Conducteur... j'avais pris vos messageries

Honoré Daumier's lithograph — his preferred medium, pulled from stone and hand-colored — lampoons early French railway travel. A stout, exasperated passenger leans from a coach marked Messageries Générales, gesturing wildly at a uniformed conductor below, while grotesquely caricatured fellow travelers crowd the carriage window. The figures carry the bulbous noses, rubbery lips, and exaggerated class markers typical of July Monarchy caricature, a visual shorthand Daumier deployed without apology to signal bourgeois pretension and working-class indignity alike. The print belongs to his Physionomies des Chemins de Fer series, skewering the chaos of France's railway boom. Daumier stands in direct descent from Gillray and Rowlandson, and his serial format — repeated characters, sequential social observation — fed directly into the grammar that became the comic strip.