ABSTRACT
Philipon’s pears (discussed in chapter 4) were hardly alone in their derision of the government, and the heyday of caricature was not just political: honoré Daumier’s pen made a mockery of nearly every social class, profession, event, and public practice. One of his most famous series featured the scheming robert Macaire, a buffoonish, swindling representation of the money-grubbing bourgeoisie. In the words of James Rousseau, as explained in his Physiologie du Robert Macaire (1842), the figure was “l’incarnation de notre époque positive, égoïste, avare, menteuse, vantarde, et, disons le mot, il est ici parfaitment à sa place— essentiellement blagueuse” [“the incarnation of our time—positivist, egotistical, greedy, lying, bragging, and, let’s say the word, for it’s perfectly at home here— essentially full of hot air”] (James Rousseau 5). So emblematic of the period was Macaire that rousseau declared that it would not have been possible to create the character at any other time; he was “bien enfant de ce siècle” [“certainly a child of this century”] (5).
