Rue Transnonain, le 15 avril 1834

Honoré Daumier's large lithograph—printed on stone, not etched into metal—shows a working-class man sprawled dead across his bedroom floor in a white nightshirt, his body pinning an infant beneath him. A second corpse is visible at the frame's edge; overturned furniture completes the wreckage. This is not satire but documentary accusation: on April 15, 1834, the French National Guard massacred tenement residents on the Rue Transnonain in Paris after a sniper fired from the building. No caricature distorts the figures—Daumier abandons exaggeration entirely, borrowing instead from history painting's gravitas. The image bridges the Gillray–Rowlandson tradition of lithographic political imagery toward the sequential narrative consciousness from which the comic strip would later emerge: a single frozen frame that tells an entire story.