Tout est perdu! fors la caisse

Honoré Daumier's lithograph — the dominant medium of French popular satire after 1820 — shows a corpulent bourgeois in full flight, cane raised, hat tumbling, while a chain and padlock clatter behind him on the cobblestones. A harbor and a sign reading Banque d'Épargne (savings bank) fix the scene in the financial panics that shadowed the Revolution of 1848. The caption, "All is lost — except the cashbox," skewers the propertied class whose first instinct in political crisis was the protection of capital. The figure's exaggerated bulk and grotesque face carry the physiognomic class mockery standard in French caricature of the period — the fat banker as physical emblem of moral corruption. Daumier inherited this language from Gillray and Rowlandson, sharpened it into a vernacular visual rhetoric, and handed it forward to the comic strip.