Gustave Doré: Twelve Comic Strips

GUSTAVE DORÉ

GUSTAVE DORÉ

Twelve Comic Strips

Introduced and translated by

David Kunzle

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

Designed by Todd Lape

Frontis image on page ii: Doré, c. 1856–1858, by Nadar

Copyright © 2015 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2015

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Doré, Gustave, 1832–1883

Gustave Doré : twelve comic strips / introduced and translated by David Kunzle.

pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-62846-216-6 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-62674-589-6 (ebook) 1. Comic books, strips, etc.—France. 2. Doré, Gustave, 1832–1883 3. Art, French—19th century. I. Kunzle, David.

PN6747.D66K86 2015

741.5’944—dc23                             2014042181

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

For Marjoyrie, ever youthful, ever funny

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Bibliography

THE COMIC STRIPS

1. Les Travaux d’Hercule (The Labors of Hercules)

Album, 1847

2. Le Communisme en tableau (Communism Depicted)

Journal pour Rire, 1848

3. La Vie en Province, Histoire d’une invitation à la campagne (Life in the Provinces, Story of an Invitation to the Countryside)

Journal pour Rire, 1849

4. L’Homme aux Cent Mille Écus (The Man with One Hundred Thousand Crowns)

Journal pour Rire, 1850

5. Trois Artistes Incompris et Mécontens (Three Misunderstood and Discontented Artists)

Album, 1850

6. Voyage en Allemagne / Voyage sur le Rhin (Trip to Germany / Trip on the Rhine)

Journal pour Rire, 1851

7. Les Trains de Plaisir de Môsieu Godard (The Pleasure Trips of Mister Godard)

Journal pour Rire, 1851

8. Les Dés-Agréments d’un Voyage d’Agrément (Displeasures of a Pleasure Trip)

Album, 1851

9. Une Ascension au Mont Blanc (An Ascent of Mount Blanc)

Journal pour Rire, 1852

10. Vacances du Collégien (Schoolboy’s Holiday)

Journal pour Rire, 1852

11. Une Heureuse Vocation (A Fortunate Vocation)

Journal pour Rire, 1852

12. La Conscription (The Conscription)

Journal pour Rire, 1853

Index

Preface

Among the masters of the nineteenth-century comic strip, Doré has been much neglected. He is of course remembered best, and for good reason, as the primary illustrator of literary classics of his age, which gave him an unsurpassed international reputation, and concomitant scholarly attention. He himself repudiated, and critics and biographers have scanted, his beginnings as a caricaturist. These are rescued, for the first time in English, by the present work.

Doré’s caricature is known to a few specialists in France, but fewer still have pointed out that his mastery of the comic strip, or picture story, in particular marks him as an entirely original figure in the post-Töpffer era of revolutionary, mid–century France, when Daumier and Gavarni, never comic strip artists, were dominant in caricature generally. Doré, remarkably, drew these comic strips, which total about a dozen in number, when he was between fifteen and twenty-two years old, for Charles Philipon’s Journal pour Rire (The Laughter Journal), virtually dominating it for the years of its survival (1848–1855). He also created three (actually four) longer, separately published albums, which show him at his very best. They are consistently funny, often ludicrous, and are infused with a graphic inventiveness that only the twentieth century would catch up with. The topics covered by these graphic stories include a parody of an ancient fable, the discomforts of life in the country, the perils of artistic ambition, the absurdities of mountaineering and travel whether by balloon or on foot, and the antics of schoolboys.

This book provides a summary sociopolitical context for the caricature of Doré, focusing on his comic strips in the Journal pour Rire, the character of the journal, and the three comic strip albums done while he worked there, all of which present originality, as well as being prescient of his later work as illustrator of literary classics. Our analysis reveals his debts to his predecessors in the comic strip, Töpffer, Cham, and Nadar, but stops short of the Histoire de la Sainte Russie of 1854, that huge summum of comic strip art with its 543 drawings, which has been republished in the twentieth century, and is available in English translation. None of Doré’s Journal strips has been republished. The (smaller) albums were included, much reduced and incomplete, in the 1975 German edition of Doré’s Collected Graphics. One album (the Hercule) appeared in 1927 and 1984 German editions but are unavailable; another (the Dés-Agréments) has recently been published in the original French, in facsimile. The third (Trois Artistes) remains quite unknown, as do all the Journal pieces.

This edition includes facsimiles of twelve—that is, all the significant graphic novels and comic strips, and the first translation into English of the captions.

As this book goes to press, I have received the excellent, just-published book by Thierry Groensteen on Töpffer and heirs (including a segment on Doré), which I have been unable to use here apart from adding it to the bibliography. I acknowledge gratefully some hints from the anonymous reader for the University Press of Mississippi, sponsorship of the nucleus of the introduction here by Philippe Kaenel (in Kaenel, ed., Gustave Doré, Master of Imagination [Musée d’Orsay, 2014]), and Todd Lape for his excellent, incisive design, and Becca Wilson for her acute copy-editing. I am grateful for the generosity of the library of the Eglise de Brou, Bourg en Bresse, for scanning their copy of the Travaux d’ Hercule.

Introduction

As if to confirm the old adage that culture precedes politics—that is to say, that cultural phenomena can predict major political crises—a new, cheap illustrated journalism, a new kind of caricature, and a unique caricaturist appeared on the eve of the Revolution of 1848, which broke out in February of that year. Every true democratic revolution promises a rebirth, a renaissance, and new cultural and political freedoms. The Revolution of July 1830 gave birth to La Caricature and then the daily Charivari magazine, the virulent political caricature of Daumier and his many graphic allies, as well as the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe, with its own distinctive culture of corruption, encapsulated in the writings of Balzac. The Revolution of 1848 sired a new, heavily illustrated journalism of entertainment in the Journal pour Rire, which gave young Gustave Doré, its principal illustrator, his début, and Charles Philipon, its publisher, a new lease on life.

