Note 36 — Chapter XVIII · FRENCH CARICATURE.

Mr. Thackeray, who was but nineteen when Louis Philippe came to the throne, witnessed much of the famous contest between this knot of caricaturists and the King of the French; and in one of the first articles which he wrote for subsistence, after his father's failure, he gave the world some account of it.[36] At a later period of his life he would probably not have regarded the king as the stronger party. He would probably not have described the contest as one between "half a dozen poor artists on the one side, and His Majesty Louis Philippe, his august family, and the numberless placemen and supporters of the monarchy, on the other." Half a dozen poor artists, with an unscrupulous publisher at their head, who gives them daily access to the eye and ear of a great capital, can array against the object of their satire and abuse the entire unthinking crowd of that capital. A firm, enlightened, and competent king would have united against these a majority of the responsible and the reflecting. Such a king would truly have been, as Mr. Thackeray observed, "an Ajax girded at by a Thersites." But Louis Philippe was no Ajax. He was no hero at all. He had no splendid and no commanding traits. He was merely an overfond father and well-disposed citizen of average talents. He was merely the kind of man which free communities can ordinarily get to serve them, and who will serve them passably well if the task be not made needlessly difficult. Hence Philipon and his "half a dozen poor artists" were very much the stronger party—a fact which the king, in the sight and hearing of all France, confessed and proclaimed by putting them in prison.