes” series published in Le Charivari in 1840 (see figure 4.7). A well-dressed bourgeois male, outfitted with the identifying hat and black umbrella, stares into a shop window at a display of four corsets. From the perspective of the viewer, the lines of the floor and shop windows lead the eye to the barrel-shaped belly of the man, in contrast to the rigid female figures of the corsets. The caption reads, “It’s exceptional! I’ve had four waists, just like these, during my lifetime: Fifine, my first! Cocotte, little devil, Cocotte! Big Mimi, and my wife up there in the corner.”50 The corsets are the shells of the bourgeois’ past relationships with women. In this scene, the women in his life are memorialized as nothing more than their four different sizes. The man’s clothes indicate his materialism, while the corsets extend that materialism to the consumption of women. Women, it seems, are only one more product to be displayed for him, and by implication they can be acquired and enjoyed.51 The image underscores the important place of consuming in bourgeois ideals of masculinity and femininity. But, remember, this image is not a sober portrait, and the exaggerated features of the male body, animated strokes of the pen, and wholesale reduction of women to underwear tell us that we are to read it as a satire. Yet what exactly is being ridiculed, the empty shells of women who can be bought or the masculine figure that covets them? The answer seems to be both. While the male character exercises his freedom to stroll about the city and cast his desirous gaze on whatever he wants, there is a real ambiguity about how the female figures in this image. Visualized as corsets, she is present in public not as a physical being but as an idea. Yet at the same time, the female is emphatically embodied in the cloth replicas of female forms. The image seems to capture a moment when women fit into public space only in an abstracted way, in this case as commodities. In this vision of public life, created a decade after new social opportunities brought more women into public life than ever before, and after Revolution had held out the possibility of political democratization, the working-class prostitute, “Cocotte,” like the bourgeois wife feature only as traces of women, as masks that stand-in for women’s bodies. Women, in other words, are decidedly absent from this street scene. At the same time, the male figure

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Figure 4.7.

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“It’s exceptional! I’ve had four waists . . .,“ Le Charivari, 1840.

himself looks somewhat ridiculous standing on the street consuming fantasized women. If women have been removed altogether from public life, this image also seems to challenge, albeit in a very different way, the male’s civic virtue by exposing his relationship to commodity culture, his reliance on commodified sexuality.

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Judging from the attention satire paid to women and materialism, one might conclude that French satirists represented commodity culture as a problem of femininity only, but in fact, satirists could be critical of commodity culture’s feminizing effect on masculinity as well. “Reign of Equality,”52 for example, showed a grocer and his wife, Madame and Monsieur Potasse, dressed in every conceivable frill, sash, feather, and finery, parading their wealth of cloth and ribbon in public. Based on the visual display of commodity culture that authorized women in public to shop or promenade, the image typified satire of overdressed couples who eat up their funds displaying themselves like bourgeois courtiers.53 The wife glances sideways at the viewer to check that she is seen. Satirists locked onto middle-class women as seemingly insatiable consumers of fashion, a weakness that cast them outside the limits of sober, civic discourse. But this image shows both the male and female figures to be concerned with display, frivolity, and ostentation. Under the socalled “citizen-king’s” “reign of equality,” during which many bourgeois in fact enriched themselves at the expense of the working poor, men and women achieve equality in their vanity and quest for fortune. The “Reign of Equality” feminized men by representing them as women’s equals in the world of consumption and cast doubts on their ability to be disinterested citizens. Thus, satirists ridiculed materialism of both men and women as they mocked the economics of many social relationships under the July Monarchy. Bourgeois marriage topped the list of disparagement, an institution exposed in satire as a function of money and property relations that, like the more public encounters between middle-class men and working-class women, was based on economic opportunity. Revealing how people treated one another as commodities pointed a finger at perpetrators and questioned not just their human merchandise but them, too, as appropriate civic actors. This was part of a larger trend in which changing social relations brought both femininity and masculinity under the microscope. According to Victoria Thompson, the growing market of industrializing France threatened the public and private virtue of both men and women. Taming self-interest and salvaging virtue now required men to exhibit self-control in the face of market forces and women to withdraw from the marketplace altogether.54 Yet satirists were also responding to transformations in political structures and dissatisfaction with political life in the 1830s. They used feminized male figures and concepts of the grotesque, of a natural order perverted, to portray the whole of the July Monarchy twisted out of shape. Perhaps this was best expressed by the ubiquitous character, “Mayeux,” a diminutive hunchback who turned up in newspapers and pamphlets throughout the 1830s as the personification of the “bourgeois monarch’s” politically hybrid regime. Mayeux’s deformed male body, feminized and made grotesque by its round

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hump, represented the July Monarchy itself as the ineffectual and the ridiculous. As early as 1831, the newspaper, Le Figaro, struck by the wide popularity of Mayeux, queried, “is there not something strange about this figure of Mayeux, thrown into the midst of our serious political questions, entangled in judicial discussions, and becoming in some way the only thing appealing to the people of our epoch?”55 The mainstream press underscored Mayeux’s representativeness and powerlessness. Le Figaro declared, “Mayeux is you, me, all of us . . . serious buffoons opening our mouths up to the eyeballs, showing teeth to laugh and never to bite.” Mayeux seemed both phallic and feminine, a “ big gun carried by a dwarf,” an “exaggerated spirit in a frail frame.”56 As a character, Mayeux expressed disappointment in the July regime and embodied the rhetorical political question posed by Le Figaro and other critics of current politics: “Why this passionate vigor [of Revolution] only to end in the grotesque?”57 Characters like Mayeux that framed questions about post-revolutionary politics illustrate how satire’s muscle lay in its ability to specify masculine and feminine ideals that simultaneously expressed criticism and gave order to public life under the July Monarchy. Satire faulted the intrusion of commodity culture into social and political affairs that lay at the core of bourgeois society and that politics sustained at the highest level. At the same time as it targeted women’s sexualized bodies for debasing public life, it mocked a covetous masculinity by ridiculing the behavior of men in public and by presenting working-class women’s victories over them. And yet, while satire revealed the gendered disorder of bourgeois society, it helped to configure political life as specifically male. It faulted a concept of masculinity based on public greed, represented as the sexual possession of women in public, while it perpetuated gendered ideals that denied women alternatives to the economic arrangements of marriage. It is crucial to see that satire put forward a vision of order by criticizing both feminine and masculine behavior. Satire placed beyond the frontiers of acceptability images of literary women who abandoned domesticity and feminized men who suffered because of it; of working-class women who sold their sex and middle-class men who bought it; of middle-class women who lived ostentatiously and middle-class men who married them. Interestingly, if satire showed politics to be properly a masculine realm, it also offered a vision of masculine virtue based on the body. In part, this developed naturally from the codes of caricature, which were based on the body and appearance. Satirists often worked by selecting physical features for exaggeration to make statements about things people did and believed, their caricatures using the body to say something about character.58 But in the context of questions about representative government and citizenship in the July

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Monarchy, satire placed on the surface of men’s bodies a moral frame that measured irresponsibility and duplicity. For example, satirists might show a swollen stomach or flabby physique to suggest that the traditional male citizen had been deformed in the 1830s. Daumier’s well-known lithograph, “The Belly of the Legislature: view of the ministerial bench of the prostituted Chamber of 1834,” pictures France’s highest ranking politicians as a legislative body of misshapen figures (see figure 4.8). Arguing that it is from an empty stomach and active bowels that legislators work, the scene uses the body to illustrate the abuses of the July Monarchy. The people pictured were those deputies who had been awarded positions beyond that of deputy for loyalty to the ministry or government. La Caricature’s editor explained how appetites had eclipsed their reason and compassion: “The belly is the God of the ministry, it is the soul of the legislative body, it is its heart, it is its head, it is everything for the Chamber of 1834.”59 Satirists impugned the corrupt legislators by pointing to their distorted masculine forms. Similarly, the satire, “Hercules the conqueror,” uses the body to critique and define masculine virtue, this time presenting Louis-Philippe as the classical figure in statue (see figure 4.9). Unlike the muscular, upright body of antiquity, however, Louis-Philippe’s corpulent body sags into a pear shape, completely divested of its classic allure. Outfitted with identifying top-hat and bourgeois umbrella, he mimics the pose of the demi-God, but holds

Figure 4.8.

“The belly of the Legislature,“ La Caricature, 1834.

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“Hercules,“ La Caricature, 1834.

his hat, filled with three small bombs, behind his back. Another bomb sits at his feet as he gazes down on burning city ruins. The scene’s sting has to do with the fact that it was printed in May 1834, one month after workingclass uprisings in Paris and Lyon had been brutally put down by government forces. Given the timing, the image implies that behind-the-back government machinations may have been a part of the king’s Herculean struggle to quell

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the disorder.60 This threw a jab at the government that itself frequently hurled accusations of conspiracy at the public. Using Hercules’ body to symbolize national leadership was not something new; the Revolutionaries of the 1790s had also adopted Hercules to represent the French nation, though in a far different way.61 And, in fact, representing Louis-Philippe as a known symbol of Revolutionary France was itself an act of opposition that insisted on the Revolutionary character of the July Monarchy. But in the 1834 case, Hercules was not a hard-bodied abstraction of the French nation, but a soft-bellied image of King Louis-Philippe. The satire accused Louis-Philippe of a culpable response to the April uprisings. In part, the bombs signal the king’s guilt, but the bombs are actually quite small; it is the bulbous body of the king that captures viewers’ attention. The king’s fleshy form alerted viewers that the monarch was a flawed figure. Desecrating the body of the king or any other male political figure of the citizenkingdom prepared the ground for satiric charges of bad political behavior, behavior against the political interest of the nation. It compared the peril of this kind of political conspiracy to the feminized corruptibility of the human body, and opposed it to the purity of political reason. The bloated bellies of men-out-of-shape taught audiences to consider whether the actors besieged by satire were fit for civic duty.

UNMASKING POLITICAL PROBLEMS THROUGH FORM AND CONTENT: SATIRE’S AESTHETIC SOLUTION All of these images suggest an important difference between a satiric and a sober indictment of gender disorder: satire could strip away the mask of propriety and involve audiences in a means to address the mythic sexual disorder and consequent social danger that the mask concealed. More than simply a denunciation of women’s sexuality, the satiric form and the content of images existed in a mutually reinforcing relationship, and it was this relationship that projected both the problem of social disorder and the solution to it. For example, in the scene with the virtue manual discussed earlier (figure 4.4), indeed the content asked viewers to see women’s virtue as deceit behind which lay the “truth” of women’s sexual impropriety and appetite, and threat to social and political order. But additionally, the form of satire, the humor of which depended on a first, then a second, moment of recognition, taught viewers that the image’s initial message—that of the husband discovering a virtuous wife and deciding that his first impression of marital infidelity had been wrong—was incorrect, and that viewers who stopped at deceptive first appearances would miss the second, “real” message lurking literally in the

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shadows of this lithograph. Thus, in the specific context of new literary technology and readership, and new questions of women’s role in public, satire’s gendered images of deception simultaneously provided a narrative of hidden danger in society and called on viewers to exercise the skills of detection needed to see it and set it right. Significantly, this kind of satire coopted gender into a satiric aesthetic, a valued pleasure in communication that detected hidden reality behind surface appearance. Satire offered a visual pleasure of seeing the hidden. In this way, it invited complicity with the viewer, that is, it invited the viewer to invest himself—and most readers were men62—in the act of detection. From this perspective, the overarching message of the satirized literary woman discussed above, then, was trifold: first, she, like the “savage” women on Paris streets, corroded both public and private life for both women and men; second, society could be made orderly by controlling her dangerous influence; and third, the public had an important role to play in uncovering femininity’s menace to social and political stability. Through these mechanisms, in other words, satire policed the boundary of acceptable femininity and masculinity by showing transgressions to be ridiculous and unacceptable. Its mockery threw into sharp relief the social challenge posed by women who used language to create an identity as authors, an identity that transgressed a middle-class ideal of women as objects of male desire or mothers of children. Women writers appeared in satire as unacceptably public women because they had used language to assert their absence from the male-oriented world of commodified sexuality. Satiric attempts to construct and hold in place notions of femininity through strategies of degradation reveal anxieties based not only on femininity that incorporated women’s intellect and control over their own bodies, but also on the opposite, on femininity as an uncontrollable sexuality. Whether animalistic or infantile, women who entered the masculine and competitive world of literature and publishing, the arena in which satire was itself produced and consumed, became targets whom satirists “unmasked” as impostors in public. But why did “unmasking” women satirically as impostors seem necessary? That is, what power did women seem to be gaining in the 1830s? One answer might lie in the way that social behavior of real women outside of domesticity challenged women’s exclusion from political life. When women rejected domesticity, they also defied the social and political hierarchy that domesticity sustained. As Susan Grogan explains, “(t)he essence of domesticity lay not in defending a spatial separation of the sexes, but in defining a social hierarchy that enshrined male control of public life and political power. Spatial distinctions mattered because space was political, but the domestic ideal was ultimately about authority . . . the eruption of women into political life at

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times of crisis—in protest, rebellion and revolution—was, for many observers, the hallmark of disorder and of the world gone awry.”63 The idea that women had to be expelled from political space found support with high government officials. With women on the barricades and at the press agitating for legal reform, François Guizot, who served the July Monarchy as Minister of Public Instruction, ambassador to England, and Minister of Foreign Affairs, found it necessary to reiterate arguments against women taking a role in politics: “ . . . there is no doubt that, naturally and in general, neither women nor minors are capable of controlling the interests [of society]. Providence has destined the former for a domestic life; the latter have not yet attained the full development of their individual existence and of their faculties. The first restriction on the right to vote, its legitimacy as well as its necessity, stems from this fact.”64 For Guizot, the prospect of political women had to be countered as a perversion of nature, an absurdity. Faced with the same range of social changes for women, satirists voiced similar concerns about political and social uncertainty and offered an aesthetic solution: their satire of women’s bodies defined women as disorderly and limited those bodies aesthetically to texts and spaces where they would be managed. Satire’s images of femininity and masculinity gone awry presented a way to restrict social and political change, and invited viewers to set women and men back on course.

SATIRE AND REPUBLICANISM Satire’s gendered images painted a picture of danger lurking in the shadows of the juste milieu, of more transpiring in society—as did in satiric images—than met the eye. In particular, satire’s images identified women’s sexuality as a threat to political order and called implicitly for limits on women’s public movements. Once it was established as a sign of the ridiculous and the inappropriate in public, femininity could be used to comment on men’s public behavior. Bulbous bodies criticized what duplicitous characters political men had become, or might become, under the July regime by showing them not as clear political minds, but rather as the sum of the very appetites and desires against which ideologies of representative government since Rousseau had defined the public realm of reasoned politics. Political leaders looked like emotional, irrational beings subject to dishonesty and sleaze. Legislators used familiar justifications of state security and political order to censor satire,65 yet ironically, the work of satiric papers like Le Charivari was actually a means by which constitutional political life, and specifically

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the political public, was being reordered in the 1830s. Satire was a crucial force in the political culture of the decade because it figured citizenship as a matter not only of political beliefs, policies, and reason, but also of appearances, appetites, and gender. In other words, condemning bad citizens as soft bodies insisted on bodily appearance and gender as categories with which to discuss civic fitness. To some extent, satirists were building on old models of citizenship in which gender had always mattered. Ideologies of “republican motherhood” had long argued that biologically-based qualities of gentility and virtue directed women naturally to a private world of domesticity, while intelligence and fortitude qualified men for a public life of politics.66 The republican public sphere was supposed to be a realm of masculine reason dominated by the virtuous and transparent male citizen. Satire had been outlawed under the First French Republic as incompatible with these standards of virtue and transparency.67 Yet if republican ideology emphasized reason and transparency, republican practice was changing under the July Monarchy to embrace the nontransparent machinations of satire. Criticism that accused politicians of self interest and improper politics by showing them to have feminized or grotesque bodies (as opposed, for example, to poor logic) tied the political to the bodily in a new way. Moving beyond abstract ideals of rationality and simplicity, republicanism evolved in the July Monarchy as satire shaped it through gendered arguments about desire and artifice. Tightly focused since the eighteenth century on the ideal of a transparent citizen, republican practice of satire now embraced not only reason and virtue, but also non-transparent humor and emotion. These were the tools with which satirists shaped male and female citizens, legislators, and even Louis-Philippe, showing the king to be a pearshaped, corpulent body of self-interest and desire, not a streamlined, virtuous “citizen-king.”

THE DUCHESSE DE BERRY: POLITICAL IMPOSTOR Until this point we have looked at how satire linked politics and society in the 1830s, how satirists tried to correct the disorder of industrializing society by drawing sharp gender lines around public life and in the process configured political society as male. Unmasking male and female political impostors in images like that of the “savage,” satire defined the boundaries of political legitimacy. Satiric images found their most famous human counterpart in the political affair of the duchesse de Berry, mother of the Bourbon heir to the French throne. Less than two years into Louis-Philippe’s reign, the duchess

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attempted to claim the throne for her son. Her political demise, and the mockery of her as a political woman that caused it, demonstrate ridicule’s powerful influence on national politics and illustrate the consequences of equating the political ridiculous with the feminine in public. After the Revolution of 1830, Marie-Caroline de Bourbon, duchesse de Berry, had followed her father-in-law, the deposed Bourbon king, Charles X, to the remote Scottish town of Holyrood, but her stay with the exiled court was brief. Eager to place her son on the throne of his ancestors, the duchess answered the pleas of royalists in the Vendée region of western France who, in 1831, were urging her to lead them in revolt against the July Monarchy. Her plan was simple: she would return to France secretly, have her fatherin-law abdicate, and serve as regent until her son could ascend the throne as Henri V. As mother of the royal heir, the duchess had a justifiable claim to political power, but from the start, her effort had the feel of farce that satiric appraisal would expose and intensify. Using a string of aliases, the duchess worked her way to Holland then south to Italy. Careful to guard her conspiratorial correspondence, she changed codes repeatedly, calling herself “Madame E” and her accomplices “57” or “125,” to fool the agents of the French king who kept her under surveillance.68 Despite the precautions, agents tracked her through intercepted mail, and the French government backed her expulsion from Piedmont. Finding no allies on her subsequent tour through Italy, she settled eventually in the principality of Modena, where she and three legitimist leaders laid secret plans for an uprising in France. Disguised and moving cautiously to evade government troops, the duchess maintained communication with Vendean leaders as well as with Pierre Berryer and Chateaubriand, councilors she had designated to serve as a provisional government after the insurrection. These latter, however, were lukewarm supporters of the duchess’s efforts. Under surveillance by the government for their links to her, Berryer, Chateaubriand, and two others were soon arrested for “conspiring against state security.” Arresting leading political figures outraged the public and increased scrutiny of the instability on everyone’s mind. There was really no choice but to see the duchess’s plot as a mockery of political maneuvering. Even the non-satiric press reported the inept efforts as a satire of political life. The monarchist La Quotidienne likened the duchess affair and the arrests to Gulliver’s Travels, the well-known satire of French society where horses become riders and nothing is as it seems. Editors marveled at the irony in a member of the royal family hunted like a “seditious rebel” in a “country of the impossible” like that of “the prudent Gulliver,” where formerly revolutionary procureurs du roi [attorneys general] and

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policemen arrest conservative statesmen Chateaubriand, Hyde de Newville and de Fitz-James for threatening the monarchy.69 Disaster after disaster befell the duchess’s efforts and shaped public perceptions. First, government troops discovered the blueprints for insurrection in a surprise search of a chateau of a legitimist nobleman; then a key leader of the uprising was forced from hiding and beaten to death; and finally a young noblewoman was shot while fleeing the Vendée after being mistaken for the duchess herself, who remained in disguise. Eventually the French army overpowered the Vendean rebels, made preventative arrests, and suppressed the opposition press.70 As the Vendée fell, the duchess was spirited away incognito to Nantes, disguised this time as a peasant woman.71 Her flight once again eluded Louis-Philippe’s officials who thought briefly they had caught her royal highness fleeing France aboard the “Carlo Alberto,” but who had instead scouted her maid.72 Inevitably, the bungling yet treasonous affair of the duchess intrigued the public, who debated the matter in gendered terms. To some, the activities surrounding her pointed to a government too feeble to arrest a woman; to others, the case suggested purposeful inactivity or even complicity.73 And in fact, the king and his wife (who was also the duchess’s aunt) did fear the scandal of a political trial and were thus eager to see the duchess escape France. For months, the duchess thwarted government efforts to capture her and even to bribe informants into giving her up. But in October 1832, the legitimist agent, Simon Deutz, sold the government information on her location. Against the wishes of the king, but with the support of the legislature, the Interior Minister, Adolphe Thiers, paid a half a million francs and ordered the fugitive captured. Drawing on centuries-old traditions of ridicule and mockery, locals hailed government captors in the streets of Nantes by banging on kitchenware in a forty-eight-hour charivari.74 Satirists mercilessly used news of the paid informant to lampoon the July Monarchy, targeting particularly the state’s supposedly pervasive acceptance of corruption and financial maneuvering. Le Charivari explained what had transpired when state officials approached this “honorable Gonzague Deutz” to bargain for the duchess. “Betray the duchess to us within eight days and we are ready to count out to you a million francs,” officials had promised the informant. According to Le Charivari’s version of events, when Deutz claimed his payoff he found it short. Just as “the Pharisees did business with Pilate,” the police of the July Monarchy had taken a cut on crime; they had taxed the betrayal of the duchess. “Why,” queried the paper, “would secret corruption escape federal taxes in a country where all possible corruptions pay for a license, from street prostitution to the so-called ‘royal’ lottery?”75 Critiques of Thiers and the government suggest that as the duchess’s coup

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attempt unfolded, satiric treatments undermined her self-presentation as a political leader and transformed her into an icon of political commentary about other legitimatist political figures. Government troops soon surrounded the house where the duchess was hiding, captured her, and imprisoned her in the ancient fortress in Blaye.76 The duchess’s conspiratorial efforts and secret dealings had exposed her political cause to public ridicule, but at this point, her claim to power remained politically viable and throughout France, public opinion divided over news of her capture. Legitimists were incensed at the dishonor, as were the king and queen, who did not want to see their niece in prison. Nor was the king eager to imprison a member of the royal family, which could be hazardous to the political health of the Monarchy. Minister of Public Instruction, François Guizot, would later report the king’s worries over the power of royalty in prison. “People conspire to set them free as readily as to follow them, and their captivity excites more ferment amongst their partisans than their presence.”77 But capturing the duchess had been a great victory for Thiers and the deputies, and middle-class opinion was eager to punish the duchess for her efforts, however maladroit, at civil war and revolution. Nevertheless, the affair required delicate handling. For one thing, the arrest had been accomplished illegally and Thiers feared its impact on his career. For another, Marie-Caroline’s team had exposed to the eyes of France and the rest of Europe the problem that opponents posed for Louis-Philippe’s precarious power. Situated at the intersection of political and gender ideology, the duchess presented a dilemma for the Monarchy. Acquitting a political conspirator would make a mockery of royal authority, but, to many, condemning a woman would seem barbaric, while pardoning her would seem corrupt. In a political culture based on bourgeois codes of honor and duty, the question of the duchess pitted the masculine honor and duty of Louis-Philippe to protect a woman, especially a woman family member, against the political honor and duty of the monarch to ensure state security. Ordinarily, patriarchical notions of honor and protection sustained the idea of monarchy and its power, but here was a moment in which upholding masculine honor would look like proof of government corruption and unequal justice under the July Monarchy. Additionally, punishing her would acknowledge that her performance was indeed political and would validate her as a political woman. Importantly, the dilemma drew the duchess into view as a grotesque figure, an embodied contradiction of the political and the feminine, which was very unstable symbolically.78 For the time being, officials addressed the affair by stalling on substantive issues and refurbishing the duchess’s quarters in Blaye, an absurdly

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insufficient response that became a regular feature and target in Le Charivari. When legitimists raised concerns about the duchess’s health, for example, the king commissioned a report on the prisoner’s living conditions in Blaye. He published the findings to deflect criticism of his treatment of the woman and to reassure the public that the duchess was being accommodated comfortably. Le Charivari then published the medical report in column form, side by side with its own report of a republican woman being held in the Conciergerie prison in Paris for participating in a republican insurrection. For example, the fortress of Blaye, which holds 700 men, “currently counts among them only 22 who are sick,” while in the Conciergerie, “the detainees, some 700 individuals, count among themselves no more than 700 who are sick.” Compared to the accommodations of the republican, those of the royalist were a palace. Where the king’s inspectors report that, obliged to visit the kitchen, they could now state that the food was good quality and carefully prepared, the satirist-inspectors covering the republican situation reported, “we abstained from visiting the kitchen because there was none.” While the royalist ate meals that were especially well-prepared, the republican ate the same poor nutrition everyday in “a piece of black bread, potato soup, and a potful of water.”79 In the understated language of official reports, the direct comparison pointed to the glaring discrepancy in the accommodations. By showing the king’s preferential treatment for the legitimist duchess, the mock-up report alerted readers to divisions in the king’s much touted union of royalist and republican politics in the “juste milieu.” At the same time as satire was decreasing the duchess’s own political power as a leader, it was shaping her into an increasingly powerful symbol in political criticism. Le Charivari’s comparison cast doubt on the veracity and wisdom of the king’s report and showed it to be a calculated refutation of the suspicions that had necessitated the mission to Blaye in the first place. Moreover, it exposed the hypocrisy of justice under the July Monarchy where legitimist royalty is confined in comfort while a republican activist is punished in prison. The comparison left readers free to decide for themselves whether the king was complaisant about his niece’s crime. Perhaps most interestingly, by using a republican woman in their subterfuge and foregrounding the conditions of two women distinguished by their politics, satirists directed readers’ attention to questions of political orientation. In pseudo-scientific style, they “proved” that the king was not showing leniency toward the duchess because she was a woman, for which the king might receive public support from across the political spectrum, but rather because she was a member of the extended royal family, for which the king would seem politically dishonorable to all but the most conservative royalists.

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The question of the duchess’s fate roused debate in the Chamber of Deputies over legal policy. The law of April 10, 1832, had banished all members of the Bourbon family from France in an effort to prevent just the kind of uprising the duchess had led. Although it seemed to override the existing penal code’s death penalty for violators, the new law in fact muddied the question of the duchess’s fate because it failed to specify a penalty for her treasonous actions. After the duchess’s arrest in November 1832, deputies disputed which aspects of the law would prevail. Hesitant to legislate over particular events, which had proved cataclysmic in 1789, the legislative Chambers instead forbade all penal and judicial proceedings regarding the duchess, a course which seemed to many like the only legal option. Thus, pondering her fate evolved into questioning equality before the law and royal inviolability. The Left objected that a penalty that merely placed the duchess at the government’s disposal would register greatly unequal treatment for treasonous offenders, while the Right countered that monarchy is inviolable, and that once royal, one can never again be confined by ordinary law. Guizot noted later that legislators had feared the consequences of subjecting deposed royalty to the law. “The contrast between their rank as princes and their condition as fallen and proscribed men inspires more personal interest than their enterprises excite anger and alarm.”80 Anxiety brewed over what might follow from sending the duchess de Berry before a Tribunal, over speculation that acquittal might appear as her victory but that condemnation might establish her as a martyr to her cause. Fortunately for the crown, it would never have to decide the issue of a trial: the duchess was pregnant. Throughout the salons of Paris, the “name the father” game became the rage. All legitimist notables came under review as possible collaborators in this conspiracy within a conspiracy.81 The republican press eagerly published the news of the impending birth, sparking a battle among journalists that pushed bourgeois codes of masculine honor to outrageous extremes. An editor of the Legitimist Revenant responded to what he considered an insult to the duchess’s honor in the republican Corsaire by challenging the republican journalist to that quintessential instrument of masculine honor, a duel. Chivalry turned to farce as journalists clamored to defend the maligned virtue of the duchess. Proposals for a mass duel by the Tribune and National were rejected by the Quotidienne, but when an editor of the Revenant seriously wounded the well-known editor of the National, Armand Carrel, republican journalists vied for more duels in revenge.82 Among them was Charles Philipon, who submitted his name to the Tribune to fight along with other republicans, but the affair ended before he could participate.83

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It was at this point that the duchess proclaimed to a stunned public that she had been married secretly in Italy before her undertaking in the Vendée. Although the father of the child was actually the lawyer who had been hiding with her in Nantes, the duchess tried to save her honor by marrying a Neapolitan diplomat brought forward for the purpose by a legitimist envoy. Reaction to her February revelation was mixed, but did little to undermine popular sympathy for her.84 Police reports claimed that supporters of Charles X and of Henri V were ashamed and discouraged. Republicans, too, lamented the affair since discrediting legitimists deprived them of fellow government critics and convenient scapegoats. Flabbergasted supporters of the duchess believed the announcement was a hoax and criticized Louis-Philippe for permitting his pregnant niece to languish in a drafty fortress. The duchess’s health became a volatile political issue. Even non-legitimists, including Tocqueville, argued against keeping her in prison without a trial.85 In spite of such sympathy, satiric papers could not get enough of the duchess, “our boarder in Blaye.” After the announcement of her secret marriage in Italy, Le Charivari likened the duchess to a Parisian grisette, a working-class woman who made her way in the world through relationships with middle-class, male providers. “The little Italian prince appears to us one of the most beautiful little inventions for which the gaping public has ever been indebted to Le Constitutionnel,” the first paper to report that the duchess had contracted her fortunate connections with an Italian count. “Within two weeks there won’t be a grisette in Paris who, thanks to Le Constitutionnel, will not call her protector a ‘little Italian prince.’”86 Audiences thrilled to such a titillating story told in public. Exposing impropriety enhanced satire’s explanatory power; satirists spoke with the authority of seeming to have gained control over the sexual license and conspiratorial crimes that they targeted.87 At the heart of satire’s revelations of political turmoil lay the promise of renewed order once social problems were brought into focus. Public opinion increasingly portrayed the duchess degenerating into a royal commodity; Chateaubriand stated baldly, “a Jew [Deutz] sold her; a minister [Thiers] bought her.”88 Satirists, however, were quick to point out that if women like the duchess were traded about, so were men-for-sale like the Italian prince. In the wake of the duchess affair, Le Charivari put men on the auction block in a caricature portraying the showroom of a “procurer of spouses” whose notice of male “goods for sale” advertised “marriages made” and specifically “young men furnished to princesses, girls, widows and others.” The scene took a jab at the sudden and clandestine marriage of the pregnant duchess, a marriage that not only made a bid to rehabilitate what the public saw as the royal woman’s dubious morality, but also gave the king a publicly acceptable way to avoid punishing his monarchist niece

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Figure 4.10.

