Introduction: The birth of Caricature
The history of Caricature, as part of a discipline in modern graphic design, may be traced back to the cultures of ancient Egypt, Greek and Rome and in the middle ages to Leonardo da Vinci's attempts to comprehend the concept of ideal beauty, by analyzing "the epitome of grotesque".
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| An Egyptian funeral boat |
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| An Unfortunate Egyptian Soul |
Caricatures are designed to oversimplify and exaggerate each subject's distinctive features, while still maintaining a recognizable likeness, in order to convey a visual message. According to Thomas Wright, a message has been conveyed to us from the distance of the ages by an Egyptian image in which a small boat with provisions that runs into the back of a larger funeral boat, upsetting the tables of cakes and other supplies. Thus this scene has the characteristics of a caricature. Wright, provides other Egyptian examples in which animals are employed in occupations usually reserved for humans which appear to be humorous , and he discusses examples of the ancient Greeks who were especially partial to representations of monsters, frequently using their images in their ornaments and works of arts.
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| The Egyptian God Typhoon |
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| A Greek Gorgon |
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| The Roman Sannio, from an engraving in the "Differetatio de Larvis Scenicis" by the Italian antiquary Ficoroni, who copied it from an engraved gem. He wears the Foccus or low shoe peculiar to the comic actors. |
In particular, Greeks adapted the figure of the Egyptian god Typhoon to represent their Gorgon, as the above images show the Greek Gorgon was a rather close emulation of Typhoon. The image of Typhoon with its broad, coarse, and frightful face, lolling out his large tongue , appeared frequently on the Egyptian monuments. According, to Pliny in his "Natural History" among the pictures exhibited in the Forum at Rome there was one in which a Gaul was represented, "trusting out his tongue in avert unbecoming manner". Perhaps by using a Gorgon-type caricaturization, Romans were trying to exhibit their displeasure with Gauls. The Roman popular character Sannio, or buffoon, whose name is derived from a similar Greek character and who was employed in performing burlesque dances, making grimaces, and in other acts calculated to excite the mirth of the spectators, was another example of these ancient caricatures.
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| An artist studio in Pompeii |
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| The Oldest drawing in British Museum, 1320 AD. Two demons tossing a monk headlong into a river. |
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| Luther Inspired by Satan |
In the Middle Ages religious anxieties were mixed with carnivals, festivals and enjoyment of the ludicrous. A manuscript from this time provides an example of two demons playfully tripping a monk and throwing him into a river. According to James Parton, "Reformation began with laughter, which church itself nourished and sanctioned ... upon edifices erected before the year 1000 there are few traces of the devil, and upon of those of much earlier date none at all; but from eleventh century he begins to play an important role". Artists competed with each other to give the devil the most hideous looks, and as time passed he looked more and more ridiculous. However, Luther spoke of the devil very seriously, as he thought that devils are present everywhere and in every action. People laughed at clergy, "the clergy, self-indulgent" in the words of Parton "preached self denial; practicing vice, they exaggerated human guilt. " Parton writes " among the curiosities which Luther himself brought from Rome in 1510, was a caricature suggested by the Ship of Fools, showing how the Pope had fooled the whole world with his superstitious and idolatries. ... Luther himself was a caricaturist ... The famous pamphlet of caricatures published in 1521 by Luther's friend and follower, Lucas Cranach, contains pictures that we could easily believe Luther himself suggested."
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| The Pope Tossed into Hell, Lucas Cranach, 1521 |
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| Pythagoras with musical devices. In Franchino Gaffurio, Theorica musice (Milan: Filippo Mantegazza for G.P. da Lomazzo, 1492) |
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| America, Jan Galle after Joannes Stradanus (Jan Van der Straet), ca. 1580, from Nova repetra. In seculum diuersarum imaginaum speculatiuarum a varijis viris doctis adinuentarum, atq[ue] insignibus pictoribus ac culptoribus delineatarum... |
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| &Bibliotheca Publica in Leiden, In Johannes van Meurs, Athenac Batave, Sive, De urbe Leidensi, Academia, virisque claris ... (Leiden: Apud A. Cloucquium et Elsevirios, 1625) |
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| The Padua anatomy theater designed by Hieronymus Fabricius, 1595. In Giacomo Filippo Tomasini, Gymnasium Patavinum (Udine: Nicolaus Schirattus, 1654) |
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| A coffehouse in London. In E. Ward, The Fourth part of Vulgus Britanicus; or, British Hudibras (London: James Woodward and John Morphew, 1710), frontispiece. |
Between 1490 and 1495 Leonardo da Vinci (1452- 1519) developed his habit of recording his studies in meticulously illustrated notebooks. His work covered four main themes: painting, architecture, the elements of mechanics, and human anatomy. It appears that as much as he was interested in the human anatomy, through his sketches of various facial characteristics he was also interested in understanding of the human emotions and the impact of the ravages of time on the battered faces of various characters. These sketches which are collected into various codices and manuscripts, are indeed real precursors to modern caricatures.
Over time,as Werner Hoffman, in his Caricature from Leonardo to Picasso. (New York: Crown Publishers, 1957) argues artist deviated from Leonardo's approach to the human figure to develop a more exaggerated appearance of their subject. The “principles of form established in part by Leonardo had become so ingrained into the method of portraiture that artists like Agostino and Annibale Carracci rebelled against them. Intended to be lighthearted satires, their caricaturas were, in essence, ‘counter-art.”
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| Study of Aesthetics in Five Rugged Heads, Leonardo da Vinci c. 1495 |
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| The parable of the blind, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1568 |
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1520?-1569), who was from Flanders introduced his imaginative symbolism mixed with a subtle sarcasm in his paintings of various biblical parables and other metaphors, such as the Parables of Blinds, in which a blind is leading the others. His composition, and exaggerations of various human sensitivities are truly stunning and anticipates the best today's political cartoons.
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The Drunken Silenus ("The Tazza Farnese", ca. 1597–1600
By the end of the 17th century, Annibale Carracci had raised the status of the caricature up to a high art discipline. His exaggerated visual narratives were later followed by many caricaturists of the 18th century. |
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| Annibale Carracci, Sheet of caricatures, c.1595, British Museum |
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| Annibale Carracci, Various Works According to seventeenth century sources, the inventor of caricature as an independent art form was, the Bolognese history painter, Annibale Carracci. Mosini recorded Annibale's 'theory' of caricature as being the ultimate antithesis of beauty: 'una bella... perfetta deformità.' Like beauty in art, Annibale held, caricature was based on selection and synthesis. The artist was to devise it, in a playful spirit like that of Nature, whenever She offered him suitable models. The point was to offer an impression of the original which was more striking than a portrait. |
In political cartoons the artist reduces the intriguing conceptual complexity of historical events, within a cultural context, into a stark but simple imagery accompanied by a witty and sarcastic statement. When this image is carefully analyzed, it leads to discovery of a number of important historical, social,economical political, and cultural facts that offer authentic and accurate insights into the various cultural biases, human right issues, public anxieties, democratic wishes, and other features of a particular age. They shed light on enigmatic causes of historical events and describe the trajectory of a civilization through time towards achieving humanistic ideals . Since the early eighteenth century, political cartoons have opened a sharp visual communication window into the past. The key to the caricature is an exaggeration of those aspect of a narrative that the artist wants to highlight. The personage of a tyrant, a charlatan politician or a corrupt clergyman in the hands of an artist turns to a revealing caricature that no amount of censorship can cover up. In this regard political cartoons have become a unique visual communication device since the 17th century, providing political editorials and socio-cultural commentaries. The main aim of this visual communication is to shape public opinion by using a verity of artistic, cultural, and psychological techniques, including resorting to nationalism, symbolism, hyperbolic suggestions, labeling, analogy, and irony. But, most often, they use sarcastic metaphors, satirical comparisons, and over the top description of reality to simplify complex political events so that the general public can comprehend their significance, from a particular perspective.
Perhaps the first political cartoonist was the Dutch artist Romeyn de Hooghe (1645-1708), who at the service of William of Orange, later King William III of England, repeatedly caricatured James II and Louis XIV, sometimes using pseudonyms on his most audacious images. He painted, engraved, sculpted, designed medals, enameled, taught drawing school, and bought and sold art as a dealer, but above all he was a graphic designer who etched allegories and mythological scenes, portraits, caricatures, political satires, historical subjects, landscapes, topographical views, battle scenes, genre scenes, title pages, and book illustrations.
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| Louis XIV as Apollo led by Madame de Maintenon, Romeyn de Hooghe, etching from 1701 |
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| One of the earliest political cartoons was that of Robert Walpole, considered as the first British prime minister (1720 to 1742), who was represented by his exposed rear end. The cartoon did not show his face, because everybody knew you had to kiss his bottom if you wanted a highly paid government job. Walpole's attempts to arrest cartoonists only heightened interest in this medium. Bowing to the inevitable, he commissioned more flattering cartoons in an attempt to outflank his rivals. ” |
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| The farmer crushed by "Taille, Impots et Corvee"; by tithe, taxation and statute-labour. Coloured engraving. |
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| The Third Estate, the clergy and the nobility shouldering the national debt. French Revolution. Engraving; 1789. |
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Marie-Antoinette was cruelly lampooned throughout her life in France. She was an Austrian Princess,who at age 15 married the Crown Prince of France in 1770. She and husband Louis XVI were still teenagers when they ascended the throne in 1774. This anonymous cartoon from around 1791 blames the unfortunate queen for her alleged infidelity, the scandal provoked by her alleged greed in the affaire du collier or the necklace affair, the doomed flight to Varennes and counter-revolutionary intrigue. The image depicts her carrying the Dauphin, her eldest son, and Louis XVI, followed by her daughter Madame Royale and the King’s aunt Madame Elisabeth, leaping to safety from the Tuileries. The royal couple are both holding the broken scepter and are encouraged by the King’s brother, Comte de Provence (left), holding a purse full of money. Beneath are references to the Queen’s alleged sins. The affaire du collier which was the trigger point for the French Revolution was started when jewelers Böhmer and Bassenge nearly went broke creating a necklace that they presumed King Louis XV would buy for his mistress Madame du Barry. But the king died before he could purchase it and the jewelers hope that the new king, Louis XVI, might agree to buy the necklace for Marie Antoinette was dashed when Marie Antoinette discouraged Louis from purchasing it. Then a desperate, heavy-indebted Comtesse de Lamotte told cardinal Rétaux de Villette that the queen desperately wanted the diamond necklace but that she didn't want to ask Louis for it. Comtesse and her lover, forged letters in Marie Antoinette's hand and send them to the Cardinal, who was disliked by Marie Antoinette, asking him to buy the necklace, and Lamotte slyly suggested that if Cardinal de Rohan could find a way to procure it for her, his good reputation would be restored at court. At last, the cardinal wrangled the diamonds from Böhmer and Bassenge on credit. The jewelers presented the necklace to the queen's footman for delivery -- only the footman was Comtesse's lover Rétaux in disguise. He seized the necklace and headed to London. When his first payment was due, Cardinal de Rohan couldn't cough up the amount. The jewelers demanded money from Marie Antoinette, who had no knowledge of the necklace. By then, the necklace had been sold. A furious Louis had the cardinal arrested; later, he was acquitted of all charges and exiled. The scheming mastermind Lamotte was imprisoned but broke free and took up residence in England. There, she spread propaganda about the queen. |
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Luis looks at the empty chests and asks “Where is the tax money?“ The financial minister, Necker, looks on and says “The money was there last time I looked." The nobles and clergy are sneaking out the door carrying sacks of money. Necker’s principal mistake was his misguided attempt to finance French participation in the American Revolution without recourse to additional taxation. In trying to raise the necessary loans, Necker published in 1781 his celebrated Compte rendu au Roi (“Report to the King”), claiming a surplus of 10,000,000 livres in the hope of concealing an actual deficit of 46,000,000. The opposition of the leading minister, Jean-Frédéric Phelypeaux, comte de Maurepas, and the hostility of the queen, Marie-Antoinette, forced Necker to resign on May 19, 1781. |
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| "The Awakening of the Third Estate," an aristocrat and clergyman are horrified to see a man casting off the shackles of his class. The hierarchical society of France was distinguished by her three estates: the clergy, the nobility, and commoners. The first estate, the clergy, occupied a position of conspicuous importance in France. Though only .5 percent of the population, the clergy controlled about 15 percent of French lands. They performed many essential public functions—running schools, keeping records of vital statistics, and dispensing relief to the poor. The French church, however, was a house divided. Taxpayers hated the tithe levied by the church, even though the full 10 percent implied by the word tithe was seldom demanded. They also complained about the church’s exemption from taxation. While the peasants remained moderately faithful Catholics and regarded the village priest, if not the bishop, with esteem and affection, the bourgeoisie increasingly accepted the anticlerical views of the philosopher. Like the higher clergy, the wealthy nobles of the Old Regime, the second estate, were increasingly unpopular. Although less than 2 percent of the population, they held about 20 percent of the land. They had virtual exemption from taxation and monopolized army commissions and appointments to high ecclesiastical office. |
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| Confiscation of Churches Lands |
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| The runaway royal family busted by French democrats Louis and extravagant Marie Antoinette were apprehended in Varennes, just miles from the Austrian border. Some say the strong scent of the queen's perfume gave their whereabouts away. |
 Edmund-Burke, Radical Arms, The conclusion of the French Revolution |
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| James Gillray, "The Zenith of French Glory - the Pinnacle of Liberty.(Louis XVI) Religion, Justice, Loyalty and all the Bugbears of Unenlightened Minds, Farewell!", February 12, 1793. Etching |
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| A French Gentleman of the Court of Louis XVI ; A French Gentleman of the Court of Egalité, James Gillray, 1799. A sarcastic treatment from England of French manners that contrasts the weakness of the old regime with the vulgar arrogance of the new revolutionary regime. The engraver also seems to be pointing toward two entirely different views of masculinity. |
In England, James Gillray (1757-1815) adopted the caricatural style of Bruegel, to create caricatures of his contemporary statesmen that today can be categorized as political cartoons in which his wit was directed not only against the political and legislative abuses of his time but also against the morals of the royal family. Gillray initially supported the French Revolution, and it's principles of liberty , but when the revolution turned violent particularly during the work of the Terror he turned against, nevertheless later on he turned against the tyrannical regime of Napoleon Bonaparte, describing him as "Boney the carcase-butcher" in a number of offensive images.
