Sur les boulevards de Paris

A lithograph — Daumier's preferred medium — showing two bourgeois men on a Parisian boulevard, one absorbed in a newspaper (the masthead reads Les Nouvelles or similar), the other gesturing urgently at his shoulder, apparently delivering political gossip. Both wear the top hats and frock coats that mark their class; Daumier renders them with the rubbery, bulging physiognomy he used to mock the self-important juste-milieu citizen — the comfortable Frenchman who consumed politics as entertainment while 1848's revolutions shook Europe. This sheet belongs to the tradition running from Gillray's political grotesques through Rowlandson's social comedy: sequential, character-driven, printed satire aimed at a mass audience. That lineage flows directly into the comic strip and, eventually, the comic book.