Chapter 19 Daumier and Replacing the King’s Body Oliver Watts Abstract This chapter follows a politico-theological approach to the law, which also includes among other trappings of theology, icons. The law’s image is based on command, authority and sovereignty and relates to the order of the Lacanian big other, or the symbolic order. Subjects, however, respond to this symbolic order in different ways: some may hysterically call out to be recognised and some may follow blindly. This chapter looks at art in early modernism when the authority of the law and particularly sovereign power is still effective. We will explore early modernism as the original attack against the State’s right to make and control images. On the cusp of monarchical control and the birth of democratic freedom, a particular challenge was mounted by Honoré Daumier’s paintings and caricatures. His battle and jailing for his terrible indignity against the king’s body marks the birth of an emancipated space for the modernist artist (outside the power of the court). His freedom is guaranteed from some other sovereign body outside the frame. This chapter suggests a new approach to the modernist canon and the avant-garde. It suggests that modern art’s seminal attack was an attack against the sovereign (monarchical) effigy and its replacement by the republican effigy or Marianne. In this way even in democracy the effigy is persistent; democracy was still imaged in relation to the monarch and an alternative sovereign body. This is no longer a riot, this is a revolution!1 The trouble with this country is that there are many men who, like you, imagine to themselves that there was a revolution in France. No Monsieur, there was not a revolution; there was but a simple change in the person of the Head of State.2 Auguste Marmont, Duke of Ragusa, major general of the Royal Guard in a note to Charles X during the 1830 July Revolution. 2 Casimir Périer to Odilon Barrot 1831, quoted in Petrey (1991, 65). 1 O. Watts (*) Department of Theoretical Enquiry, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, Kirribilli, 2061, Australia e-mail: oliver.watts@sydney.edu.au 421 A. Wagner and R.K. Sherwin (eds.), Law, Culture and Visual Studies, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9322-6_19, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 422 O. Watts Fig. 19.1 Honoré Daumier, Gargantua, 1831, 30 cm × 21 cm, lithograph 19.1 Finding the Effigy in the Modernist Canon Honoré Daumier moved art inexorably away from the royal court towards everyday life and social themes. In responding to the common man (the peasant in a train carriage, the worker) and by pillorying the lawyers, aristocrats and academician snobs, art moves from a courtly, State-sanctioned purpose, to bourgeois autonomy. The artist fights for freedom, and the ‘halo of martyrdom’ was assured by Daumier’s trial and sentencing for depicting the king, Louis-Philippe, unfavourably in Gargantua, 1831 (Fig. 19.1). By placing Daumier on the limen of the new regime and the new, Daumier’s art relates to the revolutionary shift into modernity. The early period of Daumier’s career coincides with the July Revolution that created a tabula rasa upon which everyone tried to write their own ideology. It was an extremely volatile and unstable period with many competing political interests. Daumier was merely one of many gaoled and censored for questioning, through images and text, the king’s legitimacy (see Goldstein 1989). Beyond that he was merely one of a large popular movement against the Orléanist monarchy, which crumbled in 1848. Daumier’s trial will be used to delve into something beside his own legacy of modernist rebellion. The archaic charge of lèse majesté is the crime against the defamation of an effigy; it cannot exist without the belief in the ‘second body’ of the king. Early modernism is revisited as a response to this effigy as defamed by Daumier to create a republican polemic. In this extended revolutionary period the image was of primary propagandistic 19 Daumier and Replacing the King’s Body 423 importance to both the king and the artist. The king too had his artists, and there was a fight to see whose images would prevail. 19.2 Riot and Revolution in the July Monarchy The substantial modernist blind spot in the reception of Daumier’s work between 1830 and 1835 is that it relates to revolution not riot. Daumier’s work is often determined from a modern viewpoint as a satirical critique against the government in an effort to petition for political change. However, this work – on the threshold of modernism – aimed for the complete disavowal and revolutionary overthrow of a governmental system. The period of 1830–1835 is characterised by a struggle for legitimacy. Louis-Philippe had to legitimate his accession to the throne and continually appease competing ideological positions. His reign was one of great tension and consensus building between 1830 and 1848 (Collingham 1988). The king’s position was Orléanist constitutionalism, which became a desperately centrist position between monarchical and republican interests. The monarchical legitimists believed that only a Bourbon should rightfully accede the throne and championed a return to ancien régime tradition. This position had been greatly undermined by the July Revolution and the uprising against Charles X and his repressive, autocratic rule. The republican side broadly includes the Orléanist constitutionalists (the resistance party) but more usually refers to the Movement Party that was more radically republican and wanted to see the overthrow of Louis-Philippe (see Harsin 2002).3 The period transformed France into a modern capitalist economy. There was a consolidation of the power of the middle class and the rise of industry. This created a popular political consciousness and press power. It also created the shift towards a modern autonomous art, brought about by the middle class alongside the Statesanctioned academic art of the Salon. The shift from monarchy to a republic was ongoing and had begun with Napoleon, who Foucault sees as embodying this shift: ‘The importance, in historical mythology, of the Napoleonic character probably derives from the fact that it is at the point of junction between the monarchical, ritual exercise of sovereignty and the hierarchical, permanent exercise of indefinite discipline’ (Foucault 1975, 217). Underlying these regime changes was the effect of the 1789 French Revolution, but it was not until 1877 that the monarchy was totally overthrown and the crown jewels sold and melted down (Furet 1992, 510–511). The July Monarchy tried to maintain a synthesis of both the monarchical past and republican ideals, in what was called the juste milieu (the middle way), but in the end increased polarisation between the two positions leads to the overthrow of the July Monarchy (Fortescue 2005).4 There was an even more radical fringe the Montagnards. Fortescue sees the failure of the July Monarchy as the inability to reach a consensus. As a matter of interest, Fortescue, contra Furet, sees 1848 as the end of the monarchy because Napoleon III was forced to give away so many absolutist, monarchical rights. 3 4 424 O. Watts Daumier and the satirical lithographic journals represent an example of the incessant republican questioning of the legitimacy of the regime. Buoyed by their role in the overthrow of Charles X, their revolutionary power was unquestionable (Kenney and Merriman 1991; Cuno 1985; Kerr 2000). This ideological positioning underpins any discussion of art in this period, for it was one important part of the juridical push to create belief and legitimacy in the regime. Revolution and democratic ideals drive the gradual retreat of the aristocracy to the rising bourgeois and the birth of the modern state (Rosanvallon 2007). Francois Furet explains the 1848 Revolution in these terms: This bastard monarchy had never found its national footing: it was too monarchic to be republican, and too republican to be monarchic. This was evidenced by the new dynasty’s inability to entrench itself as the founder of legitimacy despite all the efforts it had made to reunify national history to its advantage… Instead of terminating the French Revolution… it had given it fresh vitality. (1992, 385–386) Following Furet, Pierre Rosanvallon recently theorised the import of this gradual shift from monarchy to republic during the nineteenth century (Rosanvallon 2006). Rosanvallon astutely draws the mystical and pseudo-religious underpinnings of democracy.5 This void was held by a unified, absolute and undivided sovereignty where the individual will was replaced by a transcendent ‘common will’. It is my contention that this particular conception of democracy in France sees a direct transference of the king’s effigy, representing absolute sovereignty, to the profusion of the Marianne as a representative body of the republic (Ribner 1993). Both these ‘second bodies’ find themselves on the same page, though in tension, in Daumier’s lithographs. 