It wasn’t long after gunmen slaughtered the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo, and supporters of free speech around the world rose to support the French satirical magazine, that an uneasiness seeped into the discussion. Those cartoons of the prophet Muhammad: goggle-eyed, beak-nosed, stereotypically turbaned. Charlie may be many things—irreverent, irrepressible—but it is certainly not subtle.
“So you want to meddle with the press!” by Honore Daumier.
What it is, from the perspective of art history, is French. In the MIA collection are a great number of French cartoons from the 1700s and 1800s, some more subtle than others, all of them lampooning the powerful, the witless, the controlling. In fact, the MIA has more than 3,500 caricatures by Honoré Daumier, one of the largest such collections in the world. Most were published in Le Charivari, a slim satirical periodical that lasted more than a hundred years, until 1937, and were once owned by the great French actress Sarah Bernhardt. They were acquired from her estate in 1924 and gifted to the MIA the same year.
Among the Daumier lithographs is the one above of Count Auguste-Hilarion de Kératry, a minor politician and major dandy—an irresistible target. Daumier portrayed him with bulging, half-closed eyes and horrible teeth. Not subtle. Then, as now, not everyone appreciated such caricatures—and some were in a position to do something about it. Another Daumier cartoon, titled “So you want to meddle with the press!”, shows a heroic printer crushing a bejowled would-be censor in his press: King Louis-Phillippe.
Soon enough, the censors got their way. Daumier’s 1835 cartoon “So this is all we got ourselves killed for!” decries the lack of liberty that followed the Revolution of 1830—it would be his last political caricature for many years. Censorship laws enacted later that year restricted the freedom of the press and prohibited imagery that attacked the regime.
Daumier’s 1835 cartoon “So this is all we got ourselves killed for?” depicting disappointed martyrs of the Revolution of 1830.
Recent provocations from Margaret Cho and even Neil DeGrasse Tyson have sparked debate over the distinction between humor and hate, meaningful criticism and just plain mean. But to cartoonists from the line of Daumier, that’s not the point. To them, power is inherently corrupting—an assumption that led to outright cynicism during the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, with cartoonists leading the complaints. Prison will do that to you: Daumier was incarcerated for printing an image of the king.
Nothing is more grotesque, they suggest, than restricting expression, prohibiting imagery by force of decree or guns. To prohibit is to control, and the controlling powers—no matter their reasons or backgrounds—will always find themselves within the cartoonists’ crosshairs.