The British Library’s collection of Franco-Prussian War and Paris Commune caricatures (shelfmarks 14001.g.41, Cup.648.b.2, Cup.648.b.8) exemplifies how artists from a variety of diverse national, political and cultural backgrounds engaged with l’année terrible.

Broadly speaking, 1870-71 prints can be split into two formats. Single-sheet images produced by small teams of editors and artists were sold on the street, pasted onto buildings and displayed in shop windows. On the other hand, pre-existing publishing houses – including those which produced weekly satirical journals, like Le Charivari (1832-1937), designed sets with print collectors in mind. This latter form was adorned with title pages, and arguably maintained a higher artistic sophistication. Artists did not limit themselves to just one category: for instance, Faustin Betbeder (1848-1914), who claimed that his first single-sheet image sold more than 50,000 copies, also created multiple sets during 1870-71, several of which can be found in the BL’s collections.

Both formats touched on the same topics. For example, references to Christianity shaped both single sheets and co-ordinated sets. Their use most frequently relied on the ironic comparison of biblical figures or parables with their contemporary parallels. The BL’s fifth volume (14001.g.41) holds a set of three images which each parody three scenes from the Bible immortalised in famous works of art. The first, drawn by F. Mathis, is a spoof of Leonardo’s Last Supper mural.

F. Mathis, La Nouvelle Cène (The New Last Supper), (Paris, 1871) Volume 5 14001.g.41.

It is an almost stroke-for-stroke reproduction, but for the substitution of Jesus and John with figures wearing a Phrygian-cap and an allegory of Paris, respectively. Further, Jesus’s apostles are replaced by figures of the twelve members of the ephemeral and unpopular Government of National Defence, which led France following the fall of the Second Empire in September 1870 until a new government was formed by Adolphe Thiers (the bespectacled figure on the far left of Mathis’s print, ominously peeping through the door) in February 1871.

The gesticulating guests at Leonardo’s Last Supper respond to Jesus’s proclamation that one of his disciples will soon betray him. Conversely, La Nouvelle Cène (‘The New Last Supper’) insinuates that all of the members of this flimsy government will betray France – if they had not already. Paris suffered under a winter of Prussian siege, before the government capitulated in late January. To make matters worse, their humiliation was ratified by the signing of a peace treaty which included the secession of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, a significant war indemnity, and a Prussian military march through Paris – augmenting an already biblical sense of betrayal. This theme was central to the set’s second print, in which Jules Favre plays the familiar role of Judas Iscariot, again drawn by Mathis.

The final print from the set, this time drawn by Charles Vernier (1813-92), is a little more complex. Though still a send-up of a famous Italian painting of a biblical scene – Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding Feast at Cana , hung in the Louvre – Vernier mixes the story of Jesus’s first miracle, the turning of water into wine, with the narrative of a popular French song Le Baptême du p’tit ébéniste (‘The Baptism of the li’l ebonist’).

Paolo Veronese, Nozze di Cana (The Wedding Feast at Cana), (Venice, 1563), (Picture from Wikimedia Commons)

The scene is transformed from a wedding to a baptism, that of the latest French Republic (the Third, which lasted until 1940), with a couplet from the song in the image’s caption noting how France is like ‘a bouquet of flowers’ – in other words, that is made up of many colourful – and contradictory – parts.

Jesus is replaced by Thiers holding the baby Republic aloft, while monarchs of Europe, including Süleyman the Magnificent and Mary I of England from Verones’s painting are exchanged for representatives of various contemporary French political currents. These include the deposed Emperor Napoleon III, several of the aforementioned National Government of Defence, and even a pétroleuse – that mythical figure in anti-Communard discourse who had apparently delighted in setting Paris alight in the final days of May 1871.

 Noces de Cana, (Paris, 1871) Volume 5 14001.g.41.

Single sheet images designed for public consumption and debate were not below making biting allusions to religious iconography to mock political figures during 1870-1. The most popular trope, inevitably, was drawing any of the members of the National Government of Defence as Judas.

Other prints were more erudite. An obvious example from the BL’s second volume at 14001.g.41 is A. Baudet-Bauderval’s Une fuite en Egypte en passant par la Prusse (‘A flight to Egypt via Prussia’), the seventh print of Grognet’s 87-strong Actualités (‘Current Events’). The set was printed unevenly from the outbreak of the war to the final days of the Commune – sometimes publishing as many as ten images in a single day – and comprised several artists, meaning the sets had little ideological or topical coherency.   

A. Baudet-Bauderval, Une Fuite en Egypte en passant par la Prusse (A Flight to Egypt via Prussia), (Paris, 1870) Volume 2 14001.g.41.

Following his surrender at the Battle of Sedan in early September 1870, Napoleon III was taken prisoner at Wilhelmshöhe Castle in Kassel. Shortly after news of his capitulation reached Paris, the Empress Eugénie and their son Louis fled the city. In Baudet-Bauderval’s sketch, the imperial family replicate the flight of Christianity’s holy family to Egypt – another popular artistic motif, perhaps most famously rendered by Giotto at the Cappella degli Scrovegni in Padua.

Despite its hasty construction – and its design to invite public consumption over private collection – Une fuite en Egypte includes a subtle yet ingenious attack. The Emperor and his son wear two large yellow hats which resemble sombreros, the wide-brimmed hat typically associated with Mexico. This addition not only lampoons the halos which crown the imperial family in Giotto’s Flight to Egypt, but also imbricates a mockery of the Emperor’s disastrous campaign to install a French-friendly monarchy in Mexico, a failure itself famously memorialised by Édouard Manet’s Execution of Maximilian.

In the aftermath of the War and the Commune, partisans of the Church claimed that the disasters of 1870-71 were the inevitable result of the anti-clericalism which coursed through some strands of French radicalism and the materialistic opulence of the Second Empire. Yet religious metaphors, iconography and scenes, particularly those preserved in art, could just as easily be employed by satirical artists to mock the powerful throughout 1870-71.

Anthony Chapman-Joy, CDP Student at the British Library and Royal Holloway

Further reading:

Hollis Clayson, Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life Under Siege (London, 2002), YC.2002.a.15995

Morna Daniels, ‘Caricatures from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the Paris Commune’, Electronic British Library Journal, (2005), pp. 1-19

John Milner, Art, War and Revolution in France, 1870-1871 (London, 2000), LB.31.b.19108

Bertrand Tillier, La Commune de Paris: Révolution sans images? (Paris, 2004), YF.2004.a.14526