19.3 The Middle Way: Steering a Course Between Two Poles At the beginning of the July Monarchy, on August 7 the Charter of 1814 was revised and called the Charter of 1830. It was imposed by the nation on the king who then swore to uphold the Charter and accept his title ‘King of the French’, the Citizen King (Beik 1965). From the very beginning of his reign, there were many contradictions. Although there was no coronation, at the inauguration Louis-Philippe dressed in seventeenth-century costume so as to directly recall Louis XIV, to whom LouisPhilippe bore more than a passing resemblance (see Boime 1987, 302). LouisPhilippe had been chosen as a hopeful consensus builder between both sides of the revolution. According to the wishes of the allies, the Bourbon monarchy was restored in the figure of Louis XVIII by Talleyrand at the Congress of Vienna Rosanvallon, like Pierre Legendre, is influenced by Claude Lefort on this score and sees the ‘unknowability’ of democracy as a primary characteristic. Rosanvallon follows Lefort and Francois Furet (a mentor of Rosanvallon) in seeing democracy in Rousseau’s terms as a unified popular sovereignty, which replaces the absolute sovereignty of the king. 5 19 Daumier and Replacing the King’s Body 425 between 1814 and 1815. He agreed however to rule under a Charter drawn up by the allies which allowed for a parliament, preventing the return to absolute rule. The freedom of the press, freedom of religion and habeas corpus were also assured. At his death, his brother Charles X became king. Unlike Louis XVIII, who had no coronation, the spectacle of Charles X’s coronation was purposively linked to the ancien régime. Indeed the 1824 coronation even included the laying of the king’s hands to heal the sick, in a resurrection of the divine right (Jackson 1984; Bloch 1973). He explained his monarchical position with the statement, ‘I had rather chop wood than reign after the fashion of the King of England’. Although the reign started favourably, with freedom of the press and amnesties for political prisoners, the reign of Charles X became more conservative. Between 1829 and 1830 the Prince de Polignac programmed changes reverting back to before the revolution, giving more power to the church and aristocracy. Parliament opposed the changes, so Charles X dissolved parliament. When the dust settled, the new Parliament was weighted more heavily against Polignac. Clutching at straws, Charles X passed the Ordinances of St Cloud (1830), which tightened press controls, took away voting privileges from the majority and dissolved parliament again; the aim was to destroy rule by the Charter of the Allies. The Revolution of 1830 broke out, and events were moving to a republic when Thiers suggested an alternative monarch from a younger Bourbon line, Louis-Philippe. So instead of a republic, Louis-Philippe was the compromise: a constitutional monarch. Louis-Philippe is an example of a notable and effective strategy that has been called the middle way or the juste milieu. Its aim was to keep the bourgeoisie on side and to stave off revolution. It was an important strategy in the nineteenth century in France and in other European nations, including England (Starzinger 1991). Francois Guizot, Louis-Philippe’s primary advisor, expressed the strategy as one that ‘rejects absolute principles, extreme principles; it is adaptable to the diverse needs of society; it manages to stay abreast of ongoing social changes, and in turn engages in combat whenever necessary’ (Boime 1987, 272). Another contemporary source from Scotland saw the connection between England and France’s new king in supportive light: The cause of peace in Europe and of good government in France is staked on the stability of the throne of Louis-Philippe. The intermediate position which his government has taken up between two irreconcilable extremes is precisely identical with the intermediate position at present occupied by the administration of Earl Grey. (Quoted in Starzinger 1991, 6) This chapter relies on the assertion that these two sides can never be fully conflated. Lafayette at the time tended to agree: ‘To say the truth France likes not the juste milieu because she knows not juste milieu between the ancient and the new dynasty… – between the liberty and the censorship of the press – between the freedom and the monopoly of commerce…France thinks, in truth, that juste milieu means nothing when applied to questions of actual policy’ (Lafayette 1833, 317). The split between the republic and the monarchy characterises France’s approach to democracy. Both positions countered the other with an uncompromising absolute, the king or the republic, respectively. 426 19.4 O. Watts Lacan, Art and the Attacks on the Master This ideological battling is well expressed through the Lacanian idea of the master signifier and how it quilts meaning. As both ideologies are based on a transcendental other, the working of this master signifier fits strongly within the master discourse. The master rules as an absolute authority. To make the situation even clearer, the Revolution of 1830 provides a point from which no master signifier can yet claim total legitimacy. The starting point is the anomie of revolution, a vacuum of power or the violent foundation of the law. In this way a revolution is a violent breach, a suspension of law. In Lacanian terminology a revolution is an ‘act’. As Rex Butler asks: ‘Is the act the passage between two different symbolic orders or between two different states of the same symbolic order? Or is it, on the contrary what founds the symbolic order, but what must be covered over or effaced by it?’ (2005, 67). It is Žižek who suggests the act and the master signifier are intertwined in a ‘constitutive way’, where the master signifier is ‘being’ and the act is a ‘becoming’. The act opens up a space of potentiality through a complete cut in the symbolic field. For Žižek the French Revolution is such an act, and we have already argued that this act still haunts the July Monarchy (Zizek 2000, 136–137). The very designation of the July Revolution implies this event cannot be explained as mere knowledge but is a subjective proposition; it remains on the plain of the Lacanian (Symbolic) Real, which cannot be symbolised as knowledge. The peace treaty, including the inauguration of Louis-Philippe, is the beginning of the symbolic sublimation of this violence into something sociable and acceptable, which represses the violence of this founding in revolution. It is the beginning of the necessary ideological work so that the ‘becoming’ of the act turns to the ‘being’ of the master signifier. Louis-Philippe tried to turn himself into an all-encompassing point de capiton (as master signifier, the signifier with no signified); he emptied himself out as a signifier to become all things. The Citizen King attempted to be both a modern citizen and an ancien régime king, assuming the labels of revolution, liberty, freedom, democracy as well as those of stability, tradition, legitimacy and authority. In many political arenas, and especially in England and Germany, this process was very successful (see Sperber 2005). As Žižek notes, only by emptying the master signifier of all meaning can it most efficiently quilt the field of signifiers. Louis-Philippe’s aim was to elicit belief from all sides. Readings of Daumier’s art, and that of other radical lithographers, have not fully addressed their relationship to these ideological processes. The most common reading sees Daumier as already ‘modern’ in what amounts to a circular definition. Daumier is on the cusp of the modern and represents a threshold in his mode of representation. Under the historicity of the four discourses, modernism is the gradual overtaking of the master discourse by the university and hysterical discourses (Zizek 2006, 298–299). To summarise, for Lacan the university discourse is the movement towards the disciplinary society, where scientific knowledge becomes the ruling force (Boucher 2006, 274). The hysteric’s discourse is the parallel rise of individualistic capitalism where the individual is the driver rather than overarching traditional authority. Although Lacan’s matrix of the four discourses suggests all modes coexist in tension, there is this historical underpinning. 