| George Cruikshank (1792 - 1878) was at his best when he was dealing with socio-cultural issues. His most celebrated of social cartoons were his Monstrosities, which were published annually from 1816 to 1828. As the conservative Victorian era began (1837) most forms of satirical art grew to be unfashionable. George Cruikshank thus turned his talents to the illustrated book, including Dickens's Oliver Twist, which bear testimony to his artistic talent. |
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| Bonaparte with authority commandeth his soldiers with fixed bayonets during the attack on the Council of Five Hundred. Note the exaggeration of his uniform and his hat feathers trying to give a comic note to the scene. They brandish proudly tricolor on what is written "Long live Bonaparte triumvirate - Seyes - Ducos." On the young drummer boy's instrument is inscribed "Vive la Liberté". |
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| The governing Directory was happy to send Napoleon to far-off Egypt. On the paper spread over the table is written "Subject: Send Bonaparte to Egypt to prevent the organizing of the Executive." According to some authors, Bonaparte can also be seen as Banquo in Shakespeare's Macbeth, who encountering the witches hear their prophesy about his future,that his descendants will be kings. Bonaparte, simply dressed in a long white shirt with a tight belt and boots is accusing the Board of wanting to remove soldiers as the only reward for his victories in Italy. |
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| Bonaparte, depicted in a bizarre military costume, furiously reads a dispatch addressed to "Mounseer Beau-Naperty ", which advising him to be cautious. On the paper dropping from his left hand is written; "The conquest of the Chouans (French royalists), old song called into music.", Signifying that England does not trust the Bonaparte promises of reconciliation. Behind him the second and third consuls are depicted as two buffoons trying to read over his shoulder. On the left, the messenger, carrying the red cap, awaiting Bonaparte's response. |
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| A courteous Bonaparte is politely welcoming to Paris the vulgar John Bull and his coarse bride Hibernia, representing England and Ireland, that are recently united by the Act of Union 1801. John Bull thanks his host by addressing him as Bonny Party. He also uses the word "gammon", which has the double meaning of "nonsense, humbug," and a cured or smoked ham; implying that for John Bull, this is not a simple courtesy visit. His wife (Ireland) interrupts him, telling him he needs to learn some manners. English cartoonists are beginning to represent John Bull as squire with top hat, Colorful jacket and culotte, a style of tight pants ending just below the knee, first popularized in France during the reign of Henry III. Bull's conservative instinct is in contrast to the excesses of the Jacobins. Created in 1712 by John Arbuthnot, John Bull became widely known from cartoons by Sir John Tenniel published in the British humor magazine Punch during the middle and late 19th century. In those cartoons, he was portrayed as an honest, solid, farmer figure, often in a Union Jack waistcoat, and accompanied by a bulldog. He was explicitly used as the antithesis of the sans-culotte during the French Revolution. |
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| The three English visitors bow before Bonaparte. Fox, the first character on left, is wearing a revolutionary cap and has bowed so low that his pants are torn. Erskine, in the middle, dressed in the black habit of lawyers and a paper out of his pocket says "O'Conners Brief." Beside him, bows Harvey Christian Combe, the Lord Mayor of London (recognizable from his gold chain). A paper out of his pocket reads "Essay on Porter Brewing by H. C. " Comb who acquired the Woodyard Brewery, of Castle Street, situated midway between the City and the West End of London was remarkable for his energy and great business ability. He became Lord Mayor in 1799, and was returned five times as the City's representative in Parliament. Sitting on a high chair decorated with elegant revolutionary symbols, Bonaparte receives the homage with one foot on a small stool, the other on the carpet covered raised podium. Note that he wears a director's uniform, not that of the First Consul. |
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| Napoleon wearing an unflattering military uniform wearing a pirate crown adorned with weapons and a skull. On the 9th of November 1799 (18 Brumaire) General Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew the Directory and assumed leadership of the French nation. Napoleon's victory at Marengo June 1800 followed by Moreau's at Hohenlinden in December 1800 forced Austria into a separate peace. Impressed by the exploits and eastern temptations offered by General, now First Consul Bonaparte, Tsar Paul inclined towards France. Along with Sweden, Denmark, and Prussia; Russia formed the Baltic League of Armed neutrality to resist Britain's efforts to enforce the blockade of France. This had added seriousness because of Britain's reliance on the Baltic ports for imports of grain, naval stores and for export markets. Britain was almost completely alone without an ally to be found across Europe. By stroke of good fortune with perhaps a (some have suggested there is a hint of complicity on Britain's part), Tsar Paul was assassinated on March 21st 1801. The new Tsar Alexander was no admirer of Napoleon and the promised Franco-Russian prosperity where they would settle the fate of northern Europe and the near east together, now evaporated like a mirage. Nine days later Nelson destroyed the Danish fleet in Copenhagen ending any potential for a combined fleet to threaten British naval superiority. In the midst of the Swiss crisis in 1802 France annexed Elba and Piedmont and in October Parma was occupied. To integrate these territories into the national patrimony was going beyond the cherished natural frontiers, and at such a critical juncture! This was flying in the face of all reason. |
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| The perception of the peace treaty with England. Napoleon had foreign expectations that encouraged him to seek peace. Initially and as Britain feared, he hoped to diplomatically and militarily defeat Britain, but once the opportunity to defeat Britain had diminished there were pressing reasons for peace. For the people of France the revolution had turned out to be a roller coaster ride, and to a large measure the reason General Bonaparte's take-over of the government was so popular was that he was perceived to be strong enough to bring things back under control in peace as he had in war. Victories alone were no longer enough, what was the point of victory if it didn't bring peace? Here a thin and elegant, but cunning and deceitful Bonaparte who has taken care to place his hat and sword on the floor, implying that he is no longer a warrior but a friend, courts a plump, prosperous, but outrageously dressed England (Britannia) who is depicted as a bit naive. Having set aside, too, her trident and shield, she is captivated by the fellow's charm, knowing that "he will disappoint again." In the background, the portraits of George III and Napoleon's face each others, but the eyes are wary, even-though their outstretched hands seem to merge. It is said that Napoleon was extremely amused by this cartoon. |
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| In the Treaty of London, signed on the first of 0ctober 1801, the guarantee of a single great power in charge of Malta was first abandoned for the collective guarantee of its independence from all the six European powers: Britain, France, Spain, Austria, Russia and Prussia. Although the last three were not present at the table, the protection and guarantee of Malta's independence was required from all of them. British forces were to be withdrawn, the fortification were to be left intact and for the next year, 1802, Malta was to be garrisoned by Naples from which Napoleon was agreeing to pull his troops out of. Following this the reconstituted Knights of St John would again hold the island. However virtually none of this ever occurred. None of the other powers ever offered their guarantee (although Russia toyed with the idea); Britain never withdrew her garrison, and when Naples sent the temporary garrison there were denied admission to the fortresses. The nominated Grandmaster could not be persuaded to accede until March when it was already too late, and the Knights of St John were insolvent and unable to govern the island in any case. By March both sides were talking of the possibility of war over Malta. France had never disarmed but further military preparations for St Domingo (or wherever) were in evidence. There was talk in England that French commercial agents had surveyed British and Irish harbours and defences. On March the 6th, Britain began a partial rearmament in response on the 13th of March there occurred a famous scene: At a Sunday afternoon drawing room review in front of 200 other guests Napoleon either staged or actually lost his temper and made a scene. In a voice that everyone in the room could hear he raged, "So you are determined to go to war." The English envoy, Whitworth, was stunned at this impropriety and did not know how best to reply. Napoleon then stormed off to complain further of British warmongering to the Spanish and Russian ambassadors. Britain was saying plainly that Malta would not be evacuated without some concession on France's part. Whitworth could threaten 'Malta or war' because he believed Napoleon was so determined over Malta that he would offer concessions to obtain this object. One such concession would have been the abandonment of Louisiana. On the 13th of April Monroe arrived from the United States to negotiate the Louisiana purchase. The transaction was completed on the 3rd of May and thus Napoleon gives evidence that his hopes for overseas expansion were gone. The purchase price of $15m (Spanish Dollars) USA 15 years bonds, (less nearly a third deducted by USA for economic damages) was immediately on sold to Dutch and ironically to British bankers at 87.5% raising $8.8m for the coming war. This was a virtual a fire-sale! The Treaty of Amiens was signed on March 25, 1802. The news arrived in London on the 29th. There was intense relief and the populace now gratefully looked forward to falling prices and rising prosperity. Much goodwill had been lost and many were fatalistic or suspicious but peace had been achieved. However, a lack of trust between Britain and France caused the collapse of the Peace of Amiens in the late-spring of 1803. Indeed, by 1804 Napoleon's conduct in Italy and Germany pushed Russia and Austria closer to an anti-French alliance. Here the drinking companions begin a quarrel: the French soldier draws his sword, while John Bull falls on his back in the middle of his beer and his ham. But with his broken oar (symbolizing the battered British sea power) he threatens to strike back. He has in his hand a map of Malta, and tramples on the Treaty of Amiens. The French has already snatched Hanover. On the wall, a lion, symbolizing France, attacks the English leopard. The turkey, on the counter, represents the English sovereign, George III, who was identified with George Dandin, a Molière character, a fool, who admits his folly while suggesting that wisdom would not help him because, if things in fact go against us, it is pointless to be wise. |
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| "Plumb Pudding in Danger", James Gillray, 1805 William Pitt and Napoleon dividing the world between them. Pitt takes the ocean: symbolically, his fork resembles a trident. Napoleon takes Europe, with the exception of Britain, Sweden, and Russia. At Trafalgar, the Royal Navy ensured its maritime supremacy for the rest of the war by destroying a combined Franco-Spanish fleet. At Austerlitz, Napoleon crushed an Austro-Russian army to become the master of Europe for the next seven years. |
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| John Bull worriedly inspects the small workshop of Bonaparte, to see what the kid is up to. He is carving and accumulating wooden vessels. Bull appears reassured because the vessels are accumulated in the trash basket. But the viewer is not fooled: the implications here are quite clear; John Bull will not notice the mischievous action of Bonaparte, and England will sleep peacefully. |
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| Bonaparte just crosses the Channel. Britannia desperately opens her arms for help from doctors (Addington and Hawkesbury) reminiscent of Shakespeare's Hamlet famous line; "Angels and ministers of grace defend us!". Their support is of no use, even if Addington tries to revive her with gunpowder. Sheridan's patriotic attitude, who dressed as a clown here, seems to be based on ulterior mercantile motives. As for Fox, with his hat pulled over his eyes, he is unable to see the seriousness of the situation. It appears that nobody assumes responsibility for the peace treaty of Amiens, . |
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| Napoleon's nocturnal dreams: the massacre of Royalist insurgents during the 13th Vendemiaire, executions of Jaffa, many victims seeking revenge. Bonaparte here is also accused of having sacrificed his soldiers for fearful of being assassinated in a turmoil. He is holding in his hand a map of Malta and England. Campaign plans are on his nightstand. |
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| “Boney bear Jemmy Wright, who shave as well as any Man, almost not quite.” 1806 Napoleon, as a barber, is shaving off the sovereigns of European countries' hair and beards and is described in this cartoon as “shaver general to most of the Sovereigns on the Continent.” The bleeding Dutchman and the bleeding Emperor of Austria praise the closeness of their shaves. The Dutchman says: “Yaw Mynheer very close shaver, its nix my doll when you are used to it, ” and the German Hanover prince says: “I hope he don’t mean to shave me as bare as he has you and my neighbor Austria there? I should to sit here so quietly with my face lathered!!” Francis I addresses John Bull whom is looking through the barber shop window while passing by:“Come Johnny, come in and be shaved, don’t be frightened at the size of the Razor, it cuts very clean I assure you!”. Bull refuses the Emperor’s encouragement to enter and notes the gashes and red marks left by the razor: “By Goes it seems and leaves a dom’d sight of gashes behind as you and Mynheer can testify!!”. In the center of the caricature, the Prussian king sits lathered waiting for his turn to be shaved. He has a nervous expression on his face, and his right hand clenches a paper titled “Plan of Hanover.” At the right of the caricature, Napoleon and Talleyrand attack the Sultan of Turkey by attempting to shave his beard. The Sultan tries to pull away:“By the Holy Prophet I must not part with my beard. Why my people will not acknowledge me for the grand Signor again at Constantinople!” Talleyrand tries to calm him down: “Come, come don’t make such a fuss, and my Master will cut away when he catches anybody in his shop,” and Napoleon: “Lather away Talley I’ll soon ease him on his superflicities and make him look like my Christian Customers.”. |
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| Trial of Napoleon Bonaparte, George Cruikshank, 1813 This caricature sneers at Napoleon Bonaparte leaving his army on its horrendous retreat from Moscow and for his betrayal of the ideals of the French Revolution. |
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| The Kings' Cake being Cut at the Congress of Vienna (November 1814-June 1815), L. to R. Emperor Francis I of Austria (1768-1835); King Frederick William III of Prussia (1770-1840); Czar Alexander I of Russia (1777-1825); Joachim Murat, king of Naples (1767-1815); Napoleon II, king of Rome (1811-1832); |
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| The Capitulation, caricature of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord (1754-1838) 30th March 1814, French School, (19th century) Unique in his own age and a phenomenon in any, the enigmatic Charles-Maurice, Prince de Talleyrand, was a statesman of outstanding ability and extraordinary contradictions. He was a world-class rogue who held high office in five successive regimes. A well-known opportunist and a notorious bribe taker, Talleyrand's gifts to France arguably outvalued the vast personal fortune he amassed in her service. Once a supporter of the Revolution, after the fall of the monarchy, he fled to England and then to the United States. Talleyrand returned to France two years later and served under Napoleon, and represented France at the Congress of Vienna. |
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| The Man with Six Heads', caricature of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord (1754-1838), 1815 The French diplomat and statesman Charles Maurice Talleyrand-Perigod is portrayed as a man "floating with the tide". First published in 1815 as "L'Homme aux six tetes. Le Nain jaune" (the six-headed man [referring to Talleyrands prominent role in six different regimes: As Bishop of Autun during the reign of Louis XVI, as a member of the National Convention during the French Revolution, as Foreign Minister during the Directoire Era, as Foreign Minister of Napoleon the Consul and Napoleon the Emperor and finally as Foreign Minister and Minister President of the re-established Bourbon Monarchy). A representative of the clergy in the States-General of 1789, Talleyrand sided with the revolutionists. He proposed the appropriation of church lands by the state, endorsed the civil constitution of the clergy, and was excommunicated (1791) by the pope after consecrating two "constitutional" bishops. In 1792 he was sent by the National Assembly on a mission to London to secure Great Britain's neutrality, but the radical turn of the French Revolution nullified his success. A lifelong advocate of constitutional monarchy and peace, Talleyrand sought refuge in England in Sept., 1792, following the fall of the monarchy. In 1794 he went to the United States, where he stayed until after the establishment (Nov., 1795) of the Directory in France, when he returned (Sept., 1796) to Paris. Peter V. Curl claims that Talleyrand's part in the Revolution was not simply a question of opportunism, as many historians have claimed, but that he was politically on the side of the revolutionaries. He explains that Talleyrand served six successive governments on the basis that the State was a "metaphysical concept" which had to be obeyed and served in the most enlightened manner possible. The diplomatic beginnings of Talleyrand's career go back to the Ancien Régime. Talleyrand, according to Schroeder, "took it for granted that a permanent place and a role for Austria should be found within the international system, and he tried to come up with one which would please Napoleon. Napoleon, very much a criminal with respect to international politics, clearly did not see why he should be obliged to grant any role whatsoever to Austria". |
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| Negotiation at the Congress of Verona (1822)refusing to recognize the Greek declaration of independence The Congress of Vienna established an international system of reactionary governments dedicated to maintaining a set of European boundaries, preventing revolutions and changes in government, and stopping any one power from becoming too powerful. To this end, the Congress powers agreed to meet whenever trouble should crop up in Europe to discuss how to fix it. This Holy Alliance, appropriating the name of the coalition of Christian values Alexander had wanted to set up at the Congress of Vienna, was also called the Congress System, and aimed at stopping any revolutionary attempt in any part of Europe. To deal with the revolutionary trends, Metternich called the Congress of Verona in 1822. The congress moved against the Greek revolutionaries, who really did not have the military power to take over Turkey at this time anyway. The Congress also allowed France to send an army into Spain to end the revolt and stabilize the Bourbon king. The revolution in Spain was quickly smashed. The Greeks were the most privileged minority in the Ottoman State, and enjoyed substantial privileges. As H. Hearder states in his Europe in the Nineteenth Century, 1830-1880, "European Turkey differed from the rest of the continent in one significant respect. Whereas Christian governments in the rest of Europe had permitted no Muslim communities, Christians had been officially tolerated." The Greeks were also the most populous among the non-Muslims, and under the system of "millet" the leader of the Orthodox church, the Phanariot Patriarch, was always elected from the Greeks. Therefore the whole of the Orthodox population, Bulgarians, Serbians, Romanians, and Albanians were under Greek predominance. During the Napoleonic Wars the the French revolutionary ideas came to Greece. After defeating the Austrians in Italy in 1797, the French seized and then annexed the Ionian Islands. |
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| The Congress of Vienna The Congress of Vienna did not have the features of a real Congress. Although many European delegates arrived for the Congress, it never sat as one. In fact, most of the business was discussed in private informal sessions between the Big Four (Austria, Russia, Britain, and Prussia) and France, or during decadent feasts and balls. One attendee, Prince de Ligne, who was known for his wit, famously commented “Le Congres danse, mais ne marche pas” (The Congress dances, but does not progress).Prince Metternich’s network of spies, frequented salons (drawing rooms where the intellectual, political, and social elite gathered to converse) and intercepted letters, reading, copying, and re-sealing them, before delegates began to catch on and took measures to prevent intelligence from falling into Austrian hands. At the congress, Metternich's mastery of diplomatic maneuvering earned him the title of "the coachman of Europe." More than any other single leader, he seemed to determine the future direction of the Continent. One observer described him as "not a genius but a great talent; cold, calm, imperturbable, and a supreme calculator." Metternich's main goal at the congress was to promote the idea of the "Concert of Europe": if all the great powers acted together or in "concert," they would be able to prevent the outbreak of any large European war like the Napoleonic Wars. They might also be able to see that "the foundations of a lasting peace are secured as much as possible." The Congress did have a positive and lasting impact on European history. The peace treaty signed on June 9, 1815 resulted in what Henry Kissinger called the longest period of peace Europe has ever known. It was also “the first international peace conference to discuss humanitarian issues” and resulted in a condemnation of the slave trade, and discussions on literary piracy and the civil rights of Jews. |
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| The inconveniences of a crowded drawing room", George Cruikshank, 1818 |
Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827) preferred to deal with socio-cultural issues and satirize morals. Rowlandson worked with Tobias George Smollett, whose radical books resulted in him being sent to prison for libel. Some of Rowlandson's political cartoons also got him in trouble and he was accused by his critics of being "coarse and indelicate".