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“Procurer of spouses,“ Le Charivari, 1833.

since it would dispossess the duchess of her rights as a princess of the blood and as regent. In this store-bought marriage scene (see figure 4.10), bottles of “tricks,” “conditions,” and “contracts” are all part of the service as two extravagantly-dressed young women eye a soldier for possible purchase. The salesman, a veteran agent of the French crown, whose peg-leg forces him to prop himself up with two boxes of “protocol,” guarantees the women that this man was destined to become an excellent husband.89 With tongue firmly in cheek, satirists saluted the king’s brave handling of the uprising, the pregnancy, and the secret marriage. Le Charivari implored readers to “spill a tear of compassion” for the “sad necessity imposing personally on his majesty.” Having a laugh at the hybrid “bourgeois-monarch” and alluding to popular belief that the marriage was a farce, the paper feigned pity for LouisPhilippe and his “sovereign obligation to divulge these things that in any other

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bourgeois family one hides with great concern for public defamation.”90 The occasion exposed the tensions inherent in using middle-class notions of feminine propriety to counter aristocratic sensibilities of sexual freedom. Satire was a powerful force in discrediting the duchess because it trained a critical public eye on the contradictions and ineptitude that surrounded the affair. Le Charivari questioned the future of legitimism now that its leader had been so thoroughly compromised. The problem with legitimists, it argued, was that their political beliefs depended so heavily on individuals and not at all on principles. “There exist many excellent Napoleonists,” it offered, “who do not believe Bonaparte is dead.” Referring to the son of the executed Louis XVI, who had died as a child, the paper showed the ludicrous extremes of devotion, “even Louis XVII still has a certain number of partisans.”91 Regarding the duchess affair, the paper claimed that the weakness of legitimism, then, was that when the individual falls, so collapses political fervor. Worse still, legitimists make “superhuman creatures” of their princes and princesses, “demi-gods and goddesses” who are superior to all others in “their talents, their virtues, their feelings,” who can do things miraculously like “play the guitar by nature,” and who “have nothing in common with the passions, the ridicules, the oddities and the vices of simple mortals, except sometimes the shared love of civil lists.” How harsh will be their disillusionment, satirists predicted, when “an indiscreet gust of wind” blows away the cloud in which these “choice beings” love to envelope themselves and reveals to the people “the vices of man or the weakness of woman.” The article argued that the duchess’s pregnancy and dubious claims to a secret marriage, however vexing to legitimists, might ultimately benefit the cause by ridding it of its female leadership. The paper pointed out that M. Berryer, the legitimist deputy and herald of traditional monarchy, “rejoiced greatly over an incident that is cleansing his party, according to him, of what he calls the compromising impatience of the duchess.”92 Le Charivari argued that republicans, in contrast, regard the duchess not as superhuman but as a simple woman, “a woman subject as much as all others to the laws of nature as to those of the [Civil] Code.” In other words, where the legitimist press simply refused to believe the secret marriage as beneath the dignity of an extraordinary leader, Le Charivari’s satire deflated legitimism by pointing to the duchess as an ordinary example of “the weakness of woman.” That is, this satiric interpretation of events ridiculed legitimists not only for their faith in this individual, the duchess de Berry, but also for their faith in a woman, any woman, since all women were weak by nature. Far from machinations of royalty and power, the duchess’s activities were to satirists typical of the trouble with women, pregnancy being merely “one of those things about which decent people can have a laugh in a small

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gathering near the fireplace, but the public divulgence of which is always an act of cowardice.”93 Childbirth was a prime example of woman trouble that must be kept out of public space. This kind of gendered ridicule marked the limits of the duchess as a political woman. Ridicule shut her down not just as a legitimist leader—she was already arrested, after all—but as an example of political women. It turned her into a lesson in the absurdity of women in the political public. She was, in this way, just as important for the Left as for the Right because she buttressed middle-class notions of women’s political ineptitude. On May 10, the duchess gave birth to a daughter and the monarchy used the event to put its political house in order. Years earlier, in 1820, at the birth of her first child, the duc de Bordeaux, the duchess had drawn public disapproval when, lying naked with legs apart, and still attached by umbilical cord to her newborn, she invited nearby national guardsmen into her apartment to verify the birth of the baby who would become the heir to the Bourbon throne. As historian Jo Burr Margadant explains, under the old regime, a socially mixed, public birth would have improved the king’s image as father of his subjects, but by the 1820s, some had found such public immodesty “disgusting.” The practice of verifying royal births was caught between old regime views of the royal womb as subject to public surveillance and Napoleonic, patriarchal notions of wives’ sexual bodies as husbands’ private property.94 This time, a troop of Bordeaux officials and military guards crowded around to maintain surveillance of the duchess in childbirth and to verify that the birth was not a ruse. The president of the Tribunal of Blaye, M. DanielThéoltime Pastoureau, officially interrogated the duchess immediately after the birth, having her attest that the baby was hers and that the baby was female.95 The newspaper, Le Moniteur, printed a record of their conversation and witnesses’ testimony. Prevented legally from signing as a witness to the birth of her own child, an exclusion that the law allowed but that nevertheless aroused suspicion in legitimist quarters, the duchess was looking increasingly like a woman excluded from political and civil society. The indignity of the scene shocked public imagination. A horrified Chateaubriand explained, “She delivered her baby in public, calling the authorities over from the corner, the jailers, spies, and passers-by, to see the infant come out of the entrails of their prisoner.” Having never seen “such ignominy,” he wondered, “would it not have been nobler to kill Madame?”96 Public opinion turned mainly, however, not against the invasive officials, but against the duchess. Devotees stopped making pilgrimages to Blaye to honor her. Where the duchess had once been seen as a martyr to legitimacy, the church, and tradition, she had become an ignoble and unrestrained woman.97

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Even supporters saw her no longer as a political strength and defender of royal political authority, but as “a woman weak and alone” and “deprived of rescue.”98 Evacuated of political gravitas by satire and emphatically embodied by the treatment of her pregnancy in the press, the duchess had become a sexualized, unacceptably public woman. The public could no longer regard her as a political figure because it could not see her as a sexless being of heroic virtue. Married to an Italian nobleman, she was legally no longer regent or even French, and in the eyes of the public; she was now a woman exposed as troublesome. It had not been many years since professional tradition had demanded that male physicians avert their eyes and examine pregnant women by feel only; the duchess had allowed herself during delivery to be looked at by a roomful of male agents of the crown. Chateaubriand pronounced, “She has cuckolded her own cause,”99 and many shared his belief that the legitimist cause had lost its political potency at the hands of an undisciplined woman. Increasingly, the duchess was judged according to standards of virtuous femininity and republican motherhood, institutionalized in the Napoleonic Code that sanctioned scrutiny of women’s sexual behavior to determine their public standing. Public discussion of the duchess affair was a key moment in foregrounding what have been called the “sexual overtones” of republican virtue’s civic definition.100 The duchess’s political career came to an end around a cradle. Frustrated by the endless mockery in the press and scrutiny of the public eye, she reportedly feared continued displays of discipline: “A pillory is being built and I am wanted in it.”101 Suffering the “punishment of the spectacle” of Blaye102—the relentless ridicule for her attempt to act as a political woman, for her suspicious marriage, and for the public exposure of the act of childbirth—the duchess began rehabilitating herself in the chastened role of a weaker, nonpolitical mother. Echoing bourgeois maternal sentiment, she issued prison appeals to give her dear children all of her love, and her envoys publicized missions “to bring the kisses of a captive mother to her exiled children.”103 Calling herself a “defenseless woman,” she painted herself as the victim of her politically-motivated uncle, Louis-Philippe, who “believing me pregnant and not married, had inflicted on me all manner of moral tortures to force me to do things by which he thought he could establish the dishonor of his niece.”104 The legitimist press, too, worked to rehabilitate the duchess by publicizing her as an image of maternal virtue. Sober prints foregrounded her maternal femininity in care-giving scenes with peasant families and wounded friends. As Margadant shows, Parisian legitimist society registered their objection to the duchess’s imprisonment: petitions for her release circulated, supporters

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offered to take her place there, and society hostesses refused to entertain in protest.105 Supporters propagandized that the duchess “did not wish to maintain her political character,”106 and mused publicly that “people like to see this courageous and devoted mother” who is “constantly preoccupied with the affairs of her son.”107 The Revolution of 1830 and lingering political uncertainty had opened the possibility that her role as the mother of the legitimist pretender would authorize her as a political actor. “The world understands how a princess could be a heroic mother,” wrote Chateaubriand.108 But by 1833, it was clear that this married, aristocratic woman had become a political absurdity. Honor had appeared to play a central role in the duchess’s uprising: the honor of the legitimist pretender upheld by his mother, of the Vendean rebels to uphold monarchy in France, of right-wing journalists to defend the honor of a woman, and of right- and left-wing journalists to defend their own masculine honor in a duel. But on closer inspection, satirists had exposed the play of self-interest, favoritism, and corruption in the king’s handling of the affair, and revealed that behind the battle for honor, state politics only parodied the virtuous regime envisioned in 1830. Satirists at Le Charivari used the affair to ridicule corruption in the July Monarchy and to demand the democratized arena of critique they sought as a political ideal. They used the duchess affair to point to the trouble with women as political actors and gendered this arena as a masculine ideal. Recent scholarship argues that the duchess’s significance lies in the way she sustained the cause of legitimacy in the 1830s by providing Bourbon supporters with a vision of the royal mother that fit with ascending bourgeois notions of motherhood. As she became a maternal symbol around which legitimist memory was built, admiration for her grew. Legitimist women felt a cult-like devotion to her, and legitimist families even sought pieces of the bloodied dress she had worn the night her husband died. An 1834 memoir of her arrest in Nantes by an anonymous legitimist framed her efforts in terms of motherhood. The legitimist press featured her now only as mother of the Bourbon heir and hostess to visiting aristocrats. In all of her earlier roles, save that of mother, the duchess faded from public life. As Margadant argues, the duchess’s story was a great success at the level of cultural symbolism because it gave legitimists a way to imagine the royal family in terms of middle-class ideals, and kept legitimism alive for later regimes.109 But examining the duchess’s efforts through the lens of satire shows these events to be a key moment of division under the July Monarchy when women’s cultural authority broke with political authority. Satire played a crucial role in driving the duchess out of politics. Satiric accounts and caricatured images mocked her as a political figure. Showing her publicly to be a

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ridiculous person established her as unfit for political duty, both as a rebellion leader and as a political mother. Satirists not only mocked her coup attempt, but also made any claim she might make to public, political authority based on motherhood seem laughable and ultimately unthinkable. Thus, ridicule set limits on her rehabilitation as a mother. Ridiculous in public, the duchess was redefined in terms of the female cultural authority of the bourgeois mother who operates in the private world of the home. Ridicule ensured that she was no longer a viable political figure. In so doing, satire helped establish gendered, middle-class sensibilities based on republican motherhood. Satire was central to the ruin of legitimism in the 1830s because it educated readers how to dismiss the duchess affair as ineffectual operations. Yet it also taught them how to read the affair as a critique of the sitting government, a constitutional monarchy. It mattered that the duchess was female because satirists could ridicule her sexuality and argue her lack of virtue to show her to be as dubious in her politics as she was in her personal life. The duchess affair frames a moment of possibility after the July Revolution when public space opened briefly to an aristocratic woman’s political efforts. But the affair helped redefine the public as the realm of particular actors who were specifically not royalists and not female. Satire mimicked anti-government sentiments expressed more straight-forwardly by partisans across the political spectrum. Sober papers, like La Quotidienne, for example, stated explicitly their view that the duchess affair proved how Minister Thiers had behaved such that “he could legally be accused of imposture.”110 Satire, however, which drew audiences into a realm of critical engagement, broadcast its accusations of imposture through indirectness and humor that invited complicity in the critique. Ultimately, the duchess’s bid for political power had the effect of defining her once and for all as a culturally persuasive yet nonpolitical person. For many this was the culmination of concerted government effort to “destroy the political existence of the duchess.” Many believed she had suffered “a civil death” and was now “dead to the law and to society.”111 Others believed that “the duchess had been pursued into her private life because she had become powerful in her political life.”112 The duchess’s ordeal situated the legitimist political cause squarely in the realm of the ridiculous. The 1832 uprising may have been a symbolic battle between chivalry and compromise, and between the aristocratic and the bourgeois,113 but to see it in its complexity we must look at how it was fought in gendered terms against a backdrop of ridicule and buffoonery. From the start, the adventure was a parody of political maneuvering. Foregrounded as ridicule, the display of childbirth and marriage ended the affair and made

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a mockery of the duchess’s political potential. As a pregnant woman the duchess had been able to fend off a trial and execution and after the birth of her daughter, her farcical descent into dishonor seemed like punishment enough. Many viewed the duchess much as the historian Jules Michelet had viewed the “mystery” inherent in all women; “they are altogether responsible and they are not punishable.”114 The duchess, shorn of her title as regent, lived out the rest of her life quietly in her homes in Italy and Austria. Her efforts weakened legitimism beyond repair for the rest of the 1830s. In 1840, plots for an uprising sparked again briefly, but quickly fizzled, so that after 1840, legitimists’ best hopes were for a republican overthrow of the Orleanist monarchy or some kind of failure of the bourgeois-royal compromise.115

CONCLUSION The legacy of the French Revolution had made clear by the 1830s that the logical consequence of accepting women’s claims to reason would be women’s right to exercise political power. In other words, as France moved from old regime monarchy to post-revolutionary monarchy, with at least some pretensions to republican politics, the logical political role of women shifted from forming others’ opinions to holding one’s own opinions, from inspiring political opinion to influencing it.116 It is this transitional phase that we see in the July Monarchy, the discomfort of women and men negotiating the practical meaning of equality. As with the Revolution of 1789, the Revolution of 1830 had raised the question of what the new regime would mean politically for women. Satire ridiculed women and argued that the climb from private inspiration to public orator hampered domestic duties. The outburst of satire around women, men, and gender relations in the 1830s was a counter to the political potential of women journalists, playwrights, novelists, fighters on barricades, socialists, and activists, and to the social disorder they represented. Caricaturing men and women offered a sense of order over the perceived disarray of the July Monarchy. Although the Revolution of 1830 lasted only three days, people imagined that overthrowing the laws that regulate society had loosed scandalous behavior in the streets.117 Furthering such ideas through their images, satirists propagated a story of unrestrained sexual and material appetites to expose the corruption of virtue under the July Monarchy. This story was heavily gendered. The 1830 revolution did not make all men citizens, but all men were potentially political, and mocking women who debauched politics ensured that the political world would remain the domain of the masculine. Treating women’s reason as a mockery emptied it of meaning and diminished its power to signify

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political potential at the same time as it assured satire a place in the masculine realm of republicanism. Jo Burr Margadant has shown how satire impugned the king’s honor by portraying him as womanish and weak. Satirists for La Caricature and Le Charivari developed a repertoire of emasculating signs like the soft, overripe pear or the collapsed bourgeois umbrella, intended to convey royal impotence. Margadant charts the decline of a female presence by 1834 in images that sought to ridicule or dishonor the monarch as growing political repression turned politics into an all-male realm of battle. Louis-Philippe’s opponents no longer feminized him but demonized him as a violent figure.118 But if femininity no longer worked in critiques of the regime, it persisted and even escalated after 1835 as a way for the public to turn a critical eye on itself. Between 1837 and 1849, Daumier produced more than 65 anti-feminist lithographs of intellectual women. His series, “Les Bas-Bleus,” appeared in 1844, and “Les Divorceuses” in 1848. Historians have identified a campaign of satire in 1848 to contain revolutionary challenges to social order. Satire on both the Left and the Right united in mocking women’s literary and political activism during the Revolution of 1848.119 These campaigns built on semiotic activity and patterns of ridicule from the 1830s. Thus, when the Provisional Government recognized the right to universal suffrage in 1848, women were denied the vote and barred from political clubs based on the idea that these activities would threaten domestic order. As a strategy of degradation, satire played a key role in writing women out of political life in the emerging democratic order. Through the 1830s and into the 1840s, women searched for a workable program of action, but never really found one.120 As Moses explains, feminist leadership moved away from Paris, allied Leftist movements neglected women’s issues, and women themselves disagreed over goals and tactics. Myths persisted into the 1830s that women were responsible for political atrocities and leading Revolutions astray.121 Echoing these myths, satire represented women as public misfits and undermined women’s representations of themselves as worthy of political and civil rights. Like traditions of popular justice and myths of feminine culpability, ridicule of women in public and intellectual life worked to block women from expressing political opinions and to prevent them from becoming recognized political actors. In the short term, satire’s gendered critiques offered a way to define the public following the regime change of 1830. In terms of the long nineteenth century, they furthered France’s transition from absolutist monarchy to a liberal republican polity by defining politics and the voting public as masculine. Satire not only cast women as political impostors, it specified correct behavior for men in public. We turn now to how this

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happened beyond the city of Paris as we examine satire in the streets and its impact on particular politicians in the provinces.

NOTES 1. Le Charivari, December 11, 1834. 2. McCormick, Popular Theatres of Nineteenth-Century France, 15–16. 3. The commentary read, “C’est encore un dessin de moeurs par M. Bouchot. Il représente une scène de bateleurs ou de montreurs de curiosités, dont l’exhibition se passe sans doute sur le boulevard du Temple.” Le Charivari, December 11, 1834. 4. La Caricature appeared weekly from 1830 to 1835; Le Charivari appeared daily from 1832 to 1893. This chapter is based on major newspapers that contained visual images, minor satiric periodicals with text only, and other non-satiric papers. I have selected examples that show satire turning a critical eye on public behavior and using gender to delineate the political public. 5. On the widespread appearance of women in satire, see Kirsten Powell, ed., Femmes d’esprit, (Middlebury, VT: The Christian A. Johnson Memorial Gallery, Middlebury College, 1990); Janice Bergman-Carton, The Woman of Ideas in French Art, 1830–1848 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); and Wechsler, A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in 19th Century France. 6. See, for example, Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994); Susan Kingsley Kent, Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 7. Thompson, The Virtuous Marketplace. 8. Elise K. Kenney and John M. Merriman, The Pear: French Graphic Arts in the Golden Age of Caricature (South Hadley, MA: Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, 1991) especially chapter 5, “Masks and Delusions.” 9. Cindy McCreery, The Satirical Gaze: Prints of Women in Eighteenth-Century England. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Michèle Riot-Sarcey and Alain Corbin et al., examine how women sought to participate in the French political public with varying degrees of success. See Riot-Sarcey, La démocratie à l’épreuve des femmes. Trois figures critiques du pouvoir, 1830–1848. (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994); and Riot-Sarcey, “Des femmes petitionnent sous la monarchie de juillet,” in Alain Corbin, Jacqueline Lalouette and Michèle Riot-Sarcey, Femmes dans la cité. (Grâne: Créaphis, 1997): 389–400. 10. In part, satire caused a semiotic problem; oppositional symbols, like the well-known “pear” caricature of the king, pointed to the way political meanings were constructed, to what Lynn Hunt, in another context, has called symbols’ “fictionality.” See Lynn Hunt, “Hercules and the Radical Image in the French Revolution” in The French Revolution and Intellectual History, ed. Jack R. Censer. (Chicago:

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The Dorsey Press, 1989): 166–185; and Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Sandy Petrey has argued that satire endangered the July regime because it exposed how the monarchy was itself in the process of constructing its own authority, and undermined the process of creating legitimacy through cultural means. In the absence of legitimation through an inherited throne, Louis-Philippe found his government caught in a crisis of representation with no way to justify royal authority. See Petrey, “Pears in History.” 11. Margadant, “Gender, Vice, and the Political Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century France.” For satire’s use during the Restoration’s crisis of representation see Kroen, Politics and Theater. 12. Jann Matlock, “Seeing Women in the July Monarchy Salon,” Art Journal 55 (Summer 1996): 73–85. 13. Matlock, “Seeing Women, 73–76. Quotation from Frances Trollope, Paris and the Parisians (New York: Harper, 1836): 38–39. Quoted in Matlock, 74. 14. Matlock, “Seeing Women, 74. 15. Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); Landes, Women and the Public Sphere; Gisela Bock and Susan James, eds., Beyond Equality and Difference: Citizenship, Feminist Politics and Female Subjectivity (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986). 16. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere. 17. Susan Grogan, “‘Playing the Princess’: Flora Tristan, Performance, and Female Moral Authority during the July Monarchy” in The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France, Jo Burr Margadant, editor. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 76. 18. It is important to distinguish between the ideal and actual practice. Recent studies have provided a subtle understanding of how the sharp divisions of separate spheres were negotiated and blurred in daily life. See Carla Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); and Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley: Univesity of California Press, 2004). I would add satire to the list of venues where the boundaries of separate spheres were under constant negotiation. 19. Pilbeam, Republicanism in Nineteenth-Century France, 172–174; and Whitney Walton, Eve’s Proud Descendants: Four Women Writers and Republican Politics in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000): 162–163. 20. On the political work of Gay and Sand in the July Monarchy, see Whitney Walton, Eve’s Proud Descendants. 21. The new electoral law of 1831 reduced the tax requirement for voting enough to enfranchise mainly large landholders, but also some officials, professionals, and businessmen. The lower middle class, peasants, and working class remained disenfranchised. In 1831, election law reform extended the franchise from 166,000 to 214,000, then to 3 million. Despite the relative openness, disenfranchisement remained a constant source of contention in the 1830s. Collingham, The July Monarchy, 71;

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and Philippe Vigier, La Monarchie de Juillet (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1972). 22. Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and Histories of Art (New York: Routledge, 2003), 77. 23. Michael Marrinan, Painting Politics for Louis-Philippe: Art and Ideology in Orleanist France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). 24. See Jeremy Popkin, A History of Modern France (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994); and John Merriman, ed. 1830 in France. 25. Bonnie Smith, Changing Lives: Women in European History Since 1700 (New York: DC Heath and Co., 1989). 26. Janis Bergman-Carton, The Woman of Ideas in French Art, 20–22. See also Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1984); Jann Matlock, Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria and Reading Difference in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); and Popkin, A History of Modern France. 27. Marie Caroline de Bourbon, duchesse de Berry, mother of the deposed Bourbon heir to the throne, was jailed in 1832 for attempting to claim the throne for her son. In prison, she was discovered to be pregnant. Although the father of the child was actually a lawyer who had been in hiding with her in Nantes, the duchess tried to save her honor by marrying an Italian diplomat, Ettore Count Lucchesi Palli, Prince de Campofrance, Duke della Grazia. See Hughes de Changy, Le soulevement de la duchesse de Berry (Paris: Albatros et Diffusion, 1986), 119. On the Duchesse de Berry and legitimist politics, see Jo Burr Margadant, “The Duchesse de Berry and Royalist Political Culture in Postrevolutionary France,” in The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France, Jo Burr Margadant, editor. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 33–71. 28. Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, 79–82. 29. Bergman-Carton, The Woman of Ideas, pp. 25–26; and Pilbeam, Republicanism in Nineteenth-Century France, 172–174. 30. Bergman-Carton, The Woman of Ideas, 26. 31. Moses, French Feminism, 90. 32. Le Charivari, June 30, 1839. 33. To explain satire’s attack on women writers in the 1830s, scholars have pointed out that it developed in a troubled economic context: as censorship laws squeezed publishing opportunities in the early 1830s for men like Daumier and Le Charivari editor, Charles Philipon, new opportunities were opening for women writers to publish and to share in the financial and critical rewards once limited to men. Bergman-Carton has shown that, “Unable to express their anger at the source of their disempowerment, Louis-Philippe, male journalists redirected a portion of their wrath toward a figure they saw as the female usurper of the male place, the newly professionalized femme-auteur.” Bergman-Carton, “Conduct Unbecoming,” 68. 34. See Domna Stanton, “The Fiction of Préciosité and the Fear of Women,” Yale French Studies 62 (1981): 107–134.

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35. See Steven D. Kale, “Women, Salons, and the State in the Aftermath of the French Revolution,” Journal of Women’s History 13 no. 4 (Winter 2002): 54–80. 36. Stanton, “The Fiction of Preciosité,” 131. 37. Pilbeam, Republicanism in Nineteenth-Century France, 173. 38. Moses, French Feminism, 103. 39. Le Charivari, May 17, 1837. Quoted in Bergman-Carton, The Woman of Ideas, 69. 40. See “Les femmes ne peuvent pas avoir l’art de régner, puisqu’il n’ya pas le moindre rapport avec l’art de plaire,” Le Charivari, September 8, 1837, cited in Bergman-Carton, The Woman of Ideas, 70. 41. Bergman-Carton, Conduct Unbecoming, 69–70. 42. From the Journal des debats, May 21, 1837, transcription of the hearing, reprinted in vol. 2 no. 12 (December 1837): 3–5. Quoted in Moses, French Feminism, 106. 43. Bergman-Carton has suggested that the book comes to look less like a manual of virtue than a camouflage for disordered sexuality. Bergman-Carton, The Woman of Ideas, 70. The image appeared in Le Charivari June 15, 1836. 44. Le Charivari, April 5, 1840. 45. Le Charivari, July 7, 1838. 46. See Farwell, The Charged Image. 47. La Caricature, February 2, 1832. 48. Farwell, The Charged Image, 106. 49. Farwell, The Charged Image, 106. 50. Le Charivari, February 7, 1840. 51. Elizabeth Childs analyzes this image in “La Bourgeoise,” in Femmes d’esprit, ed. Kirsten Powell, 26–27. This description is a paraphrasing of her analysis. 52. La Caricature, July 19, 1832. 53. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “The Other Side of Venus: The Visual Economy of Feminine Display” in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, edited by Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); and Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference. 54. Thompson, The Virtuous Marketplace, 12–14. 55. Le Figaro, February 24, 1831, 1. 56. Le Figaro, February 24, 1831, 1. 57. Le Figaro, February 24, 1831, 1. 58. See Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (Milton Keynes: The Open University Press, 1997). 59. La Caricature, February 13, 1834. Shows front row, l–r: Guizot, Persil, Thiers, Barthe, Soult, d’Argout, Prunelle (standing) Lefevre, Rigney. 2nd row: l–r: Podenas, Harle, pere; Royer-Colard, Odier, Pelet de la Lozere, Fruchard, Delessert. 3rd row: l–r: Vatout, Keratry, Jolivet. 4th row, 3rd from left: Viennet, Lameth; then 4th from right is Ganneron, Etienne. 60. La Caricature, May 1, 1834. 61. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution.

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62. On the predominantly male readership, see Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature; and Kerr, Caricature and French Political Culture. 63. Grogan, “Flora Tristan,” 78. 64. François Guizot, Histoire de la civilisation en Europe, quoted in Grogan, “Flora Tristan,” 78. 65. Justice Minister Charles Persil, who had jurisdiction over matters of the press as well as attempted regicides, sought extended legislation in 1835 to control attacks on the government and to ensure social morality. Naming caricature as a corrupting influence, Persil argued that, “the spectacle offered in our streets” has been injuring public decency for a long time. [I] images which shame our immorality, caricatures that attack the citizens even in the sanctuary of private life, insolent lithographs that heap derision, ridicule and scorn on the person and the authority of the sovereign and on his family, theater pieces that one cannot look at without blushing, that cannot be heard with indignation, and that, basing their success on party spirit, audaciously attack in the most indecent manner, the foundation and form of our government, all of this side-stepping points accusingly to the insufficiency of our legislation (Archives parlementaires, v. 98, 257). On satire’s threat to state security see Odile Krakovitch, “Robert Macaire où la grande peur des censeurs,” Europe (November–December 1987); Lucien La Hodde, Histoire des sociétés secrètes et du parti républicain de 1830 à 1848 (Paris, 1850). Also, see chapter one, “Conspiracy.” 66. See Jean-Denis Lanjuinais’s report of the committee charged with analyzing constitutional projects, April 29, 1793, Archives parlementaires v. 63, 561–64, 591–93, 595–96, quoted in Lynn Hunt, ed. The French Revolution and Human Rights (NY: Bedford Books, 1996); Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, chapter three; Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). 67. See Laura Mason, Singing the French Revolution, chapter three, “Songs off the Street: Newspapers, Theaters and Satire.” 68. In much of her correspondence with the legitimist organizer in Paris, Ferdinand de Bertier, during the uprising, the duchesse referred to herself as “E,” to Bertier as “57,” and to Louis-Philippe as “S.” (G. de Bertier de Sauvigny, La conspiration des légitimistes et de la duchesse de Berry contre Louis-Philippe 1830 à 1832: correspondances et documents inédits (Paris: Hatier, 1950). The duchesse also went variously as Marie, Mathurin, M. Charles, Bernardin, Anne, Petit-Pierre, Corbineau, and Bernard. See Hugues de Changy, Le soulevement de la duchesse de Berry (Paris: Albatros et Diffusion, 1986), 119. 69. La Quotidienne, October 29, 1832, 1. 70. Collingham, The July Monarchy, 127. 71. Lucas-Dubreton, La princess captive: la duchesse de Berry 1832 à 1833 (Paris: Librairie académique Perrin et Cie., 1925), 16.

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72. Jean Lucas-Dubreton, The Restoration and the July Monarchy, trans. E. F. Buckley (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1929), 220–221. 73. Lucas-Dubreton, The Restoration and the July Monarchy, 221. 74. Collingham, The July Monarchy, 128. 75. Le Charivari, December 12, 1832. 76. Lucas-Dubreton, The Restoration and the July Monarchy, 226–227. 77. François Guizot, Memoires v. 3 (New York: AMS Press, 1974), 46. 78. See Reddy, The Invisible Code, and Robert Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 79. Le Charivari, February 7, 1833. 80. Guizot, Memoires, v. 3, 40–46. Quotation on 45. 81. Lucas-Dubreton, La princess captive, 188–189. 82. Collingham, The July Monarchy, 128, and Chateaubriand, Mémoires, t.vi, 388–389. Roux-Laborie fought by sword against Armand Carrel who was wounded, as was the legitimist journalist Alfred Nettement. Police prevented a duel between three republicans and legitimists from rival papers. On the duel in nineteenth-century France, see Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France. 83. Kerr, Caricature, 99. 84. Bulletin de police February 26, 1833. AN F7.3885. Cited in Changy, Le soulevement, 213–214. 85. Collingham, The July Monarchy, 129. 86. Le Charivari, February 27, 1832. 87. On narrative authority built through apparent control of libertinism, see Matlock, Scenes of Seduction, 70–74. 88. Chateaubriand, Mémoires, t.v, 600. 89. Le Charivari, June 6, 1833. 90. Le Charivari, February 27, 1833. 91. Le Charivari, February 28, 1833. 92. Le Charivari, February 28, 1833. 93. Le Charivari, February 28, 1833. 94. Jo Burr Margadant, “The Duchesse de Berry and Royalist Political Culture in Postrevolutionary France,” History Workshop Journal 43 (1997). 33–34. 95. Lucas-Dubreton, La princess captive, 204–205. 96. Chateaubriand, Mémoires t.vi, 17. 97. Collingham, The July Monarchy, 129. 98. Chateaubriand, Mémoires t.vi, 17. 99. L. Viennet, Journal, 1955, 136–137. As quoted in Collingham, The July Monarchy, 129. 100. See Smith, Changing Lives, 121. 101. Conversation reported by de la Ferronnays in Chateaubriand, Mémoires, t.vi, 529. 102. Chateaubriand, Mémoires, t vi, 197. 103. Chateaubriand, Mémoires, t vi, 18–19.

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104. Letter from the duchess to Chateaubriand, Naples, August 10, 1833. In Chateaubriand, Mémoires, t.vi, 214–215. 105. Margadant, “The Duchessee de Berry,” 43–44. 106. Chateaubriand, Mémoires, t.vi, 197. 107. Chateaubriand, Mémoires, t.vi, 218. 108. Chateaubriand, Mémoires, t.vi, 17. 109. Margadant, “The Duchesse de Berry,” 44–45. 110. La Quotidienne, May 12, 1833, no. 134. 111. La Quotidienne, May 16, 1833, no. 138. 112. La Quotidienne, May 11, 1833, no. 131. 113. Collingham, The July Monarchy in France, 130. 114. Jules Michelet, Les femmes de la Révolution, 1854. Reprinted in Oeuvres complètes, Paris: Flammarion, 1971, 470. 115. Collingham, The July Monarchy, 129–130. 116. Genviève Fraisse, Reason’s Muse: Sexual Difference and the Birth of Democracy, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 124–125. 117. On the new space for narrative plots in 1830, see Matlock, Scenes of Seduction, 81. 118. Margadant, “Gender, Vice and the Political Imaginary.” 119. Bergman-Carton, Conduct Unbecoming, chapter three: “Ménagère ou courtisane: Daumier’s Vision of the Female Intellect.” 120. Moses, French Feminism, chapter five. 121. Fraisse, Reason’s Muse, 133. One police report after the July Revolution accused a seventy-year-old widow of having single-handedly “excited the Swiss guards to fire on the people on the Revolutionary day of 28 July.” The popular memory of her “culpable actions” so much “excited resentment” that scarcely had the frightened woman returned home a month later when vigilant crowds “surged” toward her house and subjected it to “the most terrible menacing.” AN F7.3884. Bulletin de Paris, August 26, 1834.

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Charivari

Louis-Philippe’s failed promises after the July Revolution made a republican of Armand Carrel, the great journalist and editor of the newsmaking paper, Le National. Government spokesmen tried to discredit his anti-government attacks by calling his “the street press.” Perhaps so, but Carrel shot back in his paper that it was nowhere but in the streets that Louis-Philippe, himself, had come to power: “Where do you come from? Is not your royalty street royalty? . . . Royalty of the streets, ministers of the streets, deputies of the streets; without this nomination from the streets—which freed you from your oaths to three generations of Bourbons—you would be nothing but traitors who had deserted the legitimate monarchy at the very time when it called on you to defend it against the streets.”1 For Carrel, as for many others, the July Monarchy’s origins in the streets of Paris meant that the French populace would be able to benefit from the revolution it had created. Not only did the streets underwrite the regime’s existence, they asserted the popular, democratic, and radical meaning of 1830. It is no surprise, then, that after the three days of revolution had ended, the battle over the meaning of the July regime continued to be fought in French streets. In fact, these public spaces themselves became contested territory, and the struggle to shape the juste milieu developed into a debate over the streets and who would dominate them. This chapter turns to what I call “charivari,” by which I mean broadly the popular politics of satire in public space. Moving our analysis into the street, it includes the two groups excluded from the discussion thus far, working classes and provincials, and fills out our picture of satire by taking a broad view of July Monarchy society that goes beyond the king and bourgeoisie. The chapter opens with a contextual look at the street as a site of danger and social disorder that helps to explain why charivaris so distressed authorities. 177

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From there, it treats politics proper by examining the political charivari, a public demonstration of disapproval directed at politicians and others associated with the government. It then turns to an examination of how charivarists used the social category of honor to criticize public figures and their activities. With the honor charivari, we see the categories of politics and society being drawn closer and more explicitly together by the historical actors themselves. The notion of charivari situates satire in “the streets,” which were both actual, geographical places and representational, metaphorical spaces. In both senses, they were the ground where the inclusivity of the polity was contested after the 1830 Revolution: Who would be allowed to engage in political debate? How far down the social scale, across the political spectrum, through urban space, and along national and local thoroughfares would the embrace of the regime’s proclaimed new political openness reach? In a very real sense, determining who would be allowed to act politically in the streets, and under what circumstances, would define the July Monarchy. That is, settling questions about street politics would settle questions about who would be included in the body politic, and specifically whether the political dialogue of constitutional government would include the voices of those who spoke through public demonstrations. Street mockery engaged these questions about political action and inclusivity in a process that itself became a political issue. During the 1830s, the pervasive satire of popular criticism in charivaris and religious parodies became subjects of great interest to a state struggling to negotiate between popular and elite politics. State monitoring of charivaris brought them into political discussion where institutions like the courts, the police, and the press interpreted them for wide, public audiences. At the same time, contesting the right to be in the streets through the satire of the charivari forged important political practices among the public. The term “charivari” has conventionally referred to one type of street demonstration in particular, a practice that emerged in old regime folk culture as a means of ensuring social mores. Communities directed charivaris at people who transgressed familial, sexual, and matrimonial norms. In the traditional charivari, local people might gather, for example, in front of the home of a man who appeared to be dominated by his wife in violation of local gender codes. There they would bang loudly on pots and pans while chanting insults and taunts.2 Charivaris took place at night when the cover of darkness made identifying particular participants difficult and the din of the instruments would be most disturbing. During the Revolution of 1789, reports of charivaris declined, perhaps because authorities paid less attention to what looked so apolitical, or because people engaged in other forms of protests. Yet even in

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its traditional social form, the charivari attracted government attention when it grew too loud or violent, or if the victim was involved in the government. Increasingly, this intervention pitted popular custom against bourgeois law.3 This chapter looks at a series of political charivaris that occurred beginning in 1832 in several provincial cities, including Arras, Grenoble, Metz, and Bordeaux. For the most part, these mock serenades were directed against deputies and other statesmen returning to their home departments, although some targeted other types of government supporters, including nobles and recipients of the Legion of Honor. Peter Sahlins, who has studied the charivari extensively, links the high number of charivaris to the 1832 cholera epidemic in Paris that adjourned the legislative session and sent deputies back to their departments early, where many met noisy symphonies of disapproval.4 It is well established that by the 1830s, the charivari had been turned to explicitly political uses. Retaining its basic form, it targeted political enemies and was often orchestrated by republican organizations. The change began after 1789, when the charivari expanded its repertoire from issues of social morality to those of national politics, and became a means of collective contestation akin to petitions and strikes. Despite the turn from social to political issues, local police still called these events charivaris. Thus, historian Charles Tilly argues that, by the 1830s, the charivari had entered common people’s repertoire of possible public actions.5 The charivari’s increasing visibility in the early 1830s raised public interest in its history. Gabriel Peignot, under the pseudonym Docteur Calybariat, wrote The Moral, Civil, Political and Literary History of the Charivari, a vitriolic analysis directed explicitly to people of all social classes. Calybariat defined the charivari as “a confusion of noise of frying pans, caldrons, shovels, casseroles, tongs, pots, basins, bells, hand bells, cornets, clarinet mouthpieces, horns, whistles, rattles, etc., accompanied by cries, jests and, as a rule, a statement of the name of the heroes and the reason for the festivity.”6 He recognized that the charivari was a vital tool for those who had been excluded from July Monarchy politics. Charivaris were carried out by “men of the people or men who don’t believe they are part of the people, in front of the residence of certain persons who, because of a certain recent event which concerns them in particular, have attracted this public expression of congratulations.”7 The charivari was a sort of satiric honoring, the opposite of sober honors, and in fact charivarists often referred to their targets as “honorees.” Calybariat’s history framed the charivari in terms of political utility. It emphasized the charivari’s evolution from the social to the political, and explained that the charivari was now used to exact justice. Once drawn upon mainly to comment on marital misalliance, the charivari had “for some time” by 1833 been evolving into something else; “Lady Politics” having “invaded

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all” had accordingly “decided to take up the handle of the pot and the cauldron.”8 The Revolution of 1789, the “great charivari” that shook France and the rest of Europe, had eclipsed for a time the smaller “street-corner” charivaris that began to re-emerge after stability returned in 1815. Calybariat quoted popular newspaper commentary that portrayed the July Monarchy as a charivari and its kitchenware as symbolic of government performance. “The casserole represents the July program, that is to say, the program has been made into hash.”9 There is a double entendre at work in this that suggests the program has been given a thrashing. The July Revolution’s promises have been fricasseed, liberties ground into salamis, the budget souffléd, republicans put up as marmalade, public order fried, politesse burned, and glory boiled. Calybariat’s work was filled with invective against the growing numbers of charivaris, which he likened to weeds infesting a garden, but it leaves no doubt that the charivari was recognized as a powerful political tool in France’s revolutionary past and present. If historians have long known that the traditional charivari expanded to new applications in the 1830s, its “honorees” more political figures than violators of marriage customs, they have been less clear about the political implications of the charivari’s shifting focus. How did it matter that this was a political activity that took place in the streets? And what difference did it make that so many of its participants were working-class and provincial? Calybariat called it a means of justice, but how effective was the charivari politically? Was Carrel right that the “streets” legitimated royal authority? To begin to answer these questions, it is important to see that, above all, the charivari was a local statement about locality, about being situated in a particular place, and in this chapter, I show that the charivari’s political efficacy lay in its ability to express and enforce a community’s claim on those it considered to be its own. The geographically specific nature of the charivari at the heart of these claims allowed the political charivari, like the traditional charivari, to voice a community’s concern about the behavior of one of its members, usually one who had left the community and represented it in some manner, in many cases as a deputy in the National Assembly. This relationship of accountability was important politically because it expressed and helped to establish the basic terms of representative government in the 1830s. In addition to asking who in society could participate in political debate, the charivari engaged the play between Paris and the provinces in yet another aspect of the process of inventing republicanism and educating the republican citizen. Public mockery in local streets reminded representatives that they were part of a particular community, and in this way, reinforced the ties of representative and constituency that formed the basis of national representative government. On the surface, the charivari may look like simple ridicule of some foolish act, but there was more to it than just laughter and

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embarrassment. When political charivaris faulted particular behaviors, they also implicitly made statements about what they considered to be correct or honorable political behavior. Charivarists mocked political life as they saw it by putting on a ridiculous political display themselves, a laughing indictment of a political world that excluded them. With their comments on political matters, they protested their exclusion from formal politics. Charivaris made clear that the people paid close attention to political life because, in addition to criticism, charivaris were also a call to action; charivarists exposed bad behavior to the public because they expected that change was possible, a fact that often gained attention at their trials. Ironically, in adopting the language of ridicule to point up the politically ridiculous, charivarists actually furthered representative government by voicing serious political concerns and holding representatives responsible for their actions.

