Charles Philipon (19 April 1800 – 26 January 1862) was a French lithographer, caricaturist and journalist. He was the founder and director of the satirical political journals La Caricature and of Le Charivari.
Early life Charles Philipon came from a small, middle-class, Lyons family. His father, Étienne Philipon, was a hatter and wallpaper manufacturer. He enthusiastically welcomed the revolution of 1789. According to Pierre LarousseGrand dictionnaire universel du s-XIXe, Éd. Slatkine, 1982, 17 vol. his ancestors included Manon Roland, Armand Philippon, and Louis Philipon de La Madelaine.
After attending school in Lyons and Villefranche-sur-Saône, Charles Philipon studied drawing at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon. He left his hometown in 1819 to work under the artist Antoine Gros in Paris but returned at his father's behest in 1821 to join the family business, designing fabric for three years. Though this activity did not suit him, it left its mark on his subsequent work. During hard economic and social times in 1824, he took part in a Lyons carnival parade that was deemed seditious; he was arrested, but ultimately charges were dropped.
Charles Philipon finally left Lyon for Paris where he reunited with old friends from the workshop Gros. One of them, Nicolas Toussaint Charlet, a renowned artist, took him under his wing and introduced him to lithography, a technique spreading in France in the 1820s. Philipon found employment as a lithographer and artist drawing for picture books and fashion magazines. He showed invention by converting a lead chimney to a lithographic machine. He bonded with the liberals and satirists of the day, attended the Grandville workshop (1827), and two years later joined forces with the creators of the newspaper La Silhouette, on which he worked as an editor and designer.
While Philipon's financial contribution to the company was small, his editorial contribution seems to have focused on the organisation of the lithographic department, which gave the paper its originality inasmuch as the same importance was given to the illustration as to the text. Whereas La Silhouette previously had no definite political line, by July 1830 it had developed a more aggressive approach. It is in this journal that on 1 April 1830, Philipon published the first political cartoon, " Charles X Jesuit ."
On 15 December 1829 Philipon sent his son and business partner, Gabriel Aubert, to set up the Aubert publishing house Aubert, competing with other printing shops in Paris. The Veronique Dodat pass, where the publishing house could be found, was to become in the following years a "place of breathtaking [commercial] war" (Ch. Lèdre).
Birth of a business After the revolution of July 1830, Philipon published on 4 November that year an illustrated weekly under the title La Caricature. Sold by subscription only, it had four pages of text and two lithographies in a larger format than that of Silhouette. Associated with the creation of Philipon newspaper, Honoré de Balzac wrote in the prospectus and gave it under various pseudonyms thirty articles until February 1832.Balzac et Philipon associés, Exposition-dossier à la Maison de Balzac, 23 June – 23 September 2001. Analyse de l'œuvre Projet du monument expia-poire... de The journal was primarily designed as an elegant illustrated magazine, with the drawings printed on vellum paper. The lithographs were printed on separate text and tear sheets. At first, La Caricature adopted a non-political attitude before coming to oppose July Monarchy in the spring of 1832.
On 1 December 1832, while imprisoned, Philipon published Le Charivari, an illustrated daily with four pages in a smaller than Caricature format. More varied and more "popular" than its predecessor, it was not limited to political caricature. Charivari was the only daily caricature journal of nineteenth-century France. According to the prospectus, Charivari was intended as "comprehensive overview of all the constantly recurring events, by pencil and pen, of all the various aspects of this kaleidoscopic world in which we live." The lithographs are of lower quality than in La Caricature, but better integrated into the text. Thereafter, the presentation of Charivari changed significantly.
As the owner of these two newspapers, Philipon retained full control of all aspects of the papers' written and lithographic content.
He chooses his collaborators, dealing with suppliers in the market as well as financial management. In an obituary published in 1862, Nadar the credits of "extraordinary lucidity in business" coupled with "inexhaustible fertility of invention and means".Article nécrologique repris par Champfleury dans Histoire de la caricature moderne, p. 271 et suiv. Employer of his artist friends, it defines the objectives with them, suggest topics, coordinating text and lithography. He does not hesitate to ask for changes to avoid censorship. To ensure editorial consistency, writing is reduced to a small team of highly dedicated journalists (in February 1834, they are seven Philipon included).Desnoyers, Altaroche, Cler, un critique d'art et deux critiques littéraires. David S.Kerr, Caricature and French political culture 1830-1848, Clarendon Press, 2000, p. 30.
The testimony of his contemporaries emphasises Philipon's charisma who inspired writers and caricaturists in his employ.Champfleury, Histoire de la caricature moderne, p. 26. Himself focusing on lithographs, his publishing house had an almost complete monopoly on this type of publication as of 1831, with a third of all lithographs published in Paris coming from him.Kerr, op. cit., p. 59.