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| Hodges Explanation of a Hundred Magistrates, Thomas. Rowlandson, 1815, A yokel in a long smock stands before three elderly Justices of Peace. One of the justices says, How dare you Fellow to say it is unfair to bring you before one hundred Magistrates when you see there are but three of us. The yokel tugs at his hair and replies, Why please your Worship you mun know – when I went to school they taught I that a one and two O’s stood for a hundred – so do you see your Worship be One and the other two be Cyphers! By the nineteenth century, there were three types of courts for a criminal to be brought to justice: Magistrates' Courts ( Quarter Sessions and Petty Sessions), Assize Courts, and the Court of King's (or Queen's) Bench. Courts of Petty Sessions were introduced in the 18th century as there was too much work for the Quarter Sessions (which only met four times a year) to handle. At this time the county of Essex was split into administrative units known as Hundreds. Each Hundred covered a number of parishes. For each Hundred there was a Petty Sessions which dealt with minor criminal offences. Petty Sessions dealt with minor cases such as drunkenness, poaching and vagrancy. After the Summary Jurisdiction Act of 1848, all summary trials had to take place at formally constituted Petty Sessions, before at least two magistrates. Meetings became more regular and laws passed that required the proceedings to be recorded. |
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| Lord North, Edmund Burke, Charles Fox, the Prince of Wales, and others attempting to break into the royal treasury. Political cartoon by unidentified illustrator from 1787. Lord North was Prime Minister of Great Britain from January, 1770 to March, 1782. His early successes as Leader of the House and his efforts to cut the national debt brought him the confidence of a faction-ridden Parliament and the favor and friendship of King George III. But his failure to subdue the American colonies and the subsequent loss of the Revolutionary War brought an end to his ministry and forever darkened his name in history. For the first three years of the North ministry, the American colonies appeared calm. North had decided to retain the duty on tea imported into the American colonies. The colonists were of course angered by what they saw as an encroachment upon their own legislatures' prerogatives.Lord North's efforts to rescue the East India Tea Company from bankruptcy lead to the Boston Tea Party. Under the original proposal, the surplus inventories of tea would be shipped directly to the colonies. Consignees would be appointed to sell the tea in America. The duty on tea would have been removed. North, however, was unwilling to remove the tea duty. In May of 1773, the Tea Act passed the House of Commons with little opposition. As information about the Tea Act filtered into the colonies, public opinion changed from placid to bitter resentment. In Boston, the first tea shipment arrived in November. Patriots would not allow the ship to unload its cargo, and the despised governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, would not permit the ship to sail from the harbor without paying the duty. The impasse came to an end on the night of 16 December when Boston patriots, dressed as Indians, boarded the ship and dumped the tea chest into Boston harbor. Word of the Boston Tea Party reached London on 20 January, 1774. Public opinion turned sharply against the colonists, especially Boston. The news was received bitterly by the North ministry. A policy of coercion was decided upon and Lord North drafted into legislation the Coercive Acts. Lord North intended on making a lesson of Massachusetts with the belief that the other colonies would not support her, but his assumptions were wrong. The moderates in the other colonies pledged their support to Massachusetts and called for a Continental Congress. Tensions mounted between the colonies and Great Britain. General Thomas Gage, now governor of the insolent colony of Massachusetts, warned in his letters of the impossibility of enforcing the Massachusetts Government Act without additional troops. By December, North realized that Great Britain was on the verge of war with her colonies. In January, he proposed a peace commission. He offered to eliminate the tea tax so long as the colonies promised to pay the salaries of civil authorities regularly. But it was too late. Events now overtook the hope of a peaceful reconciliation. On 16 April, 1775, a skirmish on the Lexington Green between Gage's troops and patriots transformed the American crisis into the American war. Bunker Hill followed later that summer. Lord North was forced to declare the colonies in a state of rebellion. |
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| British officers, in a child-like manner, demonstrate skills in hopes of securing a command for the war with the American colonies. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. |
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Britannia lamenting her present state, her shield and broken lance by her side, "What a situation am I in sold by an American purchased by France Spain. Oh, wheres my Pitt." Four men are standing before her, from left, an American holding in his right hand a lance topped with liberty cap and in his left a sword with which he threatens her, next a Frenchman urges him to "frighten her." A Spaniard is standing next to the Frenchman with his back to Britannia, he wears a low hat and a cloak, and on the far right is a Dutchman. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. |
Following the colonists’ defiant display at the Boston Tea Party, the majority of England was surprised, bewildered, and angered by the colonists’ actions. After much debate in the Parliament, King George III assumed an active role in deciding punishment for the rebellious and costly colonists by personally advising Lord North, the Prime Minister of Britain at the time. This resulted in the “Coercive Acts,” passed in March 1774, which were intended to quell the colonists and force them into submission.
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| James Gillray, 1783. The Times. American Revolution Print This cartoon relates to The Treaty of Paris, which marks the official end of The American Revolutionary War, in which Satan is depicted flying away with a Map of America in his hands. Dutch, French, and Spanish leaders are also represented, with the Rock of Gibraltar in the background. |
Comte de Rochambeau played a major role in helping America win independence during the American Revolution. He is considered to be one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America for his role in winning the Revolutionary War and securing American independence from Britain.
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The presidential election of 1800 is generally considered the nastiest in American history. The race between Federalist John Adams and Republican Thomas Jefferson was raucous, bitter, and unpredictable. The Adams' Federalists were divided and made a poor campaign. According to the Constitution, presidential electors were required to vote for two persons without indicating which office each was to fill, the one receiving the highest number of votes to be President and the candidate standing next to be Vice President. In the 1796 election Adams had defeated Jefferson in the Electoral College, but only by the narrow margin of 71 to 68. With the second most votes Jefferson became vice president with no responsibilities besides presiding over the Senate. Adams sought to involve Jefferson in his new administration, but Jefferson declined any participation. In the election of 1800, Aaron Burr, the Republican candidate for Vice President, had received the same number of votes as Jefferson; as neither had a majority the election was thrown into the House of Representatives, where the Federalists held the balance of power. Although it was well known that Burr was not even a candidate for President, his friends and many Federalists began intriguing for his election to that high office. Had it not been for the vigorous action of Hamilton the prize might have been snatched out of Jefferson’s hands. Not until the thirty-sixth ballot on February 17, 1801, was the great issue decided in his favor. |
President Jefferson is being held up for money by Napoleon and King George. Critics of Jefferson believed that he had paid too much for Louisiana and was prepared to pay too much for the Floridas. This cartoon also satirizes the failure of Jefferson's use of the embargo and restrictions on trade as a curb on French and British depredations of American shipping.
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Cruikshank, The Happy Effects of that Grand System of Shutting Ports Against the English, 1808 President Jefferson stands on a dais addressing a group of disgruntled Members of Congress. Before Jefferson is a table covered with papers inscribed 'Pettition and Pettition New York'. Napoleon is hiding behind Jefferson's presidential chair whispering; "You shall be King hereafter". Jefferson addresses the assembly: "Citizens - I am sorry I cannot call you my Lords Gentlemen!! - This is a Grand Philosophical Idea - shutting our Ports against the English - if we continue the Experiment for about fifteen or twenty years, we may begin then to feel the good 'Effects' - in the mean time to prevent our sailors from being idle. I would advise you to imploy them in various works of husbandry and by that means we may gain the protection of that great and mighty Emperor King Napoleon!! A small dog, John 'Bull' (its collar so inscribed), barks "Bow Wow" at the President. The Congressmen say: "How are we to Dispose of our produce; My warehouses are full; Yea friend thou may as well tell us to cut of our nose to be revenged of our face [a Quaker in a broad-brimmed hat]; My famely is Starving'; my Goods are Spoiling; It was not the case in Great Washintons time; we must speak to him in more 'forceble language'. |
William Charles, "A Boxing Match, or Another Bloody Nose for John Bull," Lithograph, New York, 1813.
The Anglo-American War of 1812 or the American'Second War for Independence, was directly related to the Napoleonic conflict. In British eyes the Americans had stabbed them in the back while they they were fighting Napoleon. Britain relied on a maritime economic blockade to defeat France. When American merchants tried to breach this blockade, the British introduced new laws, the ‘Orders in Council’, to block them, and when British warships stopped American merchant ships, they forcibly impressed any British sailors they found into the Royal Navy.
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James Madison's Tax Policies During the War of 1812 . Madison holds an iron rod bearing a banner which proclaims the War of 1812 popular slogan “Free Trade Sailors Rights.” The downtrodden taxpayer on whose back Madison stands replies, “None of your Boesting / Mr. Jammy say I / Tax, Tax upon our / Backs is the unanimous cry / it was by your Iron Rod that / we became Rule’d. / Till every Cent out of / our Pockets is foold.”James Madison (1751-1836) was the principal architect of the United States Constitution, the Secretary of State under President Thomas Jefferson, and the fourth president of the United States. As president, Madison continued to support aggressive trade measures against Britain and requested a declaration of war against Great Britain in 1812 when commercial pressure failed to achieve a change in British policy. The war expenses added to the economic problems, and Congress was forced to find additional sources for funding. Taxes on houses, land, and slaves were enacted in 1813, 1815, and 1816, with additional duties on liquor licenses, auction sales, carriages, and refined sugar, among other items. During the War of 1812, Madison faced almost treasonous opposition from merchants and public officials in New England. But he refused to limit civil liberties or declare martial law, as he was urged to do by supporters |
Reaching Washington on the evening of August 24, the British found a city largely deserted, with the only resistance being ineffective sniper fire from one house. The first order of business for the British was to attack the navy yard, which they burned. British troops next arrived at the US Capitol, which was still unfinished. According to later accounts, the British were impressed by the fine architecture of the building, and some of the officers had qualms about burning it. According to legend, Admiral Cockburn sat in the chair belonging to the Speaker of the House and asked, "Shall this harbor of Yankee democracy be burned?" The British Marines with him yelled "Aye!" Orders were given to torch the building. The British troops worked diligently to set fires inside the Capitol, destroying years of work by artisans brought from Europe. With the burning Capitol lighting the sky, troops also marched to burn an armory. At about 10:30 pm, approximately 150 Royal Marines formed up in columns and began marching westward on Pennsylvania Avenue, following the route used in modern times for inauguration day parades. The British troops moved quickly, with a particular destination in mind. By that time President James Madison had fled to safety in Virginia, where he would meet up with his wife and servants from the president's house.
After the Revolution of July 1830 Charles Philipon (1800-1862), a caricaturist and a talented journalist , founded La Caricature, the first modern illustrated satirical weekly paper. During four years of its publication, the paper was constantly prosecuted, fined, and censored. In 1832, before La Caricature's closure Philipon started a daily paper, Le Charivari , which printed a new drawing every day. Philipon frequently criticized King Louis-Phillipe the "Citizen King" whose pear-shaped head he exploited to the full in the Poire Royale or the Royal Pear series. He wound up in jail several times. The pear quickly became the commonly-recognized symbol of Louis-Phillipe and his entire regime. At the time, in France calling a person a pear was tantamount to calling him a buffoon. As part of his defense, Philipon sketched a series of drawings that transformed the king’s head into a pear. He explained that if the king’s face resembled a pear, then all pears should be subject to a fine. The sarcastic tone of Philipon’s argument was lost on the judge who charged Philipon with a fine of two thousands francs and six months in jail. But the artist was unrepentant and on November 17, 1831, three days after the trial, La Caricature published an account of the proceedings, and in the following week, Philipon published the drawings from the trial as a lithograph. However, the issue was seized by the government.
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| Charles Philipon's account of the court proceedings with respect to his portrayal of King Louis-Phillipe as a pear. Here is a translation; THE PEARS , Made in the Paris Court of Assizes by the Director of LA CARICATURE. Sold to pay the 6000 francs fine of the newspaper Le Charivari. At the request of a large number of subscribers, we present today in Le Charivari, the pears which served as our defense in the case where La Caricature was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment and a 2,000 francs fine. If, to recognize the monarch in a cartoon, you do not expect it to have a resemblance, you will fall into the absurd [?]. Look at these shapeless sketches, to which I limited my defense. [Beneath the 1st drawing] This sketch looks like a Louis-Philippe, do you condemn it? [Beneath the 2nd drawing] Then we must condemn this one, which resembles the first. [Beneath the 3rd drawing] Then condemn another, which resembles the second. [Beneath the 4th drawing] And finally, if you are consistent, you can not absolve this pear, which resembles the preceding sketch. Thus, a pear, a bun, and all the grotesque heads in which chance has maliciously placed this sad resemblance, you can inflict on the author five years imprisonment and a fine of five thousand francs!! Admit it, gentlemen, this is a peculiar freedom of the press!! |
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| Gargantua, Honoré Daumier , 1831 |
One of the most important political cartoonists in Philipon's paper was Honoré Daumier (1808-1879). In late 1831 the publishing business La Maison Aubert submitted one of his cartoons "Gargantua" to the "depot legal" for publication and put it on display in the window of the shop. It was soon seized, along with other prints done by Daumier, by the Paris police. They ordered the owner of the publishing house to destroy the lithographic stone and all the remaining proofs. In February 1932 Daumier, the owner of the publishing house, and the printer, were all brought to trial for arousing hatred and contempt of the king's government, and for offending the king's person. In the trial the argument was over whether "Gargantua" represented the king personally or if it was a symbolic representation of the king's swollen budget. All three of the men were convicted, but only Daumier served a prison term.
Philipon's example was followed all over Europe. In 1841 Punch, in Britain was established which introduced cartoonists such as John Leech (1817-1864) and John Tenniel (1820-1914), Harry Furniss (1854-1925). (Edward) Linley Sambourne (1844-1910), Bernard Partridge (1861-1945), and, Leonard Raven-Hill (1867-1942). In 1848 Kladderadatsch was established in Berlin followed by Die fliegende Blätter in 1845, and later on Punsch and Simplicissimus, in Munich. Simplicissimus introduced cartoonists like Olaf Gulbransson, Bruno Paul, Thomas Theodor Heine, and Blix
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| Friedrich Wilhelm IV doesn't accept the crown offered by the Frankfurt Parliament. The cartoon shows the allegorical Germania reprimanding the democratic leader Heinrich von Gagern: "What are you whimpering about, you little jack in the box?" to which he replies: "I've carved your little one a crown and he doesn't want it!" The February 1848 revolution in France, that had overthrew the monarchy of Louis Philippe and established the Second Republic, had also triggered a series of uprisings in South West Germany, spreading unevenly but rapidly to many other German lands and aiming to replace perceived injustices of the old, existing order. Popular grievances, which sustained the insurrections, differed from state to state in accordance with diverse conditions, but they usually included economic deprivation, a desire to abolish seigneurial dues and privileges, resentment of taxes, criticism of officialdom, an expectation of legality and equality before the law, a call for political rights of free assembly, association, speech and conscience, and the demand for a representative government and assembly. In 1848, National Assembly in Frankfurt was preoccupied with the minutiae of the constitution, including its prefatory declaration of basic rights, but they were, in effect, debating the form which the new Nationalstaat should take.The creation of a nation-state, it was widely believed, required the erection of a suitable political superstructure to suit a pre-existing national culture. The movement of history towards unification seemed inevitable and natural. Friedrich Wilhelm IV linked constitutional and parliamentary concessions to the greater cause of the German nation, but having concurred in the imposition of a conservative Prussian constitution, he proceeded on 28 April 1849 to reject the title of ‘Kaiser of the Germans’, which he had already confided privately had a ‘whorish smell of revolution’. |
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| Metternich flees Vienna, March 1848 The revolutions of 1848 ignited the countries of Europe in a way that would not be repeated until 1989. Violence broke out because legal and parliamentary movements for change were frustrated. The only countries where revolution was avoided were those where adequate concessions were made in time, such as Great Britain, Belgium, and the Netherlands, or where opposition was negligible, such as Russia. Nobilities and middle classes demanded constitutional and representative instead of arbitrary and bureaucratic government. The revolution in France transformed German politics. A mass demonstration at Mannheim on 27 February and a march on Karlsruhe, the capital of Baden forced Grand Duke Leopold to concede a free press, trial by jury, and a people's militia on 29 February, and to appoint liberal ministers on 2 March. The revolution in Vienna on 13-15 March 1848, as well as the revolution in Paris, helps to explain why Frederick William IV stooped to make concessions.The Lower Austrian Estates, which met on 13 March, were besieged by students and workers, from inside and outside the city walls, to urge them to press for reforms. Finally Metternich, the "last great master of the principle of balance," became the target of angry mobs. Forced to resign, he went into exile in England before returning to Vienna in 1858. He died there a year later. |
The capitulation of Sedan; Napoleon III Wilhelm I of Prussia
Since 1866, when Prussia had defeated Austria and won the leadership in Germany, Napoleon III of the Second French Empire had longed to crush Prussia, which he considered an upstart power. Meanwhile Bismarck, the chancellor of Prussia, felt that a war was necessary to unify Germany
The Franco-Prussian War, waged between France and the German states under the leadership of Prussia, from July 15, 1870, dramatically changed European history. The rapid and overwhelming victory of Prussia in this conflict made possible the creation of a unified German Empire. Prussian would first fight and destroy the armies of the emperor Napoleon, then the newly raised armies of the Third republic. The war also marked the final step in Germany's rise to the position of a major continental power . Napoleon III surrendered to Wilhelm I, king of Prussia, on Sept. 2, 1870, after the battle at Sedan. The battle marked the decisive defeat of the French in the Franco-Prussian War and led to the fall of the Second French Empire, which was replaced by the Third Republic. As part of the settlement, the territory of Alsace-Lorraine was taken by Germany, which would retain it until after World War I. The war provided a rich range of characters for the caricaturists of that era.