CHARIVARI IN CONTEXT: PERCEPTIONS OF THE STREETS Street satire took its power from the widely held view of streets as dangerous places. If many saw Paris as a city that pleased the eye, the exception to this vision was the city streets themselves. Streets were seen as places of possibility and progress, but also of danger and disorder, and as such, they were the focus of much dispute. While some embraced France’s long history of public politics at the barricades or in the crowd, many believed that, like the charivari, the streets needed to be sanitized and made orderly. Fearful perceptions of them as potentially perilous made “the streets” powerful symbolically, and the growing middle class of industrializing France often used them as entities against which to define itself. Observers commented on the incongruity of the most modern commercial establishments set among the filth of Paris streets, where “the shops and coffee houses have the air of fairy palaces, and the markets show fountains wherein daintiest naiads might delight to bathe . . . where the women look to belong wholly to earth and the men too watchful and observant to suffer the winds of heaven to visit them too roughly . . . you are shocked and disgusted at every step you take, or at every gyration that the wheels of your chariot make by sights and smells that may not be described.”10 If the cityscape boasted areas that defined civilization, for many the streets themselves defined the limits of civilization. They were places where the natural could not be contained. Sewage drained down street centers, horses defecated while pulling carriages, and street sludge soiled pedestrians’ shoes and clothes. Subjected to filth, “the most elegant people in the world” suffered “the perpetual outrage of common decency in their streets.”11

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The problem of the streets encompassed not just dirt and garbage, but the people who handled it. Many believed that it was the material and the human refuse of society that made the streets dangerous places. Frances Trollope, for example, the well-known observer of manners who typified this view and did much to promote it in her writing, described a scene outside the Opera on the Boulevard des Italiens. Two women, “covered with dust, and probably with vermin” sat in the street pulling apart flock mattresses to card the wool inside. Trollope complained that bits of wool flew onto passers-by and necessitated “a very dirty detour.” From her perspective, the women occupied space meant for other people. More than just an inconvenience, Trollope described this “obscene and loathsome operation” as a health hazard. Filth from the mattresses “passed into the throats of the gentlemen and ladies of Paris.” She wrote about one of the wool carders: “the old crone . . . will doubtless occupy the place she has chosen during the whole day, and carry away her bed just in time to permit the Duke of Orleans to step from his carriage into the Opera without tumbling over it, but certainly not in time to prevent his having a great chance of receiving as he passes some portion of the various animate and inanimate superfluities which for so many hours she has been scattering into the air.”12 For observers like Trollope, spectacles of filth and peril gave the streets themselves a generally treacherous feel. For many people, this brought the right to be in the streets into question; for Trollope the space occupied by the women wool carders would be more legitimately occupied by the duc d’Orléans. Trollope describes a similar occasion when “a well-dressed gentleman” suffered a head wound, and just as importantly, “the most overwhelming destruction to the neatness of his attire” when he caught his foot in the machinery of “a street-working tinker” plying his tinning trade on the rue de Provence. The episode attracted plenty of stares, and not a single apology for what Trollope called “the invasion of the highway.”13 In this line of thinking, tinkers and wool carders did not belong in the same place as opera-goers and statesmen. As invaders, they should be removed. Clearly this view would not have been shared by the workers themselves, nor by all passers-by. A working-class presence may have made the streets seem unsafe to some, despite—or precisely because of— the fact that historically the streets were the locus all things popular. In the context of political and social change in the 1830s, who “belonged” in this public space was debatable. Streets were civic spaces where middle-class identity formed in contrast with poorly lit alleyways and working-class activity. Bourgeois Paris envisioned French streets as properly the place of modern convenience, private property and unfettered commerce. The modern technology of lighting must triumph over “the demon torment” of streets left in darkness, “the profound

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darkness of every part of the city in which there are not shops illuminated by the owners of them with gas.”14 Cafés and restaurants of middle-class society used gaslight, in contrast to “the dim old-fashioned lamp suspended at long intervals across the pavé . . . no sooner as this region of light and gayety (sic) left than you seem to plunge into utter darkness.”15 Leaving middle-class spaces meant leaving the space of civilization and middle-class acceptability. As class distinctions grew and social classes mixed in the streets, efforts to assert particular class interests merged with talk of health hazards; public space was said to be infected with disease. In 1832, cholera ravaged Paris, killing even the prime minister, Casimir Perier. The water-borne disease made officials look powerless against it, and frightened citizens searched for a culprit. People named each other as suspected poisoners in confrontations that turned the streets into places of violent threats and beatings. The disease threatened political consequences for the government as citizens called for “either the head of the poisoner or that of the police commissioner.”16 Controlling the streets became important not just for public safety but for government stability. Running sewage, uneven pavement, excessive noise, and roadway obstacles could all be solved by resurfacing the streets. “An additional advantage, by-the-by,” wrote Trollope, of covering over French pavement stones, “would be obtained from the difficulties it would throw in the way of future heroes of a barricade.”17 Curtailed popular protest would make streets into middle-class, sanitized thoroughfares. It was not just health hazards, natural life, and the lower classes that made urban thoroughfares perilous; the streets were the site of political upheaval associated with republicanism, both the semi-secret republican cells that laid plans out of sight and individual republicans who were fixtures of public space, “constantly seen strutting upon the Boulevards.”18 Though many republicans held moderate political views and did not advocate violence of any kind, public perception generally associated a monolithic republicanism with the Reign of Terror. Even republicans’ clothes symbolized political kinship to Robespierre. In addition to their distinctive hat, the “bousingot,” they typically wore waistcoats known as “gilets à la Robespierre,” the wide lapels of which were sarcastically said to represent the wearers’ expansive principles. Many associated republican dress with poor personal hygiene. Republicans wore “long and matted locks that hang in heavy, ominous dirtiness.” With no formal neckwear, “the throat is bare, at least from linen, but a plentiful and very disgusting profusion of hair supplies its place.”19 In the streets, political ideology was linked to the body; republicanism was thought to be identifiable in a hair style. Public fears were not just a matter of aesthetics, though; the streets had in fact been the setting for actual uprisings, including that of 1830. The business

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of real and rumored riots grew familiar in the early 1830s. “We daily look for an account of something of the kind as regularly as for our breakfast bread,” observed one nerve-hardened Parisian.20 The trials of 1834 (see chapter one) tightened state policing of public space, especially near government buildings. Gendarmes could be seen breaking up groups of two or three people who gathered to talk in the Luxembourg gardens. Some blamed the rambunctious goings-on of the Porte Saint Martin neighborhood for the citywide crackdown. Young men assembled nightly in this boulevard neighborhood to make noise and create a stir. Even though the shouting may have been nothing more than a big racket, news of the gatherings regularly spread “from street to street until the reiterated report amounts to the announcement of an émeute,” or uprising.21 Paris awoke so often to news of a riot in the Porte Saint Martin district that people began to discuss the uprisings in a mocking tone as “little pastimes.” Government supporters spoke of street politics as mere amusements in a way that drained their political potential. The “mysterious hour of revolution hatching,” as the riots were dubbed, always led to a few arrests, but these were mostly juveniles, “said to be as harmless as a set of croaking bullfrogs.”22 “The streets” became a favorite topic of the arts, where commentary shaped public perception. Critics decried Victor Hugo’s play, “Le roi s’amuse,” for example, as a “ridiculous,” “vulgar,” and “ludicrous” tale of ordinary life. In place of heroes and demigods, Hugo featured “cut-purses, buffoons, and street-walkers,” which looked to some like a giant step down for the arts, leaving the garden of culture “that we might take our pleasure in a bog.” Some said buffoons and street-walkers made better subjects because they were natural, but this was precisely the problem for critics. The streets teemed with “vulgar vice” and obscenities. “Why should the lowest passions of our nature be forever brought out in parade before us?” asked one observer.23 In literary depiction, streets represented nature’s disorderly “loathsome slime” that needed to be controlled, not celebrated. This kind of critical commentary shaped public perception of street politics. Crowds were said to be populated by “the very lowest class” and to speak irrationally in “many a crazy burst.”24 Street demonstrations covered in the press presented a paradox for middle-class Parisians: street politics were an entertaining spectacle that were causing no immediate or obvious effect on the general political scene, yet arrests, fines, and imprisonment were constant enough to convince people that the riots “are thought worth some attention” by government officials. Trollope worried about the “little shows,” wishing that “such methods were resorted to as would effectually and at once put a stop to such disgraceful scenes.”25 Like the charivari, street demonstrations

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pushed on-lookers into political opinions. In Trollope’s case, they were an issue around which she developed her opinion that the king should take a hard line against public demonstrations of political opposition that displayed disrespect and undermined royal authority. A strong military state would put an end to street demonstrations, “that indecent species of safety-valve by which the noxious vapor generated by the ill-disposed part of the community is now permitted to escape.” Street politics might be ridiculous, but not powerless. “It may be very great, dignified, and high-minded,” she reasoned, for a king and his ministers to laugh at treasonable caricatures and seditious pleasantries of all sorts, but I do greatly doubt the wisdom of it.”26 The welfare of France depended on displays of external deference that signaled respect, a very different use of space than republicans were making of the Porte Saint Martin. Public space was also dangerous because of the dangerous information found there. Police monitored satire, pornography, and political news, often sold by the same people. As sentiment rose against satire in 1835, police reported that “for several days the palais royale and the boulevards have been infested with peddlars of obscene writings and engravings. There have been many arrests. As for those still out there, police agents have begun surveillance with the great attention. I hope I will have soon put an end to this shameful traffic.”27 Deputies debated legislation to regulate the sale of information that challenged its authority in the street. Justice Minister Persil had argued that, “the spectacle offered in our streets” had been destroying public decency for a long time (see chapter one). “Obscene engravings, images which shame our immorality, caricatures that attack the citizens even in the sanctuary of private life, insolent lithographs that heap derision, ridicule, and scorn on the person and the authority of the sovereign”28 were all part of the same public menace. At times, “reading the streets” meant reading actual slogans. Political graffiti covered the walls of Paris’s Latin quarter in particular. Inscriptions like “Down with Philippe!” and “Vive la République!” mingled with pears “of every sized and form,” in which scratches signifying eyes, nose and mouth varied to configure expressions of surprise or anger. These were references to Philipon’s famed portrayal of the king as a pear in court and in his newspapers. The graffiti used pears to express popular contempt for reigning authority.29 This manner of reading the street to monitor politics was not new. Since the 1789 Revolution, graffiti had been a sure measure of the political temperature. Efforts to monitor public spaces for clues to public opinion and potential unrest escalated in the political and social instability of the early 1830s. In 1835, for example, following the September laws that reinstated censorship, Trollope observed that hostility to the royal family of the deposed Charles

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X had seemed to subside; republicans were no longer joking about them in public, “nor even do the blank walls of Paris, which, for nearly half a century, have been the favorite receptacle of all their wit, exhibit any pleasantries, either in the shape of hieroglyphic, caricature, or lampoon, alluding to them or their cause.”30 For many observers, the streets were the place to read popular republican interests in particular.

SATIRE IN THE STREETS Despite increasing regulation of printed materials, street satire was hard to police. The “extraordinary part of all this caricaturing on walls and in print shops” seemed to be the inability of those in power to prevent it.31 Officials behaved as though all public satire were potentially explosive, and police, who seemed to fear ridicule of any sort in the streets, monitored even the smallest acts of public mockery. For example, when a group of St. Simonians on a planned walk through several Paris neighborhoods met cat-calls and whistles, police drew justice officials’ attention to a sizable crowd of on-lookers as well as to the political potential of their laughable appearance. “The intention of these men who affect calm, a burlesque stoicism, appears to be to accustom the public little by little to their costume, hoping to be able soon to recruit new members.”32 Police also reported on mere rumors of public satire. One Paris gendarme warned of rumors circulating in the Saint Denis area that forty or so people were planning a night-time masquerade, something similar to a charivari, after which they would burn in effigy two or three well-known city residents. Police sources said that Colonel Benoit, a commandant of the National Guard, was to be ridiculed in the masquerade and that there was to be “a cavalcade of donkeys and a dummy dressed as a miller,” who was also to be burned after being paraded through town.33 Police and the mayor vowed to foil the “malevolent plans.” However, it was reported days later that thirty to forty masked individuals from the Saint Denis area, followed by 150 to 200 masons and stonecutters, and a great number of curious on-lookers made their way to Benoit’s house where they burned three bales of straw. For some time, officials were unable to stop the fires and their destruction.34 Police were right to look cautiously at satiric demonstration both real and rumored. Scholars have debated whether street satire served as a safety valve that gave people a way to express grievances without affecting the status quo or a powder keg that fueled opposition and disrupted social and political arrangements. In the 1830s, street satire had the potential for both. In 1832, for example, a group of anti-royalists and anti-clerics staged a public mockery at the Tuileries. They

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dressed dogs in the purple robes of the archbishop and priests’ vestments and drove them through the streets. Then they hung a statue of Charles X from a tree in the Tuileries, after which they turned upside down and befouled a statue of the duc de Bourdeaux, whom many monarchists considered the rightful heir to the throne. In a grim end to their farce, they reportedly put a corpse on the throne of Charles X. These acts were perhaps extreme, but they were confined to a particular area, and their ridicule clearly directed against the Catholicism and monarchy dear to the French right. This kind of political mockery was intended to deflate the authority of its targets. Police charged members of the crowd with a host of further offenses that they likely did not commit, including plundering the Louvre and the Tuileries, destroying all statues, paintings and gold mirrors therein, then pillaging the Bibliotheque du Roi, the Catholic Seminary, the Departmental prefecture of the Seine, and various private houses.35 Part of the reason for close monitoring of the streets was that participants used their entertainment value to escape punishment. Charivarists and parodists claimed their innocence by saying they were simply curious and wanted to watch or be part of the show. The question of whether demonstrators had full knowledge of infractions was complicated by the question of whether acts were done only for entertainment. The humorous context of street satire made boundaries of acceptability easier to push because participants could always claim they were just having fun. This made them seem less culpable, and less responsible. This was the case, for instance, in February 1833, when four people disguised in religious vestments paraded through the streets of the Boulogne area near Paris in what police described as a “buffoonish procession.” Auguste Carette, a chemist, led the procession with a handkerchief around his neck from which hung a gold cross. A poster board rested on his shoulders, on which were written the words “pope” and “slow-acting poison.” Carette explained the episode as a bit of carnival-season license—making fun of the Jesuits by referring to a poisonous episode of their history. Carette apparently served 15 days in prison for “parody of a religious procession” and “insulting the religion of the majority of the French.”36 Similarly, the raucous fun of masquerade balls, where individuals could act publicly yet remain anonymous behind their masks, frequently spilled into street satire. The church was often the target. In July 1831, three men left a masquerade ball given in a Montmedy cabaret, “dressed themselves in grotesque clothes, imitating the sacerdotal and parodied religious ceremonies of the Catholic faith before a great number of people.”37 Justice officials emphasized the mockery as scandalous, not just because it ridiculed religion but because it did so publicly.

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Not all public masquerades were treated with equal suspicion; this depended in part on their location in the city. Proprietors in neighborhoods where entertainment featured satire, burlesque and vaudeville, complained of excessive police attention. Dartois, the head of the Théâtre des Variétés, for example, complained “several times” to the Interior Minister of police abuses. On January 10, 1836, a masquerade ball at the theater devolved from laughter to violence when a young man in costume, seated on the first galerie, tried stealthily to lift the pompom of the Municipal guardsman, whose foot was just beneath him. The sergeant caught him in the act, but rather than laugh at the prank, guardsmen tore him from the room and threw him onto the boulevard “with the utmost brutality.” Moreover, the inspector general reported later that the sergeant of the municipal guard should not have been at the ball in the first place: “this was not his post seeing that he had not been called there by anyone.”38 A second man, disguised in a sailor costume, was grabbed by police “with yet more furor,” kicked, beaten, and towed by the necktie to the police commissioner. Dartois told police superiors that he could not comprehend the violence shown at the Variétés “in comparison to the leniency, the extreme tolerance of these same agents in other public balls,” and that he could only denounce police efforts “as a system decreed with the aim of hurting our enterprise.” Dartois cited the violence as unique to the July Monarchy: “Never have we seen the police act with such brutality, or we would even say with seeming hatred for the citizens . . . we cannot believe that scenes such as those which occurred at our last ball are in the interest of public morale.39 In an interesting twist on the familiar fear of harm argument used against satirists, Dartois suggested that hypervigilent policing might play a role in creating public danger. He admonished the Interior Minister, “You will admit that the streets are not safe, and that the police are, of all the powers that be, that which one must respect the most blindly.”40 The volatile atmosphere of the boulevards and the public criticism offered by satiric theater exposed unequal applications of the law. Where authorities blamed unsafe streets on masqueraders, crowds, and potential political explosiveness, people who worked on the boulevards blamed unsafe streets on police and their demand for blind respect. What is important to see in all of this is how identifying streets as spaces of working-class filth or middle-class culture had the effect of categorizing actual space as ideological space. City-space was unstable because any ideological meaning could be mapped onto it. It is in this abstract way of thinking about space that the charivari and streets are linked: the charivari pitted fear of crowds in the street against the rhetoric of equality and representative government that had surrounded the 1830 Revolution. For those who felt

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excluded from July Monarchy politics, those whom Calybariat described as “men of the people or men who don’t believe they are part of the people,” the street held the potential for a different kind of political order based on republican justice. As scenes of uprisings, the streets had a history of both popular protest and authoritative policing.

“MUSIC OF THE CROSSROADS”: THE POLITICAL CHARIVARI Like the satiric journalists we saw in chapter one, in the early years of the July Monarchy, charivarists were frequently charged with an array of crimes against society and brought into court. Charges centered usually on the question of injury, sometimes in the physical sense but more often, and much more ambiguously because harder to determine, in the sense of insult to one’s reputation. Defense strategies hinged on the public nature of the injury, the fact that it took place in the streets. Charivarists defended themselves against charges that they had insulted someone’s reputation by claiming that their expressions were public, political acts, not private, personal insults. Their trials turned into debates over the legality and political nature of the charivari. They often pitted government prosecutors against leftist government opponents. Like the trials of Philipon, Daumier, and Le Charivari, they were widely reported in newspapers, including La Gazette des tribuneaux, and in cheap pamphlets.41 These issues unfolded clearly in the most extensively publicized case of the decade, a charivari given in 1832 to the former Deputy, statesman, and prefect of the Pas de Calais, baron Charles de Talleyrand. Before 1830, Talleyrand had been a member of a recognized republican society, Aide-toi, but had been in Toncy for a dinner engagement at the home of a well-known legitimist and former mayor of Arras. It was alleged that a “tapage nocturne,” a nighttime disturbance, had taken place to express disapproval of the dinner in the streets of Toncy at 11:00 PM. The trial that followed addressed the basic question of where the guilt lay in a charivari by debating whether the charivari was political. The defense claimed that the charivari was a political act and was therefore protected under the Charter, which guaranteed the right to publication of political views. The prosecution argued that it was not protected political speech but simply a public disturbance and subject to prosecution under article 479 of the penal code. The trial ended when the two men who had led the charivari were found guilty of insult and sentenced to fines of 11 and 12 francs. At the appeal that followed, the question to be decided was whether any illegal insult had been intended. Defense attorneys argued to the court that

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the charivarists certainly could not be faulted for the quality of the music or the instruments, and only half jokingly blamed their conviction on the inability of the artists who played them. The first defense attorney of three who would present arguments asked the court to consider that, even with Stradivarius violins and beautiful compositions, those who had serenaded Talleyrand would have still sounded terrible. But to date, “musical inability is not yet prohibited by the penal code.”42 The music of the charivari might be aesthetically offensive, but the point was that this kind of public ridicule—the “disturbance” part of “nocturnal disturbance”—was still legal. By itself, the raucous use of musical instruments did not violate the law. Like print satirists, charivarists used the courtroom setting to further their ridicule, and the appeal proceeded through a farcical performance of outrageous legal rhetoric. If guilt depended on intention, could anyone really sound out the true intentions of a caldron or the consciousness of a casserole in a charivari? How then could a crime be clearly specified or punished? In fact, the defense argued, the opposite was true: kitchenware played a starring role in French cultural life. In the ballet, “the Sylphide,” for instance, a witches’ chorus accompanies the orchestra on caldrons and casseroles. Louis XI was said to have allowed a royal concert performed by pulling the tails of cats arranged according to pitch. Was M. Talleyrand more despotic than the medieval monarch? This historical and theoretical evidence was meant to prove that no insult had been legally established by the mere fact of discordant music. As had happened in Philipon’s courtroom battles, charivarists claimed to be “artists” who wanted to share their musical art with Talleyrand, but simply were bad musicians. Their arguments reached the public in newspapers and inexpensive pamphlets that printed trial transcripts. The published transcript cued readers how to interpret these arguments by describing the excited courtroom reaction and audience smiles “that proved those in attendance understood the bitter irony of this argument.”43 Turning from music to politics, the second defense attorney set out to prove the charivari legal because it was covered by article seven of the Charter that guaranteed the French right to criticize government acts in the press and in “all other means of publishing their opinions.” Government officials would do well, in fact, to listen to the charivari, admittedly “a bit hard on the ears . . . like the austere voice of good advice,” but most importantly an expression of popular opinion. As such, the defense claimed, the charivari “perfectly conforms to our glorious monarchy, which proclaimed itself (as everyone knows) the best of Republics.”44 This argument linked the ability to express political opinions through charivaris to the health of the July Monarchy. It paralleled Armand Carrel’s claim that the king owed his authority to the popular politics that put him on

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the throne. There was a touch of sarcasm in it, too, as if to say that a true republic would protect this right of expression. These were the kinds of arguments made in defense of print satire by Daumier and Philipon (see chapter one), who were in court at about the same time. The third attorney continued the political argument by situating an updated and clearly political charivari in the new social and legal order of the July Monarchy. The old regime social charivari was out of step, he argued, with bourgeois codes of privacy and decorum: “It would be in bad taste in 1832 to laugh at accidents that happen in civilized households.” But, he argued, the current incarnation of the charivari “is essentially political,” and constitutes a crime against the state that can only be adjudicated by the assize court and a jury trial under the 1830 charter, which specifies a jury trial for all political infractions. Tallyrand’s charivari fell into this category because no one had alleged anything personal; there had been no insult to Talleyrand as a father or spouse, for example, areas increasingly walled off as private life. As so often happened when satirists came before the court, defense attorneys had to finesse the need to portray charivari simultaneously as an important political right to be protected, yet unimportant and silly enough to be seen as politically non-threatening. To do this, the charivarists’ defense counsel suggested, in a way that mocked government opposition to charivaris, that to repress such gatherings, France needed a new law “that punishes groups of whistlers, mobs of casserolers, uprisings of caldrons, insurrections of friers.” Making the proposed law look foolish ridiculed those who would punish the charivari outright without engaging the content of its political expression. Embedded in these “political rantings,” as critics called the charivari, was the question of how much political opposition France would tolerate. As one of the defense lawyers put it, “the charivari is the great political question of the day.”45 Indeed, he continued, a “musical monomania” seemed to have gripped France, and several deputies had received the “glorious insult” of the charivari, despite the fact that the Charter had declared their persons inviolable, “including the eardrum.” In fact, the charivari loudly critiqued precisely this notion of inviolability. In the equality of the streets, no one person was above the rest. While charivarists had things in common with satirists working in other media, including the need to portray their work as protected political commentary, there were differences, too, that pertained mainly to the spatial nature of the charivari. Street mockery emphasized Talleyrand’s distance from the space of inviolability, his distance from the king and Paris, and placed him in that of equality, in the outdoor space of his local community. Talleyrand was not alone in this. Scarcely a deputy associated with the ministries had escaped “these noisy demonstrations of shared popular feeling.”

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Talleyrand’s lawyer told several stories of charivaris given and deputies’ efforts to elude them, including one parliamentary refugee sneaking with the prefect into his home district of the Carcasonne at midnight only to be met by a waiting brass and iron serenade. These stories brought “general laughter” to the court, which set a positive mood for the attorney’s sober political message that “if the infractions of the residents of Carcasonne and of the rest of the charivarists of France are not political, I ask you, Gentlemen, what in the world would be?”46 If the main argument of the defendants centered on protected political speech, the chief complaint of those who opposed the charivari was that it drew crowds into the streets. Fear of public disorder lay behind efforts to squelch the charivari, and to prove it, the defense of the Talleyrand charivarists cited the work of Jean-Ponce Guillaume Viennet, a man of letters, member of the Académie française, opponent of the charivari and ardent supporter of Louis-Philippe. The lawyer cited Viennet’s lines: It is thus that, following us everywhere out of hatred, Anarchy at bay, against us unleashed. [emphasis in original]

The lawyer was making the point that critics of the charivari feared “anarchy,” disorder, and were willing to deny political expression to ensure against it. In popular memory, anarchy meant the Reign of Terror, a powerful image that had to be addressed. “Understand, Gentlemen, saying anarchy is as if you were saying ‘93, the Jacobins, the bonnets rouges.” The defense used Viennet’s words to point out that political principles were at stake in the battle over the charivari: Those who want order and peace must suffer vengeance From he who fans the flames of war and preaches license. [emphasis in original]

In these lines, the rule of order and peace was being opposed to “the demagogic principles of casseroles,” which meant something like mob rule. The lawyer noted that the respected poet knew from experience what he was talking about: the quasi-legitimist had himself been the recipient of a “radical kitchen concert.”47 In sum, up to this point, defense lawyers had argued that the accused were voicing opposition to particular political acts in a legal expression of political dissatisfaction. The charivari amounted to a noisy demonstration of opinion, but protected opinion. From here, the question of the charivari was framed as a contest not just between the accused and M. Talleyrand, but between “the

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patriots of July and the heroes of Orleans.” Debate hinged on the definition of public and private life. Prosecutors argued that the charivari was injurious and troubled public peace, but was basically apolitical because its contents were the stuff of private life. The defense would need to prove the opposite. Prosecutors argued that the form of the charivari precluded any political character. What, they asked, was political about a ball, a dance, a few quadrilles, and the popular entertainment that often followed a charivari? These were all aspects of private life. But defense attorneys countered with examples of cultural acts in the domestic sphere that carried political content. They reminded the court of balls in the posh Parisian faubourg St. Germain where women wore green and white belts and bows to signify their support of the Bourbon heir to the throne. Politics could show up anywhere, they said, even the toilette of aristocrats. To establish the legality of the political charivari, the defense turned to the Charter and its guaranteed right to publish and print opinions, a right that extended not just to the press but to many modes of expression, including musical performance. Attorneys argued that of course music had a political character, as the government itself showed by prohibiting the Marseillaise, a tune that “masks political thought” hostile to the government.48 With this, the defense seemed satisfied that the court acknowledged in general that social gatherings could be political acts; all agreed that the public had a right to critique Talleyrand’s political behavior. The question was whether they could do so in a charivari. The debate over the charivari, then, seemed to be whether it was the exercise of a constitutional right or a “tapage injurieux,” an injurious disturbance. At least, this is what the court record states explicitly. But underlying this legal question was the more basic political issue of how the government would respond not so much to the threat of social disorder, but to the political potential of social gatherings. The question of the charivari’s legal future was based on the form of the critique, that is, the presentation of mockery through public noise and music created by a crowd. Prosecutors and authorities who sought public order wanted to control the explosive potential of a crowd gathered for a charivari. They argued that it disturbed the peace, but the real problem was the political threat posed by the people in the streets who had proved so powerful in France’s revolutionary history, including just two years earlier. Prosecutors had a hard time making this argument because France’s new Charter had clearly established protections for certain types of speech. The charivari became a test of the limits of public expression. Would this liberal right extend to the working class, to republicans, and to those who used the streets for political ends? This same question of the limits of public expression had been posed of print satire, and some satirists had appealed to the

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right to free speech in defense (see chapter one). But many print satirists had sought refuge from prosecution by claiming that their work was simply art with no political content, while prosecutors had argued that satire was inherently dangerous work that destabilized order by appealing to viewers’ emotions. The Tallyrand charivarists’ defense attorneys seized these arguments and turned them into a debate over music and political opinion. “Imagine, Gentlemen, that a thought that could be written innocently in a newspaper cannot be said in music without committing a violation!” Even under the old divine-right monarchy, whatever one could write, one could sing. Since the July Revolution, the defense argued, it seems more like “whatever you cannot sing, you can write or publish. I hadn’t thought that in giving us freedom of the press the Revolution had ravaged our freedom of music.”49 The defense confessed that it did not know how free the press really was, but that even if all agreed there was complete press freedom in theory, this did not ensure equal access to political expression in practice. Illiteracy, high newspaper subscription rates, and the persistence of regional patois meant that press freedom was not enough to guarantee free political expression; other media, like music, were still necessary to “the tricolor system of government.”50 In the July Monarchy’s evolving social and political milieu, in which debates between the enfranchised and the disenfranchised, and between the forces of order and disorder, were still unresolved, the charivari was a factor in debates over music, politics, and press freedom because it gave voice to those who had no formal way to express political views. “Like the wellheeled urbanite, who subscribes to the paper of his political faction, the poor man, the peasant, the man who does not know how to write also experiences feelings of political love or hatred that he feels the need to demonstrate.”51 The defense had reached the heart of the matter. Like so many debates around satire, this one was at root a debate over the locus of national political power. In their arguments for the right to ridicule political figures in public, defense attorneys cast the charivari as the voice of the nation: “Because a peasant does not know how to raise an eloquent voice in favor of Poland, nor how to use academic discourse to wither the cowards who have abandoned him, do you believe he doesn’t feel as strongly as the well-dressed man and that he doesn’t also have scorn to express?” Turning elitist politics on its head, the defense continued that “noblesse and generosity of feeling are not aristocratic, but plebeian, and ought to have the right to be publicized before the country.” Popular opinion was not just a force of democracy but the true protector of France. Attorneys highlighted the charivari’s role in politics: “The cauldron is a popular press; the charivari is a plebeian platform.”52

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But to legitimate the charivari as a political instrument, defense attorneys had to overcome its association with “the mob.” How could street ridicule exist on a par with parliamentary debate as tools of contemporary political practice? Proponents painted a picture of the charivari as powerful and progressive. As a symbol of civilization itself, they said, the charivari “permits the honest man of the people to confound sophistry-for-sale; it equalizes intellectual strengths.” Hardly the ineffectual holdover of medieval society, as some said, it levels aristocracy and “overthrows the feudalism of parliamentary prattling.” The charivari did not hinder the political process but ensured progressive efficiency. The “Gentlemen orators” who “get dressed up” to “speak for four hours on extraneous questions” can expect that “the people will respond to you by charivaris; they will kill your sophistic arguments of the podium with their music of the crossroads.”53 Not only was the charivari legal, but its earthy simplicity was the antidote to slick talk and empty promises. In closing, the defense of the Tallyrand charivarists asked what was the best way to avoid a charivari. Attorneys pointed out facetiously that a deputy could simply not return to his home department, or, they suggested, a “more patriotic way” would be to pay attention to the charivari’s message, “to become more a man of the people, to think like the people, to uphold the interests of the people.” In other words, representatives should pay attention to their first charivari to avoid a second. The appeal yielded mixed results for the defendants in the Talleyrand case (two were acquitted and two were not). The court ruled that the charivari, in this case and others that followed, was political, but was a political demonstration against the government and therefore was not protected by the Charter.54 Nonetheless, locals hailed the charivari and trial as political victories. They celebrated the charivari with a banquet to honor the defense attorneys that brought the people of Arras together across class lines. At the Café des Allées, the largest public locale in Arras, political notables gathered with lawyers, military officers and soldiers, farmers, artisans, proprietors, and members of the National Guard in a display of fraternal spirit and solidarity. For two hours the “openly patriotic” groups sang, toasted freedom, and talked of “the enslavement into which the juste-milieu has placed them.”55 The charivari had mapped local space not in terms of class but according to the political power of ridicule. It had brought provincial farmers and artisans into political life and redressed, at least in some small measure, their political “enslavement” by the July Monarchy. We can see this mixed group’s sense of empowerment in the way it held up its victory as an act of national political consequence. A former captain of the military corps of engineers saluted, “To the defenders of the charivarists.