Rise to prominence (1830–1835)
Campaign against Louis-Philippe (1830–1832)
In the fall of 1830 Philipon, as supporter of the Revolution of July, expected much of the new regime. The first issues of La Caricature contained no political charges.Pierre Larousse, Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, op. cit. Chief editor and friend of Philipon, Balzac, contributed extensively in this period, signing his articles under various pseudonyms. Anti-clericalism, already present in La Silhouette, persistently manifested itself in both texts and illustrations. The memory of Napoleon still lived.
However, the tone changed in late December 1830 to early 1831, when the law of 4 December 1830 that restored stamp duty and censorship of newspapers was criticised by the magazine. The caricatures then maintained their political and satirical character as the new regime became increasingly authoritarian, upending the "age of consensus."Le Juste Milieu, lithographie de Philipon, non datée.Lettre du 7 juillet 1846 à Roslje, dans : Carteret, Le Trésor du bibliophile romantique et moderne, t. III, p. 124. According to Philipon, caricatures increased the important influence of artists, as had been the case in England for a long time, exposing "the enemies of our liberties."Déclinée plus tard par ces mêmes artistes (« L'ordre public règne aussi à Paris », Aubert, 1 October 1831), puis par Traviès (« L'ordre le plus parfait règne aussi à Lyon », La Caricature, 5 January 1832).
Philipon expressed his disaffection for the regime in a cartoon, Foam of July, published by Maison Aubert (26 February 1831). Better known as The soap bubbles, it shows Louis Philippe I carelessly blowing bubbles that show the unfulfilled promises of freedom of the press, popular elections, mayors elected by the people, no more sinecures etc. Prosecuted for insulting the king, Philipon would be acquitted eventually. He reoffended a few months later with another lithograph, known as The Cosmetic repair (La Caricature, 30 June 1831), in which the king is represented as a mason, symbolically erasing the traces of the July Revolution. He was again tried by the Assize Court.
November 1831 trial
"First fruit of France"
On trial on 14 November 1831, Philipon, sure to be condemned, defended himself arguing that everything can be made to look like the king, and that he and other caricaturists cannot be held responsible for this resemblance. He illustrated its defense by the metamorphosis by drawing, in four stages, the King's face evolving into a pear. This imagery became a widely used reference and symbol of the revolution, even outside of Paris.Lettres du 7 juillet 1846 à Roslje, Carteret, op. cit., p. 126).
The widespread appearance of the pears is well documented by a vast array of people of the times, including William Makepeace Thackeray, Heinrich Heine, Charles Baudelaire, Stendhal, and Sebastien Peyte, who wrote a book titled Physiology of the Pear, collecting puns and spin-offs of the imagery. Victor Hugo in Les Misérables pays homage to the imagery as a young boy sketches an image of a pear on a wall, when the king helped him finish it and handed him a gold Louis coin saying, "The pear is on that too."
Pears began to represent the regime and its associates, and began showing up more often in both La Caricature and Le Charivari including,
Daumier's A huge pear hanging by the commoners Grandville's The Birth of the Juste- Milieu Travies' Mr. Mahieux poiricide Bouquet's Pear and pips
Philipon later published an image of a giant pear statue being erected at the Place de la Concorde with the title "The expiapoire monument is raised on the site of the Revolution, exactly where Louis XVI was guillotined." Expiapoire is a portmanteau of expiatoire meaning "expiatory" and poire meaning "pear". He was tried for this piece and the prosecution called this piece "a provocation of murder". Philipon responded with, "It would be at most a provocation to make marmalade".
Doomed for closing in August after a censorship law was passed in 1835, La Caricature published the relevant portion of the law's text in the shape of a pear with the legend "Other fruits of the July Revolution".
Conviction
At the end of his trial before the Assize Court, Philipon was convicted of "contempt of the king's person." Arrested on 12 January 1832, he had to serve six months in prison and pay a fine of 2,000 francs, to which were added seven months related to other charges.
The final break with the July Monarchy occurred on 5 and 6 June 1832, at the funeral of General Lamarque, which turned into rebellion harshly repressed. Philipon had just published and signed the "Project for a monument pear Atonement." Fearing for his life, he hid in Paris until the end of the siege. He returned to Sainte-Pelagie on 5 September 1832 and was finally released from prison on 5 February 1833.
Resulting from the bitterness of a regime that "persecuted" him, along with the influence of contacts he met in prison, his positions had firmed. After he had hoped for a "liberalism compatible with monarchy", his position became Republican in itself. But he had never ceased to be ? Philipon proclamation published in La Caricature (27 December 1832), true profession of faith, leaves no doubt about it: " We repeat, we are what we were there twelve years, frank and pure republicans . Who says otherwise is an impostor who says behind us in ambiguous terms is a coward. "
Republican commitment (1833–1835)