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| Louis Bonaparte Napoleon III and Wilhelm l of Prussia, 1870. The two are depicted as drunken buffoons, betraying the moral and spiritual ideals fought for in the French Revolution. |
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| Un Bain de Sang! Napoléon Charles Louis De Frondat, 1870 The German Emperor, Wilhelm I, sitting in a tub of blood with the head of the French Emperor Napoleon III. The title reads; Bloodbath, you see it will drown both of us! |
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This Kladderadatsch cartoon by Wilhelm Scholz is entitled “Good Advice is Costly” [“Guter Rath is theuer”]. The caption reads: “Bismarck (leading Alsace and Lorraine): Dear Reichstag, we have the two lads back again, but now tell me where and how we should accommodate them!” While Bavaria would have happily taken over custodianship of the two provinces seized from France in 1871, this cartoon correctly foresees a struggle for authority between Germania (representing Germany’s martial origins) and the Reichstag, whose members saw an opportunity to import newer, liberal traditions into the governance of the territories. Agreement on a constitution for Alsace-Lorraine was achieved very belatedly in Imperial Germany – in 1911. |
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| Alexandre Dumas, André Gill, Cover of La Lune, December 2, 1866 Dumas' caricature is from The Man of the Day series by André Gill, who became known for his work for the weekly four-sheet newspaper La Lune, edited by Francis Polo. Gill worked for La Lune from 1865 to 1868. When La Lune was banned, he worked for the periodical L'Éclipse from 1868 to 1876. Gill also drew for famous periodical Le Charivari. In 1823, Alexandre Dumas, who was of a mixed race aristocratic background, became the clerk of the Duc d`Orléans -- later King Louis Philippe, because of his elegant handwriting. But, he was liberal and had republican sympathies, as he greeted the Revolution of 1848 with enthusiasm and even ran as a candidate for the Assembly. After the coup d'état in 1851 and the seizure of power by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, Napoleon III, Dumas escaped to Brussels, as he was not looked upon favorably by the newly elected President. Dumas supported Victor Hugo who was also a liberal opponent of Napoleon III and was exiled by him. |
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| Le Chevalier de la Mort (The knight of death), caricature of the German Kaiser Wilhelm 1871. The objects of quite a number of biting caricatures by French artists were the Prussian efforts to become one of the Great Powers in Europe and Bismarck's endeavors to unite the German Reich. The goals of the German politicians were to be revealed with physiognomic and phrenological means. |
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| L'Homme A La Boule, Jules Renard, 1871. Count Otto von Bismarck balances on a the world with one spurred foot entering France, and wearing only his underpants which are marked with the German imperial eagle. |
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Having secured the creation of a united German Empire following the successful outcome of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, Bismarck was keen to consolidate Germany's position via the construction of alliances with other major powers.In so doing Bismarck was acknowledging that France would remain a threat, one set upon avenging her humiliating defeat in ceding Alsace and Lorraine to Germany at the conclusion of the 1870-71 war. Bismarck set about the establishment of numerous alliances with, in 1873, the creation of the Three Emperors League. This agreement tied Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia to each other's aid in time of war. The agreement however only lasted until 1878 with Russia's withdrawal; Bismarck then agreed a new Dual Alliance with Austria-Hungary in 1879. The Courts of Austria-Hungary, of Germany, and of Russia, animated by an equal desire to consolidate the general peace by an understanding intended to assure the defensive position of their respective States, have come into agreement on certain questions. |
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"Cry 'Havoc!' and let slip the dogs of war." This words are said by Mark Antony to Caesar's corpse in Shakespeare's Julius Cesar. English foreign policy was described as "splendid isolationism", a policy of remaining aloof from alliances with other powers while exercising its influence to encourage a balance of power on the continent. So long as the continental powers checked each other, England was secure on the other side of the Channel. Throughout much of the 19th century, Russia seemed to pose the greatest challenge to English imperial interests. Periodic Russian expansion towards the Balkans and the Straits of the Dardanelles (the Ottoman Empire) posed a potential threat to the English trade route to India. English and Russian imperial interests also clashed in Persia, in Afghanistan and in northern China. There were also conflicting imperialistic goals between England and France in Africa . War erupted in 1877 when the Bulgars rose up against their Turkish rulers and Russia intervened on their side. The Russians defeated the Turks, and would have driven them almost entirely out of Europe had the other great powers not intervened. England threatened war against Russia, and Bismarck, concerned that Austria and Germany might be drawn in, convened a peace conference. In 1878, at the Congress of Berlin, the Russians were coerced into relinquishing their gains in the recent war with Turkey. Bulgaria's independence was recognized and the Austrian government made a claim for Bosnia. |
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Bernard Gillam was born in England in 1859. A contemporary of Nast's who drew for the rival Puck magazine. During the 1884 presidential campaign, he did a parody of a famous painting by Gerôme, with Blaine being exposed before Chicago pols with his body tattooed with all his various scandals. This cartoon is believed to have played a significant role in the victory of Grover Cleveland in that election. Blaine threatened to sue but was persuaded by his political friends to back down. Ironically, Gillam was a Republican who voted for Blaine in 1884. The United States had treaty rights to establish a naval base on the island of Samoa, Presient Cleveland reacted strongly when Germany tried to install a puppet monarch. President dispatched three warships to Samoan waters, a bellicose action that led to a determination by Bismarck that something be done to head off the threat of a confrontation between Germany and the United States. The Germans suspended hostilities against Mataafa, and a new conference on Samoa was called to meet at Berlin in late April. Cleveland and Bayard accepted Bismarck's proposal for a tripartite conference which resulted in a tripartite protectorate over the islands signed by Germany, Britain, and the United States.  |
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| Bismarck offers slices of Africa to European powers at the Berlin conference. |
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| Gunboat Diplomacy, By Raven Hill, 'Punch', September 2, 1911 Britain and France projected strength in their entent cordiale. The Kaiser backed down, and the French occupied Marocco. In exchange, France relinquished a chunk of the congo to Germany. |
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| Dropping the Pilot, Sir John Tenniel, Punch, March 1890. German Emperor Wilhelm II looks anxiously at the departing of his Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. The reference to Bismarck as a "pilot" was from an earlier cartoon "The Champion Pilot of the age" from the Puck magazine in which, the cartoonist Joseph Keppler depicted Bismarck on a ship, having brought it out to the high seas. In the background, the cartoonist depicted the French ship of state in distress. This symbolized Bismarck's accomplishment of forming the German Kaiserreich by means of the Franco-Prussian War. |
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| Abdul Aziz Sultan of Ottoman empire. Girls on his knees. 'Ote-toi de la que je m'y mette'. Vanity Fair, 1869. Sultan Abdul Aziz succeeded his brother Abdul Mejid in 1861 and ruled until 1876. The urging of France, Britain, and Austria enabled the progressive ministers Mehmet ‘Ali Pasha and Mehmed Fuad Pasha to reorganize the High Council to improve justice and education. In 1868 Midhat Pasha, was appointed president of a Council of State that included Christians to prepare a budget and promote reforms. Husain Awni Pasha worked on education in order to improve the army. Nonetheless Abdul Aziz was reactionary and autocratic. Whereas the Tanzimat had aimed at justice, now the young Turks wanted liberty and constitutional government. The first political party in Turkish history called the Patriotic Alliance or Young Ottoman Society was formed in 1865 as a secret society based on the Carbonari in Italy. In Namik Kemal who came from a family of Ottoman officials, began working for the Institute of Translation and translated and published an open letter to the Sultan by the Egyptian prince Mustafa Fazil demanding a constitution. Exiled to the provinces, Namik Kemal went to London and then to Paris with some other young radicals. In 1867 Abdul Aziz was the first sultan to visit Paris and London, where he came across these radicals. In June 1868 Kemal and Ziya Pasha began publishing their Turkish newspaper Hurriyet, which means freedom. Namik Kemal translated French works into Turkish, and he wrote a series of “Letters on Constitutional Regime” to expound his liberal philosophy. He believed in the political sovereignty of the people and that the rights of individuals should be based on justice. He argued that Islam is compatible with republican government, and he proposed a council of state to draft bills and administer the laws, a national assembly to legislate and control the budget, and a senate to moderate the legislative body and the executive power by protecting the liberties of the people. Kemal argued that the superiority of modern civilization could no longer be doubted, and he urged Muslims to have faith in liberty and progress. He was the first Turkish writer to point out how the West had penetrated their economy, and he criticized the current financial, administrative, and educational conditions. Although he wanted to apply Western science, technology, economy, press, and education, he criticized the Tanzimat legal reforms for undermining the Muslim community. He argued that adopting the separation of state from religion was a serious error that opened the way for European interference. He became a patriotic romantic and urged an Islamic constitution. His patriotic drama Vatan (Fatherland) portrayed the heroic defense of Silistria and was performed at Istanbul in 1873. The audience was so moved by the play that the first three performances were followed by shouting and public demonstrations, causing Sultan Abdul Aziz to close the play, ban Kemal’s newspaper, and deport him to Cyprus for three years. Mehmed Fuad died in 1869, and after the death of Mehmet ‘Ali in 1871 Sultan Abdul Aziz felt he was free from the reformers and could pursue his absolutist tendencies. He made his ministers directly responsible to him instead of to the grand vizier. He emulated the European luxuries he had observed and spent money building ironclad warships and railroads. In twenty years the Ottoman debt had risen from £4,000,000 to £200,000,000. More than half of the empire’s revenues were now going to pay its charges. In 1873 drought in Anatolia led to famine, and many taxes could no longer be collected. Tax farming, which had been declared abolished in the reforms of 1839 and 1856, was once again banned. A bad harvest and extortions for taxes erupted into insurrection in Herzegovina in June 1875 and spread to Bosnia, causing civil war between Muslims and Christians.Abdülaziz was deposed by his ministers on May 30, 1876, his death a few days later was attributed to suicide. |
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| The elite members of the Imperial Club show little enthusiasm for their new member. The cartoonist pokes fun at the Japanese's inappropriate mix of old and new attire: full western frock coat combined with traditional wooden geta on his feet, umbrella held awkwardly under the arm; buck-toothed grin and slitted eyes are easily identifiable racist stereotypes. |
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One aspect that particularly rankled the Japanese was the blatant way Russia and her henchmen in the Intervention played the race card. It may not have been coincidental that right at this time, a great deal of literature about the "Yellow Peril" found its way into print.The Germans were among the most active and inventive purveyors of the Yellow Peril myth; the term "Yellow Peril" was coined by Kaiser Wilhelm himself. The Kaiser's feelings on race are on record and consistent; he also bandied about the terms "Black Peril" (black Africans) and "Slav Peril" to undergird the theory that the Reich was encircled by enemies, justifying ever-greater military expenditures. It is said that politics makes strange bedfellows, and in the wake of Russia's duplicity in the Tripartite Intervention, Great Britain reached out to Japan. Japan's capital ships had been built in Britain and many of her leading naval commanders studied in British naval academies and served with the British fleet. So it was that in 1902 Britain signed her first ever foreign alliance: the Anglo-Japanese Pact of 1902. This was certainly aimed at Russia, Britain's rival in the "Great Game" |
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Emperor of Japan and his British and American well-wishers according to a Russian cartoon. |
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| Soveriigns, No11, ( Nasser-Ed-Din-Shah), "He endowed Persia with a National Debt," by SPY (Leslie Ward), Vanity Fair, July 5, 1873. |
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| May, Philip William, Nāṣer al-Dīn Shah, 1889 Although a younger son of Moḥammad Shāh, Nāṣer al-Dīn was named heir apparent through the influence of his mother. Serious disturbances broke out when he succeeded to the throne on his father’s death in 1848, but these were quelled through the efforts of his chief minister, Mīrzā Taqī Khān, Amir Kabir (Great Leader). Under Taqī Khān’s influence, Nāṣer al-Dīn began his rule by instituting a series of needed reforms. Taqī Khān, however, was later forced from power by his enemies, who included Nāṣer al-Dīn’s mother, and was disgraced, imprisoned, and finally murdered. In 1852 an attempt was made on Nāṣer al-Dīn’s life by two Bābīs (members of a religious sect considered heretical). Unable to regain territory lost to Russia in the early 19th century, Nāṣer al-Dīn sought compensation by seizing Herāt, Afg., in 1856. Great Britain regarded the move as a threat to British India and declared war on Iran, forcing the return of Herāt as well as Iranian recognition of the kingdom of Afghanistan. |
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| Queen Victoria receiving the Shah of Persia at the Sovereign's Entrance, Windsor Castle, June 20. Published in an extra supplement to the Illustrated London News, 28 June 1873. Nasir al-Din Shah traveled to Russia in 1878 and was impressed by their Cossacks. The next year Russian officers began training the new Persian Cossack Brigade. Amin al-Sultan his chief minister was a skilled politician and pursued a pro-British policy until 1892. In 1889 Nasir al-Din Shah went to Europe for the third time. He approved a lottery promoted by Malkum Khan; but he found opposition at home because gambling is forbidden by the Qur’an. The Shah cancelled the lottery, and Malkum Khan was able to sell his concession before the British were informed. Malkum was dismissed from his positions and lost his titles. He began criticizing the Iranian government in the reformist newspaper Qanun (Reform Law), which he founded in London and smuggled into Iran. The slogan “Unity, Justice, and Progress” was printed at the top, but he made personal attacks on Amin al-Sultan. Malkum quoted the merchant Qazvin who asked, “By what laws does the government sell our national rights to foreign racketeers?” The answer Malkum gave is that the Shah should call together a national assembly “to formulate laws that would initiate social progress.” |
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| Zichy Mihaly Horse-Guardsmen Meeting Nasir-al-Din Shah Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, a Muslim reformer who helped to reconcile secularist reforms with the ‘ulama (learned Muslims), from an Azeri-speaking village in Afghanistan, traveled to India during the Mutiny of 1857-58, developing a hatred of British imperialism. He wrote “Refutation of the Materialists” and gained a reputation for supporting Islam, though he emphasized its social aspects. Jamal al-Din criticized the intolerance of religion that stifles science and serves political despotism, but he praised philosophy that frees one from beliefs. During the 1870s he educated young men in Egypt. Then in Paris he edited the Arabic newspaper al-‘Urwa al-Wuthqa, which promoted pan-Islamism. He went to London to try to influence British policy in Egypt, but he failed and returned to Persia. The Minister of the Press persuaded the Shah to invite Jamal al-Din to Tehran; but his anti-British ideas offended the Shah, who forced him to leave in 1887. |
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| Introduction of Grand Princess Maria Alexandrovna to Shah Nasiral Dinin the Winter Palace |
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| Qajar King Nasseredin Shah kisses Queen Victoria's Hand in Curtsy upon arrival at Buckingham Palace Reception in honor of the Persian Shah's State first Visit. Nasseredin Shah and Queen Victoria long reign strongly shaped their respective countries history. Victoria oversaw Britains Industrial Revolution ( not without it's share of Dickensian transformations) where as Nasseredin Shah opened Persia to Western economic and cultural Influence, and ideas that were to actually undermine his absolute reign in subsequent years following his assassination in 1848 with the 1906 Constitutional Revolution. |
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At six o'clock on the evening of 31 May 1873, Shah Nasir al-Din of Persia, fourth king of the Qajar dynasty, and his entourage arrived at Potsdam Station in Berlin, where they were greeted by the German Emperor Wilhelm I, Crown Prince Friedrich, Chancellor Bismarck and Field Marshal Moltke. Welcomed by the cheering of thousands, the shah entered Berlin along Unter den Linden, sitting in an open carriage next to the kaiser. The Persian monarch returned to the German capital to be received by the Hohenzollern monarchs in the summers of 1878 and 1889. He was the first Persian head of state ever to have visited Europe. Some years later his son and successor, Muzaffar al-Din, was also received in Berlin. He entered the capital in June 1902 and passed through Germany in 1900 and 1905, although he was not formally received on these two occasions. The shahs' sojourns in Germany were part of their six European tours, which also brought them to various other European courts. Nasir al-Din dined with the tsars at the Winter Palace of St Petersburg, enjoyed receptions given by King Leopold II in Brussels and banquets with the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph at Schönbrunn Palace, and attended the World's Fairs in Vienna (1873) and Paris (1878 and 1889). |
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| Nassar Al-Din, Shah, was given admittance to the Order of the Garter by Queen Victoria, he committed Iran to help England against Russian design for India, By Tenniel, 'Punch', July 5, 1873. Doctors advised the Shah to travel, and the British government loaned the Shah £300,000 so that he could visit London for medical treatment. Amin al-Sultan arranged loans of £3,000,000 at five percent interest from Russia in 1900 and 1902 to repay previous loans. These proved to be financially disastrous. Persia’s annual revenue was about £1,500,000, but in three years they borrowed and spent almost that much. In 1888 Persia gave the Caspian fisheries to Russia. That year Henry Drummond Wolff arrived from London,and he managed to gain economic concessions |
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| Baron George de Reuter. 'The Wicked Baron'. Educated Cambridge. Director: Imperial Bank of Persia. Vanity Fair Nāṣer-al-Din Shah granted an unprecedented concession in 1872 to Baron Julius de Reuter, a British subject of German origin. The concession, which covered the entire territory of Persia, gave Reuter the exclusive rights and monopoly, for seventy years, to exploit all mineral resources including, but not limited to, coal, iron, copper, lead, and petroleum, and to construct and operate roads, railways, telegraph lines, water canals, irrigation systems, and customs services. Reuter’s concession was cancelled a few years later because of strong political pressure and opposition from the Czarist government, as well as a number of eminent Persians. Reuter never accepted the cancellation of his concession and repeatedly filed claims for compensation. Eventually, as a result of the intervention by the British minister in Tehran, Nāṣer-al-Din Shah granted a new concession to Reuter in 1889, which became known as the Bānk-e Šāhi (Imperial Bank of Persia) concession. Under this new concession the bank had the right to exploit all mineral resources throughout the country, except gold, silver, and other precious metals. |
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| 'Feline Rapprochement', By Tenniel, 'Punch', June 23, 1873 The British lion, the Persion cat and the Russian bear representing "The Great Game" The Shah opened the Karun River to international navigation. The Russians complained they were supposed to approve any transport concessions, but the Iranian government claimed it was not a concession. Wolff won a settlement of Baron Julius de Reuter’s claims that allowed Reuter’s bank the exclusive right to issue banknotes, and extensive mineral rights were included. This was called the Imperial Bank of Persia and had its headquarters in Tehran with several branches in various cities. The Russian Bank competed by making loans to prominent people, and they received road concessions. |
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| Illustration shows a man labeled "Persia" and a man labeled "Greece" drinking a toast from a punch bowl labeled "Renewal of Diplomatic Relations". Caption: A long time between drinks. 491 BC-1902 AD |
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| A 1910 issue of the German magazine Simplicissimus cover page titled 'The Persian Lion', showing a tamed, humiliated and impotent Persia being controlled by Britain and Russia. In March 1890 the Shah gave the British subject Major Talbot a fifty-year monopoly over Iran’s tobacco production and sales in exchange for a gift of £25,000, annual rent of £15,000, and 25% of the profits for Iran, but later in the year the newspaper Akhtar exposed the secret and criticized the concession. Jamal al-Din’s disciples added their leaflets on this issue that affected many Iranians who were involved in the tobacco business. The incident—popularly termed the “Tobacco Rebellion”—is often considered to be the origin of modern Iranian nationalism. When the tobacco company’s agents began to arrive in April 1891, a major protest was led by a religious leader from Shiraz. He was banished to Iraq and conferred with Jamal al-Din, who wrote to the top Shi’i ‘ulama, Hajji Mirza HasanShirazi. He put an interdict on smoking that was widely obeyed. A revolt in Tabriz forced the Government to suspend the tobacco operation, and the general strike spread to Mashhad, Isfahan, Tehran, Qazvin, Yazd, and Kirmanshah. The consumer’s boycott was supported by the Russians as well as Persians. By the end of 1891 a successful nationwide boycott on the sale and use of tobacco was in place. In Tehran troops fired on unarmed demonstrators,killing several, and the Government cancelled the concession in early 1892. The Iranian government contracted its first large foreign debt of £500,000 to the British-owned Imperial Bank, which authorized exorbitant pay to the company. As a result of this British fiasco the Russians became more influential. |
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| Alexander II and Nasir al-Din Shah on a Parade in the Tsaritsyn Meadow. |
Finances were re-organized; tariffs on native merchants were increased; and reduced court expenditures affected the ‘ulama. Belgian administrators were invited to reform the customs, but Iranian merchants complained that Russians were favored. The Shah sold an oil monopoly to the Australian British subject William Knox-D’Arcy, and new road tolls were granted to the Imperial Bank of Britain. A French company loaned Persia £200,000 to buy arms. The Belgian Joseph Naus mediated a new customs tariff that was signed by Persia and Russia in the Treaty of Erzerum in November 1901, ratified in December 1902, and kept secret until February 1903. People protested against the Belgian administrators and the foreign concessions. In the summer of 1903. Secret societies grew and spread critical literature.