The end of Doré’s contribution to the comic strip coincides with that of the Revolution and briefly ensuing Republic. That end also coincides with the demise of the Journal under that title, and a hiatus in the production of comic strips elsewhere in Europe (England and Germany). The Second Republic (1848–1851) was already repressive; the even more censorious Second Empire (1852–1870), having suppressed revolutionary freedoms, engendered a culture of disillusionment, of which Baudelaire is perhaps the best-known exponent, and an atmosphere unpropitious to the naturally irreverent comic strip.

Fig. 1

Doré, Cowherd reading the Journal pour Rire (from Doré 200 Sketches . . .)

Comic Strip: An Art of Revolution

In neighboring Geneva, the Revolution of 1830 also indirectly gave birth to the modern comic strip, under the lithographic pen of local schoolmaster and polymath writer Rodolphe Töpffer. Beginning in 1839, the invention of the Swiss was soon being imitated in Paris by the young Cham (Amédée de Noé), and then again by Nadar in his short-lived Revue Comique (1848–1849). A third wave was initiated with Doré in the Journal pour Rire 1848–1853 and his separately published albums of that period.¹

Doré was ever aware of his forebears in the new genre of comic strip, Töpffer and Cham, as they appeared in journals and narrative comic albums, not to speak of the powerful models offered by the resolutely non-narrative Grandville, Gavarni, and above all by Honoré Daumier, the greatest caricaturist of the whole era, whose Histoire Ancienne inspired Doré’s first album, Les Travaux d’Hercule. The debt Doré owes Töpffer is clearly massive.

Yet even as a beginner, as a child, Doré was fiercely determined to transcend all of his elders. He attempted this in about a dozen histoires en images, or romans en estampes, to use Töpffer’s terms for the little follies of his new invention. These included three longer, separately published albums, also narratives, advertised as albums comiques, and albums Jabot, after Töpffer’s first, which was plagiarized by Philipon. (The Swiss author was never credited.)

We must distinguish, as advertisements and critics of the time failed to do, the album as a collection of plates about the same social type, such as the famous Macaire series, from the concept of a narrative sequence deriving from a typical life or adventure often signaled in Journal pour Rire with the running title Histoire de . . . As a pioneer of the latter genre, Doré proved himself master of three major domains of caricature: the single cartoon, the series or group of drawings on a theme, and the narrative album (graphic novel). All three overflowed and often intermingled in the Journal pour Rire, leaving to Daumier and Gavarni the exhaustive exploration in large figures of single social types, equivalent of the much smaller and cheaper Physiologie booklets with their woodcut vignettes. The lithographs of Daumier, Gavarni, and others would be collected into considerable albums after being issued regularly as single plates in the Charivari. With an audience large but a little further down the socioeconomic scale, the Journal pour Rire saw its commercial advantage in much smaller and cheaper (virtually throwaway, and now very rare) albums, in which Doré willy-nilly participated.²

But Doré also saw himself as doing a grander series in this vein, which promised proven financial and career rewards. Daumier’s financial swindler Robert Macaire (which eventually ran to one hundred plates), and Gavarni’s ever-ingenious courtesans, the Lorettes, emerged from the Charivari as best-selling albums. Doré apparently planned two such lithographic series, to be called The Doctors and The Painters, impressions of which survive (twelve and seven plates, respectively), tentative, captionless drafts, leaving no trace of an attempt to bring them to publication.³

His 1852 series Folies Gauloises has no more than an irreverent take on a great random swath of French history as the internal thematic link; externally it presages the Sainte Russie. There is little coherence here any more than in his two albums dated 1854 of miscellaneous, barely linked topics, called La Ménagerie Parisienne and Les Différents Publics de Paris. The publisher, Philipon, apparently did not see a way to enlarge the thematic groups Doré scattered with open hand in the Journal pour Rire, such as his singers, orators, clubmen, schoolboys, bathers, and poseurs, into a series big enough to fill a large, separately publishable album to compete with Daumier and Gavarni—not to speak of repurposing bric-a-brac offerings run under Doré’s name and titles such as grotesques, and pochades (jokes).

But Doré’s ambition to establish himself in the separate album was apparent at the start. Philipon, in fact, actually announced another Doré album as imminent in the preface to Doré’s first, his Travaux d’Hercule. The artist told his father too, it seems, who noted the success of that volume but thought that the proposed second topic of a Vie d’artiste (life of an artist) would be generally more accessible than the exploits of a hero from ancient mythology. But such albums, said Doré, thinking perhaps to rival Daumier on this topic, were more conducive to my reputation.⁴ Doré père had not been immediately convinced that his son had a talent to live by, unlike the mother, who may have been the one who first accompanied young Gustave to Philipon and who was always dominant in his life. The father, who had not intended to stay in Paris—his job as a railway engineer required his return to the provinces—was fearful of the boy’s strange temperament, of his being irresponsible (étourdi), light-headed and careless. He wrote his elder son Ernest (November 6, 1847), asking him to take care of his slightly younger brother because I’m afraid he will play some practical joke one of these days [as was his wont as a small child] causing him to be expelled from the Collège Charlemagne as he has been expelled everywhere.⁵ He was also worried that Philipon might commit some political indiscretion that would involve his boy.

Philipon, former editor of the Charivari and promoter of the Daumier, Gavarni, and other series, while recognizing Doré’s