Daumier, I, 34), for which the Cour d'Assises at his trial on
February 23, 1832 convicted Daumier of the crime of insulting
the King. Philipon accepted Daumier's first lithograph for La
Caricature at about the time of the trial. Two weeks later, Philipon
published Daumier Masques de 1831 ( Loys Delteil. Honoré
Daumier, I, 42) which is an impressive indication of his trend
towards portrait-caricature. Drawn around the head of Louis-
Philippe, as the inevitable pear, are the grimacing masks of four-
teen of Louis-Philippe's Ministers and deputies, including Gui-
zot, Thiers, Soult, d'Argout, Kératry, Barthe and Lobau. At
about this time, Daumier began to model the thirty-six busts in
rough clay, which he used for the drawing of the famous portrait-
caricatures of the Ministers and politicians. The series began with
de Lameth in La Caricature on April 26, 1832 ( Loys Delteil.
Honoré Daumier, I, 43); it was suspended during Daumier's
imprisonment and began again in La Caricature and Le Charivari
in 1833. Out of them came Daumier's synthesis of the ministerial
party on the benches of the Chamber in Le Ventre Législatif.
It was No. 18 of L'Association Mensuelle and the first of the
four greatest numbers of the series.

Nos. 18, 20, 22 and 24 of L'Association Mensuelle mark Dau-
mier's extraordinary mastery, at the age of twenty-six, of litho-
graphic political caricature; and they overshadow all the other
caricatures of the series. However important the political carica-
tures of Grandville, Raffet and Traviès may have been, when
they were published, and in spite of Philipon's emphasis on the
series as a whole, the interest of collectors and museums has been
centered on the four lithographs by Daumier. Many of the
twenty-four numbers of L'Association Mensuelle were seized
and destroyed; many have disappeared; it is very difficult to find
or bring together a complete set in a satisfactory condition; and
few collectors or museums possess the whole series. As it is poorly
known, there have been misconceptions and misstatements about
it, even in otherwise authoritative books of reference.

The exhibition of L'Association Mensuelle at The Grolier
Club of New York City in the winter of 1949-1950 was in the
nature of a surprise and a discovery on the part of many of the
visitors. Actually the complete series of these political caricatures
had probably never before been shown at any public exhibition.
This book is the first attempt to reproduce and present these
caricatures as a complete series.

The subject-matter of the caricatures is so rooted in the history
of the freedom of the press in France and is so enmeshed in events
from the first abdication of Napoleon and the adoption of the
Charte Constitutionnelle to the suppression of political criticism
in 1835, that they would speak an enigmatic language if they
were torn out of their background. Little explanation was neces-
sary for Philipon's subscribers; to his contemporaries his com-
ments were intended to be inflammatory appeals. For us, how-
ever, the satire and anger of his caricaturists would lose much of
their force and meaning, if they were not related to the issues
which caused them. In the first interpretation of the Charte Con-
stitutionnelle of 1814 lay the convulsive problem of repression
which, after harassing all the intermediate Ministries, came to
its crisis under Louis-Philippe and the de Broglie Ministry in
September, 1835.

Looking backward from the ignoble press laws of that year,
obviously their provenance was by way of the bourgeois political

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