Le Congrès suspendu (The Suspended Congress)

A hand-colored lithograph by Jean-Ignace-Isidore Gérard, who signed himself Grandville, this sheet shows European monarchs and statesmen—labeled by name in the caption band above—seated around a gilded council table, each literally suspended by a thread from the ceiling above him. The text below mocks the July Revolution's shock to the conservative order: the tricolor has been raised across France, and 'His Most Christian Majesty' cannot attend the session. The figures include Mahmoud II rendered with Ottoman-turban exaggeration, a stock Orientalist shorthand of the period. Grandville worked in the lineage running from Hogarth and Gillray through Daumier—sequential, label-heavy, speech-and-caption driven images that trained European audiences to read pictures as argument, the direct ancestor of the comic strip's panel grammar.