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They came into our walls to defend a principle of liberty . . . we hope that soon, in a bigger theater, they will devote their patriotism and their talent to defending the general interests of France.”56 Toasts like this situated the rights of the nation on local ground. They linked the right to ridicule political figures and hold them accountable in local streets with French national pride and with the rights of people struggling against tyranny. “To Poland,” offered one merchant, “to the honor of France, based on which the representatives have said, ‘No, Poland will not perish.’ [emphasis in the original.] Let us drink and hope for the resurrection of this people of heroes.”57 Celebrating the right to political expression through charivari also meant celebrating “the people” as they were remembered in French Revolutionary history. “To the people,” toasted the journalist F. Degeorge, but to the people in their integrity, without exclusions of class, without preference of caste. To this heroic people that saved France from invasion by kings during the time of the Republic. To this courageous people who, under the Empire, planted the tricolor flag at the palace of the potentates. To this people finally, who, freed from tyranny, was able in three days to overturn the monarchy dating back thirteen centuries, and who did and will always save liberty if any peril threatens anew this idol of noble hearts and great courage.58

This constellation of toasts cast public mockery as a benchmark of French liberty. The charivari was a local act that was building national identity based on the rights of representative government. Each toast was followed by rounds of applause that animated the café, “the citizens reunited at this civic fête.” The issues of the barricades were still being fought in the streets, only now with kitchen tongs and frying pans. The charivari was a “sacred cause” that would prove the people were “invincible” in their pursuit of liberty. The pamphlet that circulated news of the charivari reported that at the center of the café was a tall pile of guns, powder, stones, and broken carriages, a public lesson in popular might. With their stack of weapons and show of strength, the charivarists exploited administrators’ fear of disorderly streets to work toward the possibility of a new political order, an improvement on the July Monarchy’s current order with a more egalitarian order of the streets. It has been argued that the political charivari of the 1830s was the practice of the middle class. Sahlins, for one, says that the charivaris given throughout provincial France were the work of middle-class young men dedicated to liberal and republican sympathies.59 But it would be a mistake to ignore the popular nature of the charivari. Even Sahlins acknowledges that not all of the charivari instigators were middle class. As the Talleyrand charivari suggests,

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as a political act, the charivari appealed to people beyond the middle class with an explicit cross-class rhetoric of “the nation.” Political justice was the overriding concern for charivarists, and exactly where justice would be decided, and by whom, continued to be issues around the charivari. Debates about justice kept alive questions about the political nature of the charivari. Just as was happening with print satirists in the same period, charivarists sparked impassioned discussion in the years following the Tallyrand case about the definition of politics and whether the charivari was political in nature. We can see this in the case of a charivari given to Deputy Jaubert. In July 1833, M. Jaubert, the Deputy of Cher, was visiting several towns in his district, and received a charivari in the town of St. Amand. Though authorities warned him to stay away, he insisted that the law was on his side should a demonstration occur, though he apparently did attempt to keep his arrival time secret. As predicted, Jaubert was greeted by a loud charivari which followed his carriage through the streets of St. Amand and into the town square. The charivarists danced around him and made noise until the mayor arrived and ordered everyone home. Jaubert complained that his reputation had suffered public insult from the mockery, and twenty-two people appeared before the correctional tribunal of St. Amand where their lawyer explained the charivari had been a demonstration against Jaubert’s legislative votes and political opinions. In all of this, a debate arose over where the case should be tried. The Charter specified that cases “with a political color” should be tried by the assize court, the only court to try cases by jury, and the defense wanted a change of venue from the local tribunal. Prosecutors countered that the charivari was not named specifically in the Charter as an example of an act “with a political color” and therefore fell under the tribunal’s jurisdiction. Stepping beyond the Charter’s exact words to include the charivari as a protected political act would be a problem for the judicial system because each case would have to be evaluated for political content. “If political infractions are not formally specified,” argued one prosecutor, “it would always be necessary to hear all debates to know if a cause of action contains something political.”60 The charivari threatened to subject each case—and expose each “honoree”—to political scrutiny. The defense argued that this kind of evaluation was exactly what judges were supposed to be doing. In drafting the Charter, “the legislature had intended only to indicate the main political infractions and it had left to the judges the duty to determine if such and such an infraction were political or not.” The Charter was not restrictive; it did not say that political infractions were limited to only those that it specified. Invoking the Charter to examine

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the charivari pushed the definition of the political by suggesting that acts not defined by the Charter as political might carry a political charge. At stake, once again, in other words, was the political significance of popular demonstrations. The charivarists challenged the courts to decide whether workingclass and provincial people who felt excluded from formal politics would be recognized as political actors. Courtroom debate over the St. Amand charivari brought these concerns into focus and showed how the working-class charivari could be manipulated by middle-class people. In this case, the participants may have been working class, but the orchestrators were not. Two of the accused, a notary-elector and a proprietor-elector, that is, people who paid the high taxes required to vote, told the court they had given the charivari for purely political reasons to oppose the political behavior of their representative to the National Assembly. Most of the rest of the accused admitted being there, but said that someone else had given them charivari instruments with instructions use them to ridicule Jaubert. They had done so “without knowing why, and were just going along with the others.”61 Recruiting participants proved how important popular voices were in this raucous show of political disapproval. In arguing for punishments, the court distinguished between the two “instigators” who had “education and enlightenment,” and the others who, less equipped for political life, had been duped into banging on pots. “[T]hey have only been the unwitting instruments of the passions of those who have led them into this ignoble demonstration of [political] party mindedness and personal or political hatred. But the knowledgeable men should know the consequences of their actions.”62 By this argument, the educated men had acted politically; the others had merely followed. This upheld notions of the political as the province of the educated middle class, but it may have had the unintended consequence of educating the participants in a process of political contestation. This was precisely why, the defense argued, the charivari was crucial to politics under the July Monarchy. The defense made the key point that the July Revolution had not provided the people with all of the liberties that they had hoped for. Most citizens participated in nothing in the way of formal politics. In short, the people “could manifest their disapproval of the conduct of the representatives the electors had given them only by a charivari.” The people needed this unique way of making their opinions, both positive and negative, known to legislative deputies. “If ovations and serenades of approval are permitted, then charivaris must necessarily be tolerated.”63 That is, the charivari embodied the notion that politics depended on popular support, which could be given freely only if disapproval were equally possible. In the Jaubert case, the court upheld the view of the charivari as politically

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offensive and gave the notary and the proprietor-electors stiff penalties of 500 franc fines. Four others received much smaller fines of 100 francs and less. The charivari was a fluid event, the political color of which could change as passions flared. As the charivari gained recognition as a political act, even charivaris that began as traditional commentary on social issues were interpreted as potentially dangerous, whether for their large crowds of disenfranchised people or defamatory political accusations. For example, in April 1834, the Justice Ministry learned of a charivari that had taken place the previous August in the town of Cormeilles. A very traditional charivari had begun against a woman whom the civil tribunal of Pont-Audemer described simply as having little regard for her husband and failing to make him happy. The tribunal was much more interested in the details of how “local authority had been ignored” in dispersing the group.64 Things had been so out of hand that, in true Rabelaisian style, one of the charivarists had urinated on the deputy mayor. What began as a community’s ritual negotiation of marriage norms turned into an overtly political event of some concern to the president of the local tribunal where the legalities of the charivari would be decided. The evolution became clear during legal proceedings against the charivarists, whom the tribunal president reported were defended by a clever lawyer “with the talent to make it a political trial.” One of the three men before the court, Clément DeLabigne, “did not stop repeating and publicizing every place that they [the charivarists] are republicans,” which the president feared gave the impression that they were only prosecuted because of their politics. On the contrary, claimed the president, “the tribunal has acted with the greatest impartiality, even indulgence.”65 The problem was that the tribunal had been “attacked indignantly” in a pamphlet about the charivari. The president worried that the brochure, “a sheet of lies that distorts all the facts,” was “insulting, defamatory” and gave a “most troublesome impression of the magistrature.” The magistrate claimed that republicans had paid to produce the pamphlet, and warned that the story of the charivari would turn public opinion against the government. He cautioned that “a great number of copies” had been printed and were circulating “with too much indifference.”66 It is easy to see why magistrates would not like the pamphlet because it offered a powerful interpretation of the charivari as a necessary part of July Monarchy politics. From the first paragraph, the pamphlet framed the charivari in terms of injustice that could be seen and addressed in the city’s public space. Describing a four-night charivari in the streets of Cormeilles, and the resulting trial, the pamphlet, like the government account, spent one line on the charivari’s traditional origins, stating that a charivari had occurred

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outside a tobacconist’s shop/home and been quickly dispersed. The night after the tobacconist episode, the deputy mayor, Daufresne, and a justice of the peace, Signol, “violently dragged a worker named Jacdalle to prison,” having grabbed him as he innocently “left his workshop whistling” as he normally did. It was this injustice that raised the indignation of a gathering crowd, and “citizen Clément DeLabigne” called out to the deputy, referring to revolutionary terror and to recent brutality against workers, “You want to try a little terror at Cormeilles? You want to do like in Lyon and Paris? You’d be wrong to do so because you wouldn’t succeed.” Apparently, under the threat of popular local muscle, Jacdalle was released and the crowd dissipated. The following night a bigger crowd gathered as “about 1200 people pressed into the square and the streets.” According to the pamphlet, police announced that charivarists would have one half hour to do their business to the tobacconist and even urged people sitting in the cafe “to go into the street to have fun.” [emphasis in the original.]67 To some in the group, this invitation apparently seemed like a set-up. As the hullabaloo of the charivari escalated, someone tried to force the door, calling for tobacco. Delabigne and another man in the crowd ran to the mayor’s office, hoping the mayor would order the door opened and prevent further violence, but found no one. Eventually, Daufresne and Signol, accompanied by two gendarmes, returned to the crowd to shouts and hissing. Delabigne managed to silence the crowd by appealing to the equality of the streets. “Don’t insult anyone,” he cried loudly. “Like you, the gendarmes have a right to be in the street; equality for all.”68 Not only had Delabigne calmed the crowd, but he had also cleverly asserted the limits of the gendarmes’ authority by reminding them, somewhat back-handedly, that the people had a right to be in the streets, the place of equality. By that time, several people had entered the tobacco shop, and Delabigne wanted to get any republicans out of there, presumably to avoid political reprisals. As he left the shop, Signol grabbed his hand and implored him to use his popularity to “help the administration” and “stop the gathering.” Delabigine refused, according to the pamphlet, because “personal and political motives prevented him as a citizen from lending a hand to a problematic and provocative administration.”69 This was a decisive moment; the charivari was forcing people to side with or against authorities. Thirty minutes later, Daufresne shouted that someone had urinated on his back. The next night, yet another gathering in the town square produced more cries, whistling and insults. A police agent, Bernard Delabigne, was struck by a soldier on leave, and the crowd, upon hearing “Delabigne’s been hit,” mistook the agent for Clément Delabigne, and some brawling ensued. Eventually, the estimated 500 participants and onlookers withdrew.

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All parties agreed that breaking the tobacco-shop door, befouling the deputy mayor, and assaulting a police officer were serious matters that needed to be redressed by local authorities. The pamphlet charged, however, that the charivari became a matter of larger concern when it became a pawn of political passions, exploited for the singular purpose of “compromising honorable citizens” and countering their influence. The story was, in other words, that when guilty officials found themselves testifying before the courts, they trumped up charges that the charivari had actually been “a republican provocation,” and provided facts selectively so that authorities would “strike at the republicans rather than the guilty.” The pamphlet asserted, “It was hoped that the tribunal would provide not a judgment but a service,” the service of putting local republicans out of commission in Cormeilles.70 Although this charivari was not given to a politician, it was clearly a place to fight political battles. The pamphlet set the charivari in the context of national politics as they had played out in Cormeilles. Under the Restoration, Cormeilles had been a bastion of opposition; Daufresne himself reportedly had said that “kings were the scourge of the people,” and that only a republic would bring France its due glory. While many in Cormeilles still felt this way, the pamphlet explained that others, who had received “lucrative distinctions” and now thought that “power and money held merit before all else,”71 embraced the current government. These new July Monarchy supporters could not forgive their former allies for not following their defection from government opposition. Moreover, the pamphlet linked national loyalties to local scandals. The Patriot, a republican newspaper, had recently reported missing communal revenues and fraudulent bills for public work that had never actually been done in Cormeilles. The paper had called for legal action that had never been taken. According to the pamphlet, the charivari was a continuation of political wrangling over this scandal. Accusations of wrong-doing had apparently come from within the municipal council itself, and the pamphlet charged that a plan was hatched to rid the local government of republicans. The mayor, his assistant, and three councilmen were to resign, which they did. But rather than simply replace these five people, the entire council was dissolved. In a dazzling feat of corruption, all of the “wine, promises, malfeasance, and scandalous cunning of the Restoration” were brought to bear on elections that expediently placed July Monarchy supporters in office.72 The Patriot had uncovered these maneuvers and was calling attention to the administration’s refusal to make the communal budget available to the public. The pamphlet was potentially explosive because it implied that the administrators of Cormeilles used the charivari as retribution for the republican newspaper’s exposure of local administrative corruption. It told of republicans assaulted by government-backed “agents provocateurs” in the town square.

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Death threats and insults were screamed at republicans to get them to react in some punishable way. Crowds were allowed to gather and applaud the vulgar displays, and amazingly, “during it all the authorities couldn’t get through!”73 Rumors spread to neighboring towns that the Cormeilles republicans had rioted, stormed the mayor’s office, killed the mayor, and burned a factory. Gendarmes came to Cormeilles, and as the pamphlet points out, “This was not to protect the republicans.” Very visibly, they entered the cafe run by Clément Delabigne and did little other than make a show of examining the wall paintings, but even this intimidated patrons. Authorities even allowed “the same agents provocateurs” to insult newly elected officers of the National Guard who were republicans.74 Apparently, few were surprised by the persistent assaults. The pamphlet claims that offenders were paid for their insults. Worse than that, “the wife of one of them said that impunity was assured for anyone who would kill a republican.”75 All of this took place in April 1834. On April 29th, the procureur du roi, the juge d’instruction of Pont-Audemer, and four gendarmes arrived in Cormeilles and joined the mayor’s assistant to search a few key citizens’ homes, Delabigne’s among them. The searches were basically fruitless, turning up nothing more than a few commonly available republican publications. Responsibility for the injustices, according to the pamphlet, lay with the combined actions of national and local politicians. “All of the offensiveness of this persecution should not fall exclusively on the local administration, we know that. It pertains in large part to the men who govern us. But at Cormeilles, orders from higher authorities have been rigorously backed up by the excessive zeal of M. Daufresne.” Opinion seemed to be that because of the Patriot exposé, the deputy mayor had not cared how many people would be victimized by “these ignoble humiliations.”76 The history of scandals, exposés, resentments, and maneuvering were the backdrop against which the Cormeilles charivari was viewed, and it convinced many of “the bad will of authorities in regard to republicans”: “The voice of the public, this source of truth that one claims to disdain when one fears it, has proclaimed that someone wanted to profit from the charivari, to drag the republicans into a trap, to give birth at any price to an occasion, be it good or bad, to prosecute them in criminal court [before the police correctionnelle].”77 There was evidence to suggest that Daufresne had known his presence was a provocation to the crowd and had waded in purposely to create disorder. Signol had urged police to do nothing to stop the charivari and prevent assaults. And authorities had grabbed people violently in the crowd and let them go, trying to provoke an uprising that could be blamed on republicans. The pamphlet charged government officials with turning an episode of street ridicule to political use against republican opposition. But more than that, the pamphlet itself used the charivari politically as an occasion to defend

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republicans. From the beginning of the charivari, the main republicans of Cormeilles, including Delabigne, had been sure that authorities wanted to exploit the event against them. They had warned their friends of the danger and told them to stay out of the fray. The question of who turned the charivari into a political event became an issue as the charivari increasingly showed not the free play of public opinion but the manipulation of public politics. The pamphlet charged that Daufresne and Signol had reported to the procureur du roi that “the republicans, notably citizen Delabigne, caused the charivari to take on a political color in declaring themselves against the government and local administration.”78 Republicans countered that Daufresne was trying to discredit them with false rumors that they were threatening the witnesses against them. Further, government officials cited Delabigne for calling Jacdalle’s arrest an act of cowardice and for threatening that he and his friends would not stand for any more arrests. Republicans denied that Delabigne ever said this and called on the people of Cormeilles to back them up. The public apparently blamed Daufresne, who soon lost his bid for re-election to the municipal council. If the government feared the political passion of republicans in the streets, the lawyer who wrote the pamphlet feared the political passion of officials with judicial authority. Using this charivari to condemn republicans was only one instance of a bigger problem of cases being judged “under the influence of political enmity.” In other words, “in small towns as in big cities” the greatest concern of many magistrates is to “indulge their prejudice against men with political opinions.” Why did the government object to political opinion? In the name of “the people” the pamphlet accuses the magistrates of overstepping the limits of their positions to convict people who were innocent of crimes but politically active: “The voice of the public has named the agents of the administration guilty of extra-judiciary maneuvers.”79 When it was over, Delabigne and Bouchard (the urinator) were sentenced to jail time despite the facts that many witnesses placed Delabigne far from the scene of the assaults he was supposed to have committed, and that Bouchard’s conviction rested on the ability of two witnesses to see with certainty at 9:00 PM across the people in front of them that Bourchard’s pants were unbuttoned. Many people opposed the judgments, and during their first two weeks in jail, the prisoners were visited by more than 350 sympathizers. In protest, Cormeilles and neighboring towns raised enough money to cover the cost of the trials and of printing the pamphlet. When Delabigne was released, residents from the surrounding towns made the occasion into a public, popular performance of republican support: “May 29th, twenty citizens came from Lisieux [home town of the Patriot] and Cormeilles to Pont-Audemer to greet Clément Delabigne at the door of the prison. More

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than fifty other citizens waited for him at Bayvel Chapel and from there to the village his numerous escort grew larger with new groups at each step. Three quarters of the population were in the streets.”80 Whether or not the numbers are exaggerated, Delabigne clearly enjoyed popular, public support. What are we to make of “three quarters of the population in the streets”? The charivari was political not only because it was argued to be so in the courts, but because it was a popular show of force, whether directed at a tobacconist or the government. The pamphlet asserted that popular demonstrations triumphed over judicial might in the matter of the charivari, that the tribunal’s judgment “has more than been broken by these demonstrations of public opinion” and that those who brought the case have lost some of their public influence. It interpreted the charivari as a lesson in injustice and poor leadership in which national politics were performed in local political space, and emphasized how the tradition of street ridicule had taken on a political cast. “[The charivari] has furnished new proof that those who call themselves moderate, that is to say the current powers of the day, are fiercer persecutors than were the powers of the Restoration.”81 The charivari was especially damning because it showed that the right to express opinions in the streets under the July Monarchy was being used against the people who exercised it. It exposed the incongruity of Louis-Philippe’s rhetoric of liberalism after 1830 (his calling himself the “King of the French,” for example) and his regime’s efforts to limit political expression and increase royal authority. This was never clearer than in September 1835, just days after French legislators instituted severely restrictive censorship of all sorts of political satire, when the state prosecutor of Mans notified the Justice Minister in Paris of sharp local response to the new laws: “I have the honor of informing you that the 18th of this month a mob formed in this town outside the house of M. deVauguyon, a member of the Chamber of Deputies and that the following cries were proffered: ‘Charivari! Charivari! for whom? for this pig deVauguyon who voted for the law against the press!’ These cries were followed by a great noise of whistling, hooting, etc.” [emphasis in original].82 Police quickly stopped the charivari and arrested one young man from the crowd. In an interesting twist, the arrested teenager told police that all of his accomplices were young students like himself who had been put up to this “outrageous scene” by some older men. During the charivari these men had stayed out of sight. Police spent the following day rounding up twenty known participants, all about seventeen years old, who corroborated the teenager’s story. Authorities came to believe that the students had simply “served the passions of [other] guilty men.”83 On the 19th, the prosecutor reportedly was notified of plans to continue the charivari that night. This time not just students but print workers, whose jobs would be drastically affected by the new laws, were going to join in the

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ridicule of “the old guy [deVauguyon] who had responded poorly to their hopes.” Indeed, at dusk “numerous groups of considerable size formed in the streets neighboring M. deVauguyon’s residence.” Despite the fact that “the crowd was considerable” and that “many workers had gathered,” police, having been tipped-off, ended the charivari before it could begin and dispersed the people from the deputy’s neighborhood. The workers apparently did not go home, however, but reconvened in a different location, “a remote and deserted quarter of the city,” where, according to the prosecutor, they spent the night dancing the carmagnole.84 The charivari did not end there, but continued to evolve so that by Sunday, the 21st, activities had expanded to a sizeable workers demonstration. The prosecuting attorney (parquet du procureur) of Mans, who stayed in contact with the Justice Minister during the charivari, focused at this point on the workers, warning, “we have been threatened with a much more shrill demonstration” from the workers, described condescendingly in the prosecutor’s account as “heads smothered by wine.” Charivarists were said to be planning to demonstrate against not only Deputy deVauguyon but also his colleague, Deputy Goupil. Authorities escalated measures to police the streets, marshalling what they described as a “powerful armed force” to “maintain good order and repress the troubles that might take on a serious character.” They were keen to break up the charivari in part, they said, to maintain civic order—that is, to prevent injuries and stop property damage. But from the beginning, the mockery had been framed by French national politics: deVauguyon was a deputy in the national legislature who had voted for a national law of press censorship; the local disturbance protested national issues; and local authorities developed an explanation for the charivari that tied the community’s charivari to the nation’s political scene. The liberal deputy, Etienne Garnier-Pagès, whose defense of press freedom and social reforms were popular in Mans, was expected to visit the region and the local prosecutor worried that the display of disorder shown to the deputy who had backed government policy might be part of a larger political performance of republican opposition that cheered representatives like the republican Garnier-Pagès. The prosecutor explained to the Justice Minister, “to emphasize the ovation set for this republican deputy, one begins by offending the deputies who have upheld the cause of order.”85 The charivari, in other words, enacted national political debate over France’s press law in a local venue. And it had apparently become a useful part of a conscious political strategy. The minister’s report from the cour Royale d’Angers underscored the participants’ youth and immaturity and the fact that the charivari’s originators had hidden their identities, at least in its early phase. It expressed concern that the charivari was not just performing political debate but was being used as a

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tool in political wrangling, but for the court to take action against defamation, deVauguyon had to file a complaint. Until then, the charivari would remain simply “un tapage injurieux et nocturne,” an insulting nighttime disturbance.86 On September 22nd the cour Royale again contacted the Justice Ministry in Paris to report further disturbances in Mans. This description of events, however, no longer simply speculated on connections between the charivari and republicans, but now stated political links as fact. “This time,” the court said, “it was no longer only deVauguyon that the republican party wanted to charivari. The same offense was done to Goupil, his colleague.”87 At 7:00 PM, a crowd rumored to number as many as 600, gathered in the streets near the two deputies’ homes. When the prosecutor and his assistant arrived, shouts of “Vive la République!” went up and authorities dispersed the crowd. Twenty six young men, all under age 20, and as the court reported, including members of both “the bourgeois class” and the working class were arrested and interrogated. Again, it seemed they were doing the work of organizers who had “taken care not to take an active part” and were eluding authorities. The court addressed the Justice Ministry as a partner in figuring out how to handle the matter and in particular how to maintain control of the working class, suggesting that “our efforts” should focus on the hidden organizers so they “do not mislead the . . . working class that has until now remained apart from the disorder.”88 Preventing working-class participation was a stated priority, even though the court had already reported workers being involved and arrested. The charivari might start out as a manipulated event, but control over it was never certain, and authorities feared worker participation as a powerful threat to social order. As all of these examples show, charivaris were acts of representative politics. They facilitated working-class and provincial political expression and were manipulated locally to comment on national issues. By locating their critique of national political actors in the local community, charivarists insisted on their representatives’ grounding there and responsibility to their constituencies. In other words, the space of the charivari mattered because it located particular individuals in the space of their constituencies, not in some distant arena of autonomous politicians. The spatial organization, that is, the “local” nature of the charivari, anchored national politics in local political expression and insisted that representatives hear the people they represented.

THE HONOR CHARIVARI Publishing charivari accounts in cheap pamphlets, where readers could learn about street battles and the political debates they caused, was damaging to “honorees” because it polluted the public acclaim that “honor” implied

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and required. Honor lay at the heart of politics and society under the July Monarchy. Historian William Reddy has examined the honor code by which bourgeois professionals operated in the nineteenth century. He emphasizes that this was an honor code, not a moral or ethical one, and it allowed for concealment of moral deviations or ethical infractions, for the maintenance of appearances.89 With the honor charivari, charivarists drew politics and society together in an attack on particular behaviors that the monarchy held up for public esteem. They brought to light the hypocrisy of public honors given for reasons other than merit. (Recall, this had been part of Daumier’s message in his print, “Gargantua.”) In doing so, they cast themselves, and public opinion generally, as the arbiters and guarantors of honorable behavior. The “Record of the Big Orchestra Charivari given in honor of M. FosseauColombel, Batallion Chief of the National Guard of Batignolles”90 was published in 1832 by M. Dupont, the lawyer for the charivarists who in this case attacked what passed as national honor. “Sold to profit the Polish,” whose independence was not supported by Louis-Philippe, the pamphlet announced its opposition to national policy on its cover, and tied the ridicule of a local charivari to the broader French and European political scene. At issue in the charivari was Fosseau-Colombel’s claim to honor, which had been publicly accorded to him by his decoration with France’s Cross of Honor. The pamphlet claimed that the profusion of 370 Crosses of Honor were given as cheap goods, and that a “rather large number” of Batignolles residents “believed it their duty to protest” the “honor” of the former stock broker turned National Guardsman. Charivarists performed their own mock display of honor. In the streets outside Colombel’s house, armed with frying pans, sheet metal, casseroles, cauldrons and horns, “they gave Monsieur the Commandant one of the most harmonious charivaris ever to flatter the ear of the decorated.”91 The record reports events of the charivari and subsequent trial with irony, its mocking journalism foregrounding the humor of the charivari. In the courtroom, Dupont directed attention to the form of the protest, that is, to the aesthetics of the charivari. “It appears,” wrote Dupont, “that M. Colombel and M. Jaique, mayor of Batignolles, are not very sensitive to harmony.” Angry with the “artists” for performing the charivari, they had twelve people charged with creating “un tapage injurieux et nocturne,” an insulting nighttime disturbance. On trial, the pamphlet reported, the mayor read the charges “in a language that was more-or-less French.”92 Each of the 12 admitted to being one of the artists and to wanting to protest the decoration, for which the prosecutor called for fines of 15 francs and five days in prison. Sarcasm, understatement, and, above all, humor ran through the defense. At trial, Dupont reported that he had been reluctant to take the case. Why had the accused chosen M. Colombel? He asked the tribunal rhetorically, Didn’t

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Colombel deserve the medal? After all, during the July Revolution, did he not patrol the streets in the interest of public order? This mocking respect pointed out that Colombel had fought against the Revolution. Dupont recited an incident of cowardice in mock praise of Colombel’s honor. On patrol on the last of the three revolutionary days, Colombel had heard a gunshot a few hundred steps away. “No doubt, it was the entire army of Charles X advancing!” Was he going to endanger his men? “Certainly not: their precious and cherished lives must be protected,” and M. Fosseau-Colombel had hidden his patrol behind a coachman’s door. “Fifteen minutes later,” Dupont told the tribunal, “when this looming danger had passed, M. the Corporal Colombel had emerged with his patrol, and returned to the barracks without having lost a single man!!!!”93 In sum, it was the “courage” to hide that saved the lives of his men and himself, and that testified to Colombel’s honor. The charivarists’ trial and the pamphlet that reported it criticized the government for bestowing honors on someone so undeserving. Whether or not people found the charivari objectionable, the issue for the court was whether it was a matter of law covered by the penal code. Was the honor charivari injurious? To answer, Dupont distinguished between the conjugal or traditionally social charivari, publicizing opposition to those who violated norms of domestic life, and the political charivari, “publicizing a political thought, an accusation of blame, an act of censorship, or a criticism.” Dupont used the notion of honor to justify the political charivari: if honor existed as public praise then so must the charivari as public blame. Honor implies the importance of public opinion, but for public opinion to be truly free, it must have the right to be negative as well as positive. The charivari’s “sounds of improbity” resonate as the “great political, moral, and musical antithesis” of honor’s flattery. In other words, public praise supported the authority of the ministry, while the charivari opposed it. Public political praise— such as the Cross of Honor— “is the music of the Juste-milieu; the charivari is the harmony of Movement,”94 the name given to those who advocated greater change away from monarchy. If the charivari was the music of opposition, a political expression made in the streets, then was this against the law? Dupont cited the familiar article seven of the Charter on free speech “that all of the French have the right to publish and make their opinions known.” He had drawn attention to the aesthetics of the charivari to argue that the form of the expression did not exclude the expression from protection: whether in print, voice or “more-orless harmonious music,” publicizing opinions was constitutional. “The Big Orchestra Charivari” drove home the claim that public displays of government support would be meaningless without the right to stage public opposition. The value of public praise for the government rested on the

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right to public ridicule in the streets. Those who defended the local practice of charivari knew that this communal expression held great importance for men of state because it refuted charges of despotism. Thus, Dupont argued, political leaders like Persil— attorney general, president of the royal court of Paris, and deputy—who present themselves for approval and election, must be prepared for “the honors and pleasures of a charivari.”95 Because honor lay at the heart of the social and political institutions that sustained the July Monarchy, it drew fire as criticism of the regime developed. Honor was the key issue in December 1832, when a charivari was given in the town of Castelnaudary to the mayor, Jean Pierre Rodière. Townspeople gathered in the street outside his home to comment on his recent decoration with the medal of the French Legion of Honor. The five leaders of the charivari were sentenced to 24 hours in jail and 11 franc fines by the tribunal of the police simple of l’Aude. The defense attorney, M. Trinchant, questioned the merit of the honor in an argument so impassioned that it inspired an article about the charivari and the trial in the newspaper, The Patriot of July. The article opened with a laughing inquiry about the mayor’s honor: Oh! tell me, my friend Jean Pierre Where the devil did you earn the cross?

The article attracted enough attention to be picked up by a local printer, who printed “a large number of copies” of it in a 4-page pamphlet form. The work was attributed to the defense lawyer, Trinchant, who was charged with producing it without making the proper caution deposit. Caution deposits were required of all publications labeled “political” by 1832, and were ostensibly used to guarantee payment of fines received from insulting the king or violating some other press law. The printer had thought a deposit unnecessary for reprinting newspaper articles. This omission landed him before the tribunal of Lavaur which fined him 2000 francs in April 1833. Failure to pay the caution deposit, however, was a charge frequently leveled at publications the government did not like, and Trinchant’s legal troubles likely had to do with what he had said about the government while defending the charivarists. Less than three weeks earlier, the president of the tribunal of l’Aude had told the prefect of l’Aude that Trinchant had behaved “immoderately” during the court proceedings, word of which the Interior Ministry sent to the Justice Ministry. Trinchant and a colleague, Fayes, were charged with having insulted the king in defending the charivari.96 What was in this defense of the charivari that attracted so much attention? The pamphlet began by describing the charivari and setting the somewhat rowdy scene of the trial, the latter being attended by “a very numerous

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public” and led by “the laughing face of the presiding judge.” Since the charivari was given in opposition to Rodière’s decoration of the Legion of Honor, the merit of the mayor’s services was discussed. Trinchant then “showed that the political charivari is a completely constitutional demonstration” that was in no way criminal. Next came the case against the charivarists. Casting the charivarists as national enemies, the procureur du roi countered that these “acts against the government” were driven by personal ambition, “as was the work of all political opponents of the state.”97 During the trial, the judge’s laughter and on-lookers’ audible commentary mirrored the performance of the charivari itself. When the procureur’s assistant asserted the honor of the decorated Rodière, Trinchant called it a “most pompous and least merited elegy,” and the courtroom audience reacted vocally against the assistant. “[M]urmers from the audience promptly let it be known that the public did not share [the assistant’s] opinion.” Perhaps they thought Rodière undeserving, or perhaps the assistant unreliable since Rodière was apparently the assistant’s former tutor. In any case, the scene rankled the court. When Trinchant asserted that “never had the government fallen so low,” he was “apparently approved by the numerous audience that heard him.”98 Defense attorneys used the charivari and courtroom battles as opportunities to register their opposition to the regime. None of what was said was very flattering to Rodière or the government that honored him, but it was likely Trinchant’s concluding profession of political faith, a statement that was “listened to religiously by the public,” that the government found most objectionable. Prosecutors had used the occasion of the charivari to portray themselves as devoted to Louis-Philippe and the true servants of France. Trinchant responded baldly that he and his defendants did not accept the July government as a legitimate one founded on national sovereignty. “No, in our eyes, national sovereignty was not consulted in 1830.” Casting the charivari, the constitutionality of which had still to be determined, explicitly as a tool of government opposition, he continued, “we will attempt to overturn this imposed royalty by all means legally furnished to us.”99 If honor charivaris criticized the monarchy by exposing the hypocrisy of its institutions, trials gave attorneys a platform from which to articulate political arguments. Trinchant issued a clear call for a Republic, the national fight for which would rely “on the progress of public mindedness in France, on the patriotism of the generation that rose up, on the truth and power of republican theories, and the day when we will have triumphed, the day when the nation, through its representation will be able to tell royalty to retire itself, that it feels strong enough to govern itself.” In a brilliant twist of rhetoric, the attorney tied the July Monarchy’s proclaimed tolerance of political opposition

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to tolerance of the charivari and acquittal of the charivarists, promising that under the legitimate government of national sovereignty, “we will give our political adversaries an example of tolerance, of moderation, of selflessness they will not be able to comprehend.”100 The pamphlet reported that the courtroom erupted in “unanimous applause.” The procureur du roi “gnawed his nails.” The assistant “bit his lips.” The bench “moved impatiently.” News of the episode spread throughout France and reached the highest levels of government. The Gazette des tribunaux covered it nationally and in June 1833, the Minister of Public Works, Adolphe Thiers, notified the Justice Minister of the Rodière charivari as a story worthy of attention.101 Though it is not clear what action, if any, Thiers took, the charivari had captured the attention of the highest levels of government. The Rodière charivari and all honor charivaris criticized claims to honor made by the government and its supporters as being unwarranted. As legislation made political criticism more difficult in 1834 and 1835, the honor charivari continued as an alternative to overt political statements. In September 1834, for example, a captain of the disciplinary council of the National Guard of Bercy, M. Montulle, faced a crowd of three or four hundred, armed with charivari instruments, marching through the streets to the mayor’s office. There, the disciplinary council was meeting to sentence 152 national guards who had come before it. The noise of the pots and pans, singing, and shouts of “Down with Montulle! Down with the cross he has not earned!” prevented the meeting from taking place.102 The charivari faulted the Legion of Honor for favoring particular Guard members. The mayor of Bercy noted that among the charivarists were several officers and junior officers dressed in plain clothes, which suggests that some participants knew and disapproved of Montulle’s work. This kind of public ridicule exposed the way honor codes were not being upheld in France, or at least that public honors were not based on merit and virtue.103 Through public mockery, the charivari called into question the notion of honor itself by showing that government honors were granted to people who failed to meet standards of merit. Apart from the legal issues they raised about political expression, charivaris like this dealt a blow to the duplicity and two-facedness of honor under the July Monarchy. Street satire exposed the way bourgeois honor codes worked in society, how so much of public debate was not reasoned discourse but was men fighting for the personal honor needed to succeed socially and financially. As Reddy has shown, bourgeois society accepted the notion that personal or family advancement could and perhaps should take precedence over speaking truthfully in public.104 The charivari exposed this slippery foundation of honor, including the play of deception in maintaining a reputation. It showed the way the code worked,

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and highlighted the way bourgeois society was based on appearances. By criticizing the play of self-interest and favoritism in the government’s system of honors, the charivari implicitly asserted another standard of honor, a more transparent form of honor based on the mutual accountability of citizens and the relationship of citizens to public space. The burlesque homage celebrated virtue, courage, and patriotism as precious qualities that charivarists felt had been distorted or undeservedly attributed to “honorees.” Like satire generally, the charivari revealed vice and folly, in this case political vice and folly, for public inspection. It used the street to engage in the political dialogue promised by the rhetoric of equality.