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| Reception of Nasr-ed-Din King of Persia during His Visit to St. Petersburg on 11-14 May 1 The Azerbaijani Fath ‘Ali Akhundov wrote Kamal al-Daula va Jalal al-Daula, a collection of letters criticizing conditions in Iran. In Tabriz intellectuals were led by bookstore owner Muhammad ‘Ali Khan and Sayyid Hasan Taqizada. The Society of Learning was organized in Tehran, and they founded the first national library. Five of the most important organizations were the Secret Center in Tabriz with its journal led by the merchant ‘Ali Karbala-yi, the Social Democratic Party of Iran formed in 1904 in Baku by émigrés led by Azerbaijani school-teacher Narim Narimanov, the Society of Humanity in Tehran founded by ‘Abbas Kuli Khan Qazvini, the Revolutionary Committee headed by Malik al-Mutakallimin, and the Secret Society founded by Nazem al-Islam Kirmani who wrote History of the Awakening of Iranians. In February 1905 the Secret Society listed several demands for reforms including better laws and courts of justice. |
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Nasir al-Din Shah was assassinated in 1852. His oldest was excluded from the succession because his mother was of low birth, and the sickly Muzaffar al-Din became shah. He made no more foreign loans, and kept order, but he was not interested in political reform. He promoted music, art, and poetry, and he encouraged the translation of Western literature. The police force in Tehran was modernized, and city services were improved. The postal service expanded and began using stamps. The three progressive writers in Trabzon were extradited and executed at Tabriz. Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, the only person implicated by Rida Kirmani, became very ill with cancer and died in 1897.
In December 1905 the Governor of Tehran bastinadoed some sugar merchants for refusing to lower their raised sugar prices. They took sanctuary in the Royal Mosque of Tehran and were joined by mullahs and tradesmen. Imam Jum‘a helped the agents of ‘Ain al-Daula to disperse them. At Sayyid Muhammad Tabataba’i’s suggestion they moved to the Shahzada ‘Abd al-‘Azim shrine, where they were joined by 2,000 students, lower mullahs, merchants, and common people. They held out for 25 days, demanding a House of Justice (adalatkhana). The Shah dismissed the Governor and agreed to the demand in January 1906. When the government ordered Shaikh Muhammad Va‘iz expelled too, people protested, and on July 11 an officer killed a young sayyid. At his public funeral outside the mosque the Cossacks attacked the crowd, killing 22 and wounding more than a hundred. Many mullahs and others left Tehran and went to Qum, and the crowd protesting inside the British legation grew to 14,000 people organized by guilds. They turned the legation into an open-air school and heard lectures. They demanded that ‘Ain al-Daula be dismissed, and they asked for a representative assembly (majlis) also. |
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| Auguste Roubille, Shah de Perse, ca. 1900, French Political Caricatures Collection. Mozaffer Ed-Dine Shah Qajar (1853-1907) was the fifth Qajarid Shah of Persia, ruling from 1896 to 1907. On August 5, 1906, Muzaffar al-Din Shah, faced with a general strike in Tehran, agreed to the Assembly (Majlis), which was elected by male voters from the six classes of Mujahids, Qajars, nobles, landowners, merchants, and guilds. Only males literate in Persian between the ages of 30 and 70 who were not in the Government and had not been convicted of a crime were eligible to serve in the Assembly. The first Assembly began meeting in October 1906, and a committee wrote the Fundamental Law that the Shah signed on December 30, five days before he died. He was succeeded by his son Muhammad ‘Ali. He recalled Amin al-Sultan (Atabak) from his travels, and he tried to find a compromise between the Shah and the conservatives in the Assembly. A radical assassinated Atabak on August 31, 1907, the same day that the British and Russians settled their issues in Iran as well as in Tibet and Afghanistan. The treaty was signed before the Iranians were even informed, causing riots in Shiraz, Isfahan, and Tabriz. |
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| The Anglo - Russian Entente and the Division of Iran 1907, By Sambourne, 'Punch', October 2, 1907 Great Britain's interest in Persia began early in the nineteenth century. This interest led to friction with Russia, Persia's northern neighbour. The Anglo-Russian Agreement of 1907 helped to stabilize nearly a century of intermittent conflict between them. This agreement provided for a Russian sphere of influence in northern Persia while a neutral zone separated it from Britain's sphere of influence in south-eastern Persia. For Russia, Persia represented an area for future territorial annexation. Great Britain, on the other hand, sought no territory in Persia. Rather, its primary concern was not its commercial interests, or oil fields (which were discovered two years later), but the military security of India, its jewel in the East. |
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| THE SALT-WATER CURE, August 12, 1908. The Ottoman Emperor makes another specious effort to amend his constitution.. Shah of Persia. "Go on in, Abdul—just for the look of the thing. You can always come out if you don't like it." Sick Man of Europe. "Yes, I know. But one gets so wet!" Mozaffar o-Din's son Mohammad Ali Shah (reigned 1907-09), with the aid of Russia, attempted to rescind the constitution and abolish parliamentary government. After several disputes with the members of the Majlis, in June 1908 he used his Russian-officered Persian Cossacks Brigade to bomb the Majlis building, arrest many of the deputies, and close down the assembly. Resistance to the shah, however, coalesced in Tabriz, Esfahan, Rasht, and elsewhere. In July 1909, constitutional forces marched from Rasht and Esfahan to Tehran, deposed the shah, and re-established the constitution.The ex-shah went into exile in Russia. |
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| Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime Minister. (Later Earl of Beconsfield). 'He educated the Tories…', By Singe, Vanity Fair, 1869. Benjamin Disraeli first met Bismarck at the Russian ambassador’s residence in London in the summer of 1862, as leader of the Tory opposition. On this occasion, Bismarck, on the verge of assuming power, spelled out his plans for Prussian greatness under his leadership: I shall soon be compelled to undertake the conduct of the Prussian government. My first care will be to reorganize the army, with or without the help of the Landtag [the legislature] . . . As soon as the army shall have been brought into such a condition to inspire respect, I shall seize the first best pretext to declare war against Austria, dissolve the German Diet, subdue the minor states, and give national unity to Germany under Prussian leadership. I have come here to say this to the Queen’s ministers.For clarity of intent, this is hard to beat. Afterwards Disraeli warned the Austrian envoy: “Take care of that man. He means what he says.” |
Benjamin Disraeli offers Queen Victoria the crown of Empress of India in exchange for the British crown, and in the process reduces the power of the British monarch.
In October, 1839, Queen Victoria's cousins Ernest and Albert paid her a visit, bringing with them a letter from their uncle Leopold, in which he recommended them to her care. They were at once upon intimate terms, and the Queen confided to her uncle that "Albert was very fascinating." Four days after their arrival she informed Lord Melbourne that she had made up her mind as to the question of marriage. The Queen described her betrothal as follows:
"At half-past twelve I sent for Albert. He came to the closet, where I was alone, and after a few minutes I said to him that I thought he would be aware why I wished him to come, and that it would make me happy if he would consent to what I wished, namely, to marry me. There was no hesitation on his part, but the offer was received with the greatest demonstrations of kindness and affection. . . . I told him I was quite unworthy of him. . . . He said he would be very happy to spend his life with me."
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| Leopold II, King of Belgium, holding bags of money! 'With France and Prussia pressing on each side', By Coide, Vanity Fair, 1869. The most notable event in Leopold's career was the foundation of the Congo Free State. While still Duke of Brabant he had been the first to call the attention of the Belgians to the need of enlarging their horizon beyond sea, and after his accession to the throne he gave the first impulse towards the development of this idea by founding in 1876 the Association Internationale Africaine. He enlisted the services of Henry Morton Stanley, who visited Brussels in 1878 after exploring the Congo river, and returned in 1879 to the Congo as agent of the Comité d'Études du Haut Congo, soon afterwards reorganized as the "International Association of the Congo." This association was, in 1884-85, recognized by the powers as a sovereign state under the name of the État Indépendant du Congo. Leopold's exploitation of this vast territory, which he administered autocratically, and in which he associated himself personally with various financial schemes, was understood to bring him an enormous fortune; it was the subject of acutely hostile criticism, to a large extent substantiated by the report of a commission of inquiry instituted by the king himself in 1904, and followed in 1908 by the annexation of the state to Belgium. |
Thomas Nast, Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War
Some of the most recognizable cartoons were published in Harper's Weekly, a New York City periodical that also featured sketches of war scenes and famous personalities - as well as news and serialized literature. Among its illustrators were Winslow Homer (who also worked for the Illustrated Times) and Alfred Waud. The leading illustrator of Harpers Weekly was Thomas Nast. Nast was the most influential American caricaturist in the mid- to late 19th century. Specializing in political cartoons. He was a staunch opponent of slavery and throughout the Civil War produced patriotic drawings urging people to help crush the rebels. Abraham Lincoln is reported to have said: "Thomas Nast has been our best recruiting sergeant. His emblematic cartoons have never failed to arouse enthusiasm and patriotism." Nast was also the artist who created the traditional image of Santa Claus and the Republican party's elephant symbol. |
| The pedlar and his pack, or the desperate effort, an over balance, James Akin, 1812. The editor of Philadelphia Democratic Press, John Binns, who had published handbills accusing candidate Andrew Jackson of arbitrary executions and other violent acts supports a load of coffins on his back, along with the figures of Henry Clay and incumbent President Adams. |
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Black Recruit and Abraham Lincoln, London Punch, 1862 |
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We Accept the Situation, Thomas Nast for Harpers Weekly, 1867, An emancipated black voting for the first time versus a resentful, disenfranchised former Confederates. |
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| On April 13, 1906 a cartoon in the New York World featured Mark Twain dethroning Czar Nicholas II with his pen. |
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Theodore Roosevelt's "trust-busting" campaigns |
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President Theodore Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for his work in the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Portsmouth ending the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. The negotiations to end the Russo-Japanese war began at Sagamore Hill when Roosevelt invited diplomats on both sides, Russia and Japan, to his home in Oyster Bay. After meeting with all of them, he sent the diplomats out on board of the presidential yacht Mayflower. Negotiations continued at and near a naval base in Portsmouth, because it was federal property and cool in the summer. Delegates also went back and forth to Oyster Bay to confer with the president. The peace treaty was signed at the US Navy base in Portsmouth. Thus the accord is called the "Treaty of Portsmouth". |
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| Theodore Roosevelt and Anti-Third Term Principle, This cartoon satirize Roosevelt's reversal of his anti-third term promise and his assumption of leadership of the Progressive Party. Both La Follette and Roosevelt lost the Republican nomination to the incumbent, Taft, who still controlled the national convention delegates. Roosevelt, however, had swept 9 of the 12 states with primaries, including Taft's home state of Ohio. 1912 |
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| The US President Tuft Handing the Problematical Mexican Situation to His Successor Woodrow Wilson, Louis Glackens. 1913 |
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The Treaty of Versailles was signed at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. The main signatories of the treaty were the Big Four: the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, the US President Woodrow Wilson, the French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and the Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando. "Peace and future cannon fodder", a small child with a copy of the Treaty behind him and his head the sign "1940 class". The Big Four are seen walking past, and there is a caption: "The Tiger: Curious! I seem to hear a child weeping!".The final treaty was not popular. Many in Britain and France were angry that Germany hadn't been treated more harshly and that the German Kaiser hadn't been put on trial. Most Germans were humiliated and horrified by the treaty - disgusted at being made to take the blame for the entire war (the War Guilt clause - 231) and having to pay for it. |
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| Germany's view of the Versailles Peace Proposals, is captured in this cartoon in Simpliccimus issue of June 3, 1919. The American president Wilson, the French president Clemenceau and the British Prime Minister Lloyd George have condemned the country to death. |
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The Gaol bird is the broken-wing "peace" who is chained to the Treaty of Versailles. Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Wilson announce that she is free! The American politics were deeply divided with President Wilson at the helms of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party dominating the US Congress. Republicans used the Treaty as an opportunity to criticize Wilson for not consulting them about the Treaty. Americans were also queasy about president's vision for a League of Nations. Some Americans felt that the Treaty was lopsided against Germany and Britain and France were imposing harsh financial penalties on Germany to enrich themselves. In the end, the Congress rejected the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations. |
The Great War
Dutch artist Louis Raemaekers (1869–1956) has been called the Great Cartoonist of the Great War. According to president Theodore Roosevelt; The cartoons of Louis Raemaekers constitute the most powerful of the honorable contributions made by neutrals to the cause of civilization in the World War. Born in Roermond, in the Netherlands, Raemaekers, unconvinced by reports of German atrocities in invaded Belgium, crossed the border and returned home outraged. In the early years of WWI, Raemaekers, critical of the United States’ neutrality, in a number of drawings clearly asked for U.S. intervention. His scathing anti-German political cartoons gained rapid fame at home and abroad. By October 1917 more than two thousand newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic were printing his drawings on a regular basis . Raemaekers’s often provocative work resulted in his government’s threatening to place him on trial for jeopardizing Dutch neutrality. After the armistice, Raemaekers used his art to champion the League of Nations and, later, to sound the alarm against German and Italian fascism.
