A Boy Smokes a Prussian Cigar While a Furious Frenchman Delivers His Own Reply

Signed Cham (Amédée-Charles-Henri de Noé), this lithograph belongs to the satirical press commentary on the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. The scene is blunt: a boy puffs a cigar given him by a Prussian soldier while a enraged Frenchman boots him from behind — the caption dialogue confirmed in the French text below. Cham worked in the lineage running from Gillray and Rowlandson through Daumier, whose biting lithographs for *Le Charivari* established political caricature as daily journalism. Cham contributed hundreds of cartoons to that same paper. His sequential, punchy panels — distinct figures, action, speech — fed directly into the proto-comic-strip format that Töpffer had pioneered and that would harden, by century's end, into the newspaper comic strip.