IN PRAISE OF CHARIVARI: STREET POLITICS IN PRINT If authorities feared the volatile potential of street mockery, others advocated an updated charivari for political expression in an age of progress. Calybariat, for example, wanted to put order to what many saw as a traditionally disorderly event. This, he hoped, would legitimate the ridicule of the charivari in the people’s dialogue with their representatives. “[It] is not for nothing that we have won back liberty! It would be terrible if the sovereign people did not have the right to show, through a moment of hilarity, the attention it pays to these men.”105 Disorder obscured the good political work that charivaris accomplished, so Calybariat proposed regulations for charivaris: all assaults must be prohibited, for example, and public order must be maintained. The legitimacy of the charivari seemed to depend on sanitizing it of the traditional turmoil of the streets. An insult would remain, but no injury. For now, the charivari was the only way for some to discuss political and social ideals. Calybariat looked forward to a France marked by peace, tranquility, and the union of all citizens. He saw the charivari as a means of achieving ultimately a society “which neither gives nor receives charivaris.”106 By the time Calybariat wrote his history in 1833, the charivari’s effect on national politics could already be seen. The charivari caused those deputies who had attached themselves to the July Monarchy out of fear of insurrection, who had embraced Louis-Philippe’s compromise government, problems and all, because they feared the politics of the street, to travel secretly in France and to hide in their carriages. It was a growing concern for deputies “unable to escape, despite all their precautions, from the noisy concerts of tongs and cauldrons that await them everywhere people know they’re passing through.” As Calybariat said, “Willingly or grudgingly, they must submit to the charivari’s serenade.”107

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Print satirists often buttressed the charivari as a political tool by ridiculing the administration’s fear of the streets and “honorable” efforts to create order in them. In Paris, the birth of the July Monarchy had left its physical mark on the streets so that it was nearly impossible to walk through the capital without seeing evidence of the barricades. Throughout the city, bullet holes and damaged statues held the public memory of the 1830 Revolution. At the Palais de Justice, for example, revolutionaries had destroyed the bas relief under a statue of Malesherbes, the defender of Louis XVI, whom revolutionaries had guillotined in 1793.108 Some looked at such destruction as proof of popular sovereignty’s inherent violence and irrationality. They saw streets as tangible reminders of France’s history of popular violence. Bullet holes and scarred walls became popular topics for satirists who used the charged symbol of the barricade to ridicule fear of street politics and show how public opinion that once valued street politics had traded them for good order and the monarchy’s hypocritical honors. For example, the article, “Which holes shall we plug?” in the satiric journal, L’Ours, advised readers that the public objects to talk of the July barricade, but responds enthusiastically to reminiscences of “fighting.” It argued that the very culture that cites the violence of the barricade as an atrocity is steeped in violence. Despite the fact that fighting is “dishonored by the penal code,” public taste can’t get enough of public gunplay: “Down with the barricades! Long live gunfire! . . . Gunshots at the Louvre, gunshots at the palais Royal, gunshots at the Porte Saint Martin, gunshots at the rue Transnonain.”109 The article is a spoof of a city tour-guide’s complaints. The scars on the walls are popular monuments, and for awhile after 1830, the guide pointed them out to tourists, this one from “a bullet from tyranny,” that one from “a bullet from the people.” Violent government repression of striking workers the previous June and the workers’ trials in April made the task trickier: “The bullet of tyranny has become confused with the triumph of order.” What was once honored was now dishonored: street fighting that was previously called “popular-heroism-dressed up-in-a-jacket” is now called “anarchy sans culotte or radicalism in rags,” in reference to radicals’ dress in the 1790s. Symbols of the revolution, like the cocarde and tricolor flag, were now considered seditious and seen rolling in the dirt. The guide appeals to the Chamber of deputies to patch up and cover over one set of holes or the other, that is, to choose between the principles behind the Revolution and those behind government suppression of workers’ demonstrations in April and June 1834. “If you plug up July, then long live passive obedience and the cross of honor! Down with the three Glorious Days and their unfashionable heroism. If you plug up June and April, what seems good to me, then long live July! Down with passive obedience and the Cross of Honor!” In other words, the article called for an

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end to the juste milieu as indecisive and unworkable. “Let us be people or army, insurrection or despotism, otherwise we are lost, and the farther we go like this, the less we will be able to recognize ourselves.” So much of the humorous commentary about street politics, including the charivari itself, called the public and its representatives to action.

CONCLUSION In 1835, a story circulated through Paris of a young provincial arriving in the city just as the high-topped, black bousingot had come into vogue as the republican symbol. Ignorant of politics, symbols, and the power of such “hieroglyphic habilements,” the man bought what he took simply for the latest fashion and went to meet his cousin in a rooming house. As luck would have it, the house was full of carlist sympathizers, supporters of the deposed Charles X, and the hat provoked a barrage of pebbles and mud. Astounded by the assault, the man heard his cousin shout to run away and get rid of the hat. Returning to the hatter, he learned the problem was that his was a republican hat, and left with the delicate, light-colored hat of the Right. Safely equipped, the inexperienced provincial set out to visit the famous Place de la Bastille. As he crossed the Boulevards into the area of the Porte Saint Martin, he began to hear anonymous hisses that grew more menacing as he crossed the infamous Boulevard du Crime. Fearing he would be rolled in the mud by hostile locals, he returned to the hatter, whom he blamed for subjecting him to “the fury of the mob.” The hatter replied that he had only wished to suit what he thought were the politics of his customer. If he wanted the hatter’s advice, he should wear the juste milieu hat, “the best and safest to wear at the present time in Paris.”110 The story ends with the young man taking the non-controversial hat and strolling peacefully through the streets of Paris. The humor of this story tells us something about the politics of Paris streets. The butt of the joke is the provincial who enters the city clueless to the political charge of space and appearance. He learns that political sympathies have been mapped onto city streets and that those sympathies are maintained by local attachments and local policing. The story’s humorous tone that mocks the costumes of political identity also highlights the consequences of ignoring appearances; we are meant to believe it only slight exaggeration that a poorly-selected hat would invoke “the fury of the mob” or the wrath of the carlists. The punchline ironically has the provincial initiated into French politics by abandoning political expression for safety. Of course, choosing to wear the hat of the juste milieu, the name the July Monarchy gave to its proclaimed balance of republicanism and monarchy, made a political statement.

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One might infer that supporting the government was the surest route to the individual’s well-being, but was this because the juste milieu was worthy of support or perhaps because it was dangerous to oppose? If the story left this open, one thing it did confirm was that this issue was being debated in the space of the streets. Street politics drew literate and illiterate audiences into political engagement, but were also events around which the relationship between popular and elite politics was defined. Defense lawyers’ summations, charivari victims’ complaints of ruined reputations, and reports of riots in theater districts highlight conflicting perceptions of the role of popular politics in the juste milieu. The political education of street satire taught audiences and participants to read space as places of multiple, disputed meanings. If people took satisfaction in reading the cityscape, they also agreed that surface appearances could be deceptive. “In this city of contradictions, one can never sit down safely to ruminate upon any one inference or conclusion whatever, for five minutes afterward you are assured by somebody or other that you are quite wrong, utterly mistaken, and that the exact contrary of what you suppose is the real fact.”111 Charivari seized on this multiplicity of views. National leaders mocked as barnyard animals in the ritual once invoked for cuckolded men asserted a very different vision of political leaders that were so exalted elsewhere on the political landscape. Popular experiences of street mockery that transcended class divisions, even momentarily, asserted a very different vision of society than one defined by wealth and high politics. The political effect of this was not necessarily that it led people to identify themselves as republicans, though it may have in some cases. Rather, promoting multiple visions in the public eye was part of a political process, a political act that asserted the right to dialogue and a sense of inclusivity that was central to republican citizenship. In terms of republicanism, what was important about the charivari was not only that it drew working-class and provincial people into politics, but also that it insisted on the charivari-giving community’s stake in national politics. The critique of national politics was performed in the local space of the people who were using the charivari to claim a political voice. Through the charivari, that voice was simultaneously local and national; the charivari presented the geographically defined community as a political unit that could press its claims on the national political scene through local contact with representatives. In other words, charivaris reasserted a localized claim on politics, a spatialized understanding of representative government in which elected officials felt the force of public accountability, not in the National Assembly in Paris, but in the streets of the communities they represented. Locating the critique of the individual within the confines of a particular place implied that

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it was the locality, or rather the trust that the people of that locality had placed in a government figure, that had been violated by the individual. Ridicule and mockery proved to be powerful tools in the political arsenal that working-class and provincial people used to join political discussions from which they had been excluded officially. The charivari and satire generally have long been considered aspects of popular culture, but in the 1830s, they found new roles in the debates of high politics. Under the July Monarchy, satire occupied new space, becoming a voice not only in the political realm of deputies and ministers, but also in the elite arena of the French Academy and political philosophy. We look next at how satire invaded academe in the work of the political economist and philosopher, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

NOTES 1. Armand Carrel, Le National, quoted in François Furet, Revolutionary France 1770–1880, translated by Antonia Nevill. (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1992), 342. 2. See Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), 399 and Chapter 22, “Charivaris.” Weber reports that in some regions, social charivaris persisted through the twentieth century. 3. Charles Tilly, La France contesté de 1600 à nos jours (Paris: Fayard, 1986,) 40–45. The history of the charivari is part of a larger debate over the relationship between popular and elite politics in nineteenth-century France. Many scholars, including Tilly, point to the charivari’s politicization in the 1830s as part of a broad shift from the local politics of folk culture to nationally oriented forms of collective politics. The charivari was just one form of popular protest unleashed by the Revolution of 1830. Popular disturbances—sometimes violent ones—appeared throughout the country in the 1830s. See Pamela Pilbeam, “Popular Violence in Provincial France after the 1830 Revolution,” English Historical Review XCI (1976): 278–297. The charivari, however, occupies a central place in the long history of popular protest and the crowd in France. See George Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England 1730–1848 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1981); Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975; Jacques LeGoff et Jean-Claude Schmitt, editors, Le Charivari (Paris: Mouton, 1981); and Peter Sahlins, Forest Rites: The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). The best work on the nineteenth-century charivari remains Peter Sahlins’ Forest Rites. Sahlins takes up the central question posed by these earlier works: whether the charivari was a residual form of protest surviving in post-revolutionary context or an older form recast to serve new ends. He argues that after 1830, middle-class republican opposition could recast the charivari for popular protest in provincial towns

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precisely because its folk origins had excluded it from official definitions of politics. Simultaneously, peasants adopted urban political language to express local grievances. Drawing on the work of Sahlins and others, I wish to continue to complicate divisions of rural and urban, and pre-modern collective action and modern politics, by looking at the way the satiric space of the charivari’s ridicule anchored national politics and politicians in local concerns. 4. Sahlins, Forest Rites. 5. Tilly, La France contesté, 45. 6. Gabriel Peignot (Pseudonym Docteur Calybariat). Histoire morale, civile, politique et litteraire du charivari, depuis son origine, vers le IVème siècle par le Docteur Calyâbariat, de Saint-Flour; suivie du complement de l’histoire des charivaris jusqu’a l’an de grace 1833, par Eloi-Christophe Bassinet, sous-maitre a l’école primaire de saint-flour, et aide chanter à la cathedrale. Paris: la libraire rue de Vaugirard, 1833, 11. 7. Peignot, Histoire morale, 11. 8. Peignot, Histoire morale, 11. 9. Le Journal, 29 avril 1832, quoted in Calybariat, Histoire morale, 189. 10. Frances Trollope, Paris and the Parisians in 1835 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1836), 77. 11. Trollope, Paris and the Parisians, 77. 12. Trollope, Paris and the Parisians, 78. 13. Trollope, Paris and the Parisians, 78. 14. Trollope, Paris and the Parisians, 80. 15. Pavement stones pulled loose and piled into barricades during uprisings. 16. AN BB21.384.s.8.6667. Parquet de la cour royale de Paris to Ministère de la justice, December 18, l832. 17. Trollope, Paris and the Parisians, 50. 18. Trollope, Paris and the Parisians, 124. 19. Trollope, Paris and the Parisians, 124. 20. Trollope, Paris and the Parisians, 86. 21. Trollope, Paris and the Parisians, 128. 22. Trollope, Paris and the Parisians, 174–175. 23. Trollope, Paris and the Parisians, 103–104. 24. Trollope, Paris and the Parisians, 176. 25. Trollope, Paris and the Parisians, 176. 26. Trollope, Paris and the Parisians, 177. 27. AN F7.3884 Bulletin de Paris, prefet de police, September 11, 1830. 28. Archives parlementaires, v. 98, 257. 29. Trollope, Paris and the Parisians, 126. 30. Trollope, Paris and the Parisians, 207. 31. Trollope, Paris and the Parisians, 209. 32. AN F7.3886 Bulletin de Paris, prefet de police to ministère de l’interieur. 33. ANF7.6783.dr.5. Gendarmerie departementale de la Seine au ministère de l’interieur February 25, 1835.

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34. ANF7. 6783.dr.5. March 5, 1835. 35. Letter from Simeon South to Lord Brougham, May 27, 1832. Simeon’s letters to his kinsfolk, Simeon South, Esquire. (Paris: GG Bennis, librairie des étrangers, 1834), letter XIX, 226. 36. ANBB21.s.8.8558. “Memorandum,” Ministère de la justice, division des affaires criminelles et des graces, 2e bureau, September 29, 1833. 37. ANBB21.360.s.7.8024. “Memorandum,” Ministère de la justice et des graces, 2e bureau, May 27, 1832. 38. AN F21.1133. “Direction Dartois” Report of the inspector general of the Théâtre de Variétés. 39. AN F21.1133. “Direction Dartois,” letter January 12, 1836. 40. AN F21.1133. “Direction Dartois,” letter January 12, 1836. 41. On the relationship between the street charivari and the newspaper Le Charivari, see Sahlins, Forest Rites, 115. 42. Record of the charivari given to Tallyrand, presentation of the evidence. Counselors Dupont, Ledru, and Ledocq; de Warenghien, procureur du Roi. Published transcript, June 1832. BN Lb51.1368. 43. Record of the charivari given to Tallyrand. 44. Record of the charivari given to Tallyrand. 45. Record of the charivari given to Tallyrand. 46. Record of the charivari given to Tallyrand. 47. Record of the charivari given to Tallyrand. 48. Record of the charivari given to Tallyrand. 49. Record of the charivari given to Tallyrand. 50. Record of the charivari given to Tallyrand. 51. Record of the charivari given to Tallyrand. 52. Record of the charivari given to Tallyrand. 53. Record of the charivari given to Tallyrand. 54. See Sahlins, Forest Rites, 117–118. 55. Record of the charivari given to Tallyrand. 56. Record of the charivari given to Tallyrand. 57. Record of the charivari given to Tallyrand. 58. Record of the charivari given to Tallyrand. 59. Sahlins, Forest Rites, 119. 60. Gazette des tribunaux, September 4, 1833, rapport de la cour royale de Bourges, presidence d M. Heulhard de Montigny, August 29 and 30, 1833. 61. Gazette des tribunaux, September 4, 1833. 62. Gazette des tribunaux, September 4, 1833. 63. Gazette des tribunaux, September 4, 1833. 64. AN BB18 1231.A8.2018 President of the Civil Tribunal of Pont-Audemer to Justice Minster April 28, 1835. 65. AN BB18 1231.A8.2018 President of the Civil Tribunal of Pont-Audemer to Justice Minster April 28, 1835.

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66. AN BB18 1231.A8.2018 President of the Civil Tribunal of Pont-Audemer to Justice Minster, April 28, 1835. 67. AN BB18.1231.A8.2018. Charivari de Cormeilles: Notice sur le procès qui en a été la suite (Pont Audemer A. Camel, 1834). 68. AN BB18.1231.A8.2018. Charivari de Cormeilles. 69. AN BB18.1231.A8.2018. Charivari de Cormeilles. 70. AN BB18.1231.A8.2018. Charivari de Cormeilles. 71. AN BB18.1231.A8.2018. Charivari de Cormeilles. 72. AN BB18.1231.A8.2018. Charivari de Cormeilles. 73. AN BB18.1231.A8.2018. Charivari de Cormeilles. 74. AN BB18.1231.A8.2018. Charivari de Cormeilles. 75. AN BB18.1231.A8.2018. Charivari de Cormeilles. 76. AN BB18.1231.A8.2018. Charivari de Cormeilles. 77. AN BB18.1231.A8.2018. Charivari de Cormeilles. 78. AN BB18.1231.A8.2018. Charivari de Cormeilles. 79. AN BB18.1231.A8.2018. Charivari de Cormeilles. 80. AN BB18.1231.A8.2018. Charivari de Cormeilles. 81. AN BB18.1231.A8.2018. Charivari de Cormeilles. 82. ANBB18.1234.A8.2608. Correspondence parquet du procureur du roi du Mans au Ministre de la Justice, September 21, 1835. 83. ANBB18.1234.A8.2608. Correspondence parquet du procureur du roi du Mans au Ministre de la Justice, September 21, 1835. 84. ANBB18.1234.A8.2608. Correspondence parquet du procureur du roi du Mans au Ministre de la Justice, September 21, 1835. 85. ANBB18.1234.A8.2608. Correspondence parquet du procureur du roi du Mans au Ministre de la Justice, September 21, 1835. 86. AN BB18.1234.A8.2608. Parquet de la Cour Royale d’Angers to Ministre de la Justice, September 21, 1835. 87. AN BB18.1234.A8.2608. Parquet de la Cour Royale d’Angers to Ministre de la Justice, September 21, 1835. 88. AN BB18.1234.A8.2608. Parquet de la Cour Royale d’Angers to Ministre de la Justice, September 21, 1835. 89. William Reddy, The Invisible, 7. 90. Record of the big orchestra charivari given in honor of M. Fosseau Colombel, Batallion Chief of the National Guard of Batignolles, argument of M. Dupont. Sold to Profit the Polish. (Chez l’avocat, Palais Royale, 1832). 91. Record of the big orchestra charivari given in honor of M. Fosseau Colombel. 92. Record of the big orchestra charivari given in honor of M. Fosseau Colombel. 93. Record of the big orchestra charivari given in honor of M. Fosseau Colombel. 94. Record of the big orchestra charivari given in honor of M. Fosseau Colombel.

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95. Record of the big orchestra charivari given in honor of M. Fosseau Colombel. 96. AN BB18 1213.A7.8582. Report from Ministère de l’interieur, police général, 1er bureau to Ministère de la Justice, March 31, 1833; Secretariat de la cour royale de Montpellier, departement de l’Aube, Tribunal de Castelnaudary, February 21, 1833 to Ministère de la Guerre. 97. AN BB18.1213.A7.8582. Trial on the occasion of the Charivari Rodière. n.p, 1833. 98. AN BB18.1213.A7.8582. Trial on the occasion of the Charivari Rodière. 99. AN BB18.1213.A7.8582. Trial on the occasion of the Charivari Rodière. 100. AN BB18.1213.A7.8582. Trial on the occasion of the Charivari Rodière. 101. AN 1213.A7.8582. Minister of Public Works to Minister of Justice, June 17, 1833. 102. AN F7.6783.dr.4. “Memorandum,” Gendarmarie departemental de la Seine to Ministère de l’Interieur September 10, 1834. 103. Historians have argued that satire of the July Monarchy “misconstrues” the administration as corrupt and as operating on the ulterior motive of self-interest. William Reddy, for example, has argued that self-interest entailed a search for honor, a code of behavior with particular rules and only a “cloudy” connection to merit. Reddy, The Invisible Code. 104. Reddy, The Invisible Code. 105. Calybariat, Histoire morale, civile, politique et litteraire du charivari, 203. 106. Calybariat, Histoire morale, civile, politique et litteraire du charivari, 207. 107. Calybariat, Histoire morale, civile, politique et litteraire du charivari, 207. 108. Trollope, Paris and the Parisians, 76. 109. L’Ours, June 10, 1834 no. 20 “The scars of the walls or which holes shall we plug?” 110. Trollope, Paris and the Parisians, 384. 111. Trollope, Paris and the Parisians, 86.

Chapter 6

Absurdity

In July 1840, exactly ten years after the revolution that established the Orleanist, “bourgeois” monarchy, the philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon published What Is Property?, an essay he had written for a competition held by the Academy of Besançon. “Property is theft!” he asserted, and all proprietors are robbers and traitors. The notion that unequal skills justified social distinctions and property rights, Proudhon argued, was absurd. Errant ideologies had bamboozled people into accepting social inequity as the natural order, but Proudhon saw through this ridiculous thinking: “It has been calculated that if labor were equally shared by the whole number of able-bodied individuals, the average working day of each individual in France would not exceed five hours. If so, how can we dare talk of the inequality of laborers? It is the labor of Robert Macaire that causes inequality.”1 The source of social injustice, in other words, was the exploitative “work” done by the middle class under the July Monarchy, summed up by the satirical stage and newspaper swindler, “Robert Macaire,” the most popular satiric character of the 1830s. Drawn for satire journals by Honoré Daumier and played to packed houses in Paris’s boulevard theaters, Macaire had emerged from popular traditions and language to identify and fault corruption and lack of virtue in the July Monarchy. In chapter three, we saw how his rendering of the lust for wealth and the obsession with capital venture that clutched France in the 1830s gave middle-class audiences a mocking vision of themselves. The first decade of the July Monarchy, during which Proudhon formulated his thoughts on property, was an explosive age of satire in France, and Proudhon’s critique echoed others who had hoped the July Monarchy would fulfill the promises of 1789, but who despaired as propertied elites perverted liberty and justice for personal enrichment. We have seen how 221

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satire filled journals, theaters and street performances as a pervasive form of political criticism and how France’s most famous satiric newspapers, Le Charivari and La Caricature, gave satire a daily voice in political affairs. Plays, like Balzac’s Vautrin, mocked rampant hypocrisy. Satire ranged across venues. In the last chapter, we saw how, in the streets, the ancient ridicule of the social charivari evolved into a powerful tool of popular politics. Across location and media, this kind of humor educated audiences in the skills of rights-based government. Satirists and viewers analyzed current affairs, formed opinions, and held public officials accountable for their actions. Proudhon’s What Is Property? developed as part of this new critical politics, yet no one has placed Proudhon in the satirical tradition. Historians have treated him as a scientist, philosopher and anarchist, and have identified him as an important influence on the work of Karl Marx.2 However, the great scientist was also a great satirist. We can understand his work and his time better if we resituate them in an examination of satire. This is not without precedent. Two decades ago, Dominick LaCapra published his ground-breaking analysis of rhetoric in Marx’s satire, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis-Napoleon,” and showed the importance of this genre in Marx’s politics.3 Like Proudhon, Marx characterized the July Monarchy in terms of Robert Macaire, referring to France as “a joint stock company for the exploitation of the French national wealth,” and to Louis-Philippe as “a director of this company, a Robert Macaire on the throne.”4 However, Marx was drawing on a bigger satirical moment that began in the 1830s and that shaped the perceptions of his predecessor, Proudhon.5 In What Is Property?, Proudhon took boulevard satire into the academy. For Proudhon, the Robert Macaire caricature painted a true picture of bourgeois behavior, where possession of the tools necessary to provide for oneself had been distorted into a drive for accumulation through rents and interest. Robert Macaire embodied the virtueless, libidinous proprietor. His “filthy enjoyments” dominated life under King Louis-Philippe, and robbed France not only of a just society but of a reasoned philosophy for achieving one in the future. With What Is Property?, satiric absurdity reached beyond the popular venues of Robert Macaire to infect even the exalted language designed to educate people in the new science of political economy. The work’s equation of property with theft reduced philosophical and legal justifications of hereditary property to absurdity. The punch lines used to close paragraphs attacking major thinkers and sarcastic dialogue between characters in scenes reminiscent of street theater allowed Proudhon to explain consumption and the politics of Louis-Philippe’s regime. Controversy over What Is Property? culminated in a public legal battle in which both Proudhon and political satire went on trial.

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Proudhon saw satire as a tool at his philosophic disposal at a time when ridicule, exaggeration, and parody were usually excluded from the scholarly arena of political philosophy. As France’s academic center, wrote Proudhon, Paris was the nation’s head and heart. “Let’s add the stomach,” he said of his planned attack on high philosophy via the grotesque and the absurd.6 Proudhon’s work is, generally speaking, a parody of the Abbé Sièyes’ Revolutionary pamphlet, What Is the Third Estate?, and invoking the mocking Robert Macaire to indict the bourgeoisie is only one of many humorous moves in What Is Property? Proudhon twisted Sièyes’ answer that the third estate was everything, but had been treated politically as nothing, into the claim that property was “a delusion, NOTHING” that had been perverted into the foundation of French society.7 For Proudhon, the situation was ridiculous and What Is Property? laughed at popular political ideologies and those gullible enough to believe them. What Is Property? parodied not only Sièyes’s What Is the Third Estate? but also the ideologies which supported the values of the July Monarchy. It paralleled the content and techniques of satire elsewhere, especially stage productions like Vautrin and Robert Macaire. Proudhon mimicked the styles of argument and mannerisms used by defenders of property and of the individualism and corruption property engendered. He showed how social and political philosophies were out of step with the way people actually lived. Proudhon often referred to his work as his last will and testament,8 a play on the document used to ensure the smooth transition of hereditary property. It is this laughing tone and daring mockery that created tension in What Is Property?, as it did in satire generally. We must remember that Proudhon was interested in much more than making a joke of his fellow intellectuals. He wrote the essay to put forward a reasoned critique of society in which he identified sources of injustice. The goal of rational critique existed in tension with Proudhon’s rhetorical style, however. Proudhon used a satiric voice and drew on an aesthetic that asserted the beauty of criticism and destruction through wit and ridicule. He did not merely log social absurdities, but used seemingly absurd rhetoric himself to expose the faulty reasoning of some of the most respected thinkers of the day. If we can take absurdity to be the opposite of reason, the unreasonable, we might well ask why Proudhon used this mocking voice, a voice that seems to subvert the reasoning of his political philosophy. In other words, what role did satire play in setting forth his new science of society, a task that would seem to require a sober voice by its very nature? This chapter will examine satire in What Is Property? as a case study of the complex interaction of humor, the academy, the state, and republicanism. I begin with a close reading of Proudhon’s inflammatory text to see

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how Proudhon used satire, so crucial to July Monarchy politics, to expose hypocrisy and to subvert the power of political language. Through the language of absurdity, Proudhon expressed what he found to be an absurd power relationship—the rule of human will, as opposed to natural law—at the heart of the July Monarchy. His rhetoric shocked the establishment, but I argue that ridicule and mockery allowed Proudhon simultaneously to critique and to participate in the institutions of knowledge of which his new science would be a part. While satire gave voice to Proudhon’s politics in What Is Property?, the satiric voice itself deeply troubled first the academy, then the state. I show how the criminal charges and courtroom trial to determine whether Proudhon’s ridicule masked serious scholarship or dangerous politics allowed the author to perform his satiric critique. In doing so, I analyze how the mechanisms of satire, the peering beneath surface appearances for hidden realities, mirrored politics and society in Louis-Philippe’s regime.

SATIRE IN WHAT IS PROPERTY? Briefly summarized, Proudhon’s book took aim at speculative property, the basis of bourgeois society. Proudhon saw around him poverty, bankruptcies, and exploitation caused by accumulation of capital. Searching for the laws and logic governing society, he determined that “property was impossible” because it prevented economic equality, the only social condition that accorded with natural law. Proudhon defined property in a peculiar way as income produced without work. He distinguished between possession as a fact and property as a legal right. Farm and house tenants, for example, possess their goods; landlords and money-lenders do not possess the land on which they claim rent or the money from which they make interest. Unlike other important reformers, the socialists and communists in particular, he did not advocate common ownership but rather the abolition of property altogether. By saying that property was “impossible,” Proudhon meant that capital’s own logical contradiction would destroy it. Basing property on labor would not work because people differed in their abilities and could not produce equally; in this way they are not actually born as equals. Proudhon’s new definition of justice was based on precisely this—an end to uneven accumulation of property through innate abilities. But that was impossible to achieve, so Proudhon wanted instead to abolish property. “Natural inequality as the condition of equality of fortunes! What a paradox!”9 On the question of labor as the basis for social justice—that is, whether to pay the highly skilled scientist more than the minimally skilled laborer—Proudhon argued this was unjust because both workers are made up of both the laboring person and

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the inherited skills, knowledge and technology built up over years of previous labor, a capital structure that they do not own but that is common to all because all had a role in creating it. Property, which assumed the right to use and abuse of a product, had to go because it made the distribution of labor and products impossible for the government. Since goods are property, and property rights are absolute, Proudhon “reasoned,” why shouldn’t each proprietor be a king, a despotic king at that, a king in proportion to the amount of property each scrambles to acquire? And with each proprietor an absolute king of his domain, “how could a government of proprietors be anything but chaos and confusion?”10 Proudhon hoped his book would be a catalyst to building a new society, and to that end he explicitly implicated the society of the July Monarchy in his critique. He shamed bourgeois exploiters and readers alike, and drew his readers into his political project by addressing his ridicule to them directly. In one example, Proudhon described a laborer’s systematic demise by proprietors who, each time the laborer’s crop fails, are on the scene ready with seemingly benevolent schemes like extended labor hours to earn extra money, or buying off some of the laborer’s meager holdings until ultimately the laborer has been “philanthropically dispossessed.” Proudhon seized the moment to strike. “In this century of bourgeois morality in which I have had the good fortune to be born, the moral sense is so weakened that I should not be at all surprised if I were asked by many a worthy proprietor what I see in this that is unjust and illegitimate. Debased creature! Galvanized corpse! How can I convince you if you cannot tell robbery when it happens before your eyes!”11 Proudhon castigated the thieving bourgeois subject, but as this went on, its meaning for the reader grew more ambiguous. “And you think this is just? Take care! I read in your amazement the reproach of a guilty conscience rather than the innocent astonishment of involuntary ignorance.”12 After sharply invoking the devil to describe philosophers of property, he claimed, “It is never my intention to surprise my reader,” suggesting that if a reader were taken aback it would be due to his/her own naiveté or gullibility. Although he wanted to shock readers, he mocked them for being shocked, and in so doing implicated them in both society’s problems and potential solutions. Proudhon made a burlesque show of all that was sacred to bourgeois society. Theology he defined as “the science of the infinitely absurd.”13 Sovereignty, defined as the power to make laws based on human will, was “another absurdity, based on despotism.”14 The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, that “high-sounding marvel” of the Revolution that decreed all citizens equally eligible for political office and that has been so admired by the people, was “a piece of nonsense,” and Proudhon showed why. The representative system it produced had made fools of the public because people

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still sought office to line their pockets and benefit their friends. Moreover, the people were not even as good at exploiting offices as kings had been; control over the list of pensions and payoffs actually remained in the hands of their representatives. The political system is ridiculous, Proudhon concluded, and the people are thieves.15 In his view, this kind of private will had no place in government, which should be the institution of law based on scientifically observed natural order. Proudhon used the indirect tack of sarcasm to focus readers’ attention on an indictment of the July Monarchy he crept perilously near. I am not even asking, he said, whether Louis-Philippe’s government meets standards of neutrality and scientific impartiality, “whether, for example, the will of the ministry ever influences the declaration and interpretation of the law, or whether our deputies, in their debates, are more intent on succeeding by argument rather than by force of numbers.”16 This kind of circumspect rhetoric involved readers in Proudhon’s argument by asking them to read between the lines for the full critique. Proudhon objected to the current state of French society, which he believed operated on ignorance. Even the best thinkers had misunderstood basic social values like liberty, equality and above all, property. Proudhon grasped the idiosyncrasies of these misunderstandings to mock them and reduce their power to absurdity. For example, though a defender of the poor, he nevertheless questioned why the rich should pay more taxes. If the state collected taxes to provide citizens with protection and conveniences, then this inequality was illogical. “Does it cost more to defend the life and liberty of the rich than that of the poor? Who, in time of invasion, famine or plague causes more trouble, the large proprietor who escapes the danger without the assistance of the state or the laborer who sits in his cottage open to all calamities? . . . is the man of large income more appreciative than the poor man of national festivities, clean streets, and beautiful monuments?” Proudhon concluded that the proportional tax should either reward larger taxpayers with greater privilege or be abolished because unjust. Taxes are not collected according to physical strength or ability; why should property be a gauge? Casting the state as thief, Proudhon argued, “It is the state which through the proportional tax becomes the chief robber and sets the example of systematic pillage; and so it is the state which should be brought to the bar of justice at the head of those horrible brigands, that execrable rabble which it now kills out of professional jealousy.”17 Proudhon brandished his cutting sarcasm to expose the illogic that linked poverty, property, and sexuality. In searching for ways to extinguish pauperism, he said, “atrocity and absurdity compete for the prize.”18 The ancients had tried infanticide. Napoleon had vowed imprisonment “to protect the rich from the importunity of beggars” and to spare them the “disgusting

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sight” of poverty. “What a great man!”19 Modern economists have turned to devising checks on the reproductive behavior of the poor. Proudhon’s rhetorical razzle-dazzle mocked these so-called solutions. “Some wish to prohibit the poor from marrying; thus having denounced religious celibacy, they propose a compulsory celibacy, which will inevitably become a licentious celibacy.”20 Others advocated prudence, but not famed philosopher Destutt de Tracy, who urged all to have sex and marry when they pleased. Proudhon pointed out how the fact “that the consequences of love and marriage are to increase poverty do not bother our philosopher. Faithful to the dogma of the necessity of evil, it is to evil that he looks for the solution of all problems.” Having set him up, Proudhon quoted Destutt de Tracy and let the philosopher indict himself by accepting the systematic sacrifice of society’s poorest people: “Since the multiplication of men continues in all classes of society, the surplus of the upper classes is supported by the lower classes, and that of the latter is destroyed by poverty.” Proudhon, delivering the humorous punch, added, “this philosophy has few avowed partisans, but over every other it has the indisputable advantage of being demonstrated in practice.”21 It was, however, the Fourierists, “inventors of so many marvels,” whom Proudhon most delighted in ridiculing. To slow population growth Fourier had invented “the gastrosophic regime, or in plain language, the philosophy of the belly.” He had argued that loading up on rich food would make a woman sterile, just as excess sap makes flowers barren. Mocking the serious language of the logician, Proudhon showed the analogy to be false: flowers only become sterile when their male organs, the stamen, become petals or when pollen becomes too wet to fertilize. Thus, for the gastrosophic regime to work, Proudhon concluded humorously, “not only must the females be fattened,” which of course was completely irrelevant to reproduction, “but the males must be rendered impotent.”22 In the way of remedies for pauperism, then, the best that philosophers, political economists, and social reformers had been able to come up with were “masturbation, onanism, sodomy, pederasty, polyandry, prostitution, castration, continence, abortion, and infanticide.” Proudhon cited a pamphlet recently published in England by an unnamed “disciple of Malthus” that proposes an “annual massacre of the innocents” of all families containing more children than the law allows. The pamphlet requests that a magnificent cemetery, complete with statues, fountains, and groves, be designated as a “special sepulcher for the superfluous children.” In an absurd vision worthy of Swift, the author wrote, “mothers would come to this delightful spot to dream of the happiness of these little angels and, quite comforted, would return to give birth to others, to be buried in their turn.”23

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Each of these methods was inadequate. So, how about simple proscription—outlawing or even killing the poor? The problem with that, Proudhon wrote, in mock seriousness, was that although it decreased the number of the poor, it increased their proportion. In a parody of Thomas Malthus’s mathematical calculations, he explained that if a proprietor were to charge interest on his product of one twentieth of the product, for example, then we can say that twenty workers produce for only nineteen since the proprietor takes the share of the twentieth. If we suppose that the twentieth worker, “the poor one,” is killed, the production of the following year decreases by one twentieth “and consequently the nineteenth will have to give up his promotion and perish.” Because it is not one twentieth of the produce of nineteen which has to be paid to the proprietor, but rather one twentieth of the produce of twenty [ i.e., just because one worker died does not mean the proprietor will lower the original rate of interest]. “Each surviving laborer must sacrifice one twentieth plus one four hundredth of his product; in other words, one man out of nineteen must be killed. Therefore, with property, the more poor people who are killed, the more, proportionately, will be born.”24 In other words, Proudhon argued that killing off poor laborers through decreasing production would only raise the proportion of newborn poor compared to the total poor population. This apparent absurdity parodied Malthus’s observation that linearly increasing food production could never keep up with a geometrically increasingly population. Proudhon dedicated himself to exposing the folly of solutions to poverty that left property intact. He argued that property always created despotism, which is why his new philosophy and new system of justice were based on property’s abolition. His style was to unpack political terms and use them in unfamiliar ways, to make fools of experts or pundits who claimed naively to understand them. Introducing his vision of a society without despotism, for example, Proudhon asks: “What is to be the form of government in the future?” “But,” as some of my younger readers may protest, “You are a republican.” Republican, yes, but this word defines nothing. Republic; this is, the public thing. Now whoever is concerned with public affairs, under whatever form of government, may call himself a republican. Even kings are republicans. “Well, then, are you a democrat?” No. “What! You are a monarchist?” No. “A constitutionalist?” God forbid. “You are then an aristocrat?”

