Naissance du juste milieu (Birth of the Juste Milieu)

A lithograph from La Caricature—the combative Parisian weekly that made Honoré Daumier and J.-J. Grandville household names—this print depicts Liberty as an exhausted mother who has just delivered a monstrous infant before a crowd of uniformed officials, lawyers, and courtiers. The newborn represents Louis-Philippe's juste milieu, the centrist bourgeois monarchy that French republicans felt had stillborn the promise of 1830. Grandville's figures carry the exaggerated physiognomy standard to the era: pear-shaped heads signaling stupidity, bloated bureaucrats, a crowing rooster at their feet. Such class and physiognomic caricature—meant as political weapon, not comedy—descends directly from Gillray and Rowlandson's London prints and fed forward into the German Bilderbogen picture-sheets and eventually the sequential comic strip panel itself.