Le prévenu (bas à l'Avocat)

A lithograph from Daumier's Croquis Parisiens series, plate 3, showing a courtroom scene: a hunched, anxious defendant whispers urgently to his robed and square-capped avocat, who leans over a writing table, while a gallery of spectators crowds the background. The caption records the defendant muttering that all this asking-the-President business is fine, but the lawyer really ought to be attending to his affairs. Daumier's line distorts both figures through class-coded exaggeration — the lawyer pompous and indifferent, the common defendant cringing and physically compressed — a visual rhetoric inherited directly from Rowlandson and Gillray. Such single-image satirical lithographs, printed cheaply for Parisian journals, are a direct ancestor of the sequential comic strip: panels became sequences, caricature became character, and the speech balloon formalized the whispered caption below.