Dernier conseil des ex-ministres

Honoré Daumier's lithograph — his medium of choice for the Paris satirical press — shows a cluster of panicked ex-ministers scrambling over one another in grotesque flight as a allegorical female figure (Marianne, the Republic) strides through a doorway to confront them. Daumier exaggerates jowls, pot-bellies, and tangled limbs in the tradition of Gillray's political grotesques and Rowlandson's crowd caricatures, but replaces English vulgarity with French graphic economy. The caption, Dernier conseil des ex-ministres (Last council of the former ministers), pins the target to the political upheaval of 1848. Daumier's mass-printed lithographs for Le Charivari are a direct ancestor of sequential comic art: single-image political narrative that taught readers to read gesture, expression, and symbolic figure as compressed story.