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Not at all. “You want a mixed government?” Still less. “So then what are you?” I am an anarchist.25

As he is meant to do, the imagined conversant immediately assumes Proudhon is “being satirical,” which Proudhon denied in order to explain what he meant by “anarchist.” First, he said what anarchy is not— it is not the rule of human will, of the sovereignty of one person over another. “In whatever form it appears,” Proudhon explained, “monarchic, oligarchic, or democratic, royalty, or the government of man by man, is illegal and absurd.”26 Arguing that monarchy was republican and anarchy was good politics mocked politicians and philosophers who defined these terms rigidly. What Is Property?’s satire faulted political philosophers’ formulaic way of talking. The playfulness tied to this popular, “low” genre acted as a corrosive to philosophers’ rigid categorizing. Proudhon was striking down tired formulations not just by countering them with other ideas, but by using a new genre. This rhetorical showmanship broke down old thinking. It exposed not just the malleability of language but the absurd power relationship—the rule of human will—embedded in these terms as they were commonly understood. Through ridicule, Proudhon worked to achieve the republic he desired. His bold identification of his republican vision as “anarchy” shows us how the definition of republicanism, never more in flux than under the July Monarchy, was taking shape through satire. Proudhon knew he was playing around with common understanding. “I confess that all this is a reversal of received ideas and that I seem to be attempting to overturn actual political thinking, but I beg the reader to consider that having begun with a paradox, I must, if I reason correctly, meet with paradoxes at every step and end with paradoxes.” By this he meant that property did not ensure freedom, as many had argued, but despotism, “the government of arbitrary will,” the reign of “libidinous pleasure.” The proprietor, the robber, and the sovereign were all the same in the way they imposed their will as law and hoarded legislative and executive power. However, Proudhon wanted to see all citizens share legislative and executive power. He objected, “I do not see any danger to the liberty of citizens if, instead of the pen of the legislator, the sword of the law were entrusted to their hands. The executive power, belonging essentially to the will, cannot be confided in too many proxies: this is the true sovereignty of the people.”27 As Frederic Jameson has observed, a great mimic must be able to step into the place of the person imitated,28 and indeed Proudhon’s work betrays a conflicted sympathy for some of his targets. His attitude toward What Is

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the Third Estate? mixes admiration with criticism. Sièyes’ simple questions (What is the third estate? —Nothing, What ought it to be? —Everything.) had jarred the people of France into reasoning their way through the notion of popular sovereignty, and “five years after the publication of the pamphlet of Sièyes, the third estate was indeed everything; the King, the nobility, the clergy were no more.”29 Proudhon admired Sièyes’ work because it spurred the public to action, “a great veil was torn aside, a thick blindfold fell from all eyes.” This was, after all, what he wanted to accomplish with his own work, and he mimicked the form of What Is the Third Estate? in his own stunning opening question. “I am sure if you read me,” he addressed his readers, “you will be forced to agree. The things I speak of are so simple and so evident that you will be astonished at not having perceived them before, and you will say, ‘I never thought about it.’”30 But Proudhon argued that the move toward popular sovereignty in 1789 had taken root in a spirit of contradiction where the law had justified the people’s actions, yet the law itself had not been based on scientific study and did not bear up to knowledge of the laws of nature and society. Even after the Revolution and into the 1830s, the law continued to be based on the concept of sovereignty, that is, on human will, not reason. The institutions established after 1789 formed the structure of property rights in 1840, and for Proudhon, they epitomized the unreasonable, the absurd. Parodying Sièyes, Proudhon intertwined a cognitive use of language to explain this history with a performative, carnivalesque use of language as a social critique and act of intervention in a society he thought had gone awry.31 What Is Property? was a bid for social and political change. Proudhon acknowledged that shifting from absolute monarchy to greater democracy had multiplied the number of sovereign voices and raised the odds of someone acting from reason, but for him, calling 1789 a “revolution” was a joke. The people who saw a “revolution” were fools. In “the so-called new institutions,” the Republic and successive governments maintained precisely the principles they had opposed and the prejudices they had wanted to abolish. “We congratulate ourselves, with ill-considered enthusiasm, on the glorious French Revolution, the regeneration of 1789, the great reforms that have been effected, and the change in institutions—a delusion, a delusion!”32 What Is Property? would put society back on track. “Wherever this work is read and discussed, the germ of death to property will be deposited there, privilege and servitude will sooner or later disappear, and the rule of reason will replace the despotism of will.”33 Proudhon’s satirical vision of political rights and wrongs had roots in the French republican tradition. “I am frankly and irrevocably republican,” he told his friend Muiron in 1832.34 Even though many took What Is Property?

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as a reminder of 1793’s radical republicanism, Proudhon did not share Robespierre’s ideal of strong, central leadership. Rather, his republicanism had more in common with the ideas of Montesquieu and Rousseau. Like them, he concerned himself with the problem of social cohesion in the absence of religious grounding, and worked to find the general spirit that would achieve it.35 Both Montesquieu and Rousseau had theorized how selfish desire might be subordinated to, or replaced by, desire for public good. Proudhon shared their vision of a popular republic that would be realized and sustained by civic virtue. His republic would be achieved through the right thinking of the populace aided by the empirical discoveries of social science. “The work of our race is to build a temple of science,”36 he stated. The law of the land waited to be detected by keen inductive reasoning, not created by an act of will, even a general will as Rousseau had asserted. For Proudhon, a just society required not only political but social equality; the greatest obstacle to justice was property—ownership that produced income without work. Ridiculing solutions to poverty that dodged naming property as society’s culprit, Proudhon exposed how the ideology of property naturalized the self-interest of the bourgeois will. The people, he argued, are duped by the notion of sovereignty, convinced of the correctness of individualism. They are repressed through their own consent to property as a natural right and to property as a basis for representative government. Tearing apart the ideologies that sustained representative politics allowed Proudhon to expose the play of interest beneath the surface of the juste milieu. Proudhon located the absurdity of a political philosophy based on the sovereignty of will in property, and in doing so he unmasked the hegemonic interest of a class. At the heart of this sociopolitical critique lay language, specifically the power of language to reveal or to hide truth. Proudhon stated early in his career his belief that in the origins of language he would discover “the primitive . . . traditional philosophy” containing the natural laws of society.37 In search of a divine social order, he read Latin and Hebrew. When he applied for the Suard pension in 1838, he planned to go forward with his philological work which he thought would result in explicating an “evangelical morality.”38 Ostensibly, his work turned in the 1840s away from this kind of abstraction, toward knowledge based on experience and observation.39 But Proudhon never fully gave up the search for a morally correct absolute truth. Although Proudhon seemed to abandon language study for a “scientific” search for truth based on observation, in practice, language remained entangled with science in his quest for social justice. He believed that language “retarded the progress of science. . . . Our mind is enlightened in vain; the imagination prevails and our language remains forever incorrigible.”40

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Language, imagination, and beliefs were slow to change when contradicted by “the testimony of the eyes.” Proudhon felt that language could retain the appearance and power of truth even when observation and experimentation showed it to be false. Thus if science was insufficient to change the public’s imagination of social values, then rhetoric—in this case, the devices of satire—might be marshaled to the cause. Language remained a crucial category of analysis for Proudhon, and to him, absurdity was the language of political philosophy and the institutions around it. When he saw political philosophy he did not see reason and right thinking; he did not find reason when he read Malthus or Destutt de Tracy, for example, but instead saw an imitation of it, a manipulation of logic and language that mocked the scientific search for social truth. To join the discourse of political philosophy—if only to blow it apart—Proudhon had to speak the language of scholarship as he understood it, language that was supposed to express reason but that actually masked an obscene lack of reason. To reverse the discourse, Proudhon flipped the somber tone of scholarly writing to the mocking tone of satiric writing whose laughing surface appearance masked a shocking line of logic. In other words, in What Is Property?, Proudhon used satire in imitation of absurdity to join in the discourse of the academic and juridical establishment because that was the language that he heard spoken there. The structure of satire itself—the overarching ridiculousness, the hidden meaning, the closer inspection required of readers—seemed to reenact the realities of the July Monarchy. Just as politics based on property and individual will hid inequality and injustice beneath a rhetoric of equality in July Monarchy society, Proudhon’s language and imagery of the absurd contained a carefully reasoned political critique.

SATIRE, THE ACADEMY, AND THE STATE Proudhon hoped his satiric attack on social problems and obscurantist philosophies would shock academy and government insiders into social action. But would mocking the July Monarchy establishment be taken as scholarship, or was it a political act, perhaps even a crime? These were the questions posed by Besançon scholars and French officials grappling with Proudhon’s work. Neither academicians nor state officials knew how to classify satire used for serious intellectual endeavor, or how to respond to its critiques. Their struggle to contain Proudhon’s rhetoric, first through academic proceedings then through a courtroom trial, showed satire to be central to the politics of the July Monarchy.

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Proudhon’s parody invited readers to use their own powers of reason against a false political philosophy, but the mocking rhetoric of What Is Property? also exposed Proudhon’s ambiguous relationship to the Academy of Besançon and the academic establishment in general. Proudhon cast himself as the only thinker courageous enough to take on property as an injustice. He condemned “the false learning of an arrogant jurisprudence” and “the absurd aphorisms of a political economy created by property.”41 In particular, he belittled the work of his wealthy cousin, the learned professor, J.-B.-V. Proudhon, whose Treatise on the Rights of Usufruct, Proudhon tells us, relegated the fundamental question of the origin of property to “the list of useless questions.” In a deliciously simple refutation, Proudhon said that if he looked around and saw his fellow citizens enjoying sufficient property he would support his cousin’s contention that property was simply a fact whose origins were irrelevant. But, of course, that was not what society showed. Taking a sideways swipe at craven intellectuals, Proudhon mused that “(s)ome people do not like to raise the dust of pretended titles to property and to investigate its fabulous and perhaps scandalous history.”42 In Proudhon’s view, “The principle of property infects the sciences of economics, law, and government in their essentials and leads them in the wrong direction.”43 Proudhon linked property and the law that sustained it directly to the academy. “If our Charters and our Codes are based upon an absurd hypothesis, then what is being taught in the law schools? . . . what is politics? Who is it that we call a statesman? What does jurisprudence mean? Should we not rather say juris-ignorance?”44 Slacking professors angered Proudhon, who observed their behavior in seminars. “These Gentlemen teach their courses off the cuff [‘par-dessus la jambe’]. Salon prattle has replaced education.” Science professors were the worst: “They preach decentralization in the most centralized way,” he wrote to his friend Pérrenès, and Proudhon eventually gave up their lectures.45 Society was a mess because it was not built on reason. Philosophers stood out of touch with social needs. Moralists and jurists trembled at the “terrible dogma” of equal social conditions, holding it as “one of those principles which are true in their sublime generality but which would be ridiculous and even dangerous to attempt to apply rigorously to the customs of life and to social transactions.”46 To the very people entrusted with the responsibility of reasoning through social questions, equal conditions were simply “an inviting bait.” The discipline of political economy, rife with “trifling generalities” to which economists “give the appearance of depth” by clothing it in “fancy jargon,” looks like an ontology: “it knows nothing, explains nothing, concludes nothing.” As for economists’ usefulness as actual problem solvers, “all that can be said of them is that if their lucubrations sometimes show good sense,

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they immediately fall back into absurdity.” With their science such a joke, Proudhon wonders, “how can two economists look each other in the face without laughing?”47 Throughout What Is Property?, Proudhon flaunts his disdain for the Academy and its experts who make a mockery of science and social justice. But this ridicule was not uncontested. If Proudhon was at odds with an academic world he found foolish, like the viewer of Robert Macaire, he was also drawn to it. He wrote What Is Property?, after all, competing for an academic prize. In the letter that prefaced his essay, he honored the Besançon faculty under whose tutelage he worked: “you are the ones to whom I owe the most. Your prize competition, your programs, and your instructions, which are in accord with my secret wishes and my dearest hopes, have never ceased to enlighten and to show me the way.” Proudhon attributed his work to them, calling his essay on property “the child of their designs.”48 He saw his work as a way into the world of the academy. In some ways, this was a world he approached from the outside. Unlike his cousin, the professor J.-B.-V. Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph came from a relatively poor branch of the family. In his early years, he worked doggedly as a printer, but eventually had to ask his cousin for money to save the foundering business. As a student in Paris, he lived in poverty and took hack writing jobs to survive. Much of his academic pension he sent to his family. Professor Proudhon had himself taken on the social question, so important to Pierre-Joseph, in his Treatise on the Domain of Property, published a year before What Is Property?. In the treatise, Professor Proudhon held up proprietors as selfless protectors of society from destruction. “And who are they, on the other hand that, hypocritically and in the hope of hiding their thefts, promote disorder to achieve their ends? Needless to say, the vagabonds and the proletarians.”49 J.-B.-V. Proudhon defended the system of property he enjoyed and from which P.-J. Proudhon had been largely excluded. If P.-J. were to join the academic community it would not be from a position of privilege. Proudhon felt he had been rejected by the academic community in the past. In 1838 he had written a philological treatise to compete for the Prix Volney from the Institut de France. The award, however, had not been given out because the judges had felt no paper deserved it. Proudhon had received an honorable mention along with some criticism of his methods and “conjectures.”50 The following year he had submitted to the Besançon Academy On the Celebration of the Sabbath in yet another essay competition. Faulted for his “digressions” and “ill-sounding, audacious, temerarious, and inadmissible propositions,” Proudhon had received only a bronze medal. Insolently, Proudhon had told his friend, poet Paul Ackermann, “I much prefer the bronze medal which I have been awarded. . . . My memoire had been classed as apart

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and out of line; that is worth more, you will agree, than an ex aequo.”51 Later, as a “defender of equality” in What Is Property?, Proudhon claimed to speak “with the independence becoming a philosopher, and with the courage and firmness of a free man.”52 In light of his personal and professional tensions with the Academy, what are we to make of the fact that Proudhon acknowledged the Besançon professors as the inspiration for the work that attacks them: “If by an infallible method of investigation I establish the doctrine of equality, if I determine the principle of civil law, the essence of justice, and the form of society, and if I abolish property forever, then it is you, Messieurs, who will receive the glory, for I owe it all to your help and inspiration.”53 Perhaps the answer lies in the double, sarcastic sense of “inspiration.” One of the central arguments of What Is Property? had been that although men differed in their native abilities, they should be equal in rights “since it is not their own merits but the inherited traditions, techniques, and means of production embodied in society which make it possible for them to develop their capacities.”54 Could Proudhon have been referring to the inherited traditions of the academy? Criticizing the means of production of knowledge to which he had less access than, say, his cousin? Although What Is Property? argued vehemently against individualism and its material manifestation in property, part of what Proudhon did, paradoxically, was to build a personal reputation and attempt to ensure a career for himself. After What Is Property? was published, he wrote to the Besançon Academy, “I have only you, Gentlemen, I place my hope only in you, I expect favor and a solid reputation only through you.”55 On one hand, Proudhon was self-effacing in What Is Property?. While others “offer you the spectacle of a genius wresting nature’s secrets from her and revealing her sublime oracular messages,” Proudhon said, setting himself apart from France’s social theorists, “here you will find only a series of experiments about justice and right, a sort of verification of the weights and measures of your conscience.”56 Proudhon was only revealing what nature had already created. Anyone else could do the same; he was simply the first. On the other hand, killing off property, “the beast of the Apocalypse,” once and for all, was no light task, and Proudhon set himself up as the man for the job. “Something more than courage is required to subdue this monster,” he explained; “it is written that it should not die until a proletarian, armed with a magic wand, had fought with it.”57 With some hyperbole, Proudhon framed himself as the last hope of a desperate society. “If I fail to win my case,” he surmised, “there is nothing left for us proletarians but to cut our throats.”58 He put forward an image of himself as a scientist. He was no agent of discord or instigator of sedition, but merely one who reveals social truths by making liars of the human race. “I am a demonstrator, I expose facts,” he told his friend, the

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scholar Fréderic-Guillaume Bergmann, when preparing his memoire. “Pray God that I find a publisher; it is perhaps the salvation of the nation.”59 But just as Proudhon had shocked the establishment, so he was himself surprised and disappointed at the work’s reception. Mostly his target audience of serious thinkers ignored him. Unexpectedly, the middle-class proprietors he had called thieves loved him. In a letter to his friend Bergmann, he wrote, “In general, the religious types, the lawyers, and the devotees of pure literature have it in for me. The merchants, bankers, money-lenders, shopkeepers, and business people are applauding me, if you can believe it. But then, even in Jesus Christ’s time, the publicans were closer to the kingdom of God than Pharisees and doctors.”60 His friend Ackermann responded to the work by faulting Proudhon’s “harsh uncompromising style.”61 Proudhon readily admitted, “I have spoken with small respect for jurisprudence” and “I have been pitiless in criticizing the economists, for whom in general I have no liking,” even though he had dedicated his book to the Besançon Academy. No blow struck harder, however, than the Academy’s rejection of Proudhon’s lively text. Within two months of the book’s appearance, Proudhon received a letter from the Academy that it intended to disavow and condemn his work publicly. The letter demanded first, that Proudhon retract the dedication and second, that the Academy’s disavowal be part of the printed record. And so it was. Proudhon included the “ridiculous decree,” adding, “I can only ask the reader not to measure the intelligence of my compatriots by that of our Academy.”62 Despite the defiant tone, privately Proudhon despaired. He wrote to Bergmann, “The effect of my book on the Academy has been terrible for me. They have cried scandal and ingratitude . . . I am an ogre, a wolf, a serpent. All my friends and benefactors reject me . . . From now on, everything is finished. I have burnt my bridges. I am without hope. They would almost like to force me to issue some kind of retraction.” Perhaps most devastatingly, “I am not read, I am condemned.”63 While academicians rejected What Is Property?, government officials feared that Proudhon’s satiric subterfuges hid politically dangerous messages behind their humor. Proudhon learned that not only was he in danger of losing his academic pension, but in the climate of political fear and conspiracy of 1840, the public prosecutor had sent a copy of the work to the Justice Minister, and had suggested the author should be investigated. The minister had read the book and found it insightful, and intellectually significant, but unsure of his appraisal, had sought a professional opinion. He sent it to the Académie des Science Morales to determine specifically whether What Is Property? was a work with scholarly merit or simply a political tract. Proudhon’s use of sarcasm, ridicule, and absurdity had made it hard to tell.

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What is fascinating about this turn of events is that the parodic form and satiric nature of the work had become a legal issue. So often this had been the case with satire under the July Monarchy. Government censors had put individual satirists and their satiric newspapers and theater performances on trial as threats to state security throughout the 1830s. In a series of high-profile trials, the producers of the satiric journals Le Charivari and La Caricature had been fined repeatedly and even served jail time for their inflammatory humor. Many satires had been highly critical of government officials, including one notorious piece that advocated chopping the pear-king into fruit salad. Satire had spoken from a position of public opinion, that is, a position of the nation making claims on, and measuring the performances of, its government representatives and sovereign. Because it asserted the right of individuals to engage in political critique, it had looked politically unstable to government officials reaching for political compromise in the July Monarchy. The years 1830 to 1840 had seen ten attempted regicides, and officials had routinely linked satire to these conspiracies by searching satirists’ homes and offices for political materials and by confiscating satires from political radicals. Officials had found it difficult to adjudicate satire’s slippery truths and had outlawed overtly political satire altogether in 1835. Newspapers had reported this parade of satirists on trial to readers and sparked debate over the place of satiric criticism in political life. This time, in Proudhon’s case, the question was whether this study in absurdity and ridicule, this mocking exposé of the illogic of property, could stand as scholarship or if this work of satire could harbor a meaningful political threat to the government. Seeking an expert opinion, the Besançon Academy recruited one of its fellows, Adolphe Blanqui, brother of the famous radical-left conspirator, to study the book. In both an academic report and a review in Le Moniteur, Blanqui said that although Proudhon’s work contained expressions that were extremely blameworthy, there was no denying its scholarly character.64 Proudhon believed that ultimately the academic community would accept his work. “I know that you propose to condemn what you call my ‘opinions,’ and to renounce all solidarity with my ideas,” he wrote to the Besançon Academy. “I persist nevertheless in believing that the time will come when you will give me as much praise as I have caused you irritation.”65 Still the Academy considered ending his pension. “They no longer expect anything of me at the very time when I dare say they should expect the most,” Proudhon wrote to his friend, scholar Jacques Tissot; “they will abandon me at the moment of my strength and fruitfulness.”66 When the governing board of the Besançon Academy called Proudhon to appear before it, he felt it was “to justify myself and to hear myself reproached

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for having written an anti-social book, contrary to all proprieties of form as well as content.”67 In other words, the book had angered the Academy not just for its critique of property but also for the form that critique took—the ridicule, sarcasm, and absurdity. Proudhon made excuses and failed to appear, provoking the Academy once again. The Academy was insulted. Letters were exchanged and after Proudhon vowed that if his pension were ended he would make his case to the people of Besançon, the institution decided narrowly to drop the matter. Although there was no prosecution, Proudhon’s reputation was tainted. That October, when a worker attempted to murder King LouisPhilippe, the investigator, Girod, noted, “why should we be astonished that there are regicides when there are writers who take for their thesis: Property is theft.”68 As had happened throughout the 1830s, the voice of satiric criticism had once again become entangled with regicide in the public imagination. In planning What Is Property?, Proudhon had made daring rhetorical choices. He had told his friend Ackermann, that “the style will be rude and sour; irony and anger will be strongly felt . . . when the lion is hungry it roars.”69 Sainte-Beuve, Proudhon’s biographer, later admired Proudhon’s work for the way it forced the reader to rethink the issue of property, and perhaps move closer to Proudhon’s perspective. But Sainte-Beuve also said, “I can hear from here his outbursts of sarcastic laughter. Perhaps after all, that was what he set out to achieve.”70 Proudhon seemed torn between the impulse to mock absurd theories in his own language of the grotesque, and the desire to lay out his new science for readers so that a new society might be created. When a friend reminded him of Henri IV’s saying that more flies are caught with honey than with vinegar, Proudhon replied that his goal was not to catch flies but to swat them, but promised to ease his rhetoric in his next essay.71 Yet if Proudhon was determined to remake society, he remained equally driven to court the academic establishment. “I have such confidence in the certitude of my principles and the rightness of my intentions that I do not despair of obtaining one day some mission or other from those in power, servatis servandus, of course.”72 Proudhon wanted something more than what parody would provide him, and yet his next memoire did not stop mocking the established order. Warning to the Proprietors, which continued Proudhon’s attack on property, ended on a strong ironic note. As a devotee of national order, Proudhon declared he would rather salute the king than die, since that is what the monarchy requires. But that, he wrote, “does not prevent me from demanding that the irremovable, inviolable, and hereditary representative of the nation shall act with the proletarians against the privileged classes; in other words, that the king shall become the leader of the radical party.”73 In this absurd pairing of the royal and the radical, satire lived on.

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Again, the Academy was not amused. The book sold only a few copies and received no real attention from noted writers. Besançon prosecutors wasted no time seizing it and launching a case against its author. Proudhon sent a copy to the Interior Minister along with a letter that Woodcock reports “prejudiced rather than improved his situation, by a series of criticisms describing the existing government as hypocritical, devouring, perverted, and anti-national, and recommending it to overthrow its own legal system so as to prevent a more general debacle.”74 The Paris police searched Proudhon’s rooms and called on his friends. This time, Proudhon had dedicated his work to Blanqui. Police erroneously interpreted this as evidence of a conspiracy between Blanqui and Proudhon and were ready to prosecute the two. On February 3, 1842, Proudhon was summoned to the cour d’assises du Doubs in Besançon where he stood trial on four charges of crimes against public security: attacking property; disturbing the public peace by exciting the citizens to scorn and hatred against one or more classes of people; excitation to hatred and scorn of the government of the king; and giving offense to the catholic religion. Possible punishments totaled five years in prison and 6000 francs in fines.

PERFORMING THE CRITIQUE OF WHAT IS PROPERTY? THE CASE IN THE COURT As in other cases where satiric work was on trial, the curious jammed the courtroom to see the spectacle of Proudhon defending himself. The trial was “phantasmagoric,” Proudhon told Bergmann, a fantastic stage from which Proudhon, “at ease” before the court, explained his theories to his best advantage and convinced the public he stood “outside the ring of conspirators.”75 The trial took place amidst economic slump and labor turmoil. With two serious attempts at regicide in 1839 and 1840, and increasing working-class opposition to economic distress, middle-class fear of revolution made its way into the courtroom. “I was worse than Robespierre,” wrote Proudhon, “an anti-Christ”76 to enraged onlookers. At trial, Proudhon’s defense paralleled arguments made in What Is Property? It rested on the notion that his ideas were universally held in the conscience of all people; he was only enabling his readers to perceive a truth they had always held. In other words, Proudhon had simply been asking audiences to look beneath surface appearances for the deeper truths of their own conscience. These truths would not bring chaos or revolution, he argued, but would strengthen the government. Proudhon’s lawyer emphasized his client’s position as an establishment outsider. Proudhon’s native district, the FrancheComté, was not a cultivated urban center of order, he reminded jurors, but

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an outlying land of free thinkers and hearty stock. And others had attacked property with impunity; why not his client, who, after all, was not actually attacking property but its abuses? Had not the esteemed Professor Blanqui passed his expert eye over the work and declared it stylistically crude but basically “scientific”?77 Even the courtroom could not tame Proudhon’s satire. Proudhon used the proceedings to perform the critique he had written in What Is Property? He found the Besançon Academy’s approach to the trial ridiculous. “The Academy, by way of its newspaper (yes, our Academy has turned itself into a journalist) put me on the same line as a murderer and a baby killer,” he wrote to Ackermann, “and in view of my lack of wealth, argued I should have ten years behind bars and only fifty francs in fines. This is what counts as the affability of people of letters.”78 Despite the sarcastic review of the Academy’s discussion of him, Proudhon reveled in the public spotlight. He thrilled in manipulating his public appearance into something unexpected. “Imagine the astonishment,” he told Ackermann, “of all these curious onlookers, priests, women, aristocrats, etc., when instead of a republican outfitted with the typical red coat, goatee, and sepulchral voice, they saw a little blond, fair fellow with a simple, good-natured appearance and calm expression, claiming that he has been charged only because of the scorn of the public prosecutor which, moreover, he himself zealously supports.”79 Accused of stirring up opposition to priests, academicians, journalists, philosophers, magistrates, and legislators, Proudhon seized the moment of his defense as he put it, “to give a critical review of these various classes of citizens.” The substance of Proudhon’s critique seemed less important to him than the style in which he delivered it. Relating the event to Ackermann, Proudhon did not bother to explain the content, but rather reviewed the piercing nuances of his own sarcastic performance. “This critique, read with great seriousness and very simple intonation that contrasted singularly with the salt, the vivacity, the energy, and the justice of the sarcasm, full of personal allusions to members of the audience, produced a marvelous effect.”80 The charged voice of ridicule enabled Proudhon to wriggle free of courtroom restraints and act out his critique. Throughout his defense, Proudhon purposely used tricky scientific language and the court was baffled. Proudhon called it “judicial mystification,” “a paté of indigestible political economy.” With its images of stomachs and intestines, the language of the grotesque had been summoned to the service of political philosophy. Proudhon used the trial to great advantage as a forum for his ideas and sarcasm. “What I was reproached for having written was as nothing compared with what I was allowed to say.”81 He was acquitted when the jury simply could not understand the rhetoric and thus could not be certain any crime had been

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committed. It had been a beautifully entertaining show. “The jurors pinched themselves to keep from laughing, the judges had to lower their heads to maintain their solemnity, and the public laughed. . . . I was acquitted to public applause, handshakes from jurors, and congratulations from the judges!!!”82 Proudhon had apparently found sympathizers with whom his humorous political performance resonated. Scholars generally agree that the courtroom performance and acquittal brought Proudhon a celebrity far greater than his work had. He became known as an important, radical writer who had rebelled against the academic establishment and deserved serious intellectual attention. Proudhon rejoiced in his new position vis à vis the court, the government, and the academy. “Now I should be able to say everything, as would an instructor or a friend.” Aware of the tenuous nature of this new rapport Proudhon vowed, “It is up to me to keep this magnificent position.” This would not be easy, however. His defense had forced him to delve into difficult—and controversial —philosophical details, fodder for the “multitude of fools who make and unmake reputations in an instant.” Nonetheless, Proudhon was pleased with his courtroom appearance. “I hope that soon the government, even without agreeing with me, will tolerate me. I know that already it holds me in esteem and honor.”83

CONCLUSION For Proudhon, life under the July Monarchy was lived as a parody of social justice. The revolutionary events of the previous half century had dispersed sovereignty to more voices, but had done nothing to rid society of sovereignty itself, of the legal imposition of one will upon another. Proudhon hoped to usher in a new social era with What Is Property? in imitation of Sièyes’s What Is the Third Estate?, yet his rhetoric and style seemed to undercut this project. Proudhon’s arguments twisted words and logic, and were not what people expected of political philosophy. A casual reader might think, for example, that an argument against proportionate taxation defended property rights. The argument that all proprietors are thieves might be interpreted as a call for revolution like that of 1793. Mocking the practices of the scholarly establishment as absurdities might be seen as a rejection of the academy and its intellectual project. Why invoke this ironic voice of parody and mockery? Proudhon used the language of absurdity to expose absurdity lurking in what passed for the most reasoned arguments and institutions. His parody had a double face that simultaneously destroyed the logic of property and constructed the voice of new social

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values. Proudhon parodied Sièyes’s great text of the Revolution because he wanted the same sort of reaction it had inspired, but one with different—very different—social content. His parody and ridicule exposed the self-interest that he felt impeded republican virtue. Proudhon’s republicanism, an ideology very much under construction between the First and Second Republics, was defined through this laughing rhetoric as both the absence of sovereignty and the practice of individuals critiquing the representatives of power. Proudhon is often seen as someone who wanted to blow society apart. However, he was not simply criticizing this system of law, sexuality, knowledge, and government. He also wanted to be rewarded by it within the establishment. Thus, his work also shows a double project of destroying the current, property-driven foundations of society, but of joining in the academic life which was deeply implicated in that society. His satiric voice allowed him to ridicule and deflate the academic establishment that rejected him. It provided a way to explore the academy’s prejudices by provoking it to reject his work while Proudhon simultaneously sought academic approval. Proudhon often called himself a child of various philosophical and political movements (of the Enlightenment, the Revolution, republicanism, etc.), but he was also a child who had not inherited equally. He lived in poverty and struggled with his relationship to the academy while his cousin inherited greater means and sat on an academic faculty. It is no coincidence that Proudhon labored to make the inherited skills or place in a profession into the common property of all. Proudhon was thumbing his nose at the establishment to secure a place there for himself. His insistence that inherited knowledge, both academic and nonacademic, is common property created a logic by which his knowledge was worthy of the academy, and by which he sought the position in the academy he craved. Though Proudhon never joined an academic faculty, when the July Monarchy fell in revolution six years after his trial, he became a deputy of the new Republic. His work had made him a political insider, at least for a time. For many, Proudhon’s wild rhetoric discredited his politics. What sense could be made of political analysis that mocked the academy, or courtroom outbursts that befuddled jurors? Contemporaries may have interpreted Proudhon’s satire as proof of lunacy, but taking Proudhon’s rhetoric seriously shows him to be an integral part of his political milieu. Looking closely at genre reveals that for Proudhon, as for so many others in the July Monarchy, satire had become a primary means by which individuals could hold representatives entrusted with public duty—jurists and political philosophers, in Proudhon’s case—to the standards of their own rhetoric. Satirizing the logic of social scientists who failed to effectively address society’s biggest problems showed that these representatives of right thinking were failing the public.

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State officials saw in Proudhon’s faultfinding a possible political threat, but satire’s devices made it hard to tell. This slippery form of expression became a serious legal problem, and like Proudhon, justice officials attempted to expose an obscured reality. Proudhon’s trial demonstrated the government’s drive to search out conspiracy against it, to look beneath the surface of political writing for hidden meanings. Proudhon’s satire encouraged this second look: his work was a satiric, second look at property to expose its structure; What Is Property? challenged the academy to take a second look at property and to see through satire to its own role in sustaining inequality, and his trial dared jury members and everyone who saw his performance to see past his mocking rhetoric to the absurdity of the charges against him. In fact, wherever Proudhon used it, satire itself required audiences to look twice for the second, hidden meaning that created satire’s humor. Employed by Proudhon, this genre not only revealed the inequalities hidden in orthodox theories of property, but also exposed the July Monarchy’s intolerance for political rhetoric and its tendency toward centralization. Ironically, Proudhon’s mocking engagement with France’s legal institution gave him an international reputation and political presence that would catapult him briefly to official political position.

NOTES 1. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Qu’est-ce que la propriété?, translated as What Is Property? by Donald R. Kelley and Bonnie G. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 98. 2. Pierre Bécat. L’anarchIste Proudhon, apôtre du progrès social (Paris: Nouvelles editions latines, 1971); John Ehrenberg, Proudhon and His Age (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1996); Pierre Haubtmann, Marx et Proudhon, leurs rapports personnels 1844–1847 plusieurs textes inédits (Paris: Economie et humanisme, 1947); Edward S. Hyams, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: His Revolutionary Life, Mind and Works (New York: Taplinger Pub. Co., 1979); K. Steven Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); George Woodcock, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (London: Routledge and Paul, 1956). 3. Dominick LaCapra, “Rereading Marx: The Case of ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire,’” in Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts and Language, ed. Dominick LaCapra (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 268–290. On rhetoric in historical analysis, see Natalie Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987); Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Jann Matlock, Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria and Reading Difference in

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Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); and Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). 4. Karl Marx, Class Struggles in France 1848–1850, 1895. Quoted in Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature, 165; and Kerr, Caricature and French Political Culture, p. 211. 5. Proudhon was far from alone in seeing satire’s political uses. As Sheryl Kroen has recently argued, satire was a popular political form at work under the Restoration. A discontented public invoked Molière’s Tartuffe to assert anticlericalism and to expose efforts to reestablish Bourbon legitimacy. Jo Burr Margadant has shown the importance of caricature in constructing republicans’ gendered critique of the July Monarchy. These works have helped me to bring into focus the innovation in Proudhon’s use of this popular form for serious intellectual work. See Kroen, Politics and Theater; and Margadant, “Gender, Vice and the Political Imaginary.” 6. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Correspondance de P-J Proudhon (Paris: A. Lacroix et ce., 1875), t. 1, 97, lettre à Pérrenès, March 13, 1840. 7. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 169. 8. Kelley and Smith cite the following comments, for example, from Proudhon’s personal reading notes: “Pierre Joseph Proudhon, printer, to all those present and all those disinterested and of good faith, I am . . . bring a new truth, a new Gospel, an Evangelium novum, or at least I offer a deplorable example etc. I of human folly . . ..” What Is Property?, xx. 9. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 101. 10. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 211. 11. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 90. 12. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 91. 13. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 25. 14. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 28. 15. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 30. 16. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 31. 17. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 42. 18. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 152. 19. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 153. Here Proudhon explains that he is borrowing details from an unnamed “modern economist.” 20. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 153–154. 21. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 154. 22. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 155. 23. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 156, note b. 24. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 156. 25. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 204–5. 26. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 207. 27. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 210. 28. Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” The Cultural Turn (New York, 1998), 4.