19 Daumier and Replacing the King’s Body 427 Daumier is a good example of an artist, on the cusp of modernity, who acted in a few modes. The common reading of Daumier is influenced by the university discourse, where his lithographs ‘show’ the corruption of power. They declare the cruelty of the judge, the poverty of the poor and the nepotism of the king. In this reading Daumier is the declarative rebellious artist who depicts power for what it is. A broader picture can be drawn through the master discourse, which sees Daumier’s work as toying with the effigy. Here effigy implies the sacred presence of the king in the image, rather than merely a representation – a premodern belief in the power of the king’s image to embody the ‘king effect’. It questioned the authority of the king’s effigy to represent France and kept the alternative image of the republic in play in order to render the king’s effigy as illegitimate. In this sense, Daumier’s art between 1830 and 1835 constituted a violent act and not merely a riotous protest. Instead of seeing 1830 as the birth of the July Monarchy, it is important to remember that it was still a period of flux and that Louis-Philippe’s regime was under constant pressure from republican and legitimist interests. The period 1830–1835 was in effect an extension of the revolutionary period, a period of becoming rather than of being. If the master signifier is used to sublimate the founding laws, in this period no master signifier could definitively finish or sublimate the revolutionary phase. The art of caricaturists, such as Philipon and Daumier, can be seen here as Lacanian Acts, as an extension of the revolution, because they attempted to problematise the king’s legitimacy and keep that legitimacy open to questioning. As Furet suggests, it was the spirit of the French Revolution that pervaded this republican political movement, and it is this authority that Daumier draws on to contrast the republic and the constitutional monarchy. State reaction to Daumier and the other lithographers, and the popular uprising they spearheaded, was violent and efficient. This was because what Daumier and the others were suggesting was nothing short of total upheaval. Within the master discourse, Daumier is willing, like Hegel’s slave, to risk his life in a struggle for mastery and domination. Although Louis-Philippe wins the struggle (at least until 1848), this does not diminish 1830–1835 as an important site of ideological struggle. To be sure, the king’s reforms were popular, and the republicans did poorly in the elections of 1834. After 1835 and the attempted assassination of the king, the September Laws were harsh and thorough, and Louis-Philippe was finally able to exert enough control through the modern censorship laws to quash any dissent. There were to be no political cartoons at all between 1835 and 1848 in the Philipon journal Le Charivari, and La Caricature was closed in 1835 (Hanoosh 1992, 115). The virulence of the State response shows the battle was not merely fought in the arena of facts, but between two alternative and possible masters. 19.5 Daumier, Lèse Majesté and the Birth of Modernity Two famous trials can be reassessed in relation to this understanding of the art of the period. Both published in 1831, the first relates to Charles Philipon’s The Pear, 1831 (Fig. 19.2) and the second to Daumier’s Gargantua. Daumier’s appropriation of Philipon’s image of the king transforming into a pear was widely circulated. Both 428 O. Watts Fig. 19.2 Charles Philipon, The Pears, 1831, pen and bistre ink sketch artists were brought to court for lèse majesté. These trials, especially the trial and imprisonment of Daumier, are famous as proof of their modernist, transgressive credentials. However, we should not forget that these trials centred on a legal question that is central to the birth of modern art: whether the image of the king was an effigy or merely a representation. In other words, the way the law controlled the image as lèse majesté or later through censorship marks the shift between courtly and autonomous art and from the politics of the absolute master to the disciplinary society. The other issue it raises is the violence of the image and the importance of the legal image to quilt the society. Lèse majesté is a law that for the last time in Western society admits the use of the image to bind the legal subject; the God of Nation in the disciplinary society was framed by knowledge so that its mystical base was repressed. Soon after the signing in of Louis-Philippe and the rewriting of the Charter of 1830, new press laws introduced in November 1830 included lèse majesté. Philipon’s first trial in 1831 was over a simple cartoon called Soap Bubbles, which showed the king blowing bubbles like Chardin’s boy (Soap Bubbles, 1734), but what was popping in the air were all the virtues of republicanism, including freedom of the press. In the more notable trial of 14 November 1831, for The Plasterer, Philipon was found guilty and gaoled; in this image the king is shown to be plastering over the virtues of the republic. Similarly on February 22, 1832, Daumier was brought to trial for composing Gargantua. The charge was breaking the press law of November 1830 by arousing hatred and contempt of the king’s government and by offending the king’s person, the crime of lèse majesté. Daumier’s mercy plea was unsuccessful as his ‘seditious crayon had traced the guilty image’ (quoted in Childs 1992, 26–27). 19 Daumier and Replacing the King’s Body 429 Before further analysing the political context of these trials, it is necessary to discuss the largely archaic law of lèse majesté. The crime of lèse majesté is the criminal corollary of the cultural existence of the sacred ‘second body’ or effigy: it is the criminalisation of the unauthorised effigy. This crime can only exist in a functioning discourse of the master, where the master acts through the effigy; the crime cannot exist in a disciplinary society, other than as an anachronism. The crime of lèse majesté is shared by many civil law jurisdictions and is based on the Roman crime of laesae majestatis, literally injury that diminishes the majesty. Floyd Lear describes the many acts that this crime covered in ancient Rome including rules pertaining to the image, ‘respect for the images of the emperor, including unseemly acts real or alleged, committed in the presence or in the proximity of an imperial image; and the act of defacing, melting, or destroying a statue of the prince which had been consecrated’ (1965, 29). The destruction of or injury to the image of the prince was not seen merely as an insult or injury but as an impiety. It was a crime that involved the relationship between the individual and the public authority and so became a question of loyalty and trustworthiness. This squares with our notion of subjectivisation through the legal image; in Roman law this enemy within the symbolic order was different to the alien enemy and was called perduellis.6 The crime was linked to early Roman religious sanctions against the killing of the father or head of the household (parricidium) (Lear 1965, 24). As the effigy is a sacred body, the act of treason or lèse majesté is close to a sacrilegious offence. Again the makeup of the law is connected to Pierre Legendre’s reading of the sovereign as conflated to the father figure.7 By 1830, lèse majesté was already itself in a threshold moment (between the absolute master and disciplinary power). The crime of an ‘imagined’ treason that is a form of (blasphemous) libel, as opposed to an actual regicide or planning for regicide, was already waning in France by the eighteenth century (Coleman 1990). Kelly suggests that after the French Revolution in France, there was a shift to limiting treason to merely attempts