A Boy Smokes a Prussian Cigar While a Furious Frenchman Delivers His Own Reply

Signed Cham (Amédée-Charles-Henri de Noé), this lithograph belongs to the satirical press commentary on the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. The scene is blunt: a boy puffs a cigar given him by a Prussian soldier while a enraged Frenchman boots him from behind — the caption dialogue confirmed in the French text below. Cham worked in the lineage running from Gillray and Rowlandson through Daumier, whose biting lithographs for Le Charivari established political caricature as daily journalism. Cham contributed hundreds of cartoons to that same paper. His sequential, punchy panels — distinct figures, action, speech — fed directly into the proto-comic-strip format that Töpffer had pioneered and that would harden, by century's end, into the newspaper comic strip.