J'ai vu trancher les jours de ma famille entière / Et j'ai vu mon époux traîné sur la poussière (Andromaque)

A hand-colored lithograph from Daumier's Actualités series, published in a French satirical journal. At left, a street dog-catcher drags a hound while other dogs are beaten or flee in panic across a cobbled street. At right, an enormous anthropomorphized dog — rendered in the broad, grotesque distortion Daumier perfected — stands on a balcony, throwing back its head in operatic anguish. The French caption parodies Racine's Andromaque, casting the mongrel as tragic queen. Daumier's lithography — crayon on stone, printed in editions of thousands — sits precisely at the junction between the Gillray-Rowlandson tradition of single-sheet political caricature and the sequential narrative panels of Épinal picture-sheets that directly prefigure the comic strip. The joke is literary burlesque, not ethnic caricature, though the dog-catcher figure carries the era's class condescension toward municipal laborers.