of actual regicide as a safeguard to free speech (1981, 270). So to some extent, the lèse majesté laws of November 1830 could be seen as a disciplinary style of censorship given legitimacy through the older absolutist idea. Regardless of the mode, the effect was a return to treason, and after 1835, the censorship laws were bolstered by a rule making it ‘illegal to advocate republicanism’ Literally ‘the hidden enemy’ as opposed to the hostis, which was a foreign enemy. In the English system, the crime is subsumed under treason and is presently based on the Great Statute of Treasons, 1351. Treason here is understood as distinguishable from the crimes of murder and even regicide; treason is a symbolic crime against a ‘symbolic body’ or ‘second body’ of the king. First codified in England by the 1351 Statute of Treasons (25 Edward III, St 5, c 2) during the reign of Edward III, treason has as a central aspect in imagining or compassing the death of the King. In 1534 Henry VIII passed legislation which made it possible to commit treason by words or writing (Act of Treasons Henry VIII c 13) further clarifying the ways in which such an ‘imagining’ could manifest. In the English system, this was considered ‘treason by words’, a designation suggested by Henry VIII on his road to absolute power; the crime of lèse majesté was thus made redundant. This had the paradoxical effect in England, of increased debate and dissent over the definition of treason (see Lemon 2006). 6 7 430 O. Watts (see Aminzade 1993, 55). So in the end, lèse majesté was stopped along Foucault’s lines ‘to punish less perhaps but to punish better’. The violence of the assassination was a perfect precipitant for the crackdown. Fieschi took lodgings on the Boulevard du Temple, and there, with two members of the Société des droits de l’homme, Morey and Pépin, contrived a machine infernale, consisting of 20 gun barrels, to be fired simultaneously on July 28, 1835. There had been numerous attacks on the king’s life, and there were many apologists in the press. In September 1835, the National Assembly passed new press laws (the September Laws). Here the law of lèse majesté was redrawn in a modern guise; any reference to the king that tried ‘exciter a la haine ou au méprise de sa personne ou de son autorité constitutionelle’ was seen as an attack against the State and punishable by up to 1 year in prison and a 5000 franc fine (Articles 2 and 4). The ‘September Laws’ remained in use throughout the July Monarchy. In an ‘Age of Terror’, it is not all that difficult to empathise with a period in which distinctions between friend and enemy were being drawn. The reinvigoration of the premodern crimes of sedition across the world was surprisingly ‘kingly’. Lèse majesté is still on the books in many countries and has been used most recently in Thailand, although in another kingly right, the criminal is often pardoned. What is common to both our contemporary perspective and the absolute monarch is the background of the Lacanian master’s discourse. In the master’s discourse, the master signifier is unchallengeable. It is the same iconoclastic imperative of the original Old Testament master-God. Identifying with this system is relatively intrinsic, having lived through the response to terror and the control of dissenting voices. Generally, however, the workings of contemporary society would not accept a crime of lèse majesté. Within the university discourse, the disciplinary society, criminal sanction is based not so much on imperatives as on power/knowledge. The crime of lèse majesté gradually gave way to the regime of censorship and control of information rather than the symbolic attack against the king’s authority. The difference can be summed up with respect to the Danish cartoon that caused worldwide riots in 2006. On one level Western countries called for freedom of speech, but on the other hand, Muslims from around the world appealed to the blasphemy of imaging Mohammad. To argue that the image was a vilification of Muslims (i.e. calling all Muslims, represented by Mohammad, terrorists) was to miss the point of the protestors, who were not attacking the message but upholding the Islamic ban against images. The issue highlights the risk in forgetting the power of the effigy now and in modernism as a whole. Charged with lèse majesté, little theoretical attention has been done to follow the logic of this indictment in the trials of both Philipon and Daumier. What was at issue was the very question that concerns art and sovereignty: can an image function as a presence or does it remain as mere representation? This question defines a major shift from courtly to modern art. Philipon argued that the second body of the king did not exist, insisting that the king was merely a symbolic representation. This issue was central to Philipon’s famous image showing the head of Louis-Philippe metamorphosing into a pear. Philipon’s argument, expressed through this image, was that it was not enough to draw the king’s likeness (to defame him) 19 Daumier and Replacing the King’s Body 431 because it was not certain whether that was actually the king. The likeness for Philipon needed framing by text or insignia to prove the connection to the ‘second body’ of the king (Hanoosh 1992, 118). This argument follows the logic that an effigy, to act with ‘king effect’, must be clearly authorised by the symbolic order, through either State use, State promulgation or the use in State-sanctioned space or festival. The journal complicated this usage because it was not State sanctioned. Philipon argued: A resemblance, even if perfect, is never an attack; you must not recognize it as such, and you must above all refrain from sanctioning it by conviction. The injury is precise and proven solely by the name of the king, by titles, insignia coupled with his image, which is then, whether there’s a resemblance or not, culpable and deserving of punishment…but it’s not the king. (quoted in Petrey 1991, 52) He suggested that the king merely represented the government in symbolic guise. Indeed in the same tirade quoted above, Philipon wrote in La Caricature, November 24, 1831: ‘Yes we have the right to personify power. Yes we have the right to take for this personification, whatever resemblance suits our needs! Yes all resemblances belong to us!’ Similarly Elizabeth Childs has astutely seen that the issue of Daumier’s case turned on ‘whether or not Gargantua actually represented the king, or was intended as a more symbolic representation of the government’s swollen budget’. Childs has done the most to look at the relationship between Daumier’s images, the trial and the context of censorship laws (Childs 1999). She dismisses the importance of Philipon’s argument by calling it ‘a strained defense necessitated by the concept of lèse majesté’, as if any argument against the body politic was merely for pragmatic reasons (Childs 1999, 49). Childs suggests that the image was actually both the ‘second body’ and a representation, but does not take her own claim seriously. She understands the ‘hybrid figure’ of Louis-Philippe as both modern and absolute, an amalgam of ancien régime and the modern. Most importantly in relation to Daumier, Philipon and other caricaturists of the time, she notes their ‘humour of the body politic’ and footnotes Ernst Kantorowicz to highlight her meaning of the ‘second body’. Although this idea titles her article, it is not followed up, and the ‘body politic’ is treated as a symbolic representation of France, not as an effigy. This essay recovers the ability to use the term effigy; the caricatures of Philipon and Daumier respond to and point to the existence of the effigy in early modern art. It suggests to its existence in contemporary democracy but disguised. The Pear became famously known as an effigy. In Les Misérables, Victor Hugo wrote: One summer evening, Louis-Philippe, returning home on foot, saw an undersized urchin straining on tip-toe to draw an enormous pear on one of the pillars of the Neuilly gateway. With the amiability which he inherited from Henri IV, the King helped him to finish it and then gave him a coin, a louis d’or. ‘There’s a pear on that too,’ he said. (Hugo 1976, 503) Whether as a pear or as a Gargantua, the ‘second body’ of the king, his effigy, was alluded and indeed so serious was the misuse of the image that a bizarre law was passed outlawing any image of a pear in 1835. The pear symbol had become a commonplace, and one even found its way onto the pyramids. 