Mes Rosiers en Hiver (My Roses in Winter)

This etching depicts three skeletal female figures—labeled Maréchal Canrobert, Géant des Batailles, and Princesse Mathilde—frozen in a winter landscape. The French military and political establishment, personified as withered aristocrats, stand among bare trees in a post-war wasteland. Created the year after France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, the print uses the satirist's traditional tools: anthropomorphic caricature, allegorical landscape, and the etching's precise line-work to register historical trauma. The work descends from 18th-century Hogarth and Gillray, through Daumier's revolutionary imagery, into the graphic satire tradition that would shape modern editorial cartooning and sequential art.