Le Carcan (The Pillory)

A lithograph—Daumier's preferred weapon—shows a courtroom or legislative chamber: a speaker gestures from a podium at right while rows of bald, owl-faced deputies slump in tiered seats, indistinguishable from one another in their stupor. A large figure at lower left sits slumped and isolated, a placard around his neck bearing the title's accusation. The rotund, homogenized deputies embody Daumier's class contempt for the July Monarchy's bourgeois parliament—bloated place-holders, not statesmen. This sheet appeared in La Caricature, the combative Paris journal that landed its publisher in prison under press-suppression laws. Daumier's work sits squarely in the line from Gillray's savage parliamentary grotesques through to Thomas Nast, a lineage whose sequential storytelling and panel-ready compositions fed directly into the grammar of the comic strip.