432 19.6 O. Watts Pears, the Master Discourse and Presence Apart from the trials asserting the existence of lèse majesté (and the effigy), there are other examples of the confusion, in the early nineteenth century, between the image as presence (effigy) and as representation (portrait, image), a confusion explained by the shift from the courtly to the bourgeois autonomous art of modernity. Daumier’s early cartoons and caricatures of 1830–1835 have been largely overlooked because they do not fit within the realist mould of his later work. Their overtly political character creates a blind spot for modern art history, but it is of particular interest to this chapter. After 1835, caricatures of manners became a popular response to the strict September Laws. The mode of caricature itself has a bearing on the question of the effigy and modernity that has also been broadly suppressed by art history. Ernst Gombrich suggests that ‘One of the things the study of cartoons may reveal with greater clarity is the role and power of the mythological imagination on our political thought and decisions’ (Gombrich 1963). As Gombrich reminds us, the portrait caricature can be linked to images of infamy: The public enemy would be represented hanging from the gallows on the façade of the town hall, and such hangings in effigy, as Kris has reminded us, were still closer to witchcraft than they were to art. Their aim was to wreak vengeance on the enemy and to destroy, if not the person, at least the aura that was his honour (Gombrich 1963, 134–135). The defamation of character is the opposite of the honouring of the dignitas found in the kingly portrait; both ideas are connected. For Gombrich and Kris, the caricature is an extension of the effigy (Gombrich and Kris 1940). Gombrich and Kris in their study of caricature see its very power linked to the magic and presence inherent to the image: If we ask the psychologist he tells us again that, as with caricature, the hidden and unconscious aim of such fun is connected with magic. To copy a person, to mimic his behaviour, means to annihilate his individuality. The very word ‘individual’ means inseparable. If we succeed in singling out and imitating a man’s expression or way of walking we have destroyed this individuality. It is as if we declare to our laughing fellow-creatures, ‘Look, here is his whole secret. You need not be afraid nor even impressed; it is all a hollow sham’. (1940, 14) Gombrich goes on to suggest that the caricature’s late arrival as an art form was its success in conjuring the sitter; ‘We think that the portrait caricature was not practiced earlier because of the dire power it was felt to possess; out of conscious fear of its effect’ (1940, 15). So that caricature is part effigy belief, part modern naturalism and realism and part defamatory. It comes from the long line of images of infamy. But the difference was that the images of infamy were a legal remedy, a Statesanctioned violence. The move to creating your own images of infamy, for example, of a king, was tentative. Running parallel to the history of duelling, the image was seen as a direct attack against the enemy’s dignitas, a slap in the face. The Pear and the Gargantua represent the threshold moment between presence and representation (Petrey 1991, 2005; Cuno 1985; Kenney and Merriman 1991). It seems to express both modes. As Childs writes, ‘The defiant pear thrived as a symbol of resistance in the margins of the law and the margins of the official culture’ (1999, 49). 19 Daumier and Replacing the King’s Body 433 Fig. 19.3 Honoré Daumier, The Masks, 1831, 29 cm × 21 cm, lithograph It was at one time the actual king and on the other just far enough removed. It should be remembered too that Gargantua was not published by Philipon in La Caricature, but was merely sold as a loose-leaf image, suggesting that even Philipon was weary of this particular image. On the level of knowledge (the university discourse), many art historians examine The Pear as a sign, a mere representation and symbol of monarchy. The Pear was attacked in the most obscene ways, and in Lacanese these responses could be seen as responses of the hysteric. They show that the king is not symbolic enough, not ‘castrated enough’ but has all-toohuman corruptions and vices. Daumier’s Gargantua fuses these two approaches. On the one hand, it directs the viewer to read a story of avarice and greed. On the other, there is the directly scatological effect of the throne/toilet. The abject scatology points to the corrupted symbolic body such as Daumier’s Royalty in Decline, 1834 where the king sits on a chamber pot with a clysma tube or in another print where Louis-Philippe is shown in a torn and muddied ermine robe, Your cape’s in pretty good shape!…1834. This becomes a very popular method of satirising the king for artists (Weisberg 1993). These modes have been utilised to discuss the work of Daumier, but if we go back to Gombrich’s reading of caricatures on the threshold of modernity, The Pear also becomes an effigy. For example, The Masks (Fig. 19.3) seems to illustrate the difference between the king’s effigy and a straightforward caricature, because it so readily recalls the laws of lèse majesté. Unable to draw the resemblance of the king, he is represented by a pear surrounded by likenesses of his cabinet. Compared to the other politicians, the king, as sovereign, was still seen as sacred, if at the very least by the courts. But The Pear becomes repeatedly used. The ones that are framed by insignia are meaningful in stretching the boundary Philipon set in his own court case (that it is only insignia, like crowns and medals that can mark the effigy as an effigy). On top of this, the pear is treated like the punishment of hanging in effigio in many of Daumier drawings, such as Heave! Ho!… Heave! Ho! Heave! Ho!… 1832. 434 19.7 O. Watts Modernism and Censorship The control of the image mirrors the shift from absolute monarchy to disciplinary society. There is no doubt that these images were powerful and were seen as a serious threat to the stability and legitimacy of the July Monarchy. Courtly art had enjoyed a quasi-monopoly on the king’s image and the imaging of the State. The court maintained a phalanx of artists to image the July Monarchy, but the new autonomous art became an unwelcome disruption (Bezucha 1990). There was a huge growth in the dissemination of images through journals and posters and through the more autonomous art market (Chu and Weisberg 1994). The birth of the author is the corollary of the birth of censorship. This tale has been read as an insistence on the modern right of freedom of speech, where Daumier becomes the freedom fighter for modern autonomy. But what Daumier was gaoled for was more political and dangerous; the actual political threat has been diminished in historical accounts. Similarly, censorship has been read within its own logic of the disciplinary society through crimes of defamation, obscenity or social corruption. In this threshold moment, it is clear that the actual rights of the author were a corollary of the need to name and control the author. The philosophy of aesthetics and their categories of originality and individuality all feed into the legal framework of censorship. Martha Woodmansee conflated literary and legal perspectives on the notion of authorship through a sociological reading of the author in eighteenth-century Germany (Woodmansee 1984). Carla Hess has shown that in France, the idea of the individualistic ‘author’ as bearer of literary property rights was introduced as an instrument of monarchist repression, ‘a legal instrument for the regulation of knowledge’ (Hesse 1990). The French revolutionaries later sought to ‘dethrone the absolute author… and recast him, not as a private individual (the absolute bourgeois), but rather as a public servant, as the model citizen’ (Hesse 1990, 109). Jonathan Gilmore writing about mid-nineteenth-century France also saw a relationship between copyright protection and censorship; with copyright protection of lithographs in 1820, censorship laws were also instigated in tandem. The lithograph was seen as particularly dangerous in that ‘working class’ society could easily digest the satirical content of the lithograph (Gilmore 2002). Until French censorship laws were abolished in 1881, the government censored drawings in advance of publication, but not the printed word. High art was on the other hand seen as opaque and non-threatening. It was not as yet covered by copyright protection or censorship. I suggest that this special control of middle class art responded to the threat and monopoly of ideological control offered by and through the image. Philipon’s journals were the perfect bourgeois art. Indeed part of the appeal of Philipon’s journals, to connoisseurs who collected the prints, was the banal fact that paper was especially suitable for collecting (Childs 1999, 48). This popularity threatened the stability of government, which up until this point had had a monopoly on image making, particularly the image of the king. High art still was largely State sanctioned through the academic control of commissions and the State control of the Salons. 