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| Will they last, Louis Raemaekers, c. 1915, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, the subject of Raemaekers’s many barbed caricatures, put a bounty on his head. |
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China imperialism cartoon-while Emperor Guangxu helplessly looks on, China as a pie is about to be carved up by Victoria (British Empire), Wilhelm II (German Empire), Nicolas II (Russian Empire), Marianne (France), and Meiji (Japanese Empire) |
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Political cartoon by Frederick Opper from Puck magazine showing Queen Victoria and her family panhandling from John Bull on the steps of Buckingham Palace. |
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| THE STORY OF FIDGETY WILHELM (Up-to-date Version of "Struwwelpeter") "Let me see if Wilhelm can Be a little gentleman; Let me see if he is able To sit still for once at table!" "But Fidgety Will He won't sit still." Just like any bucking horse. "Wilhelm! We are getting cross!" Feb. 1, 1896 |
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| SOLID, Entente Cordiale GERMANY: "Donnerwetter! It's rock. I thought it was going to be paper." (Aug. 2, 1911) On March 31, 1905, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany arrived in Tangiers to declare his support for the sultan of Morocco, provoking the anger of France and Britain in what will become known as the First Moroccan Crisis, a foreshadowing of the greater conflict between Europe's great nations still to come, the First World War. A Second Moroccan Crisis flared in April 1911, when the French pushed troops into the country, claiming to be defending the sultan against riots that had erupted in Fez but actually violating the terms of the Algeciras convention. In response, Germany sent its own warship, the Panther, which arrived in the port of Agadir on May 21, intensifying the enmity between the two nations and, by extension, their allies. Slightly more than two years before the outbreak of World War I, then, the two Moroccan crises left no doubt that the traditional power balance in Europe had shifted into large blocs of power, with Germany relatively isolated on one side—enjoying only lukewarm support from Austria-Hungary and Italy—and Britain, France, and Russia on the other. |
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The Entente Cordiale, an agreement between Britain and France, resolved a number of longstanding colonial disputes, and established a diplomatic understanding between the two countries, which however stopped short of binding either to any military undertaking in support of the other. France, keen to build a buffer against possible German aggression, signed the agreement in a bid to encourage an Anglo alliance with France. Similarly Britain was willing to encourage co-operation between the two countries with an eye on Germany's decision to expand her naval strength in competition with Britain. Germany, concerned over the signing of the entente agreement, determined to test its practical strength by provoking a crisis in Morocco in 1905, leading to the Algeciras Conference (1906). The entente was extended in 1907 to include Russia, culminating in the alliance that formally took on the Central Powers during World War One. |
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| UNCONQUERABLE, 1914 THE KAISER: "So, you see--you've lost everything." THE KING OF THE BELGIANS: "Not my soul." On 2 August 1914, the day before Germany declared war on France, the German government wrote to the Belgian government demanding the right of free passage across Belgium for its troops, so that the latter could most efficiently invade France and reach Paris. Belgium's reply to what amounted to a German ultimatum (grant free passage or suffer occupation as an enemy of Germany) was delivered on 3 August 1914. Germany's invasion of Belgium on 4 August 1914 quickly prompted allegations of 'war crimes'. Some of them were confined to excesses committed in the military conflict. But the accusations of atrocities committed against civilians in occupied Belgium were far more damaging to the German cause. During the autumn of 1914, the British Foreign Office received a number of disturbing 'eyewitness' accounts from fleeing British subjects and Belgian refugees. |
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| THE EXCURSIONIST, November 1914 TRIPPER WILHELM: "First Class to Paris." CLERK: "Line blocked." WILHELM: "Then make it Warsaw." CLERK: "Line blocked." WILHELM: "Well, what about Calais?" CLERK: "Line blocked." WILHELM: "Hang it! I must go somewhere! I promised my people I would." |
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| THE FLIGHT THAT FAILED. January 1915 THE EMPEROR: "What! No babes, Sirrah?" THE MURDERER: "Alas, Sire, none." THE EMPEROR: "Well, then, no babes, no iron crosses." (Exit murderer, discouraged.) Throughout 1914 the Zeppelin air ships were used for reconnaissance patrols over the North Sea, but the German Admiralty was pressing for permission to use them for attacks against England. The Kaiser, somewhat reluctantly, granted such permission and on the 19th of January the Germans carried out the first Zeppelin raid against Britain, killing two and injuring sixteen. This was the first of many raids, which continued at a rate of about two per month, in parallel with the continuing reconnaissance patrols. The German Admiralty was very enthusiastic about the results, and asked for permission to bomb London. This was only granted by the Kaiser after a series of raids by French bombers on German cities. On the 31st of May 1915 the first raid was carried out against London, killing seven and injuring thirty five. |
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| THE OLD MAN OF THE SEA SINBAD THE KAISER: "This submarine business is going to get me into trouble with America; but what can an All-Powerful do with a thing like this on his back?" At 1:40 p.m. on May 7, 1915, the German U-boat, U-20 launched a torpedo at the British ocean liner RMS Lusitania, famous for its luxurious accommodations and speed capability. The sinking of Lusitania enraged Americans and hastened the United States' entrance into World War I. |
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| REALISATION ("When I went to Bulgaria I resolved that if there were to be any assassinations I would be on the side of the assassins." STATEMENT BY FERDINAND.) The Kaiser, Ferdinand and Hamid II stand over the corpse of Armenia. On 19 May 1915, Britain, Frence, and Russia condemned Turkey's massacre of Armenians. Bulgarian Tsar Ferdinand decided on 23 September 1915 to join the Central Powers, and on 14 October 1915 declared war on Serbia. In retaliation Britain and France declared war on Bulgaria on 16 October. Russia followed suit a few days later. |
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| AN UNAUTHORISED FLIRTATION THE KAISER (to Austrian Emperor): "Franz! Franz! I'm surprised and pained. " In the summer of 1915 Austria approached Serbia with proposals for a separate peace, Kaiser was dismayed. |
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THE RETURN OF THE MOCK TURTLE-DOVE, December 1916
THE BIRD: "Wouldn't even look at me!" |
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| THE DAWN OF DOUBT GRETCHEN: "I wonder if this gentleman really is my good angel after all!" Gretchen's character in Faust represents the ability of humanity to become corrupted because of a turn towards the subjective self. Gretchen originally represents goodness and morality; even Mephistopheles finds no fault in her. However, Faust's influence on her inward life causes her to lose this morality by focusing on a selfish love affair that costs her life and faith. |
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| THE LAST THROW, February, 1917. |
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| ALSO RAN, March, 1917. WILHELM: "Are you luring them on, like me?" MEHMED: "I'm afraid I am!" |
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| DYNASTIC AMENITIES, April, 1917. LITTLE WILLIE (of Prussia): "As one Crown Prince to another, isn't your Hindenburg line getting a bit shaky?" RUPPRECHT (of Bavaria): "Well, as one Crown Prince to another, what about your Hohenzollern line?" After the German declaration of War on France on August 3, the Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia joined his regiment, which saw action at the Battle of Longwy. For his service the Crown Prince was awarded the Iron Cross. Soon the winds of war changed, German troops had been close to Paris, but came to a halt at the Marne. The bitter fighting and the heavy losses of men and material made the Crown Prince write a memorandum in which he stated that he favored an end to the senseless hostilities. Russia was very much on his mind. In 1917 the Crown Prince tried to persuade Chancellor Hollweg to sue for a reasonable peace. This time a firm refusal came from the High Command of the Army (Hindenburg and Ludendorff) In another letter dated July 18, 1917 he tried again to influence Reich politics. He brought forward several suggestions for the possible achievement of Peace. Again, he was rebuffed. He was not involved in the reform efforts in the fall of 1918; he was at the time with his regiment. The peace negotiations were of the utmost importance for the future of the House of Hohenzollern, as the opposing nations demanded the abdication of the Kaiser. However, the Kaiser refused to give up. At the beginning of November 1918, in view of the hopeless situation on the fronts and the intolerable situation at home, a group of sailors of the Imperial Navy refused to take their ships out for a last senseless slaughter, and soon this revolution spread all through Germany, reaching Berlin on November 9. The Kaiser was at his headquarters and still refused to budge. Chancellor Max von Baden took it upon himself to announce that the Kaiser of Germany and King of Prussia, Wilhelm II, had decided to denounce the throne. His hand forced in this way, the Kaiser was persuaded to seek asylum in neutral Holland. He avoided capture but made it impossible to retain the monarchy in Germany. Both the Kaiser and the Crown Prince signed the document of abdication. With this, the 500-year-old dynasty had come to an end |
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| A WORD OF ILL OMEN, June, 1917. CROWN PRINCE (to Kaiser, drafting his next speech): "For Gott's sake, father, be careful this time, and don't call the American Army 'contemptible.'" On 3 February 1917, President Wilson addressed Congress to announce that diplomatic relations with Germany were severed. In a Special Session of Congress held on 2 April 1917, President Wilson delivered his 'War Message.' Four days later, Congress overwhelmingly passed the War Resolution which brought the United States into the Great War. |
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| RUSSIA'S DARK HOUR, August, 1917. Since early 1917, Russia, one of the Entente's principal powers, had been in a state of turmoil. In February of that year, the Czarist government's poor management of the war had helped to inspire a popular uprising, the February Revolution. This revolution forced the abdication of Czar Nicholas II and placed in power a Provisional Government of liberal and socialist factions, ultimately under the leadership of Socialist Revolutionary party member Alexander Kerensky. This brief experiment with pluralist democracy was a chaotic one, and in the summer months, the continual deterioration of the war effort and an increasingly dire economic situation caused Russian workers, soldiers, and sailors to riot ("The July Days"). On October 24-25, 1917, Bolshevik (left-wing socialist) forces under Vladimir Lenin seized key government buildings and stormed the Winter Palace, then the seat of the new government in Russia's capital, Petrograd (now St. Petersburg). The "Great October Socialist Revolution," the first successful Marxist coup in history, dislodged the ineffectual Provisional Government, and ultimately established a Soviet Socialist Republic under Lenin's leadership. The new Soviet state's radical social, political, economic, and agrarian reforms would in the postwar years unnerve Western democratic governments, who so feared the spread of Communism throughout Europe that they were willing to compromise or appease right-wing regimes (including Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany) in the 1920s and 1930s. But the immediate effect of the Russian Revolution on the European stage was a brutal and enduring Civil War in Russian lands (1917-1922) and the decision of the new Bolshevik leadership to make a separate peace with the Kaiser's Germany. When negotiations foundered over German demands, the German army launched an all-out offensive on the Eastern Front, resulting in a peace treaty at Brest-Litovsk on March 6, 1918. |
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| THE INSEPARABLE, September, 1917. THE KAISER (to his people): "Do not listen to those who would sow dissension between us. I will never desert you." |
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| BETRAYED, December, 1917. THE PANDER: "Come on; come and be kissed by him." |
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| MADE IN GERMANY, March 1918 CIVILISATION: "What's that supposed to represent?" IMPERIAL ARTIST: "Why, 'Peace,' of course." CIVILISATION: "Well, I don't recognise it--and I never shal |
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| THE DEATH LORD, April, 1918. THE KAISER (on reading the appalling tale of German losses): "What matter, so we Hohenzollerns survive?" |
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| THE SANDS RUN OUT, October, 1918. On November 9, 1918, in the midst of widespread unrest and deserted by the commanders of the German Army, Emperor (Kaiser) William II abdicated the German throne. On the same day, SPD delegate Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed Germany a republic, with an interim government led by Friedrich Ebert. Two days later, German representatives, led by Catholic Center Party (Zentrum) representative Matthias Erzberger, met with a delegation of the victorious Entente powers under French Field Marshall Ferdinand Foch, the commanding general of the Entente forces, in a railcar in Compiègne Forest and accepted armistice terms. |
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| Ilych Lenin ridding the world of monarchs, capitalists and clerics, Viktor Deni, 1919 |
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| The Gap in the Bridge, by Leonard Ravenhill, in the British magazine Punch 1919 |
This cartoon is critical of America. Although President Wilson had been the originator the the idea of a League, now America is refusing to join -- in spite of the USA being the 'keystone'.
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| Woman’s Vote, William H. Walker, 1920. In the first presidential election in which they could vote, women were wooed by both major parties. |
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| A bread line or a run on a bank? Chester Garde, 1931. Hoover, facing harsh criticism from the American public for his policy inaction, reluctantly established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), in 1932, which provided loans to failing banks, and through the additional power of the Emergency Relief Act, the RFC was authorized to provide loans to state governments for unemployment relief. But, these efforts were too late to stop the economic downslide of the country. He was overwhelmingly defeated by Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election. For the rest of the depression, though, Hoover attacked every substantive measure for relief and what he saw as radical influences in Washington. |
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| “A Scene from the ‘Good Old Days.’” from Brennessel, the Nazi humor magazine, January 1934. Marx is portrayed as a theoretician that leads German workers into a ruinous path. |
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| Hoover Prosperity, Tulley, ca. 1932. A sarcastic interpretation of Herbert Hoover’s contention that prosperity was just around the corner. |
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| Mephisto to Faust: You Can Trust me, Louis Raemaekers, 1939, A sarcastic interpretation of the Non- Aggression Pact of 1939 signed in August with a secret agenda between Stalin and Hitler. |
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| Constitution of the United States Canceled, Greaves , 1940. F.D.R.’s pursuit of a third term suggested that he acts like a king who considered himself above the law. |
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| “The Calendar of a Condemned Man.” a German propaganda cartoon in Lustige Blätter, 1941. Churchill crosses out the names of English cities as the gallows waits behind him. |
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| Nazi propaganda cartoon, Brennessel, 1938. Mars is speaking to the "warmongers" Eden and Churchill, who had been objecting to Chamberlain's appeasement policies. This was Brennessel's last cover cartoon featuring Churchill before closing down in that year. |
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| “American Candelabra,” an anti-Semitic propaganda cartoon in Lustige Blätter, 1942. Roosevelt is portrayed as the upholder of the Jewish Interests |
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| The Russo-German Pact, A Japanese perspective. |
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| The Nightmare. “A frightening thought. Our voters are demanding that we fulfill our campaign promises...” |
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Punch cartoon, 1933. Adolf Hitler is carried to power on the shoulders of President Paul von Hindenburg (Left) and Chancellor Franz von Papen (Right). By dismissing Prussia's social-democratic state government in July 1932, Papen struck a fatal blow against the beleaguered Weimar Republic. |
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| Hitler's Dream |
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| In 1940, Marshal Philippe Pétain was a national hero in France for his victory at the Battle of Verdun during World War I. Following the German invasion of France in May 1940, the well-respected eight-four-year old was asked to form a government. Seeing the French army defeated, the “Hero of Verdun” asked for an armistice. With the German army occupying two-thirds of the country, Pétain believed he could repair the ruin caused by the invasion and obtain the release of the numerous prisoners of war by cooperating with the Germans. He, however, opposed Franco-German collaboration advocated by his vice premier Pierre Laval, whom he dismissed in December 1940. When the Germans forced Pétain to take Laval back as premier, he himself withdrew into a purely nominal role. Yet he balked at resigning, convinced that, if he did, Hitler would place all of France directly under German rule. After Allied landings in November 1942 in North Africa, Pétain secretly ordered his forces to aid the Allies. But, at the same time, he published official messages protesting the landing. His doubledealing was to be his undoing. When Pétain dispatched an emissary to arrange for a peaceful transfer of power, General de Gaulle refused it. Brought to trial in France for high treason, he was stripped for all rank and sentenced to death. The High Court requested that the sentence should not be carried out in view of Pétain’s great age, and later de Gaulle commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment. |
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| The Dummy That Spoke by Itself. Adolf/Benito } (together). "Where did that one come from - you or me?" (the dummy, General Franco of Spain, says "Withdraw All Volunteers!" as neither Hitler or Mussolini knows which of them is really controlling the puppet) |
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| Illingworth, 2 November 1939, Hitler is being advised by his advisers ‘Why not an offensive today?... Wait until the spring .. Russian gold is behind us... Germany is bankrupt... Why not bomb Britain?... there might be reprisals...’ |
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| Arthur Szyk, 1944 |
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| A soviet propaganda cartoon depicting Uncle Sam exploiting South Americans, Israelis and others. |
Editorial cartoons after WWII
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Harry Truman playing Stalin a chess game the board is Germany, and the opening gambit occurs in Berlin. Leslie Illington, National Library of Wales. Stalin’s pieces include “Eastern Bloc,” and “Berlin Blockade.” Truman's pieces include a knight, “Air Lift,” and a piece looking a lot like Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, “Atlantic Alliance.” Stalin's real concern was for the emergence of an economically viable West Germany that would fall under the shadow of American control and eliminate any potential opportunity for Soviet influence in either the western zones or western Berlin. He saw the world in terms of competing hegemonies, one in the East controlled by the Soviets and one in the West by the United States. |
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On April 12, 1945, Harry S. Truman, the Vice President of the United States, was elevated by the sudden death of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the Presidency of the United States. With the war in Europe near its triumphant end, Truman had immediately to deal with Soviet intentions to impose Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and possibly to exploit the economic breakdown in Western Europe. Simultaneously he had to seek military and political solutions in the war against Japan. He was interested when Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson explained the atomic project to him on April 25, 1945-- "If it explodes, as I think it will, I'll certainly have a hammer on those boys," "On July 24 I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force," Truman recalled. "The Russian Premier showed no special interest. All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make 'good use of it against the Japanese.'" Truman established 12 points for the maintenance of World peace in a speech on Navy Day. The UK's Prime minister Attlee suggested to president that the five permanent members of the World Security Council -- Britain, America, Russia , France and China - share the atomic bomb secrets, meaning that the Big Five would be able to use the bomb against an aggressor nation, but no aggressor, except a member of the Council, would be able to retaliate. Truman later explained his policy on his State of the Union speech on January 7, 1953. Arguing that The communist rulers are moving, with implacable will, to create greater strength in their vast empire, and to create weakness and division in the free world, preparing for the time their false creed teaches them must come: the time when the whole world outside their sway will be so torn by strife and contradictions that it will be ripe for the communist plucking.To overcome this threat he suggested that: Like the pioneers who settled this great continent of ours, we have had to carry a musket while we went about our peaceful business. We realized that if we and our allies did not have military strength to meet the growing Soviet military threat, we would never have the opportunity to carry forward our efforts to build a peaceful world of law and order--the only environment in which our free institutions could survive and flourish.The first major step in the cold war to develope unity, strength and resolute will of the free nations according to him was the determined and successful effort made through the United Nations to safeguard the integrity and independence of Iran in 1945 and 1946. |
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| Cy Hungerford, "An Uncomfortable Situation." December 3, 1953. This editorial cartoon comments on the political problems Senator Joseph McCarthy presented to President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy was a little-known junior senator from Wisconsin until February 1950 when he claimed to possess a list of 205 card-carrying Communists employed in the U.S. Department of State. From that moment Senator McCarthy became a tireless crusader against Communism in the early 1950s, a period that has been commonly referred to as the "Red Scare." As chairman of the Senate Permanent Investigation Subcommittee, Senator McCarthy conducted hearings on communist subversion in America and investigated alleged communist infiltration of the Armed Forces. His subsequent exile from politics coincided with a conversion of his name into a modern English noun "McCarthyism," or adjective, "McCarthy tactics," when describing similar witch hunts in recent American history. [The American Heritage Dictionary gives the definition of McCarthyism as: 1. The political practice of publicizing accusations of disloyalty or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence; and 2. The use of methods of investigation and accusation regarded as unfair, in order to suppress opposition.] Senator McCarthy was censured by the U.S. Senate on December 2, 1954 and died May 2, 1957. |
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| David Low, "Ssh! Welcome!" 23rd Oct. 1957 Macmillan wanted the repeal of the 1946 McMahon Act which blocked the sharing of nuclear infor- mation between the United States and the United Kingdom. At the Bermuda conference of March 1957, Macmillan succeeded at least in rebuilding a public front of Anglo-American solidarity. During August 1957, fears plagued Washington that Syria might be about to become a fully fledged Soviet satellite state. In a bid to thwart this development, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles agreed to pool efforts with the British in a joint Syria working group established during September 1957. The purpose of the group was to examine the options available to Britain and America to block the advance of Soviet influence in Syria through covert action. It was with the example of the cooperation forged over Syria in mind that Macmillan responded to the momentous news of the launch of the Sputnik satellite on 4 October 1957.24 The launch prompted the dispatch of a crucial personal message from Macmillan to Eisenhower on 10 October. In it, Macmil- lan linked the Syrian experiment with the Sputnik challenge. Arguing that Sputnik had served to bring home the need to pool efforts to meet the formi- dable Russian threat, in a s diary entry, Macmillan wrote: The Russian success in launching the satellite has been something equivalent to Pearl Harbour [sic]. The American cocksureness is shaken. . . . President is under severe attack for first time . . . Foster is under still more severe attack. His policies are said to have failed everywhere. . . . The atmosphere is now such that almost anything might be decided, however revolutionary. |
Leslie Illingworth , "There's Nothing In It.", Punch, October 1951
After nationalizing the Iranian oil industry, the ring master, Prime minister Mohammed Mosaddeq of Iran, passes the circus hoop to the Egyptian Prime Minister Mustafa el-Nahhas, encouraging him to nationalize Suez Canal, and forcing the British lion to jump through the hoop.
