Jules Grévy — 'the French Republic'

Signed with the monogram T for Théobald Chartran, this chromolithograph shows Jules Grévy, elected President of the French Republic earlier that year, standing before a billiard table—a pointed reference to his reputation as an unpretentious bourgeois who preferred the billiard-room to the salon. He leans on a cue like a walking stick, dressed in a plain dark frock coat, his white hair and short beard rendered without flattery but without ethnic distortion. The caption, 'the French Republic,' is the whole joke: this stolid, unheroic figure is the Republic—deliberately unglamorous, anti-Bonapartist, anti-monarchist. The RF fasces emblem in the corner underlines the republican allegory. Chartran's relatively sympathetic treatment reflects British liberal admiration for French parliamentary consolidation after the turbulent 1870s.