19 Daumier and Replacing the King’s Body 435 The image was, unlike text, censored before the image was published. If the image was treated as knowledge, fact or satirical comment, like satirical novels, it would not have had this special treatment. The caricature was controlled, even here at the birth of censorship and disciplinary statutory control, due to a fear of its magical power as much as any satirical knowledge that it produced. As a response to the modern power of images, Terdiman notes that the government countered with increased administration. The journalistic image was a successful subversive technique and difficult to control, and the French government started its own journal, La Charge. A primary reason for the fear of the image was an irrational notion that drawing directly affected the world as in an act, not as comment or rhetoric. When the French government requested the reimposition of prior censorship of drawings in 1835, the Minister of Justice, Jean-Charles Persil, argued that this request was constitutional, despite Article 7 of the Charter of 1830, which guaranteed the ‘right to publish’ and declared that ‘censorship can never be re-established’. The argument that Persil made directly connects with the shift from effigy to image as outlined above. Persil argued that the Charter provision applied only to the ‘free manifestation of opinion’ but not to ‘opinions converted into actions [my emphasis]’. He suggested that although opinions could be expressed in words, because they addressed ‘only the mind’, drawings however were ‘when opinions were converted into acts’. As Persil continued, ‘[drawing] speaks to the eyes. That is more than the expression of an opinion, that is a deed, an action, a behaviour, with which Article 7 of the Charter is not concerned’ (quoted in Goldstein 1989, 2). Supporting Persil’s argument, the chairman of the legislative committee, Paul Jean Pierre Sauzet, considered the government’s proposal of pre-emptive censorship of images through reference to the king’s body as sacrosanct. In reference to Philipon’s depiction of Louis-Philippe as a pear he wrote: ‘No measure is more needed by the situation and desired by public opinion [than] putting an end to these outrages that corrupt the spirit of the population in degrading with impunity the royal majesty’. At the birth of censorship, we witness a residual reliance on the laws of lèse majesté. Published in La Caricature (November 24, 1831) at the time when Philipon was first sentenced to a gaol term in 1831, he writes: Men of power, you want to hide your hideous nakedness under the royal mantle. You demand, shivering, an asylum in the inviolability of the monarch [my emphasis]. Well, you will be chased from the temple that momentarily serves you as a place of refuge and you will find us always at the door armed with a whip to lacerate you. There is something in Daumier and Philipon’s caricatures that still recognises the magic and exception of the king and his effigy. The king is the inviolable sovereign who must be imaged either as a pear or not at all, who stands at the limit of what can be transgressed or questioned. In the next part of the chapter, I expand on this revelation. Daumier is not the transgressive modernist who hysterically calls out to the king; rather, Daumier approaches this subject via another mode of resistance. Only the king, following the logic of lèse majesté, can image himself. The State has a monopoly on the effigy. The effigy’s job is to act as a visual master signifier, which interpellates the 436 O. Watts subject and assigns a symbolic order. Louis-Philippe attempted to use his body as a point in which monarchical and republican claims meshed. What Daumier and Philipon were able to do was break Louis-Philippe’s ability to unify these claims to his body as the master signifier. They managed to keep the republican master signifier separated and distanced from Louis-Philippe, stymieing the strategy of the State. 19.8 The State, Art and the Middle Way Louis-Philippe, born into a family of regicides, was seen as a great hope. Delacroix’s famous image, 28th of July: Liberty Leading the People 1830, suggests how liberty overthrew Charles X in the three glorious days of the July Revolution. But the violent hope of the July Revolution soon reified into the July Monarchy of LouisPhilippe. Even Delacroix’s work, exhibited with great pride and solemnity in the 1831 Salon (and bought by the French Interior Ministry for the Musée du Luxembourg), was secreted out of sight by 1832 due to a fear that it would incite sedition. In its stead, images that showed how the two warring parties could be brought together under the middle way were created. An exemplary piece is F.E. Picot’s July 1830: France Defends the Charter (1835) (for image see Ribner 1993, 73). The Charter, which Louis-Philippe – the self-styled Citizen King – agreed to, sits between the two opposing parties: the masked republic (a phoney sovereign face) and the blind absolute monarch. Orléanist constitutionalism was the answer. It is the stellar work of the late Albert Boime that has most explored this notion of an art of the juste milieu (Boime 1993). Paintings and sculpture were severely circumscribed by the policies and preferences of the French Academy and the regime of Louis-Philippe. Seeking to discourage the creation of large-scaled, politically tendentious subjects taken from Greek and Roman antiquity, the State and the Academy encouraged the exhibition of easel-sized pictures representing nationalistic, patriotic and familial themes from past and present history. This style would be called genre historique by the Academy. For some writers genre historique predates the larger paintings of the worker and genre scenes in Realism. Sandra Petrey sees this style in the literature of the day as well. It is a ‘hybrid style’ of ‘allegory and reality’, which ushers in the birth of Realism (2005). Similarly, Michael Marrinan has made a very detailed study of the ideological control and money spent by the July Monarchy on commissioning works that fit within genre historique, or what Marrinan calls the ‘history painting of the juste milieu’ (Marrinan 1988). Artists such as Ary Scheffer and Antoine-Louis Barye, for example, sought to achieve a reconciliation of the 1789 Revolution with restoration through freedom and order, democracy and stability, science and faith, progress and ‘business as usual’. This meant that such cogent bourgeois businessmen as Louis-François Bertin, or Madame Moitessier (married to the wealthy banker Sigisbert Moitessier), could be painted by Ingres alongside the achievements of the First Republic and the victories of Napoleon. According to Boime, the art and politics of the July Monarchy endeavoured to blend the irreconcilables of French society. 