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29. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 26–27. 30. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 14. 31. On the cognitive, the performative, and the parodic in Marx, see LaCapra, “Rereading Marx: The Case of ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire,’” 268–290. 32. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 27. 33. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 214. 34. See Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, quotation p. 31, Correspondance, t. 1, 13, lettre à Muiron, 1832. 35. On Proudhon and republican virtue see Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 56–70. 36. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 14. 37. Daniel Halevy and Louis Guilloux, eds., Lettres de Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (Paris: B. Grasset, 1929), 23, lettre de candidature à la pension Suard. 38. Proudhon, Correspondance, t. 1, 44–45, lettre à Pérrenès, February 21, 1838. 39. See Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 54. 40. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 18. 41. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 34. 42. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 43. 43. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 53. 44. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 164. 45. Proudhon, Correspondance, t. 1, 97 lettre à Pérrenès, March 13, 1840. 46. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 55. 47. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 105–196. 48. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 4. 49. J.-B.-V. Proudhon, Traité du domain de propriété, ou de la distinction des biens. (Dijon: Chez V. Lagier, 1839). Quoted in What Is Property?, xxii. 50. Woodcock, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 38. Proudhon submitted Recherches sur les catégories grammaticals et sur quelques origines de la langue française. 51. Proudhon, Correspondance, t. 1, 150–151, lettre à Ackermann, September 9, 1839. 52. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 34. 53. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 5–6. 54. Quoted in Woodcock, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 48. 55. Proudhon, Correspondance, t. 1, p. 228, lettre à MM. les membres de l’académie de Besançon, August 3, 1840. 56. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 14–15. 57. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 121. 58. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 36. 59. Proudhon, Correspondance, t. 1, 178, lettre à Bergmann, February 9, 1840. 60. Proudhon, Correspondance, t. 1, 239, lettre à Bergmann, August 19, 1840. 61. Quoted in Hyams, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 50. 62. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 8. 63. Proudhon, Correspondance, t. 1, 224, lettre à Bergmann, July 22, 1840. 64. Hyams, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 52.

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65. Proudhon, Correspondance, t. 1, 228, lettre à MM. les membres de l’académie de Besançon, August 3, 1840. 66. Proudhon, Correspondance, t. 1, 232, lettre à Tissot, August 10, 1840. 67. Proudhon, Correspondance, t. 1, 239, lettre à M. Bergmann, August 19, 1840. Emphasis in the original; underlining is mine. 68. Proudhon, Correspondance, t. 1, 329, lettre à M. Ackermann, May 16, 1841. 69. Proudhon, Correspondance, t. 1, 183, lettre à M. Ackermann, February 12, 1840. 70. Sainte-Beuve quoted in Hyams, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 48. 71. Hyams, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 50–51. 72. Proudhon, Correspondance, t. 1, 252, lettre à M. Ackermann November 15, 1840. 73. Quoted in Woodcock, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 57. 74. Woodcock, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 59. 75. Proudhon, Correspondance, t. 2, 15, lettre à M. Bergmann, February 8, 1842. 76. Proudhon, Correspondance, 41, lettre à M. Ackermann, May 23, 1842. 77. Haubtmann, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 307. 78. Proudhon, Correspondance, t. 2, 42, lettre à M. Ackermann, May 23, 1842. 79. Proudhon, Correspondance, t. 2, 42, lettre à M. Ackermann, May 23, 1842. 80. Proudhon, Correspondance, t. 2, 16 lettre à M. Tissot, February 28, 1842. 81. Hyams, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, 58–59. Quotation, 59. 82. Proudhon, Correspondance, t. 2, 44, lettre à M. Ackermann, May 23, 1842. 83. Proudhon, Correspondance, t. 2, 15, lettre à M. Bergmann, February 8, 1840.

Conclusion

Satire has a long history in French political life, but a convergence of historical circumstances gave it new meaning under the July Monarchy. Louis-Philippe’s abolition of censorship opened the door to satire’s political critique. As censorship immediately began to creep into political life after 1830, in violation of Revolutionary promises, political hypocrisy made excellent fodder for satirical evaluation. Technological innovations like lithography and improved printing presses meant that satire could be extremely current and by the 1830s could have a daily voice in political affairs. And in the juste milieu’s attempt to wed institutions of republicanism and monarchy, satire affirmed popular consent over traditional justifications for government power. In this historical convergence, I argue, republicanism took shape as an aesthetic of satiric criticism—a critical habit of mind, a valued practice of looking behind the scenes and between the lines for obscured reality, an ethos of perpetual observation and critique. Drawing the public into the joke and involving it in political protest by inviting it to unravel a satire’s humor set up a model of popular participation. Satire nurtured a sense of being a citizen through critiquing the government and taking action. The popular images and visual codes that surrounded satire gave shape to a political community unified not by voting rights, but by new skills of political critique. From the satire of the 1830s grew the critical spirit that erupted in 1848. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, most people remained excluded from “official politics,” even with periodic expansions of the franchise. But satire shows us that, despite their exclusion, they found ways to participate that had political significance. While David Kerr is right to say that, with the notable exception 247

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of the September Laws, satirists had little direct impact on official policies,1 satire nonetheless tells us about the emergence of democracy in France by showing how the disenfranchised were actually learning the practices of representative government. The satire of the July Monarchy educated a critical public, and in so doing, built on a long tradition of seditious practices from the Restoration and even the 1789 Revolution, by which France became accustomed to representative government and developed democratic political culture. Each regime after 1789 faced a crisis of legitimacy; under the July Monarchy, satire was at the center of the crisis. Viewed in the longue durée, this important element of modern French political culture played a part in the process by which France ultimately established legitimate political authority. In her work on Restoration politics and theater, Sheryl Kroen calls for the Restoration and July Monarchy to be studied together because of continuity in the practices the regimes used to deal with the problem of legitimacy and “in the repertoire of practices by which the population as a whole participated in bringing about its resolution.”2 She focuses on the struggles through which the transition from monarchy was finally achieved. “Analysis of these struggles allows us to appreciate the particularities of French history which emerge from the struggles . . . it shows how France came to be constituted on an entirely new political foundation . . . how ideologies were invented and secured through the practices of everyday life.”3 My study of July Monarchy satire fits well with Kroen’s analytical framework. Like Kroen, I am not arguing that everyone in the July Monarchy believed the same thing, but that when we look at satire, patterns can be seen in the web of meanings that developed around it, and that these patterns tell us something about the ideological problems of the period. The escalating surveillance, policing, and legislating around satire, well-documented in court records, police reports, legislative debates, and newspaper accounts, confirm that police and state administrators feared the new practices of satire that emerged in the 1830s. Independent observers, like Baudelaire and Heine, who were not connected to the state, suggested that the fear was at least in part due to the way satire taught audiences to see in new ways, how it schooled citizens in criticism and political vigilance. The theater led the public in revolutionary ideas, Arago had said, and he used his theater explicitly to educate audiences about politics. Philipon instructed his readers to use his caricatures above all “to see,” to see the truth behind political appearances. The public apparently learned to do this. Gilbert-Martin said that satire was easy to use after the July Monarchy precisely because the public had learned to “read between the lines” and recognize satire’s doubled messages. These were adaptive measures, strategies to cope with the dual political problems of a monarchy that lacked legitimacy and a monarch who looked to be corrupt.

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If satire expressed anxiety about the political world of the 1830s, it also taught skills needed to work within it and ultimately asserted the people’s right—and ability—to accept or reject state leadership. The satiric aesthetic that took shape in the 1830s played a key role in defining the republicanism of 1848, yet its influence has been undervalued and misunderstood. Historical analysis of republicanism in the July Monarchy and 1848 Revolution has focused on the banquet campaign and economic problems, a story that begins with a change in ministry in 1840. Throughout the decade of the 1830s, liberals held a majority in the Chamber of Deputies, but that changed in 1840 with the Guizot-led ministry, which would survive from 1840 to 1848. Deputies who favored political change were in the minority after 1840 and real political transformation became unlikely.4 Thus, political efforts on the left focused not on overthrowing but modifying the monarchy, and particularly on extending the franchise. Suffrage reform bills, though a regular feature of the 1840s, accomplished little. In 1846, when France fell into economic depression and suffered harvest failures, economic crisis brought popular unrest. A series of more than seventy reform banquets, focused on franchise reform, took place in 1847 and 1848. More than 22,000 people participated, including over 100 members of the Chamber of Deputies. Despite their popularity, banqueters lacked any unanimous program for change and, even though banquet speeches typically faulted current political practice as corrupt, the government apparently felt secure enough to withstand them.5 In addition to the advent of the Guizot ministry, there were other good reasons to believe the regime was strong. Legitimism had been defeated in 1833. The conspiracy of the Société des saisons in 1839 proved to be the last significant republican uprising the regime would face until 1848. Philipon and Aubert were under surveillance and under control. Political satire was prohibited, along with a host of other political activities and institutions. Many on the left became socialists, leaving Louis-Philippe with the sense that his position was secure, so much so that he allowed the return of Napoleon’s ashes to Paris in 1840. With republican clubs prohibited from 1835 to 1848, scholars have credited the campaigns with carrying republicanism forward. Historians note the government’s cancellation of a banquet in February 1848, as a catalyst of the 1848 Revolution and creation of the Second French Republic, though some, such as Pamela Pilbeam, for example, point to the economic context and argue that “the social impact of the prolonged economic crisis contributed far more to de-stabilizing Louis-Philippe’s France than the banquet campaign.”6 The 1848 Revolution and Republic are often treated as occurring somewhat by default. Pilbeam explains, “the Second Republic was the product of

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economic crisis and Orleanist panic, an abdication rather than a seizure of power.”7 For many, the Republic was established largely because there was no good choice for a king. Indeed, republicanism can be difficult to find in the 1840s when relatively few advocated a republic, and those who did mostly did so in secret. But if the July Monarchy has been seen as a political backwater, satire reveals a very different picture of the 1830s political landscape. It has been my argument here that the seeming frivolity of satire in the 1830s help to create the revolutionary republicanism that emerged in the 1840s. Satire drew together political and social critique to constitute a new kind of republicanism. In the 1830s, it became the biting advocate of a government that would be responsive to the people. Satirists dragged into court for press violations used trials to claim a French national right, historically and for the future, to shape national leadership by mocking government foibles. As one attorney argued before the bench, “our fathers laughed, our sons will laugh, I hope, and your solemn gravity doubtlessly would not wish to dispossess the present of this privilege of gaiety.”8 Appraising his work in the final issue of La Caricature in 1835, Philipon placed his satire in the context of France’s struggle for rights under the Restoration and July Monarchy: “We have unmasked the actors of the last fifteen years, all the apostates of liberty. We have strapped them to the pillory of our paper; we have unrelentingly delivered their portraits to the mockery of the people whom they exploit.”9 For Philipon, the Orleanist regime had proved to be no better than the Bourbon. Yet, Philipon, Daumier, and the other satirists of Le Charivari and La Caricature did not start the decade of the 1830s as radical republicans; their work shows no campaign for universal suffrage or education, for example. But as the liberal promises of the 1830s failed to materialize, satirists faulted the monarchy at first for stifling the free press, so crucial to satiric activity, then more widely for other abuses and contradictions, discrediting to the regime, that would suppress humorous criticism. Historian François Furet has argued that government efforts to halt the revolutionary momentum of 1830 at a replication of 1789 “radicalized minds” as the gulf between Louis-Philippe’s regime and the principles of 1789 grew evident.10 Satire shows us how this happened. The monarchy’s vision of the 1830 revolution was contested by opponents who sought to move beyond the goals of 1789, many of whom positioned themselves as oppositional only gradually as the process of defining 1830 unfolded, and particularly as it unfolded around accusations of conspiracy. Satirists, whose opposition was framed by the government as conspiracy, criticized the regime’s policies and exposed ambiguities, and government officials cracked down on this public criticism that challenged its authority through both its content and its form.

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Almost immediately after the July Revolution, the new government began violating the freedoms promised by the new Charter, and satirists began attacking them. They objected most of all to assaults on press freedom, not just the source of their livelihood, but the voice of public opinion and place where the French nation entered into constitutional government. To these satirists, disallowing press freedom was a conspiracy against what Louis-Philippe had proclaimed would be a more liberal government than its predecessor. Mocking the government exposed the way Louis-Philippe’s regime claimed to guarantee constitutional rights while it actually undermined them. But satirists’ view of the regime’s shifty and sometimes hidden maneuvers against press freedom was only one of the accusations of conspiracy operating in the 1830s. Another was that made by the government itself, on the lookout for political plots against its uneasy compromise between monarch and republic. This “juste milieu” would not tolerate political opposition and saw conspiracy in all political agitation. Moreover, government officials used the reality of political factionalism to pit political groups against each other in behind-the-scenes efforts that were themselves conspiratorial. In the search for conspirators that characterized the July regime’s tension between centralizing authority and political opposition, satirists were scrutinized, but not because they operated in secret political societies, at least not at first. Rather, the trouble with satirists had to do with both the content and form of their work. In terms of content, satire pointed out how the regime failed to meet the liberal standards it had set for itself in 1830. Mocking images and articles showed that behind the superficial, quasi-republican rhetoric lay substantial centralizing practices. In fighting the government for the right to criticize the king, these satirists invoked the 1830 Charter and initiated a struggle over the shape of the new constitutional monarchy. Enacting their rights as citizens to speak freely about politics, satirists forced the July regime to define its positions on key issues, most notably on press freedom and political debate. Their critique used an aesthetic of double meanings to accuse the government of hiding behind a doubled definition of itself as much more liberal than it actually was. In terms of form, satire was a problem for the July regime precisely because of these double meanings. Satire operated by embedding humor in surface meaning. With censorship abolished, this was not illegal, but authorities found it difficult to address judicially. They could not give it free rein because they feared that behind what was allowed might be lurking something politically dangerous. As “Soap Bubbles,” the Blondeau satires, Balzac’s “Vautrin,” Proudhon’s What is Property? and debates over resemblance show, authorities could read multiple political meanings into a work of satire. Police, censors, judges, and ministers could not be sure that satirists

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were not slipping something conspiratorial—politically dangerous—into their work. As images like “Gargantua” and courtroom performances by Philipon and Proudhon illustrate, prosecutors found it difficult to prove in court exactly what satirists were saying. Satire itself came to look conspiratorial, its chicanery and false-bottoms indicative of wrong-doing and worthy of extended government surveillance. Satire practically defined the conspiratorial as the absence of stabilized political discourse. Thus, the 1830s saw an effort to codify satire judicially as political activity. High-profile trials, searches of offices, and punishing fines drove satirists into the arms of “real” conspirators, clandestine republican societies that provided money to wage legal battles. Some evidence and a lot of innuendo existed to suggest that satirists were tied to serious crimes, and legislators argued convincingly in the National Assembly that satire inspired regicide, making it the most serious conspiracy imaginable. In what began as an effort to call the state to account, satire was actually used to justify expansion of state control over popular criticism. The obsession with looking, however, inescapably raised the possibility of not seeing, of characteristics or behavior passing unobserved, and indeed the decade focused intently on hidden conspiracies lurking beneath the surface of the juste milieu. Satire instructed observers to search for what was not readily apparent. Periodic discoveries of actual conspiracies and secretive behavior, whether against the government or satirists, fueled the search. Propelled by the dynamic surrounding conspiracy, from the proclaimed abolition of censorship with the July Revolution to its reinstatement with the September Laws, satire exploded as the preeminent mode of socio-political examination. It exposed the criminological by teaching audiences to see crimes camouflaged first as government practice and later, after 1835, as social norms. Dependent as it was on subterfuge and innuendo, satire was incompatible with the kind of political transparency sought by state surveillance. Thus satire became the battleground on which Parisians fought for the right to maintain surveillance in the 1830s. As Philipon and others kept a critical eye on politics, authorities stared back, conscious that the public was watching the contest unfold in newspapers, courtrooms, and storefronts. Satirists who capitalized on the bourgeois monarchy’s promise in 1830 to circulate information more freely than in the past criticized Louis-Philippe’s regime to expose the ambiguities and hypocrisies on which its power rested. State monitoring of satire journals, stage caricatures, and even satiric discourse in the academy brought satiric works into the realm of official political discussion where the courts, the police, and the press defined them as political. In these contradictory ways—as a political aesthetic of public criticism and as a

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justification for centralizing government authority—satire became a political power in France. Just what kind of power it became has not always been clear, and scholars have debated the efficacy of satire as a force of opposition in this period. The question carries implications for interpretations of 1848. Sandy Petrey has argued that the ubiquitous pear caricatures drove the 1848 Revolution that brought down the July Monarchy by exposing the contingent nature of its ideological foundations. Philipon’s logic in his courtroom defense where he drew the pears had been that, although viewers might associate LouisPhilippe with the pear, there was no actual resemblance between the king and the fruit. Petrey shows how the artificial nature of the connection mirrored the artificial nature of the duc d’Orléans becoming King Louis-Philippe. The pear became a symbol of the way that the king, like the satiric representation of him, had been constructed and that there was nothing absolutely truthful about his reign.11 Likewise, Louis-Philippe himself blamed satire for his downfall, believing that it had undermined his authority and public respect for politics generally.12 In contrast, David Kerr argues that satire may have had some indirect effect in terms of lowering royal respect or providing political language to opposition movements, but the loss of respect for Louis-Philippe and his cabinet did not weaken the government radically. He explains that while radical republicans may have found satire energizing, no substantial policy changes resulted from satire, charivari victims continued to accept awards and honorific posts, and the September Laws ensured that there was virtually no political satire in France after 1835 through the 1840s.13 In fact, he says, satire may have strengthened the July Monarchy by motivating radical republicans to act in ways that exacerbated public fears of violence and Revolutionary upheavals and raised middle-class support for the regime.14 Indeed, satire did contribute to the July Monarchy’s centralization. As we have seen, an important part of satire’s political impact was its role in defining and stabilizing French liberalism. In print, on stage, in the academy, on the streets, and in court, satire’s omnipresent political critique brought to a head conflicts between liberal values of freedom of speech and political and social order. As satire seemed to elude government control, legislators called for stronger weapons in the fight against satire’s conspiracy. Through legislation and policing, the July Monarchy defined French liberal priorities to favor political order over press freedom. Satire seemed to present these values as antithetical, and in the context of industrialization and the growing middle class, the cause of political order that would ensure economic stability prevailed. Securing political order meant taming satire, and the September Laws accomplished this with new legislation that outlawed political satire and reduced the power of juries and jury trials in the French judicial system.

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But this is only part of the picture. As we have also seen, satire taught skills of democracy and decentralization. Further political significance of satire in the 1830s lay in the new critical practices it trained viewers to use, and with them, the galvanized middle-class identity that developed around satire’s spirit of critical engagement. Satire taught viewers to analyze political appearances and hold representatives responsible for their actions. These were the skills required for representative government. Middle-class selfcriticism was learned in the 1830s through satire, and such critical abilities would prove powerful in 1848 and eventually in 1870. Satire’s most noteworthy impact on political culture was to republicanism. Far from a fixed entity, republicanism was under construction in the 1830s as satire refocused it from theoretical ideals of transparent citizenship and civic virtue to the critical imagination and practices necessary for rightsbased government. Because satire spoke from a position of public opinion—a position of the nation making claims on its government representatives and sovereign—it looked politically dangerous to government officials reaching for political compromise in the July Monarchy. Satire troubled officials in no small measure because it pointed up the way that Louis-Philippe had constructed his authority in reference to a particular history, French Revolutionary history, raising fears that the project of constitutional monarchy opened the door to the power of the nation and to republicanism as France had seen in the 1790s. Satire shows us that republicanism took shape under this monarchy as the “conspiratorial,” not as secret cells but as a particular kind of critical thinking based on the search for meaning beneath surface appearance. In the 1830s, satire reconfigured the meaning of representative politics and constitutionality by showing that the sober ideal of republican transparency was not the only mode of republicanism in practice. Making the state accountable for its actions required the ability to look at the political conduct behind misleading and self-serving superficialities. A vigilant public depended not just on the reasonable and the logical but on the emotional and visual. Through a series of high-profile trials, the state coded satire judicially and then legislatively as a political practice of opposition, and particularly of republican opposition. Satire was political, said the state, and more than that it was linked to leftist threats to the state and its monarch. The producers of satire, who at the beginning of the 1830s did not identify as republicans, came to define their defense of free speech as republicanism. While satirists may have emphasized the aesthetics over the politics of their work, their political critiques nonetheless became a defining feature of republicanism under the July Monarchy. When the September Laws forced satirists to abandon overtly political satire for mockery of July Monarchy society, censors repoliticized

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satire by treating it as an attack on the monarch. Satiric plays and characters, like Balzac’s Vautrin, politicized social criticism by shifting between attacks on society and attacks on the king. By the second half of the decade, social satire had shifted focus from openly criticizing the king and his ministers to suggesting that the source of France’s political problems might be found in the increasing influence of capitalism. Satire traded on conflicts between bourgeois entrepreneurism and civic virtue, portraying bourgeois business as fraudulent transactions, and the July Monarchy as a government swindle. The French political tradition made for a complex relationship between republican authenticity and what might be called a pre-mass market. Satirists embodied this tension; one of the key differences between satirists of the 1830s and their old regime predecessors is that July Monarchy satirists were not clients but artist entrepreneurs. They personified the conflict between a critical public of disinterested citizens (as Rousseau had theorized would sustain a republic) and an emerging society of self-interest that operates on the market model. Their self-consciously aesthetic vision asked audiences to examine this conflict in the society of the bourgeois monarch. It showed them how to inspect proclamations of honor and virtue for deception and trickery, and how to see through such fraud by questioning surface appearances. But paradoxically, as plays like Robert Macaire and Vautrin show, laughing at bourgeois materialism became a sign of taste, intelligence, and good citizenship. Audiences of stock traders and venture capitalists that were drawn to satiric visions of themselves participated in a powerful ritual of self-definition. Viewing satire defined middle-class theater-goers as a critical public. Satire helped create a new identity of the middle class as savvy cultural critics who take themselves as both the subject and object of their critical public discourse. It did much to establish the foundational function of criticism in bourgeois society. The culture of satire came to argue in the 1830s that the good citizen is self-critical and that society functions by criticizing itself. In such critical practices lay the promise of mobility, both social and political; if satire showed that identity had become a matter of putting on a costume, it also suggested that anyone and anything could always be otherwise. This self-shaping project, in which bourgeois society functioned by pointing to corruption, grew more radical in the 1840s as the solution to corruption was increasingly seen as universal suffrage. The “satiric decade” shows us, then, that bourgeois society developed in part around practices of criticism, and that this critical function, in fact, was one of the fundamental tropes of a sort of republican liberalism in the 1830s: politics based on representation, which required debate and critique. This class association set it apart from earlier French satire; while Molière’s

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comedies lampooned the pretensions of those not of the true aristocracy of manner and birth, post-revolutionary satire was the self-critical project of a system which economically favored competition and culturally tended toward leveling. In other words, satire was the expression of the republican idea that the bourgeois is self-critical. In the social and political milieu that informed satire in the 1830s, the role of the critic was being created as bourgeois society was creating the function of professional criticism and was moving generally toward a notion that society functions by criticizing itself. In the capitalist society of Louis-Philippe, criticism and satire affected the status of individuals and groups in a process of creating and recreating the fashionable, a process that was the key to a capitalist society that functioned by making and remaking itself, by a cycle of defining and replacing the obsolete. Whether in newspapers or in plays, satirical sanction defined obsolescence; it bestowed or denied success in a capitalist society that relied on analyzing status, monitoring status, and seeking status. Thus, in the 1830s, satire was crucially connected to social mobility. Historically, this had not been the case. In the eighteenth century, satire had been stable and conservative. In the Revolution it had been used against political others. The liberalism of the bourgeois monarchy unlocked satire and made it powerful. From productions like Vautrin and Robert Macaire, we can see that satire was vital to the project of capitalist society that believes in itself, that sees satire as a necessary mechanism to sustain itself. It was this self-shaping project that erupted in the Revolution of 1848 when a republicanism built on popular criticism met with a devaluation of monarchy and social division. Satire reveals the mobility in the values of political rule that preceded 1848. In the early 1830s, social corruption was seen by republicans as the fault of political corruption, itself due to narrow political participation. In the political discourse of the late 1830s and 1840s, to which satire was central, virtue referred increasingly to economic virtue, the incorruptibility of the masses, and was linked to a call for universal suffrage. In other words, satire of bourgeois society that pointed to corruption constructed not only a liberal republican identity but also a more radical one that implied the need for universal suffrage. Virtue implied an egalitarian vision of society where wealth would not be the basis of suffrage.15 Thus, by the end of the 1830s and into the 1840s, satire was evolving from a crucial element of liberal critique, liberal politics, and a liberal bourgeois identity to having more radical implications. Replacing the aristocracy of voters with a broader voting base would ensure moral correctness because masses were seen to be impervious to economic corruption. Satire paved the way for easy acceptance of this idea in the 1840s, when it became the republican platform and was instituted a month after the 1848 Revolution.

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With its emphasis on public opinion and critique, satire seemed to have wide democratic potential, but its political effects were circumscribed in the 1830s not just by class but by gender as well. During this decade of political renegotiation and redefinition, its democratizing critique raised its own questions about how inclusive the public sphere would be. Satire specialized in unmasking “the feminine” as political impostor, as the sign of the ridiculous and, thus, the illegitimate in public life. The 1830s had brought new experiences for women outside of domesticity at a time when the Revolution had once again raised the possibility of expanding the political public. Satirists responded to these developments by mocking women’s political and literary activism. Their images worked to exclude women from the emerging political order. Like traditions of popular justice and myths of feminine culpability, ridiculing women in public and in intellectual life worked to prevent women from becoming recognized political actors when republicans embraced the concept of universal suffrage in 1848. At the same time, satire had implications for masculinity. As a strategy of degradation, it defined a new masculine civic virtue for the emerging democratic order that pointed to conflicts between consumer culture and political virtue, but reassured viewers that they had the critical skills to identify and discriminate between acceptable and unacceptable public behavior. Satire’s critique may have operated from a fantasy of a rational public sphere, but satire did its work by marking the body and drawing the grotesque into political debate; its discourse on citizenship was conducted less in the language of reason than that of bodies, emotions, and the grotesque. Satire defined femininity by showing women to be animalistic people who lacked control over their own bodies, or alternatively, intellectual people who used their bodies inappropriately. It defined masculinity by casting men as subject to appetites that conflicted with ideals of civic virtue. Images of women with ape-like figures and men with rounded and soft physiques used the “bodily” to say that the natural order had been perverted and that July Monarchy politics and society had become twisted out of shape. Thus, satire offered an analysis of contemporary problems and solutions based on physicality. It not only showed politics as properly masculine, its pictures also placed on the surface of men’s bodies a moral frame that measured public irresponsibility and duplicity. Images such as “Hercules the conqueror,” for example, used flawed figures that sagged out of shape to question whether particular men were fit for civic duty. Representing and critiquing the French public man, that is the French citizen, satirically constituted a refigured representation of citizenship that treated public legitimacy in feminized terms of the visual and the particular, rather than the logical and the universal. In the short term, this challenged the new

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regime by making its leadership look feminine and thus politically ridiculous. But if we look at satire’s effect on the body politic in the long term, satire bridged the gap in the political culture of old-regime and post-revolutionary France by negotiating and breaking down the division between hypervisualist monarchy where appearance is all, and representative government, where citizenship is said to be about reason, the male is seen as the universal political actor, and appearance is thought to matter only as transparency. In all of its images, the key to satire’s power lay in its ability to strip away a mask of false propriety, whether social or political, and invite viewers to address the danger or disorder that the mask concealed. In other words, the satiric form and the content of images, whether in print, on stage, or in the courtroom, existed in a mutually reinforcing relationship that presented viewers with both a problem and a solution to it. Content asked viewers to see deceits that masqueraded as truths in the juste milieu—a king who claimed to support constitutionality but actually sought royalism, for example, or a virtuous woman who was actually sexually promiscuous—and recognize such deceits as threats to proper order. But additionally, satire’s form, the humor of which depended on a first, then second, moment of recognition, trained viewers to see that an image’s initial message could be incorrect or incomplete, and that viewers who stopped with deceptive first appearances would miss the subsequent, “real” message, or hidden truth. Thus satire’s crucial contribution to July Monarchy politics was the way it simultaneously provided a picture of secreted dangers and instructed viewers how to detect and correct them. Detecting the hidden and getting the joke were pleasurable experiences, but they were also political ones. Uncovering political critiques embedded in satiric texts and images taught satire’s audiences to “read between the lines,” as Gilbert-Martin said, and drew them into a realm of critical analysis and political engagement. Satire’s popular media reached audiences that had no official political voice. They educated people about the issues—about censorship and political centralization—but they also schooled audiences in the skills of forming political opinions and holding political representatives responsible for their actions. Satire became vital to political life by instilling these critical habits of thinking and establishing them as valued practices. These critical habits of mind found expression outside of Paris through the charivari. Political satire reached the provinces in print form through La Caricature and Le Charivari, but the main venue for satiric appraisal and the invention of republicanism was the street. Charivaris drew working-class and provincial people into a realm of political activity that asserted the right to political dialogue and inclusivity that lay at the heart of republican citizenship. Through charivari, communities faulted their representatives for particular

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actions and policies. Charivaris communicated popular opinion to political elites and denounced popular exclusion from national political discussion. Their expressions of disapproval held national representatives accountable for their actions and confirmed ties between representatives and provincial homes that formed the basis of national representative government. Their humorous indictments showed popular concern with, and knowledge about, political issues, and conveyed to deputies and other public figures an expectation that provincial populations would have an impact on high politics. By the end of the 1830s, satire had so invaded French politics and society that it even entered the academy. In 1840, Proudhon’s What is Property? took its place as part of satire’s new critical politics, and transported satiric absurdity beyond the realm of the popular into the science of political economy. Proudhon used satire’s tools of exaggeration, burlesque, and parody to expose what he saw as the absurdity of property relations under the bourgeois monarch. His rhetoric of ridicule and mockery attempted to subvert the power of academic language itself to sustain these unjust relations. Ironically, using language normally excluded from academic discourse gave Proudhon entrée into France’s institutions of knowledge, allowing his critique to reach the heights of academe. As it had in other, less exalted realms, satire distressed its targets—academicians in this case—and eventually the state. People worried that Proudhon’s mockery might be masking something conspiratorial, that behind its humor perhaps lay not serious scholarship but political danger. As had happened with satire in popular venues, Proudhon’s satire came under legal scrutiny, and, like Philipon, Proudhon used the courtroom to further his satiric critique. Proudhon’s choice to use satire in academic discourse shows how far satire reached into the political milieu. By 1840, it had become an integral part of political life and a key means by which individuals held those entrusted with some moral or civic duty to the standards of their own rhetoric and office. Satire’s power lay once again in its ability to promote “the second look.” What is Property? encouraged readers to look again at property relations and see their true structure. It invited the academy to see through satiric mockery to academe’s role in sustaining inequality and academicians’ failure in their duty to see beyond materialism to right thinking. The 1830s left a legacy of strict policing of satire based on the harm that the legal system and legislators had determined it caused to individuals and the state. Still, however, the slippery nature of satire ensured that the battle to control it would be hard fought as satirists persisted in trying to slide outlawed political and social allusions into their work. Through the Second Empire to Third Republic, censors drew heavily on the policing apparatus of 1835 to confiscate and forbid hundreds of caricatures. As they had revealed in debates about satire in the early 1830s, censors continued in later years to

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fear the multiple levels on which satire could communicate, and worried that they might not see something dangerous hidden beneath surface meanings. Likewise, this kind of focused attention to satire continued to draw mockery. For example, Le Tombinoscope reported in April 1882, that when censors received one of satirist Andre Gill’s images, “there was no magnifying glass powerful enough to plumb all its depths. The censors got to the point of borrowing from the director of the observatory the most powerful telescopes to scrutinize the hatchings of their Gillmitaine [an untranslatable pun meaning something like ‘fearful Gill drawing’]. They were absolutely persuaded that a drawing most innocent in appearance must hide the most perfidious intention and the public joined in with such eagerness that they also searched for puzzles in all the drawings which Gill’s crayon produced.”16 The public’s skill at reading satiric images had developed so fully that it too became a butt of ridicule. “It got to such a point, Le Tombinoscope jested, “that when the clever artist was lacking a subject he said to himself, smiling, ‘I’ll make a simple clysopompe [an enema device] with no purpose, but the public will certainly find one.’”17 Although prior censorship of written work was abolished with the establishment of the Third Republic in 1870, caricatures remained subject to it until 1881, when all requirements of prior censorship were lifted. The continued ban inspired great ridicule since republicans had called for freedom of expression in the waning years of the Second Empire, and in fact, for decades earlier.18 Apparently, authorities feared the power of pictures more than words to communicate with the public during the political instability of the new Republic. Many journalists and historians have noted, both at the time and in retrospect, the markedly smaller role that caricature played in French political life once legislators lifted the ban.19 They have suggested that satire lost its deadly punch under the Third Republic because no single person or small group dominated politics enough to be mocked as a statement of national importance. The Republic emphasized the nation and the collective over the national leader and the individual, making politics less personal as power diffused to legislators, committees, and multiple groups of people. Clearly, the facts that satire no longer had to be labeled “conspiracy” and took a place in accepted political discussion are vital signs that satire had lost much of its former position in political life. Yet, contrary to the accepted understanding of this period, I would argue that the Republic saw not the demise of satire’s influence, but in fact its greatest height. Across media and venue, Proudhon, Philipon, Daumier, and other satirists had adopted the voice of ridicule to participate in the political life of the July Monarchy because that was the language they heard spoken in what seemed to have become a world of the politically absurd.

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Satire’s ridicule, hidden meanings, and second look required of readers had mirrored the political realities of Louis-Philippe’s regime. The satire that spread through political culture in the 1830s left an inheritance of new critical practices for the 1840s. Satire had provided a public education in critical thinking and had asserted an expectation that public opinion would play a powerful role in politics. In so doing, satire had created citizens for the French republic.