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| Michael Cummings, "The problem is really one of not being taken for a ride..." Daily Express, 11 Jul 1951, Muhammad Mossadegh, the Iranian prime minister overthrown by US and British agents in 1953, was a man who declined a salary, returned gifts, and collected tax arrears from his beloved mother. Frugality was allied to punctiliousness in this droopy-nosed aristocrat who enraged the West by insisting that Iran, not Britain, should own, sell, and profit from Iranian oil. A member of the princely Qajar family, he retained a noblesse-oblige gentility even as he became the symbol of postwar Iranian assertiveness. Two years after Mossadegh’s nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) in 1951, the CIA unloosed Kermit Roosevelt and his fellow American agents on Tehran to oust him. The operation, code-named TPAJAX, carried forward to a bloody denouement what Britain’s MI6 had first plotted. The objectives of a rising America and a declining Britain diverged; they overlapped just sufficiently for both to do their worst. Iran was fragile, and Mossadegh’s constitutionalism was a nuanced idea in an environment where bazaar toughs with nicknames like Brainless Shaban whipped up crowds. Cummings used the following pieces of the news to represent a British perspective on Mossadegh News: 9 Jul: Speeches by Ministers and Press comment in Teheran suggested that the Persian Government intended to ignore the International Court of Justice, in the Hague, recommendations on interim measures for dealing with the oil dispute. News: 9 Jul: Mr Morrison, the Foreign Secretary, said that the Persians did not have the skill and experience to produce, refine and market the oil. He said the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company had provided houses, education, hospitals and clubs for its Persian employees. News: 11 Jul: Mr Mason, Mr Drake's deputy, announced that Mr Cox Fields, the general manager of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, was visiting Goshen to arrange for the withdrawal of five British staff to Abadan. The company had offered the Persian temporary board the field with 333 Persian workers, to operate it themselves, but they had not responded. Oi |
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| Leslie Illingworth, The Merchant of Persia. If you deny me, fie upon your law! (Shylock) So vital is the cause at stake to the nation that Persia cannot afford the slightest risk of an unfavourable decision. (Moussadek), Punch, June 1952. Most of Iran's oil reserves were in the Persian Gulf area and had been developed by the British Anglo-Iranian Oil company and exported to Britain. For a number of reasons — a growing consciousness of how little Iran was getting from the Anglo-Iranian Oil company (AIOC) for its oil; refusal of AIOC to offer of a ‘50–50% profit sharing deal' to Iran as Aramco had to Saudi Arabia; anger over Iran's defeat and occupation by the Allied powers — nationalization of oil was an important and popular issue with "a broad cross-section of the Iranian people."[On 28 April 1951, the Majlis named Mosaddeq as new prime minister by a vote of 79–12. Aware of Mosaddeq's rising popularity and political power, the young Shah appointed Mosaddeq to the Premiership. On 1 May, Mosaddeq nationalized the AIOC, cancelling its oil concession due to expire in 1993 and expropriating its assets. The next month a committee of five majlis deputies was sent to Khuzistan to enforce the nationalization. Oil production came to a virtual standstill as British technicians left the country, and Britain imposed a worldwide embargo on the purchase of Iranian oil. In September 1951, Britain froze Iran's sterling assets and banned export of goods to Iran. It challenged the legality of the oil nationalization and took its case against Iran to the International Court of Justice at The Hague. The court found in Iran's favor,but the dispute between Iran and the AIOC remained unsettled. Under United States pressure, the AIOC improved its offer to Iran. |
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| Herbert Block, The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1963. When U-2 spy planes sent by the CIA revealed that Soviet missile sites were under construction in Cuba, it led to a serious threat of nuclear war and tense negotiations between Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. |
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| It was the Cuban Missile Crisis in the autumn of 1962, that formed the backdrop to Khrushchev's fall from power. President Kennedy (embarassed by the Bay of Pigs and the Berlin Wall) was determined to stand firmly against the deployment (and arming) of Soviet missile bases in Cuba, a scant 90 miles from Florida. Khrushchev seemed equally determined to do so. In the tense, indeed terrifying, standoff of October, 1962, the Soviet fleet sailed towards Cuba, but, at the last minute, turned around. Score a point for Kennedy! It was as close to open, overt warfare that the United States and the Soviet Union came. This "balance of terror" made possible some lightening of tensions. It did, as well, have the effect of humiliating Khrushchev. In 1964, he was ousted from power. |
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Conrad, Denver Post (1963), This cartoon pertains to the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which U-2 spy planes sent by the CIA revealed that Soviet missile sites were under construction in Cuba, leading to tense negotiations between Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. |
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| Next to the symbol of the Cold War – the Berlin Wall – Khrushchev says to Kennedy: “I just closed off what belongs to me. I’m willing to negotiate about the rest.” (Pulitzer Prize winner Edmund Valtman’s political cartoon collection) |
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| Paul Labowsky, Berlin, 1963 Castro used the two communist rivals in his struggle against the US policies. Mao Zedong resented Russia's willingness to compromise with capitalism in "peaceful coexistence, and had aggressive plans for advancing Marxist-Leninist goals in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and conflict with Soviet policies in those places was inevitable. Khrushchev badly miscalculated Cuban situation, which he feared would be invaded by Americans. He sought to parry the American advantage by installing short-range Soviet missiles with nuclear warheads in Cuba, supposedly under his control (not Castro's). On Tuesday, the 23rd, 1962, U.S. ships took up positions along a line 800 miles from Cuba. The naval blockade was traditionally an act of war, but the U.S. public saw it as a step in defending the country. Khrushchev and his colleagues were opposed to a "beautiful death" and a glorious showdown with the U.S. that Castro and Che Guevara had been advocating. He told Castro that "We aren't struggling against imperialism in order to die." Castro remained furious with Khrushchev, accusing him of having no cojones. Mao joined in the criticism. He denounced Soviet leadership for giving in to the U.S. The China-Soviet split was still on, and, in 1963, Mao would find fault with the Russians for signing the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the United States and Britain. Khrushchev responded by declaring that Mao's policies would lead to nuclear war. |
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| Patrice Lumumba, by Bernard Safran (1924 – 1995) Patrice Lumumba, was the first legally elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). He was assassinated, on 17 January, 1961. This heinous crime was a culmination of two inter-related assassination plots by American and Belgian governments, which used Congolese accomplices and a Belgian execution squad to carry out the deed. Ludo De Witte, the Belgian author of the best book on this crime, qualifies it as "the most important assassination of the 20th century". The assassination's historical importance lies in a multitude of factors, the most pertinent being the global context in which it took place, its impact on Congolese politics since then and Lumumba's overall legacy as a nationalist leader. |
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| Michael Cummings, Sunday Express, 21 Aug 1960 |
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| February 2002. The Belgian parliamentary commission investigating the death of Patrice Lumumba finds that the Belgian government carried a “moral responsibility”. Louis Michel apologizes to the Congolese people. No further legal action was taken. |
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| Herblock, Washington Post, 1967. The Vietnam War was extremely long as well as highly unpopular. America became involved in the War in 1955 and the first troops arrived in Vietnam in 1965. The war continued on into the 70’s, ending in 1973. Many groups of people on the home front opposed the Vietnam War and disagreed with American domestic and foreign policies. |
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| Conrad, Nixon drills a hole in the wall of the Democratic headquarters and claims that he’s from the phone company. Los Angeles Times, 1972. “Watergate was a godsend to political cartoonists,” said Philadelphia Inquirer cartoonist Tony Auth. |
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| Bill Garner, Détente, 1976 Henry Kissinger is stuck in in detente, while Leonid Brezhnev and Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong) are watching. Joseph Stalin had not backed Mao against the nationalists during World War II, and his insistence that China pay cash for weapons during the Korean War was a source of grievance. Over time, the Soviets decided that Mao was unreliable and that China was a potential rival. When they withdrew their support of China's nuclear weapons program, the Chinese proceeded on their own, exploding their first atomic bomb in 1964 and a hydrogen bomb in 1967. Nixon and Kissinger sought to improve relations between the United States and its two communist opponents. While Americans viewed all communist nations as a united enemy, the relationship between the Soviet Union and China showed signs of strain by the early 1970s. Kissinger decided to use this widening rift to his advantage. If the United States improved its relationship with China, the Soviets would have no choice but to cooperate with the U.S., or risk become isolated. |
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| She might Invaded Russia, The Brezhnev Doctrine of Soviet Foreign Policy …Moscow’s goals in Czechoslovakia led most observers on both sides of the iron curtain to regard the intervention as a decisive Soviet victory. In the arena of east-West confrontation, the negative repercussions of the operation were short-lived. Relations with the west experienced some setbacks, particularly for the recently concluded Nuclear Non-proliferation treaty. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) was also delayed; President Johnson refused to travel to Leningrad in September 1968 and his successor, President Nixon, hesitated to reestablish contacts in 1969. Ultimately, however, the need to involve Moscow in negotiations with North Vietnam eclipsed American indignation, and Washington soon proved willing to mend fences in the interest of détente […] The invasion was most significantly experienced within the socialist community. It created instant tensions with the East European nations that had not taken part in the operation. As for the nations remaining in the Soviet-led alliance, the invasion confirmed that autonomous political reforms would not longer be tolerated. In the broader international socialist movement, the invasion seriously damaged Moscow ability to mount a united front against the Chinese… [Matthew J, OuitmetThe Rise and Fall of the Brezhnev Doctrine in Soviet Foreign Policy, ] |
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| Conrad, President Carter acting as Sisyphus, 1978. The cartoon portrays Carter attempting to push a giant boulder composed of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin up a mountain, referring to Carter’s struggles in brokering a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. |
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| "Explain slowly--what does he need all those weapons for, and why does he need nuclear reactors?" The Washington Post, March 20, 1975, Herbert L. Block Secretary of State Henry Kissinger delivering a box of nuclear material to Iranian Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In 1975, the United States signed a cooperative agreement with then-ally Iran, permitting the U.S. to sell nuclear energy equipment to the middle eastern country. |
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Shah of Iran, le Nouvel Observateur, 4 novembre 1977, Wiaz In 1971, when the 'junket' to Persepolis was organised, the Shah of Iran was embarking on one of the twentieth century's most blatant exercises in megalomania and tyranny. The sudden surge in Iran's oil revenues seemed to remove all limits to his two central ambitions: to enrich his own family, and to build the most powerful arsenal on earth, outside the United States and Russia. The following year, United States President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger visited the Shah, appropriately enough on their way back from peace talks in Russia. There, as representatives not merely of their country's government but also of its armaments industry, they wrote the Shah a blank cheque for any American arms he wanted to buy. In February 1973, the Pentagon revealed that the Shah had contracted to buy two thousand million pounds worth of arms from the United States, a figure which represented about a quarter of the entire national income of Iran. The American arms manufacturer Grunman spared no pains to win the Shah to the delights of their new jet fighter, the Tomcat. In his book, The Arms Bazaar, Anthony Sampson (now a colleague of Dr Owen's in the Social Democratic Party) described the scene near Washington when the Shah was shown the plane by Grunman:The Tomcat performed amazing acrobatics touching down in front of the Shah and then shooting up again like a rocket. The Grunman men observed the Shah's delight as he illustrated the swoop with his hands.The contract was signed, naturally not without a little bit of corruption. Houshang Levi, an 'arms lobbyist', got his cut, a standard 28 million dollars. The Shah's zest for more weapons obliged him to help himself more and more liberally to his country's straining coffers. As opposition grew to his policies, he redoubled his already monstrous power. His secret police, SAVAK, modelled itself on the KGB both for efficiency in detecting dissidents and in ruthlessness in dealing with them. Torture of political and religious dissenters was widespread, and well documented. [Paul Foot, (1983) HIM and his Friends, Socialist Register, Vol 20 ] |
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Ray Osrin, ...And No Further Interference Into The Internal Affairs Of Iran, Ohio -- Cleveland, 5th November 1980 This editorial cartoon depicting Ayatollah Khomeini with a voting machine with the names Reagan, Anderson and Carter on it under his robe, refers to Ayatollah's interference in the 1980 election, which indeed marked a true sea change in American history. Reagan was FDR in reverse, and made it clear that as president he intended to dismantle the welfare state created under the New Deal. Like his Republican predecessors Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s, Reagan planned to lower taxes on the rich in order to stimulate America's productive energies. In June 1980 the shah, then in Cairo, died, prompting speculation that the crisis might end. Khomeini, however, had other ideas, demanding the return of the shah's assets, the release of Iranian assets in the United States, and a U.S. pledge not to interfere in Iranian affairs. When that wasn't forthcoming, on September 9 the Iranian government informed Carter through the West German foreign minister, who was in Tehran, that Khomeini was ready to discuss a resolution of the hostage situation. A breakthrough finally occurred on September 22, 1980, when Iraq and Iran went to war; suddenly Khomeini realized his nation could not take on two powerful enemies at once. According to Gary Sick "Suspicions about a deal between the Reagan campaign and Iran over the hostages have circulated since the day of President Reagan's inaugural, when Iran agreed to release the 52 American hostages exactly five minutes after Mr. Reagan took the oath of office. Later, as it became known that arms started to flow to Iran via Israel only a few days after the inauguration, suspicions deepened that a secret arms-for-hostages deal had been concluded." |
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| Paul Conrad, Los Angeles Times (February, 1987). |
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| The Iran-Contra affair was a constitutional crisis that embroiled the Reagan administration in its last two years (1986-88), raised the prospect of Ronald Reagan’s impeachment, clouded the presidency or George H.W. Bush and contributed to keeping it from extending to a second term. The scandal entailed illegal funding and arming of Nicaragua’s right-wing contras fighting the leftist Sandinista regime as well as illegally trading arms with Iran. Cartoon is inspired by Bernard Gillam and his attacks on James Blaine in 1884. |
After the Cold War
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| "What do I do now?" Oleg Lukianov, 1989 An interpretation of the different policies of previous Soviet leaders and president Gorbachev. |
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| Mikhail Gorbachev and a shattered hammer and sickle, Edmund Valtman, 1991 |
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| Edmund Valtman, I Can't Believe My Eyes!, 1991, The Waterbury Republican and The Middletown press, 1991; Between 1985 and 1990 Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev (1931- ) steered Russia's foreign relations in a new conciliatory direction by working with Presidents Reagan and Bush to sign a series of arms control agreements, withdrawing Soviet troops from Afghanistan, and improving relations with China. He also transferred power from the Communist Party to elected legislatures in Russia's union republics. Such developments, along with the fall of the Berlin Wall and unification of East and West Germany, signaled the end of the Cold War. Gorbachev leads the funeral procession in Valtman's imaginative, skillfully realized drawing which memorializes the demise of communism as its hallowed trinity-Karl Marx (1818-1883), Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), and Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) look on in consternation. |
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| Dmitri Medvedev left the Russian presidency in May 2012. Many political cartoonists, portrayed him as the ultimate ‘mini-me’ to Vladimir Putin, the puppet on a string, the dog ordered to fetch, basically a doormat. |
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| President Bush and his White House counsel Alberto Gonzales had done everything they could to unleash military and CIA interrogators from the constraints of the Geneva Convention and common human decency. The result was the sad spectacle that transpired inside the crumbling walls of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq which is the subject of this cartoon. |
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More than 100 professors of law and legal studies sent an open letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in April 2006, criticizing his failure to condemn as illegal a number of abusive interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, exposure of detainees to extreme temperatures, forced standing, binding in stress positions, and severe sleep deprivation. The letter, whose signatories included several former government attorneys, asks Gonzales to issue a clear public statement regarding the humane treatment of detainees overseas, and to clarify that abuses such as waterboarding are subject to prosecution as crimes. The 2006 Defense Authorization Act, passed by Congress in January 2006, contains new provisions clarifying that all individuals acting under the color of U.S. law categorically are prohibited from engaging in or authorizing cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. These provisions were passed by Congress to rectify lack of clarity in regard to detention and interrogation techniques, and to prevent conduct that is prohibited by international law and illegal under domestic criminal law.