19 Daumier and Replacing the King’s Body 437 In terms of the king’s body, there is a complexity that we have up to now glossed over. In the juste milieu, the king’s body did not represent the monarchy. The Citizen King was trying to represent both political interests, republican and monarchical. The alliance with Lafayette was meant to smooth this transition and to give the king more republican legitimacy. In any case the king was chosen because his father was one of the few nobles who had voted for the execution of Louis XVI. The official imagery of the king followed this logic. Boime, for example, spends some time with Vernet’s royal portrait, Portrait du Roi (1847) (1993, 303). He quite literally has on both shoulders the tricoleur of Louis XIV, with his sculpture in the background. Louis-Philippe’s body embodies their fusion. What Boime suggests is that Louis-Philippe intends to legitimise his rule so as not to be seen as a usurper and to link his family to the bourbons. At the same time, he rides confidently out of the picture plane and into the future of France (Boime 1993, 303–304). Todd Porterfield has also done some work linking the juste milieu strategy to the early rise of Orientalism. He sees the shift to Orientalism occurring as a way of having a common pride in France regardless of political persuasion (Porterfield 1998). Louis-Philippe commissioned many paintings based on the Napoleonic campaigns. Porterfield summarises the strategy: Together they forged an official culture that provided a rationale for imperialism – based on images of France’s moral and technological superiority – and an enduring project for Frenchmen of all political persuasions during an era of domestic instability. The allure of empire derived in part from its function as an alternative, surrogate, mask, and displacement of the Revolution. (Porterfield 1998, 32) So that it was an effort to sublimate the revolutionary violence and again to quilt the empire behind the king and a unified France, in relation to its proud empire and against the Oriental Other. Louis-Philippe raised the Obelisk of Luxor, in the Place de la Concorde, very early in his reign. Desperately Louis-Philippe tried to stitch the regime to a greater notion of French Imperial might. Boime also sees this process in action. Again in Vernet’s Capture of Smalah of Abd el Kader, Boime sees exactly the same process that Barthes discusses in the famous Paris Match cover of Mythologies; the Oriental too is willing to fight bravely for France, for everyone is bound together under the imperialist banner (Boime 1993, 351). Patricia Mainardi also reads the politics of the Salon as a whole as a response to juste milieu politics. As the century progressed towards a modern autonomous art and away from the courtly art of the academy, there was tension between monarchist and the republican interests. In the Second Republic, the compromise became a bifurcated system of annually opened free shows, as called for by republican interests, and the less regular shows of historical monarchical academic painting (Mainardi 1993). Mainardi writes, ‘By the 1820s it was assumed that liberals would support Romanticism, Constitutional Monarchists might or might not, and only Legitimists would continue to be as committed to classicism as they were to the ancien régime’ (1993, 11). While attention has already been paid to the impact of the juste milieu on art history, the argument to follow is an extension of this scholarship. 438 19.9 O. Watts The Juste Milieu and the Strategy of Unquilting From the caricaturists’ point of view, the juste milieu was a travesty. There were during the period of 1830–1835 two major parties on the left: the resistance party and the more radical mouvement party. The caricaturists, including notably Charles Philipon, were of the mouvement party (Kerr 2000, 70–73). What was at the heart of the tension between the two opposing parties was that the Orléanists, the resistance party, was for reasserting authority under juste milieu. The mouvement party wanted to reassert the position of revolutionary ideals of liberty and the republic. The juste milieu was caricatured in many ways in relation to this tension. The Orléanist king pear was pitted against the republican virtues. The pear itself has been seen as a marker of the liquid, unstable shifting of the Orléanist position; the pear is like a water drop before the splash. Similarly it was seen to be a soft, impotent skinned penis. Jules David’s L’escamoteur (La Caricature, 13 May 1831) shows the king as an illusionist who, with a slight of hand called ‘juste milieu’, is able to make the revolution and liberty disappear. Or in a scatological piece of Travies, Juste Milieu se Crotte (The Juste Milieu Dirties Itself, July 1832), the king pear is seen as a faeces pot carried by the poor (represented by Harlequin and Pierrot). In Daumier’s juste milieu, the king pear hides the politicians under his robe, concealing their sins under the royal cloak. Similarly Philipon in his Le juste milieu (1830) has a pear with the tricoleur hat, unsuccessfully hiding a Bourbon white cravat and ancien régime royal garb: the ‘oxymoronic Citizen King’. The major point is that what the caricaturists were able to do, and here Daumier and Philipon were at the forefront, was to keep the two master signifiers separate. They did not allow the king to quilt the terms of the republican movement onto the body of the king. First, the king was always represented as the enemy of these virtues, whether plastering over it, bursting bubbles or shitting on them. On one level, this is a hysterical response. For Daumier and the others, the king was not castrated enough and was too corrupt. More boldly they were calling for the complete overthrow of monarchical government. As a member of the mouvement party, Philipon wanted a reassertion of the republican ideals. They stopped the conflation of values seen in the juste milieu. Beyond this understanding of the bifurcated politics of the juste milieu, there was a more active strategy. Many cartoons insistently kept the king’s body apart from those virtues of the republic he wished to accept. The effigy of the republic or liberty, as seen in Delacroix’s rousing image, was kept very much apart from Louis-Philippe. The number of these images in Daumier’s oeuvre is impressive, but it will suffice to focus on a few. Starting in reverse The Main Actor in a Tragicomic Imbroglio (29 March 1835, La Charivari) shows the bourgeois king gradually turning again into a king. All the trappings of the bourgeois king are falling away to reveal an absolute monarch: the umbrella becomes a sceptre, the top hat with cockade becomes a crown and the coat becomes an ermine cape. So although there is a doubling of the juste milieu, the king is unable to reconcile the two positions. It was this period in the king’s reign that the press laws became harsher after the assassination attempt under the September Laws. The image can be seen as imaging the failure of the regime to adequately create consensus between the republican 19 Daumier and Replacing the King’s Body 439 Fig. 19.4 Honoré Daumier, A Modern Galileo, And Yet it Continues Its Journey, 1834, 23 cm × 27 cm, lithograph and monarchical positions. Another late work during this period was Posthumous Sentencing (Le Charivari 1 March 1835), where the two master signifiers are placed on a scale; The Pear is outweighed by the republican Phrygian hat. The two master signifiers – monarchy and republic – are shown as two images that must be balanced but are not. In other images, the two are shown as outright enemies. For example in ‘Barbe bleue, blanche et rouge’ (Blue, White and Red Beard), (La Caricature, April 11, 1833; design by Grandville (J.-I.-I. Gérard) and Bernard-Romain Julien, lithograph by Becquet) the scene is made obvious by a prosaic caption. The commentary explained: ‘“It’s Louis-Philippe about to slaughter Constitution…” The Press leans out of her tower holding two republican papers, La tribune and Le national. Constitution calls to her: “Press, my sister, don’t you see anyone coming?” – “I see two knights riding at a gallop carrying a banner; it’s the banner of the Republic.”’ Louis-Philippe is seen as the enemy of the press but more importantly the enemy of the republic. An example of how the republic is an alternative and heroic master signifier that may come ‘to the rescue’ at any moment is fantastically suggested by Daumier in A modern Galileo, And Yet it Continues Its Journey (La Caricature, 6 November 1834) (Fig. 19.4). A republican prisoner sits chained but alert in a prison facing a grave judge (who resembles Persil). Between the two figures, a sceptre of freedom flies onwards unabated and into the future, on it are the dates 1832, 1833, the present, 1835 and 1836. It seems to emanate from the prisoner to attack the present legal position. So where, for example, Daumier’s Rue Transnonain, le 15 Avril (1834), shows the horror of repression and gives the viewer information regarding State violence, this image works on the level of the master signifier. The master signifier represents either liberty, freedom or the republic. France at Rest (La Caricature 28 August 1834) makes this connection clearer. Behind a sleeping 440 O. Watts Louis-Philippe, the republic is visible with her hands tied. There is the totemic cockerel without its feathers. Everything is in a state of hiatus. The king does not rule, but the republic is downcast and shackled. This image has almost a pendant in ‘Where are we going? What’s going to happen? There’s a volcano in our path… the abyss of revolution is about to open at our feet… The ship of state has gone dead in the water because of this surfeit bad feelings’. Two men are in front of Aubert’s shop, among the images is Philipon’s four pears. Finally the republic is separated out in one Daumier’s final political cartoons, Looks like it was a lot of bother to have us killed! (La Caricature 27 Aug 1835). This should be read in relation to Delacroix’s liberty as its antithesis. The three heroes of July 1830 survey the scene, watching innocent civilians killed, with irony and sadness. So the images I have chosen to focus upon all present the republic as separated from the king, or the present regime. The way to read these images is through the master signifier. Daumier refuses to let the two meet, to let the king quilt the ideas to his own effigy. It is this action that gives Daumier’s work its importance and strength. The work becomes not an act in Persil’s sense but connects to what Žižek has called an Act. Žižek suggests, ‘This is the key point: an act is neither a strategic intervention into the existing order, nor its “crazy” destructive negation; an act is an “excessive”, trans-strategic, intervention which redefines the rules and contours of the existing order’ (Butler 2005, 145). What Daumier and the other caricaturists were able to do between 1830 and 1835 is to keep the political field open so that Louis-Philippe was unable to take the authority of the republican position to his side. By keeping the republic separated, it always kept the option open for the republic ‘to come’. The republic was the little fairy that was not obvious, but nevertheless there in the prison, it was shackled behind the king but waiting. It is for this reason that finally in 1835 the crackdown was so severe. The act of Daumier and the others was so successful at keeping the revolutionary field going. In light of the images discussed above, it is worth looking back again on the Gargantua as a revolutionary act. It seems hysterical (in a Lacanian sense), producing information and knowledge that ‘The king is selling titles and favours’ and that the ‘government is corrupt’. It is also hysterical in that it finds the king’s body repulsive and ‘not castrated enough’ (i.e. not purely symbolic as a king should be). Perhaps it is the government of Louis-Philippe who understood the image best by seeing it as treasonous libel or in French terms lèse majesté. What is disguised in the image is the little fairy of the republic and indeed just near the bucket on the ground, among the common people, a small woman looks away, wearing a Phrygian white cap. In the political circumstances of the time, merely a year or two after the new regime began, even Delacroix’s liberty was seen as seditious. The mistake has been to look at Daumier through the caricature of our own time. In this image, it is not the same as merely saying, ‘President Bush is nepotistic’; it would be the equivalent of suggesting that democratic capitalism, as an ideology, is wrong and illegitimate and should be overthrown. The art historians also discuss the effect of the censor, in contemporary terms such as the freedom of the press. The issue of Daumier’s early work is not one of free speech, as a modern right, but of regime change and revolution; the censor is the regime (in a state of emergency). I am reminded of Frantz Fanon 19 Daumier and Replacing the King’s Body 441 discussing the ability of the storytellers in Algeria to raise a unified revolutionary body: ‘The epic, with its typified categories, reappeared; it became an authentic form of entertainment which took on once more a cultural value. Colonialism made no mistake when from 1955 on it proceeded to arrest these storytellers systematically’. Similarly, Louis-Philippe made no mistake in his strict censorship. In the end, the caricaturists were proved correct, and the regime did end because the consensus was never quite reached between these two broad factions. 1848 marked the end of the monarchy. 19.10 The Repressed Rises Again In 1848, when the July Monarchy ends, Daumier shows through his work that it is the republic that has been repressed the whole time and in whose name he was gaoled (not for some mere artistic autonomy). The work Dernier Conseil des Ex-ministres was drawn as soon as the regime was changed. The republic bursts through the door with a bright light behind her. At the table of State with papers and pen still on the table, the ministers of Louis-Philippe’s regime scramble to retreat, like moths uncovered behind a curtain. Although Baudelaire (and later modern teleology) preferred the ‘modern’ satirical works of lawyers, peasants and the bourgeois drawn from life, it was the gaoling for lèse majesté that made him a hero of the Third Republic. In his 1878 retrospective, his effigy of the republic hanging on the wall, Daumier was able to say that he had been gaoled for destabilising the monarchy, for opening the field in some way for the Third Republic to come into being almost 50 years later. So in Daumier’s work, the two effigies of both the monarch and the republic battled out briefly between 1830 and 1835. The field was successfully closed in 1835 through censorship backed up by intense violence. But for 5 years, Daumier’s works were the equivalent of the Lacanian Act. They showed the possibility against the running order of the Orléanist monarchy. Not in a hysterical voice but as a revolutionary calling for the republic. In 1848, when the revolution finally did come and the republic again stopped becoming, Daumier again imaged the republic as the Marianne of the Second Republic. Lèse majesté or treason actually marks you as the emancipatory outlaw. Their crime was the imagining of overthrow. Indeed, in 1848, when the regime finally came to an end and in the first months of the Second Republic, the provisional government organised a competition to image ‘the republic’. Daumier entered with Sketch for ‘The Republic’: The Republic Feeding her Children and Instructing them (1848). Courbet and François Bonvin’s encouragement for Daumier to compete proved worthwhile, and this effigy was State sanctioned. In 1878 this was the only effigy Daumier exhibited at his retrospective and was well received at that time as a reassertion of republican values in the Third Republic; the exhibition of this work was a visualised version of the revolutionaries’ demand, lead by Léon Gambetta, that the 1848 Republic be restored. Although there was a Royalist majority, they could not restore a monarch to the 442 O. Watts throne. The republican constitutional laws were passed in 1875 that proclaimed France would from then on be a permanent republic. The birth of the assured republic coincides with Daumier’s retrospective (and Courbet’s death) in 1877. Both artists had lived their artistic lives through both republican and monarchical governments and through many revolutions and political tensions in France. The feeling at this period is well summed up in the Punch Cartoon, 27 October 1877, A Decided Preference, where a Marianne finally puts on her republican garb for good. This image illustrates the end to an oscillation between the monarchical and the republican master signifiers where France finally settles on the republican democratic master signifier. References Aminzade, Ronald. 1993. Ballots and Barricades: Class formation and republican politics in France, 1830–1871. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Beik, Paul Harold. 1965. Louis-Philippe and the July Monarchy. New York: Van Nostrand. Bezucha, Robert J. 1990. The art of the July Monarchy: France, 1830 to 1848. Missouri: University of Missouri Press. 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