Sur les boulevards de Paris

A lithograph — Daumier's preferred medium — showing two bourgeois men on a Parisian boulevard, one absorbed in a newspaper (the masthead reads *Les Nouvelles* or similar), the other gesturing urgently at his shoulder, apparently delivering political gossip. Both wear the top hats and frock coats that mark their class; Daumier renders them with the rubbery, bulging physiognomy he used to mock the self-important *juste-milieu* citizen — the comfortable Frenchman who consumed politics as entertainment while 1848's revolutions shook Europe. This sheet belongs to the tradition running from Gillray's political grotesques through Rowlandson's social comedy: sequential, character-driven, printed satire aimed at a mass audience. That lineage flows directly into the comic strip and, eventually, the comic book.