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Slide  Rue Transnonain Daumier  [[right margin]] MMA [[/right margin]]

In the 20 years between the fall of Napoleon & the date of this Daumier lithograph, France had seen most of the liberties gained by the revolution gradually obliterated by a returning monarchy.

Louis XVIII was king until 1824, [with the 100 days intermission of Napoleon in 1815,] but his attempts at reconciling the rising bourgeoisie & proletariat to the restored monarchy gave way to an increasing reaction & his successor, Charles X, carried the reaction to its ultimate. But, in spite of all forms of repression, the Republicans revolted in July 1830 & Louis Phillipe was established as the Citizen King.

This hoped for liberal monarchy proved too weak in leadership, too insecure in the face of liberties, to risk tolerance of the steadily more aggressive Republican movement. Louis Phillipe continued the reaction & one of his repressions was the very severe censorship law of 1835.

This law forced Honoré Daumier to change from political cartooning to social satire. There are few artists of social consciousness, whether it is Blake's idealism or Goya's acid, who have not had their conflicts with authority. Daumier was not an exception. He spent 6 months of 1832 in the Ste. Pélagie prison for his caricature of Louis Phillipe as Gargantua [being fed by ministers, politicians, sycophants while the peasantry slaved to pay for it.]

Daumier was 26 when he made this remarkable lithograph of an incident in the Rue Transnonain. It was one of four trenchant political commentaries on the years preceding the July 1830 revolution which were published in a special edition at one franc each to pay the fines of the