Le Ventre Législatif

A lithograph — stone-printed, so capable of subtle tonal gradation impossible in engraving — crowding the curved benches of the French Chamber of Deputies with grotesquely individualized deputies. Daumier exaggerates jowls, bulk, and torpor to argue that the July Monarchy's legislature was a body of self-satisfied bourgeois placeholders rather than republican servants. The caricature draws directly on Gillray's savaging of Westminster and on Rowlandson's corpulent crowds, extending that Anglo-satirical tradition onto French soil. Published in the oppositional journal La Caricature, the print pushed against the press-censorship laws Louis-Philippe was then tightening. Physiognomic exaggeration here codes class (the prosperous belly). Daumier's sequential political prints are a direct ancestor of the comic strip: recurring figures, compressed narrative, mass reproduction.