Philipon and the Illustrated Press, 1830–1836

Abstract The vast majority of the political caricatures produced in the early 1830s were drawn for, and appeared in, the illustrated newspapers owned and directed by Charles Philipon. All newspapers develop a collective identity which imposes certain obligations upon their contributors; the ideological and stylistic constraints imposed upon the contributors to Philipon’s newspapers were especially strong. With La Caricature, Philipon invented a new type of satirical newspaper. His interventionist management transformed the illustrated newspaper from a fashionable review decorated with a disparate collection of lithographic imagery into a formidable machine de guerre. The artists and writers who worked for La Caricature and Le Charivari were keenly aware that they were participating in a common endeavour: they worked as a team, borrowing themes and motifs from one another constantly. Philipon’s newspapers posed a challenge to their readerships. To understand their humour fully, readers had to be able to follow the multiple cross-references between successive caricatures and between the caricatures and the newspaper articles. Scholarly monographs which artificially isolate the work of individual artists and treat their prints as if they were autonomous works of art have ignored the conditions under which caricature was produced. An adequate understanding of caricature in the 1830s can only be achieved by examining the mechanics of the illustrated press and by studying the newspapers as a whole rather than the contribution of single artists.