Abstract

Best known as a caricaturist who skewered the politicians and social mores of nineteenth-century France, Honoré Daumier also had a deep and abiding engagement with the seventeenth-century playwright Molière. This article examines Daumier’s paintings of Molière’s plays Le Malade imaginaire (1673) and Les Fourberies de Scapin (1671), initiated shortly after Daumier was fired from a thirty-year position working for the illustrated press. Rather than understanding these paintings in relationship to his broader political project, scholars tend to interpret them in isolation from his lithographs, with the inadequate justification that the formality of the stage diverges from the humor of his cartoons. Daumier—who, like Molière, had negotiated shifting censorship restrictions throughout his career—painted Molière’s plays when they were being revived by nineteenth-century theaters because new material was heavily censored. In moments of intense repression, audiences and playhouses used these plays to stage oblique attacks on the government. This article examines the legal frameworks linking a caricatural style of painting to theatrical performance and argues that, by turning to Molière as a subject in paint when explicitly political material was being censored in print, Daumier’s works intervene in the contested space of speech in Second Empire France.

摘要

以讽刺 19 世纪法国政治家和社会习俗的漫画家而闻名，奥诺雷·杜米埃 (Honoré Daumier) 还与 17 世纪剧作家莫里哀有着深刻而持久的交往。本文考察了杜米埃的莫里哀戏剧Le Malade imaginaire (1673) 和Les Fourberies de Scapin 的画作（1671 年），在杜米埃从为插图出版社工作了 30 年的职位上被解雇后不久发起。学者们并没有根据他更广泛的政治计划来理解这些画作，而是倾向于将它们与他的石版画分开来解释，没有充分的理由认为舞台的形式与他的漫画的幽默背道而驰。杜米埃——和莫里哀一样，在他的整个职业生涯中都在协商改变审查制度的限制——在 19 世纪剧院因新材料受到严格审查而复兴时描绘了莫里哀的戏剧。在强烈镇压的时刻，观众和剧场利用这些戏剧对政府进行斜向攻击。本文研究了将漫画风格的绘画与戏剧表演联系起来的法律框架，并认为，