The amazing artists of Montmartre ????????????

The amazing artists of Montmartre, Paris.

France has a long tradition of drawing caricatures. Below are some details:

In the middle Ages
In the Middle Ages, caricature, whose origins date back to ancient Greece, continued to spread. "The first engravings, which appear at the end of the 14th century, are made on wood", describes the site of the BNF . We find them "in the exterior and interior sculptures of churches or in miniatures: grotesque characters, fantastic and symbolic animals". But it is the rise of printing from the 15th century that will popularize caricatures. The designs are notably used by supporters of the Protestant Reformation to mock the pope. In France, King Henry III was also the victim of a campaign of caricatures preceding his assassination.
"The explosion of political cartoons always corresponds to periods of crisis; moreover, it is strongly linked to the material status of the document and the means of its dissemination (image inserted in a pamphlet, sold in loose sheets or in series, poster , illustration of an "occasional", press cartoon appearing in an illustrated periodical)", summarizes the BNF site.
During the French Revolution
But according to historian Annie Duprat, it was above all the period of the revolution that saw "an explosion of caricatures". "When Pope Pius VI condemned the Civil Constitution of the Clergy voted by the National Constituent Assembly in the spring of 1791, the reaction of Jacques Bonhomme – an emblematic figure of the French 'good from home' – was not long in coming: he wiped his the behind laughing with the brief of the pope, that is to say an administrative act written by the pope issuing an order to the faithful”, she takes as an example in an article for The Conversation . For this historian, caricature then becomes a real "political language in the process of becoming autonomous". According to the BNF, 1500 satirical engravings were produced between 1789 and 1792.

The July Monarchy
The king is the main target of cartoonists. In the 19th century, with the growth of the press, illustrated periodicals developed strongly. Under the July Monarchy, it was Louis-Philippe who paid the price and was irritated. The caricaturist Daumier spent six months in prison for having depicted Louis-Philippe as Gargantua, then took up the motif of the pear representing the face of the king, created by Philipon. The latter will himself be sentenced to six months in prison for "insulting the person of the king". In 1835, a law restored censorship (which had been abolished in 1824 by Charles X) for drawings, engravings and lithographs.

The Dreyfus Affair
It was not until new laws on the freedom of the press, including that of 1881, to see a new outbreak of caricatures. At the end of the 19th century, the Dreyfus affair offered designers a first-choice controversy to give free rein to their imagination. The famous drawing by Caran d'Ache, "They talked about it", representing a heated debate within a family about the affair, published in Le Figaro, has even entered history since.

During the First World War
At the start of the Great War, "a large part of the French satirical press did not survive the first days of the conflict" due to "the interruption of publication due to the state of siege, the departure for combat of many cartoonists or even shortages of all kinds", as the historian Laurent Bihl notes, on the site of the centenary mission . But the "surviving leaves are in a position of strength" and participate "in the stuffing of skulls" by feeding propaganda against the enemy. This period also saw the emergence of new publications, including Le Canard Enchaîné created in 1915.

May 68 and Charlie Hebdo
During the Second World War, censorship abolished caricatures for many, even if in the collaborationist newspapers, they remained present in particular to serve anti-Semitic propaganda. It was not until the 1950s that drawings became political again. Caricatures on General de Gaulle abound in particular. The designers have a field day denouncing the authoritarian nature of the regime and comparing it to other historical figures, such as Louis XIV and Napoleon. Cartoonists repeatedly present the general as an absolute ruler and ridicule his image.