NOTES 1. Kerr, Caricature and French Political Culture, 206. 2. Kroen, Politics and Theater, 293. 3. Kroen, Politics and Theater. 4. Pilbeam, Republicanism in Nineteenth-Century France, 140–141. 5. Pilbeam, Republicanism in Nineteenth-Century France, 142–152. 6. Pilbeam, Republicanism in Nineteenth-Century France, 154. 7. Pilbeam, Republicanism in Nineteenth-Century France, 154. 8. La Caricature, January 31, 1833. 9. La Caricature, September 12, 1835. 10. Furet, Revolutionary France, 342. 11. Sandy Petrey, In the Court of the Pear King: French Culture and the Rise of Realism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); and “Pears in History,” Representations. 12. Paul Thureau-Dangin, Histoire de la Monarchie, I (Paris: Plon, Nourrit et Co., 1886), 425. Cited in Kerr, Caricature, 208. 13. Kerr, Caricature, 206–211. 14. Kerr, Caricature, 207–211. 15. See Pierre Rosenvallon, “The Republic of Universal Suffrage,” trans. Laura Mason, in The Invention of the Modern Republic, edited by Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 192–205. 16. Quoted in Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature, 196. 17. Quoted in Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature, 196. 18. Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature, 219ff. 19. Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature, 235. See Henri Beraldi, Les graveurs du XIXe siècle (Paris: Conquet, 1888); Arsène Alexandre, “French Caricature Today” Scribners 15 (1894); and John Grand-Carteret, L’affair Dreyfus et l’image (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1898).

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Bureau du cabinet du Ministre de la Justice; 17a cabinet du Garde des Sceaux Ministère de la Justice, Corréspondance générale de la Division criminelle Insurrections and public opinion Graces demandés Chambre et cour des pairs (in particular CC582, 612,613,617, and 696) Police générale Imprimerie et Librairie, gravure de l’an IV–1863 Imprimerie, librairie, presse, censure Théâtres

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Index

L’ Abbesse des Ursulines, 92 absolutism, demise of, xviii absurdity, 223, 241–42, 259 Academy of Besançon, 221, 233, 234 Ackermann, Paul, 234 Actes des apôtres, xxiii agents provocateurs, 9, 201–2 Agulhon, Maurice, xix Alhoy, Maurice, 106–7 Almanach des Spectacles, 90 Aminzade, Ronald, xix Les Amis du peuple, 7–8, 32 anarchy, 229 André, 106 Ango, 111 anti-clericalism, xxiv, 1 Antoinette, Marie, xxvii Arago, Etienne, 112 Argout, Antoine-Maurice comte de, 38 art salon, 128 assassinations, 44. See also regicide assize court, 15, 42, 81n42 L’ Association de la liberté de la presse, 32–33, 56, 57, 58 L’ Association de la presse patriotique, 56 L’ Association libre de l’éducation du people, 56

L’ Association républicaine de la liberté de l’individue et de la presse, 58 L’ Auberge des adrets, 89, 92–93; success of, 93 Aubert, Gabriel, 11; police report on behavior of, 78–79; surveillance of, 79; trial, 26–28 Au Roi, deuxième satire (Bastide), 56 Ballots and Barricades: Class Formation and Republican politics in France 1830–1871 (Aminzade), xix Balzac, Honoré de, 75, 98, 107–12, 115, 116, 122n76; on Peytel, 84n87 Barbier, 11 “Les Bas-Bleus” series (Daumier), 168 Bastide, Louis, 56, 80n6, 83n70 Baudelaire, Charles, 76; on caricature, 112 “Baudelarian allegory,” 97 “The Belly of the Legislature: View of the ministerial bench of the prostituted Chamber of 1834,” 149 Benjamin, Walter, 97 Bergmann, Fréderic-Guillaume, 236 Berryer, Pierre, 155 Berry, Duchesse de, xx, 154–67, 171n27; aliases of, 155, 173n68; Chateaubriand on, 160, 163, 164;

277

278

Index

civil death of, 166; debate over, 156, 159; discrediting, 162; as example of weakness of women, 162; health of, 160; imprisonment of, 157; as maternal symbol, 164–66; “name the father” game and, 159; public birth of, 163; public opinion on, 157, 160, 163–64; rehabilitation of, 164–65; secret marriage of, 160; sexualizing, 164 Bertier, Ferdinand de, 173n68 “Biography of the accused of April, their defenders, peers, judges, ministers, and prosecutors,” 71 “Birth of the just milieu,” 142–44, 143 Blanc, Etienne, 16–25, 62; on ambiguity, 30; arguments of, 17; on political matters v. political doctrines, 30 Blanc, Louis, xviii, 77 Blanqui, Adolphe, 237 Blanqui, Auguste, 8 Blaye prison, 158 Blondeau, Charles, 53–54; imprisonment of, 54 Blum, André, xxv Bohain, Victor, 83n70 Boileau, M., 14 Bourbon, Marie-Caroline de. See Berry, Duchesse de Bourbon Restoration, xviii, xxi, xxiv; censorship under, 76 bourgeoisie, 88, 115; based on appearances, 212; criticizing foundations of, 102–3; destabilizing, 102–3; embracing satire, 116; femininity ideal, 145; gendered disorder of, 148; greed/hypocrisy of, 93; marriage, 147; masculinity ideal, 145; materialism of, 255; morality, 89, 99–100; motherhood, 165–66; multiplicity of meaning of, 114–15; self-fascination, 103; theater, 87, 95; wealth and, 116

“bourgeois monarch,” xxiv, 89 Bourla, Leon, 83n70 La Bourse, 105 bousingot, 183, 214 Brid’oison, 11; prosecution of, 48n62 Briffault, Eugene, 83n70 Brown, Frederick, 103 Bugeaud (General), 60, 80n23 “Les Bulles de savon.” See “Soap Bubbles” Bulletin d’annonces, 53 Café des Allés, 195–96 Les Cancans, 56, 80n8; prosecution of, 48n62 capitalism, 255 Carette, Auguste, 187 caricature, xvii–xviii; approval for, 77; Baudelaire on, 112; describing confiscated, 15–16; Duchatel on, 4, 44; Paulson on, 97; Persil on, 43, 173n65; Philipon on, xiii; power of, xiii; public decency and, 43, 173n65; social, xxv; targeting emotion, 44; of theater patrons, 101–2; in Third Republic, 260; using body, 148–51. See also specific caricatures La Caricature, xxi, xxiv; advertising in, 115; closing of, 74, 77; confiscations, 3, 14, 22, 24, 48n62; Le Corsaire on, 76; describing subscribers as collaborators, 16; final issue of, 250; founding of, 12; laughing tone of, 30; mission of, 17; motto of, xiii; pear sketches in, 24; prosecution of, 3, 48n62; readership of, 46n8; turning to oppositional paper, 49n87 Caricature and French Political Culture 1830–1848 (Kerr), xxvi La Caricature française, 74–75 “La Caricature politique sous La Monarchie de Juillet” (Blum), xxv carlist faction, 9 “Carlo Alberto,” 156

Index

Caron, Jean François, 71 Carrel, Armand, 177, 190–91 “The Case of the Red Flag,” 32 caution money, 13, 30, 50n117, 209; raising, 56; regulating, 74 Cavaignac, Godefroy, 8 Cavé, François, 109, 123n89 censorship, 103–7, 119; abolishment of, 46, 77; associations pledges to fight against, 57; under Bourbon Restoration, 76; Charter of 1830 abolishing, 11; education, 258; mockery of, xvi; opposition to, 106–7; Philipon retaliating against, 12–14; before publication, 37; reappearance of, xxiv; after Revolution of 1830, xiv; of Robert Macaire, 92; techniques of, 13; of theater, xxiii–xxiv; of thieves/killers, 110; of Vautrin, 108 La Charge, 5–6, 133; abandonment of, 6 charivari, 177, 258–59; avoiding, 195; celebrating, 195–96; Charter of 1830 and, 197–98; Coreilles, 199– 204; court ruling on, 195; crimes associated with, 189; critics of, 191; danger of, 199; deVauguyon, 204–6; ensuring social mores, 178; expansion of, 180; freedom of speech and, 192, 193–94; geographically specific nature of, 180, 215–16; giving voice to those with no formal way to express views, 194; great, 180; honor, 178, 206–12; increased visibility of, 179; and insulting one’s reputation, 189; interpretation of, 178; Jaubert, 197–99; July Monarchy as, 180; legality of, 189, 193; legitimacy of, 212; middle class and, 196–97; mob association of, 195; music of, 190; as necessary, 199; pamphlet, 199–204; political, 178, 189–206, 208; as popular show of force, 204; praise for, 212–14;

279

public disorder and, 192; public v. private life and, 193; punishment for, 198; recruiting for, 198; regulations, 212; representative government and, 181, 206; repression of, 191; republicanism and, 215; response to September Laws, 204–6; Rodière, 209–11; as sacred cause, 196; Sahlins on, 196–97; sanitizing, 212; social, 208; surveillance of, 178; Talleyrand, 189–95; trials, 189–95, 197–99, 207–11; updating, 191, 212; as voice of nation, 194 Le Charivari, xxi, xxiv, 37, 74; advertising in, 115; attempted regicide linked to, 70–73; circulation records, 36n8; confiscation of, 62–64; fines, 57–58; founding of, 12; prosecution of, 39; Robert Macaire lithographs in, 92; targeting, 63; trial, 40, 62–64; women and, 125–27, 126 Charles X, 8, 24, 76, 155, 186 Charter of 1815, 7 Charter of 1830, 7, 64, 89; article seven of, 190; censorship abolished by, 11; charivari and, 197–98; Philipon endorsing, 20; political expectations from, 7 Chateaubriand, F. A. R.: arrest of, 155; on Duchesse de Berry, 160, 163, 164; on Revolution of 1830, 8; on Robert Macaire, 85 cholera epidemic, 179, 183 citizen, 255; relationship to community, 40 “citizen-king,” 5, 64, 154; contractual nature of government under, 66 citizenship, xvi Civil Code 1804, 129, 139 civil society, xiii Clark, Anna, 89 class, 22; distinctions, 183; formation of, xx, 87; working, 38. See also bourgeoisie

280

Index

class, middle, 98–103; charivari and, 196–97; criticism defining, 87, 254; encouraging emergence of, xxi; excluded from politics, 88; formation of, 118; industrialization and, 88–89; Robert Macaire and, 118; slumming, 94; theater, 88–89 clean slate, July Monarchy as, 65 Collingham, H. A. C., xix La comédie humaine (Balzac), 131 commercial freedom, 5 commodity culture, 147, 148 community, 40 Conciergerie, 53, 158 confiscations, 55–59, 79, 259–60; advertisements, 72; La Caricature, 3, 14, 22, 24, 48n62; Le Charivari, 62–64; common documents, 56; describing caricature, 15–16; increase in, 55; of legitimist newspapers, 9; motives for, 62; of “Soap Bubbles,” 16 conspiracy, 5, 45; competing visions of, 65; defining/fortifying July Monarchy, 2; governments preoccupation with, 16; by horse, 36–37; against life of king, 8; “lithographic,” 7–15; lithographic satire as, 4; Philipon’s mock tirade against liberal, 18–19; police making up, 37; satire and, similarity in structure between, 15, 251; satire as, 44, 55, 79, 250; undermining effectiveness of term, 34–35 constitutional monarchy, 7, 64, 65, 66 Contre-fortune-bon-coeur, 96 Cormeilles, 199–204 Cormenin, Louis Marie de, 68–69 Le Corsaire: on La Caricature, 76; prosecution of, 48n62 Crebassan, Claude Charles, 56 criminal tribunals, 39 Cross of Honor, 207–9 Cruchet, Isadore, 39–40

cultural turn, xx Cuno, James B., xxx Daufresne, M., 202 Daumier, Honoré, 89–90, 100, 135, 139, 145, 149, 168, 221; imprisonment of, 28; Philipon petitioning on behalf of, 28–29; on resemblance, 26; trial of, 26–29 debate, xiii decentralization, 254; education, 258 defamation, 74 Degeorge, F., 196 Dejazzet, Mlle, 63 DeLabigne, Clément, 199, 200, 202–4 Delaporte (printer): as enemy of monarchy, 29; on printers, 28; trial, 26–28 democracy, xv–xvi, 248, 254; direct, 65–66 Dentu, Gabriel-André, 80n7 “Descent into the workshops of the Liberty of the press,” 37–38 Desnoyers, Louis, 70, 72; arrest warrants issued for, 70 Deutz, Simon, 156 deVauguyon, M., 204–6 Directory, xxiii dissent, right to, 40 divine right, demise of, xviii divorce, 129 “Les Divorceuses” series (Daumier), 168 Docteur Calybariat, 179–80, 212 domesticity, 152–53, 257 Donsel, Jean Marie, 56 Doody, Margaret, 114 Duchatel, Charles-Marie, 4; on caricatures, 44 Duclos, Valentin, 80n6 Dupin, A. M. J., 144 Dupont, M., 207–9 eclipse satire, 34–35 L’Ecole des Menages (Balzac), 115

Index

economics, xix; consumer, xx; crisis, 249; Robert Macaire and, 105–6; satire and, 105–6; women and, 142, 171n33 education, xiii, 41, 76, 77, 248; censorship, 258; civic, xvi, 66, 215; decentralization, 258; press freedom, 33; of women, 138 “The Eighteenth Brumaire of LouisNapolean” (Marx), 222 election law reform, 170n21 “Electoral Reform, or political discussion between Robert Macaire, proprietor, state advisor, deputy and colonel in the National Guard, and his friend, Bertrand,” 104 “Emotions parisiennes,” 145, 146 Enfantin, Prosper, 133 L’enfant trouvé, 106 equality, 22, 221, 235; social, xviii extremists, 32 factionalism, spirit of, 45 feminine: bourgeois ideals of, 145; men, xxiii, 137, 147, 168; as public spectacle, 125; as ridiculous, 130 La Femme libre, 133 “La femme libre, elle est trouvée,” 133–35, 134 fictionality, 65, 169n10 55e satire (Bastide), 83n70 Le Figaro, 37, 83n70; on “Mayeux,” 148 flag, 64 Forest Rites: The War of the Desmoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France (Sahlins), xxi, 216n3 Fortescue, Willi, xix Fourier, Charles, 135 Fourierism, 132, 227 fraud, 86 French Legion of Honor, 209–11 Frye, Northrup, xxvii Furet, François, xix, 250

281

“Gargantua,” 26–29, 27; goal of, 27; as test case, 29; threat of, 27 Garnier-Pagès, Etienne, 8, 41, 205; on jury, 69 Garrioch, David, xx Gauthier, Théophile, 96 Gazette des femmes, 139 La Gazette des tribunaux, 15–16, 40, 84n87, 211; on Daumier’s trial, 27–28; on Prud’hon, 59–60 gender, xx; boundaries, 127; cultural construction of, 127; disorder of bourgeois society, 148; division in public life, 144; images of, 132; redefining marketplace, 127; virtue, 147. See also feminine; men; women Gilbert-Martin, Charles, 78, 258 Gill, Andre, 260 Girardin, Delphine Gay de, 130 Gisquet, Henri-Joseph, 38 Goldstein, Robert, xxv, 76 Gozlan, Léon, 108 graffiti, 185–86 grain riots, 1 Grandville, J. J., 37–38 greed, 148 Griffin, Dustin, xxvii–xxviii Grogan, Susan, 129, 152–53 Grossetête, Jean-Baptiste, 80n7 grotesque, xvii–xviii, 240, 257 Guisquet, Henri, 72 Guizot, François, 144, 157; on women, 153 Hallays-Dabot, Victor, 111–12 Hanoosh, Michelle, 97 Harel, Charles-Jean, 108; bankruptcy of, 109 hawkers’ permits, 39 Haynes, Christine, 5 Heine, Heinrich, 76 Henri V, 9 “Hercules the conqueror,” 149–51, 150, 257

282

Index

Herhan, Louis-Etienne, 80n8 hierarchy, 106 Histoire du parti républicain 1814–1870 (Weill), xix homogeneity, power to insure, 40 honor code, 207; upholding, 211 Houssaye, Arsene, 85 Huart, Louis, 101, 103 Hugo, Victor, 184 Hunt, Lynn, 65, 169n10 impropriety, exposing, 160 individualism, 231, 235 industrialization, xx, 87; middle class and, 88–89; social effects of, 88 Les infidélités de Lisette, 92 institutions, xix intellectual history, xix “The Invisible Hand,” 60, 61; trial, 62 Jaique, M., 207 Jameson, Frederic, 229 Janin, Jules, 96, 99 Janvier, Eugene, 44 Jardin Turc, 69–70 Jaubert, M., 197–99 “Joseph Prudhomme,” 100 Journal des dames et des demoiselles, 132 Journal des debats, 60, 139 Journal pour rire, 138 judicial system, 67–73; turned into political theater, 67. See also assize court; criminal tribunals; jury; trials July Monarchy: as charivari, 180; conspiracy beginning/fortifying, 2; creation of, xix; criticism of, xvi; histories of, xix; legitimacy of, 45; Marx on, 222; street origins of, 177; visual culture of, xxi–xxii The July Monarchy: A Political History of France (Collingham), xix July Ordinances, xix jury, 67–73, 81n42; acquittal rate, 50n117, 67, 81n42; bias, 67; control

of, 42; critics of, 67; decisions in favor of printers, 11; demands for, 67; Garnier-Pagès on, 69; influence of, 20; as voice of nation, 68 juste milieu, 1–2, 86, 251, 258; end of, 214 Kerr, David S., xxvi, 70, 91, 247–48, 253 Krakovitch, Odile, 104 Kroen, Sheryl, xxi, xxii, 76, 244n5, 248 labor, 221; property as income produced without, 224 LaCapra, Dominick, 222 Lamarque (General), 8, 47n18, 78 Lamartine, Alphonse de, xviii Landes, Joan, 129 language: Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, on, 231–32; of Robert Macaire, 103–4; in What Is Property?, 229 Laqueur, Thomas, 89 Leconte, Claude Charles, 58 legitimacy, 64, 248; of charivari, 212; future of, 162; of July Monarchy, 45; of public opinion, 41; question of, 7 legitimist(s), 2; newspapers, 9; surveillance of, 9 Legouvé, Ernest, 139 Lemaître, Frédérick, 89–90, 108–9; praise for, 90; sabotaging Vautrin, 109 libellistes, xxiii liberalism, 5, 45, 253; republican, 86 La Libérée, ou cinq de surveillance, 104 Liberté, François, xxxivn42 Litanies of saints of the ministries and of France under the Just milieu, 83 literacy, 132 lithographic techniques, 127, 247 Louis-Philippe, xix, xxvi, 64, 149–51, 150; authority of, 22; feminization of, xxiii, 168; manipulating political opponents, 1; Marx on, 222; on satire, 253; sovereignty of, 7, 66;

Index

symbolic importance of, 22; title of, 64. See also “citizen-king”; regicide Louis XI, 190 Louis XVI, xxvii, 24 Louis XVIII, xviii Lowe, David, 113 Lucie-Smith, Edward, 97 Lyon uprisings, 38, 150 La Maison Aubert, 11, 46n8 Malthus, Thomas, 228 Marchais, André, 58 Margadant, Jo Burr, xx, xxiii, 61, 89, 163, 168, 244n5 Marie Christine (Queen of Spain), 138 Marrast, Armand, 56 marriage, 147; of Duchesse de Berry, 160 Marrinan, Michael, 131 “Marseillaise,” 193 Marx, Karl, 222 Mason, Laura, xxiii masquerade balls, 187 Mayeux, 32, 80n7; prosecution of, 48n62 “Mayeux,” 102, 147–48; Le Figaro on, 148 Mazarin, Jules, 81n32 McCormick, John, 92 McCreery, Cindy, 128 media, 112–15; crossing, 112; increased control over, 59–60. See also specific media men: body and virtue of, 148–51; feminized, xxiii, 137, 147, 168; materialism of, 147; satire of, 144–51, 257 Le Mérite des demmes (Legouvé), 139 Merriman, John, xix Michelet, Jules, xviii, 167 military state, 185 ministerial reconciliation, 100 Aux Ministres, premiere saiyre (Bastide), 56 Mizan, Antoine Raphael Gilbert, 57 La Mode, 138

283

“Moeurs conjugales,” 135–37 La Monarchie de Juillet (Vigier), xix monarchy: constitutional, 7, 64, 65, 66; criticism of, xv; Delaporte as enemy of, 29. See also July Monarchy Le Moniteur universel, 9 Monnier, Joseph, 98, 116 Montulle, M., 211 The Moral, Civil, Political and Literary History of the Charivari (Docteur Calybariat), 179–80 Moses, Claire Goldberg, 132–33 “Mousse de juillet.” See “Soap Bubbles” “Le mouvement, le juste milieu, la résistance,” 1–2, 3 “M. Parterrieu-Lafosse, Louis-Philippe, and the Conspiracy of the Horses,” 36–37 Le musée pour rire (Huart), 101, 103 music, 104–5; charivari, 190; debate over, 194. See also specific songs Le Nain Jaune, xxiv Napoleon, 77; parodies, 91; reducing number of daily newspapers, xxiii Le National, 37 newspapers, 112–14; duels, 159, 174n82; editorial publicity section, 112–13; fiction of impartiality in, 113; fragmentation in, 113; legitimist, seizures of, 9; Napoleon reducing number of daily, xxiii; police controlling, 70; subscriptions, 43, 113; time perception and, 113; women’s, 138. See also press, freedom of Nord, Philip, xiv On the Celebration of the Sabbath (Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph), 234 order: bourgeoisie gender, 148; charivari and, 192; family, 133; freedom of speech v., 5; women threatening social, 135, 151

284

Index

Orleanists, 2 L’Ours, 98–99, 213 Le Pacte de famine, 112 painting, 131 Palais de Justice, 213 Paris uprisings, 38, 150 parliamentary government, 66 party politics, xix Pastoureau, M. Daniel-Théoltime, 163 The Patriot, 201 Le Patriote, 57 The Patriot of July, 209 Paulson, Ronald, xvii–xviii, xxvii; on caricature, 97 pear sketches, 23, 24, 33, 76, 253 Peignot, Gabriel. See Docteur Calybariat “Le Pelerin,” 10 Perier, Casimir, 144, 183 Persil, Charles, 73; on caricature, 43, 173n65; Philipon’s open letter to, 13–14; on streets, 185 Petrey, Sandy, xxvi, 65, 169n10, 253 Peyron, M., 32 Peytel, Louis Sebastian, 33–34; Balzac on, 84n87; execution of, 75–76; inviting regicide, 33–34 Philipon, Charles, xxiv, 11, 46n9, 56, 57, 78, 98, 106–7, 116; acquittal of, 20, 25; appraisal of work, 250; arrest warrants issued for, 70; audience reaction to, 19; on caricature, xiii; carnival prank, 16; charged with “injury to the person of the king,” 12, 22, 24; closing arguments of, 20; early works of, 78; endorsing Charter of 1830, 20; “entry into politics” of, 16; imprisonment of, xxiv, 24; mock tirade against liberal conspiracy, 18–19; “no effect” argument of, 29; open letter to Persil, 13–14; petitioning on behalf of Daumier, 28–29; presenting “project of an expia-pear monument,” 24–25;

prosecution of, 3, 48n62; questioning resemblance law, 18; on resemblance, 24; on satire, xiii; scholarly focus of, xxv; star of own defense, 18; surveillance of, 79; trial of, 15–25 phrygian bonnet, 1 Physiologie de la poire (Peytel), 33–34, 75 “Physiologies,” 98–99 Piefort, François, 80n6 Piffard Droldeton, 101 Pilbeam, Pamela, xix, 65–66, 249–50 Place de la Revolution, 24–25 police, 259–60; brutality, 188; control of press, 70; hypervigilant, 188; making up conspiracies, 37; report on behavior of Aubert, 78–79; special attention on satire, 56; street satire and, 186–88. See also surveillance “The police hold the thread of the plot,” 1, 2, 34 political tracts, xiv Pollock, Griselda, 131 Popkin, Jeremy, xx–xxi The Popularization of Images: Visual Culture under the July Monarchy (ten-Doesschate Chu and Weisberg), xxii Poutret de Mauchamp, MarieMadeleine, 138 poverty, 226–28 press, freedom of, xvi, 29, 251; education, 33; end to limited, xix; expected, 45; governmental subversion of, 13; limits of, xxviii. See also newspapers Press, Revolution and Social Identities in France, 1830–1835 (Popkin), xx–xxi press crime, 16 press law forbidding representation of king, 12 printers, 11; Delaporte on, 28; freedom of, 28; jury decision in favor of, 11;

Index

legal formalities required of, 56; signature, 104 property, 259; abolishing, 224, 235; defined as income produced without work, 224; delusion of, 223; law and, 233; owners, 130; Proudhon, J.-B.-V. on, 234; as theft, 221–22. See also What Is Property (Proudhon, PierreJoseph) proportional tax, 226 protectionist industries, 88 Proudhon, J.-B.-V., 233, 234; on property, 234 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 221–24, 234, 259; acquittal of, 240–41; on language, 231–32; on professors, 233; reputation of, 238; trial of, 239–41, 243 Prudhomme, 100 Prud’hon, 59–60, 60 public opinion, xv, 5, 194, 259; debate over, 194; on Duchesse de Berry, 157, 160, 163–64; legitimacy of, 41 Punch, 77 Pyat, Félix, 111 “quasi-republican institutions,” xv “Quelques caricaturistes français” (Baudelaire), 76 Quintero, Ruben, xvi La Quotidienne, 155 railroads, 88 “reading between the lines,” 78, 226, 248, 258 “Record of the Big Orchestra Charivari given in honor of M. FosseauColombel, Battalion Chief of the National Guard of the Batignolles” (Dupont), 207–9 Reddy, William, xx, 207, 220n103 refined mimicry, 94–95 reform banquets, 249

285

regicide, 24–25; attempted, 53–54, 69–70, 75, 237; Le Charivari linked to, 70–73; Duchatel on, 4; increased attempts at, 6; Peytel inviting, 33–34; satire and, linking, 4, 25–26, 44 “Reign of Equality,” 147 Reign of Terror, xviii, 183, 192 religious mockery, 9, 187 Rémusat, Charles-François, 108 “Replastering,” 21, 22, 24 representative government, 181, 248; charivari and, 206 republicanism, 247, 254; charivari and, 215; clothing, 183, 214; historical examination of, xix, 249; Modern French, xviii; What Is Property? as reminder of radical, 231 Republicanism in Nineteenth-Century France 1814–1871 (Pilbeam), xix republican liberalism, 86 The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Nord), xiv republican motherhood, 154 “republic of virtue,” 129 resemblance, 49n69, 253; Daumier on, 26; pear sketches and, 23, 24; Philipon on, 24; Philipon questioning law on, 19; political loophole of, 14; proving identity, 24; room for error in, 13 Le Revenant, 159; prosecution of, 48n62 Revolutionary France 1770–1880 (Furet), xix Revolution of 1789, 65, 180, 230 Revolution of 1830, 65, 155, 167; censorship after, xiv; Chateaubriand on, 8; political compromise surrounding, 8; public memory of, 213; technological advances after, xiv Revolution of 1848, xvi, 77; catalyst of, 249–50 La Revue Republicaine, 72 Richard Coeur-d’Eponge (Balzac), 109 Richard Darlington, 101

286

Index

Le Riche et le pauvre, 112 rights, limiting, 64 Robert Macaire, 102, 117, 221; ban on, 106; censorship of, 92; Chateaubriand on, 85; critics on, 85; as cultural artifact, 96; economics and, 105–6; language of, 103–4; lithographs in Le Charivari, 92; message of, 95–96; middle-class audience of, 118; mocking authority, 110; opening of, 85, 87, 93; plot of, 93; popularity of, 94; reception of, 118; suggesting crime brings financial gain, 94 Rodière, Jean Pierre, 209–11 Le Roi S’amuse (Hugo), 184 Rouvroy, Claude Henri de, 133 royal authority, constructed nature of, xxvi royal inviolability, 36; freedom of expression v., 64–67 Sahlins, Peter, xxi, 179, 216n3; on charivari, 196–97 Saint-Divine-Worship-Thiers, 107 Saint Germain L’auxerrois uprising, 9 Saint-Simonianism, 132, 133 Sand, George, 130, 131, 132, 136–37 satire: as art v. politics, 30–38; bourgeoisie embracing, 116; classical definitions of, xvi–xvii; as conspiracy, 4, 44, 55, 79, 259; conspiracy and, similarity in structure between, 15, 251; controlling, 17; controversy surrounding, xv; definitional dilemma of, xvi–xvii; eclipse, 34–35; economics and, 105–6; hidden meaning, 14; for intellectual endeavor, 232; as litmus test, 28; Louis-Philippe on, 253; of men, 144–51, 257; negative political impact of, xxvii; as open-ended, xvi; paradox of, 11–15; Philipon on, xiii; political acceptability of, xxiii; as political threat, 3, 26, 30;

on popular culture, 40–44; positive political impact of, xxvii; power of, 20, 64–67, 253; psychological effect of, 66; regicide and, linking, 4, 25–26, 44; social, 97, 255; special police attention on, 56; in Third Republic, 260; trials as new venues for, 16; villains in, 110; in What Is Property?, 224–32; of women, 132– 44, 257. See also specific satires Satire, A Critical Reintroduction (Griffin), xxvii–xxviii satire, political: banning, xv, xxiii, 3, 4, 31, 41, 97, 145; court defining, 6–7, 18, 31, 45, 55, 64, 252, 254; debating, 15; right to, 17–18; turn away from, 75 satire, street, 186–89; civic education of, 215; police and, 186–88; as safety valve, 186–87 The Satirical Gaze: Prints of Women in Eighteenth-Century England (McCreery), 128 Scott, Joan, 129 Second Republic, xiv, 249–50 self-criticism, 86, 98, 254 September Laws, xxviii, 4, 6–7, 41, 46, 53, 54, 73–78, 101, 253; charivari response to, 204–5 Sewell, William, xix Sièyes, Abbé, 223, 230 “Soap Bubbles,” 11–12, 12, 14; confiscation of, 16 social estrangement, 100 socialists, 249 social mobility, 98, 256 Société des driots de l’homme, 38, 58, 70 Société des saisons, 249 sovereignty, 225, 230; of LouisPhilippe, 7, 66 speech, freedom of, xv, 208, 254; charivari and, 192, 193–94; order v., 5; royal inviolability v., 64

Index

Stallybrass, Peter, 94–95 stamp tax, 39, 80n8 state security, crimes against, 38, 42 Stern, Daniel, 132 “the streets”: as art topic, 184; as civic spaces, 182–83; controlling, 183; danger in, 181, 182, 185; defining limits of civilization, 181; health hazards in, 183; as ideological space, 188; July Monarchy origins in, 177; perceptions of, 181–86; Persil on, 185; political jokes about, 214; reading, 185–86; right to be in, 182; surveillance of, 187; Trollope on paving, 183. See also satire, street Sugier, M., 32 surveillance, 57, 77; of Aubert, 79; of charivaris, 178; justification for increasing, 59; mockery of, 35; of Philipon, 79; planning strategies for, 8–9; of political organizations, 39; of streets, 187; theater, 75. See also police “Sylphide,” 190 Talleyrand, Charles de, 189–95 “Taspin,” 106 Le Temps, 76 ten-Doesschate Chu, Petra, xxii Terdiman, Richard, 113 “The Testament of Robert Macaire,” 104 “That’s my wife,” 139–41, 141 theater, xiv, 86, 221–22; bourgeois, 87, 95; caricaturing patrons of, 101–2; challenging form of, 114, 117; evolution of, 89–93; geographic division of, 117; high v. low, 117; judicial system turned into, 67; melodrama, 92, 114; middle class, 88–89; Napoleon establishing censorship of, xxiii–xxiv; politics, 91; repertoire of, 90; stage crimes, 90; state-sponsored, 91;

287

surveillance, 75; violence, 91; virtue in, 92–93. See also specific theater Théâter Porte Saint Martin, 89, 107; closing of, 109 Le Théâtre considéré comme moyen révolutionnaire, 112 theology, 225 Théorie de la dimarche (Balzac), 98 “There Are Two Excellent Things in England: The Jury and Flannel,” 68 Thiers, Adolphe, 156, 211 Third Republic, xiv; caricature in, 260; satire in, 260 Thompson, Victoria, 94, 127, 147 Tilly, Charles, 179, 216n3 Tissot, Jacques, 237 Le Tombinoscope, 260 tour-guides, 213 Tracy, Destutt de, 227 transparency, xxiii, 31, 154 Treatise on the Domain of Property (Proudhon, J.-B.-V.), 234 Treatise on the Rights of Usufruct (Proudhon, J.-B.-V.), 233 trials, 3, 15–29, 254; Aubert, 26–28; charivari, 189–95, 197–99, 207–11; Le Charivari, 40, 62–64; of Daumier, 26–29; Delaport, 26–28; “The Invisible Hand,” 62; as new venues for satire, 16; Philipon, 15–25; of Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 239–41, 243; as public forum, 40; reactions at, 25; recording, 15, 25, 42. See also La Gazette des tribunaux Trinchant, 209 Trollope, Frances, 128, 182, 184–85; on paving streets, 183 universal suffrage, right to, 168 “unmasking,” 127, 151–53, 258 Vautrin (Balzac), 107–12, 116, 117, 122n76; ban of, 109; censorship of, 108; crime in, 110; humor

288

Index

through subterfuge in, 111; Lemaître sabotaging, 109; mocking authority, 110; opening of, 107 Vendée, 156 Victoria (Queen of England), 138 Viennet, Jean-Ponce Guillaume, 192 Vigier, Philippe, xix “Violence, Satire and Social Types in the Graphic Art of the July Movement” (Cuno), xxv visual culture, xxi–xxii le Voleur, 84n87 vote, right to, 88; women denied, 168 Warning to the Proprietors (Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph), 238 Wechsler, Judith, xxv Weill, Georges, xix Weisberg, Gabriel, xxii, 94 What Is Property? (Proudhon, PierreJoseph), 221–24, 259; central arguments of, 235; double project of, 242; historians on, 222; language in, 229, 230; planning, 238; reception of, 236; rejection of, 236; reminder of radical republicanism, 231; satire in, 224–32; as scholarship or threat, 237; summary of, 224

What Is the Third Estate? (Sièyes), 223, 230 “Which holes shall we plug?” 213 White, Allon, 94–95 women: Le Charivari and, 125–27, 126; dangerous, 125; Duchesse de Berry as example of weakness of, 162; defeminized, 137; denied right to vote, 168; disloyalty of, 139; economics and, 142, 171n33; education of, 138; emancipation of, 135; excluded from public, 129; financial independence of, 133; Guizot on, 153; hidden “truth” about, 135; of ideas as deviants, 136; as imposters, 152, 257; leading revolutions astray, 168; materialism of, 147; newspapers, 138; political role of, 167, 257; power of, 152; satire of, 132–44, 257; savage, 127, 130, 135; scantily clad, 128; sexuality of, 138, 151, 164; threatening social order, 135, 151; virtue, 139; visibility of, 128; writers, 130, 137, 152, 171n33. See also feminine

About the Author

Amy Wiese Forbes is an associate professor of history and director of European studies at Millsaps College, where she teaches modern European history and women’s and gender history. She received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1999. She served as a fellow at the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture and as adjunct professor of history at Rutgers University and Monmouth University before joining the faculty of Millsaps. Among her publications are “‘Let’s Add the Stomach’: Satire, Absurdity and July Monarchy Politics in Proudhon’s What Is Property” (2001) and “The Lithographic Conspiracy: How Satire Framed Liberal Political Debate in Nineteenth-Century France” (2008).

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