Jean Joseph Louis Blanc — 'social revolution'

Signed by Théobald Chartran ('T.'), this chromolithograph presents the French socialist historian and politician Louis Blanc (1811–1882) as a compact, dignified figure in a long double-breasted frock coat, top hat held at his side, gazing with composed authority to his left. The caption — 'social revolution' — is dryly ironic: Vanity Fair's largely conservative readership would have recognized Blanc as the architect of the 1848 National Workshops and a genuine ideological threat to property and order. Chartran's rendering is relatively sympathetic; no grotesque distortion of Blanc's famously short stature is deployed, and the caricature reads more as measured acknowledgment than mockery — Blanc by 1879 was an elected député, respectability having softened the radical edge.