Pear Pressure

Caricatures, censorship, and the power of fruit in 19th-century France

Charles Philipon spent a lot of 1831 in courtrooms. He was not a thief or a murderer but a publisher of a satire magazine called La Caricature. His crime was making fun of the King of France.

As is so often the case, it was the hope that hurt the most for Philipon.

The new king, Louis Philippe, had taken the throne after the July Revolution of 1830 pushed the arch-conservative Charles X to abdicate. Louis Philippe initially made gestures that impressed liberals like Philipon. He called himself “King of the French” instead of “King of France,” which indicated a belief that legitimacy came from the citizens. He promised to uphold the Charter of 1830, which created a constitutional monarchy. And he presented himself as a “citizen king,” ditching pomp and circumstance and dressing like a (very wealthy) bourgeois Frenchman much of the time.

So when, in the months after his ascent to the throne, Louis Philippe started to back away from his commitment to liberalism, Philipon and the cartoonis…