Honoré Daumier

Honoré Daumier (1808-1879) was one of the most direct portrayers of social injustice. In his print Gargantua of 1831, a gigantic Louis-Philippe, the French King (r. 1830-1848), is seated on a throne before a starving crowd. A poverty-stricken woman tried to feed her infant, while a man in rags is forced to drop his last few coins into a basket. The coins are then carried up a ramp and fed to the king. Underneath the ramp, a crowd of greedy but well-dressed figures grasps at falling coins. A group in front of the Chamber of Deputies, the French parliament, applauds Louis-Philippe. The message of this caricature is clear: a never-satisfied king exploits his subjects and grows fat at their expense. Daumier explicitly identified Louis-Philippe as Gargantua in the title of the print. In 1832, Daumier, along with his publisher and printer, was charged with inciting contempt and hatred for the French government and with insulting the person of the king. He was sentenced to six months in jail and fined one hundred francs.^[1]

In The Third Class Carriage, made about 1863, Daumier captures a peculiarly modern condition: “the lonely crowd,” in which throngs of workers are jammed into a third-class railway car, consigned to hard benches rather than to the side plush seats of first-class cars. A range of types, all anonymous, and part of the growing urban masses, endure their daily commute. The weary family in the foreground is the focus of the picture. They are simpler and poorer than the petit bourgeoisie behind them and seem to represent the uprooted rural poor who have come to Paris in search of opportunity, only to become victims of modern urbanism. Silent and tired, they are imprisoned in a turgid gloom, shut off from the wholesome bright light seen through the windows. But Daumier presents them with fortitude and dignity. What appears to be a simple peasant family is transformed into the Mother and Child with St. Elizabeth. Like Millet, whom he admired, Daumier is alternately labeled a Realist and a Romantic, his paintings similarly combining Realist subject matter with the powerful compassion of a Romantic.^[2]