FSLG Annual Review - Senate House Libraries - University of London

French caricatures of the Franco-Prussian
War and Commune at the British Library
W. Jack Rhoden, PhD student, University of Sheffield
Held at three separate shelfmarks in the British Library is a unique collection of
around two thousand French caricatures. No comparable collection exists on these
shores and although many of these images are preserved in the various sites of the
Bibliothèque nationale de France, they are not, to the best of my knowledge,
collected in such easy to access volumes as this. There is however, an enlightening,
though somewhat hidden away exhibition on the Franco-Prussian War and the
Commune at the Musée d’art et histoire at Saint-Denis that proudly displays some of
these caricatures. 1
The overwhelming majority of the images in the British Library collection were
produced between the fall of Napoleon III in September 1870 and the end of 1871.
An article by Morna Daniels attributed the acquisition of those at 14001.g.41 and
Cup1001.l.1 to one Frédéric Justen who donated them to the British Museum on 9
March 1889. It is probable that this was the same Frederick Justen who was listed as
a bookseller of German origin in the 1881 census and – given the significant overlap
of the content – that he also donated a third collection (now found at shelfmark
Cup648.b.2). 2
The majority of images are French, caricatural in form, and produced in Paris but in
addition to these there are significant numbers of German, war-themed illustrations
and caricatures, Franco-Belgian caricatures, several images produced in Lyon and a
few notable Italian caricatures. The subject matter is split between political cartoons
and caricatures of social moeurs, with several series of classical battle illustrations.
The collection held separately at Cup1001.l.1 is entirely given over to caricatures of
an explicitly sexual nature with Bismarck and Napoleon III bearing the brunt of the
attacks.
My Project
I am currently nearing the end of the third year of my PhD, funded by the Concordat
scheme between the University of Sheffield and the British Library. My supervisors at
Sheffield are Dr. Timothy Baycroft and Prof. Mary Vincent, while Teresa Vernon and
Des McTernan are my co-supervisors at the British Library. The working title of the
thesis is ‘Caricatural representations of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, 1848-1871’. The
source material for my third chapter (on the Franco-Prussian War and Commune) is
drawn almost entirely from this British Library collection. For this to be properly
footnoted and referenced I had to catalogue the entire collection, building upon the
work already done by Morna Daniels. I was also, with the help of Des and Teresa,
1 Musée d’art et histoire at Saint-Denis, Paris: http://www.musee-saint-denis.fr/ - The exhibition is
curated by Bertrand Tillier, the foremost expert on French caricature for this period. It is not digitized.
2 Morna Daniels, ‘Caricatures from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the Paris Commune’, The
Electronic British Library Journal, Article 5 (2005), p. 2.
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