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| Bush's Last Year as President, Mont Wolverton, 2007 |
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| Wall Street Bailout, Pat O'Connor, Los Angeles Daily News, 2008 |
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| Jacques Chirac's offer of friendship to George Bush |
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| President Bush's Term Comes to an End, Adam Zyglis, The Buffalo News, 2008 |
Steve Benson, Arizona Republic
Steve Sack, Minneapolis Star-Tribune
John Sherffius, Boulder Daily Camera
Pete King doesn't look like McCarthy, but he sure sounds like him: Are you now, or have you ever been, a Muslim? The very title of his hearings tells his bias from the beginning: "The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community (which presumes such radicalization exists) and That Community's Response" (which presumes it's been anything but cooperative). In fact, long before the hearings began, King had already announced his belief that 80 percent to 85 percent of American mosques are controlled by Islamic radicals; and that American Muslims have refused to cooperate with law enforcement officials in combating terrorism.
Neither of which is true. In fact, Richard Cohen of The Washington Post writes that a recent Duke University/University of North Carolina study found "a drop in attempted or actual terrorist activity by American Muslims -- 47 perpetrators and suspects in 2009, 20 in 2010." Perhaps more significantly, the report by UNC terrorism expert Charles Kurzman showed that "the largest single source of initial information" about alleged terrorist plots -- 48 out of 120 cases since September 11 -- "involved tips from the Muslim American community." In fact, the only law enforcement official to testify before King's committee was Los Angeles Sheriff Leroy Baca, who praised the cooperation of the Southern California Muslim community. Bill Press, "Joe McCarthy is born again -- as Peter King", Tribune Media Services, March 10, 2011
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| The sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2008 |
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| President Obama and the problem of Taliban, Nate Beeler, The Washington Examiner, 2011 |
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| Financial Bailout of Greece by Eu, Arend van Dam, Netherlands, 2011 |
Schrank, The Independent, May 2012 David Cameron, François Hollande, Barack Obama, and Angela Merkel at the Delphic temple for oracle of Delphi. Obama asks, "Will Greece crash out of the eurozone, oh oracle?" The oracle replies, "That'll be another 100bn euros".Despite receiving billions of euros in bailout funds, Greece was still in danger of being forced to leave the euro (the famous Grexit). The cartoon relates to the G8 summit at Camp David, where the eurozone crisis was top of the agenda.
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Frederick Deligne, Global Financial Crisis, Nice-Matin, Nice, France, 2011
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| Michael Ramirez, American Debt Crisis, 2009, Michael Ramirez is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 and 2008, and a three-time Sigma Delta Chi, Society of Professional Journalism Award winner. |
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Tom Janssen, the European debt crisis, Dutch Cartoonist, 2011 |
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Martin Rowson, Barack Obama and John Boehner's slow-moving attempt to find a compromise on debt ceiling, 2011, Guardian |
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| Warren E. Buffett, the billionaire investor known as the Oracle of Omaha, in an op-ed titled Stop Coddling the Super-Rich, published on August 14, 2011 in the New York Time, made a strong case that he and his mega-rich peers should be paying more in taxes |
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| OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched. While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks... My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.Warren E. Buffett, Stop Coddling the Super-Rich, August 14, 2011 |
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| Uncle Sam bewildered in between the Tea Party, on the right, and Occupy Wall Street, on the left, movements, Kal, 2011. Kal finds the both movements loud and confusing for poor Uncle Sam. |
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| The Tea Party demand vs Occupy Wall Street demands, Vines, 2011. It appears that Vines is more sympathetic towards the Tea Party's single demand. |
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| An unsympathetic view from the right suggesting Occupy Wall Street would lead to communism. |
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| Slippery Slopes, gives a cynical warning, Occupy Wall Street soon morphs into Occupy Private Ownership. |
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| Time to Take Occupy Wall Street Seriously, Cam, 2011. Cam warns that if the movement is not taken seriously heads may role by guillotine. |
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| An interesting take on the issue, a mea culpa admission. |
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| "I liked it when it was Egypt, but not here," a play on the hypocrisy of men in suits |
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News that the International Monetary Fund initially demanded to loot a shocking 40% of savings from the private bank accounts of Cypriots underscores how residents of the Mediterranean country could be the latest victims of the infamous “IMF riot,” as the chief economist of the German Commerzbank calls for Italians to be similarly plundered for 15% of their savings. According to Pimco CEO Mohamed El-Erian in an interview with CNBC ; the decision to loot the bank accounts of Cypriot savers could blow up Europe and lead to civil unrest across the continent. - El-Erian said that the European Union had lit two sticks of dynamite in backing a proposal that could see bank accounts raided for up to 15% of their value in what has ludicrously been described as a “wealth tax” yet amounts to nothing less than an act of wanton financial plunder. - “By including small depositors, they are risking social unrest, political disorder, and potentially an exit from the eurozone,” said El-Erian, referring to people with under 100,000 euros who will still be hit by a levy of 6.75% under current proposals. Savers with 500,000 euros in the bank face losing as much as 75,000 euros. |
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| The Spanish banking crisis, Chris Riddell, The Observer In 2012, Spain asked euro region governments for a bailout worth as much as 100 billion euros ($125 billion) to rescue its banking system, thus becoming the biggest euro economy up to then to seek international aid. In this cartoon UK prime minister David Cameron tells German Chancellor Angela Merkel: "We must do something Angela!". Merkel replies, "We?". |
Obama and the Arab Spring
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Despite his failings, and there were plenty, President Mohamed Morsi was Egypt’s first democratically elected leader, and his overthrow by the military on Wednesday was unquestionably a coup. It would be tragic if Egyptians allowed the 2011 revolution that overthrew the dictator Hosni Mubarak to end with this rejection of democracy. Crisis in Egypt NY Times, Editorial. July 3, 2013 |
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The impasse into which Egypt has been forced by the army's intervention in politics is daily becoming more dangerous. Every time the security forces open fire, their mission of bringing back order and restoring social peace becomes less credible. You cannot advance toward legitimacy over the bodies of martyrs. Editorial The Guardian, Sunday 28 July 2013 |
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| On February 28, 2013, in an unexpected move, Pope Benedict XVI -- born Joseph Ratzinger -- announced, that he is to resign. Benedict was elected pope in 2005 after the death of Pope John Paul II. In his statement, Pope Benedict -- who was turning 86 in April -- said he had come to the certainty "that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry." |
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The big takeaway from the plane chat, or at least the big media takeaway, was the pope's acknowledgement that gay priests exist and that they have as much right to their affinity with God as their heterosexual counterparts. When asked about the so called "gay lobby" within the Vatican, the pope replied: When I meet a gay person, I have to distinguish between their being gay and being part of a lobby. If they accept the Lord and have goodwill, who am I to judge them? They shouldn't be marginalized.(...)When the thorny issue of women in the church came up, the pope kindly acknowledged that a woman's role "does not end just with being a mother and with housework," (something mainstream society figured out about a century ago). He went on to pay lip service to the need to expand women's role in some way, but while he had no concrete ideas on what this might entail, he made it clear than it would never include the right to be ordained alongside men: On the ordination of women, the church has spoken and said no. John Paul II, in a definitive formulation, said that door is closed.Sadhbh Walshe, The Guardian. Wednesday 31 July 2013 |
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| Steve Kelley's comment on the Obama Administration invasion of citizen's privacy The whistle-blower Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and an employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, was responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history. He said he was content to sever his 'very comfortable life,' which included a six-figure salary, a girlfriend, a home in Hawaii and his family, to shine a light on the NSA's widening surveillance net. 'I'm willing to sacrifice all of that because I can't in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building... NSA chiefs were 'intent on making every conversation and every form of behavior in the world known to them, ... I don’t want to live in a world where there's no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity. The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to.'' |
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| Scott Stantis, Obama and Bush-Nixon legacy According to Lee-Anne Goodman, "Not so long ago, a bad week for U.S. President Barack Obama was one that sparked comparisons to Jimmy Carter, a popular whipping boy for the right who was considered weak and ineffectual by many Americans. Seven months into his second term, and the Carter comparisons are a distant memory: now Obama’s being likened to former presidents Richard Nixon and George W. Bush, popular targets for the commander-in-chief’s liberal base. Revelations about the Obama administration’s sweeping surveillance practices, as well as the ongoing investigation into the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party organizations, have resulted in a litany of comparisons to both former presidents in recent weeks. Edward Snowden himself, a libertarian who donated to Ron Paul’s presidential campaign in 2012, made the comparison in explaining why he leaked details of two top-secret U.S. government surveillance programs to two news organizations last week. “I believed in Obama’s promises,” Snowden told Britain’s The Guardian. “He continued with the policies of his predecessor. I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded.” |
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| A hero or a traitor? Oliver Stone, the Oscar-winning director whose profound understanding of freedom and democracy is a breath of fresh and uncontaminated air in Obama's era defended the American whistlebower Edward Snowden: "It's a disgrace that Obama is more concerned with hunting down Snowden than reforming these George Bush-style eavesdropping techniques. (...) To me Snowden is a hero because he revealed secrets that we should all know, that the United States has repeatedly violated the fourth amendment".John Cassidy of New Yorker agrees "He is a hero. In revealing the colossal scale of the U.S. government’s eavesdropping on Americans and other people around the world, he has performed a great public service that more than outweighs any breach of trust he may have committed.(...) So, what did the leaks tell us? First, they confirmed that the U.S. government, without obtaining any court warrants, routinely collects the phone logs of tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of Americans, who have no links to terrorism whatsoever. If the publicity prompts Congress to prevent phone companies such as Verizon and A.T. T. from acting as information-gathering subsidiaries of the spying agencies, it won’t hamper legitimate domestic-surveillance operations—the N.S.A. can always go to court to obtain a wiretap or search warrant—and it will be a very good thing for the country." |
Canada
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In 1867, Canada became a federation under the British North America Act. The anxiety over being annexed by the US was one of the key contributing factors in the creation of Canadian Confederation. In the election of 1864 the Republican Party used annexation issue to attract Irish Americans vote. An annexation bill introduced by General Banks was passed in the United States House of Representatives in July of 1866. The bill authorized the United States President to "publish by proclamation that, from the date thereof, the States of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Canada East, and Canada West, and the Territories of Selkirk (present-day Manitoba), Saskatchewan, and British Columbia, with limits and rights as by the act defined, are constituted and admitted as States and Territories of the United States of America" (Library and Archives of Canada)The United States was to pay the Hudson’s Bay Company ten million dollars for the release of all of the property. |
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In 1896 the Liberals under Wilfrid Laurier came into power. Between 1896 and 1905 Clifford Sifton, the main character in this cartoon, who became the new Minister of the Interior, assumed responsibility for immigration and settlement in Canada. He offered Canada as a commodity to potential overseas migrants, particularly to the American farmers, who had skills and capital. Sifton, and his successors, believed the darker the skin, the more 'foreign' the immigrant was. The ideal immigrant should have had the same religious, political and social institutions as the British. |
Tom Innes, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau's complete focus is on repatriation of Canadian Constitution, Calgary Herald, October 9, 1980
During the 1980 referendum debate in Quebec, Pierre Trudeau had committed to bring Quebec into Canadian confederation. He saw the way to this end through the act of repatriating the Canadian Constitution form Great Britain with an amending formula and entrenched rights for all Canadians. After the Federal forces were victorious in the referendum, Trudeau quickly set to work to come up with an agreement among the Provincial Premiers which could be taken the British Parliament with the request that they pass an act giving recognizing Canada's complete sovereignty over all matters in Canada.
On April 17, 1982 after the Canada Act had been passed in the British Parliament, it was signed into law by the Queen at a ceremony on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. Canada finally had brought the constitution and the Charter of rights and Freedoms home.
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| Aislin (Terry Mosher), November 1976, and September 2012. The separatist Parti Québécois won its first election in November 1976 and changed Quebec's political landscape forever. The cartoon on the left depicts a rumpled PQ leader René Lévesque standing beside a lean, lanky and defeated federalist Liberal premier Robert Bourassa,(the cartoon now sits in Montreal's McCord Museum of Canadian History). On the right Pauline Marois the Parti Québécois leader who claimed victory over the incumbent Liberal Party Leader Jean Charest is depicted with François Legault, the leader of the third party CAQ. |
Britain before and after Margaret Thatcher
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David Low, The "New Democratic Party", 1946 In 1946 Winston Churchill asked Macmillan to join a committee to look into reshaping the Conservative Party. On 3rd October, Macmillan published an article in the Daily Telegraph where he suggested that the name should be changed to the "New Democratic Party". In the article he called for the Liberal Party to join Conservatives in an anti-socialist alliance. He wrote in his diary that to obtain an alliance with the Liberals, it would be worthwhile "to offer proportional representation in the big cities in exchange." |
Keith Waite, "WE'RE MERELY PROTECTING OUR UNDER COVER MEN."
John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War in the British government under Conservative Prime Minister Harold MacMillan began an affair with Christine Keeler, a London call girl in 1961. Keeler had been the lover of Yevgeny "Eugene" Ivanov, a senior naval attache at the Russian embassy in London. Profumo was forced to step down from his position on June 5, 1963. An official report was released in September 1963 and a month later Prime Minister MacMillan resigned claiming ill health.
Paul Rigby, " But, Monsieur, 'se are your Friends?" The Sun, 19th Oct. 1972
The Heath Government was elected in June 1970 determined to take Britain into the E.E.C. The key question was whether the French would agree? Twice before, under De Gaulle, France had vetoed British applications. De Gaulle's successor, Georges Pompidou, was known to be more favourable, but a French "oui" could not be taken for granted. The key question, posed by Pompidou to Heath was; is Britain ready to make "a historic change in (its) attitude", a "fundamental choice" in favour of the European Community?
Harold Wilson and Lyndon Johnson, On US entry into Vietnam War ,The New Statesman Magazine April 1965
Stanley Franklin, Daily Mirror
On 19 January 1976 Thatcher made a scathing attack on the Soviet Union, declaring that “The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen...They put guns before butter...” The Soviet Defence Ministry newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (“red star”) gave her the nickname "Iron Lady", and this was eagerly taken up by her supporters.
Edward McLachlan, The SDP - pudding in danger - or - Carving up the votes, Mail on Sunday, 17 Apr 1983
This cartoon depicting Margaret Thatcher (Conservative)and Michael Foot (Labour) carving of Roy Jenkins (SDP) is based on James Gillray's cartoon The plumb-pudding in danger: - or - state epicures taking un petit souper' depicting William Pitt and Napoleon Bonaparte; published 26 February 1805. Michael Foot inherited the leadership at the most difficult time for the Labour party.Two things happened that made it impossible for him to win the 1983 general election. First, in 1981, the party came close to falling apart as the "gang of four" - Shirley Williams, Bill Rogers, David Owen and Roy Jenkins - walked out and formed the SDP in protest at his left-wing polices. Second the Falklands War, which made Margaret Thatcher hugely popular – before then she had been a very unpopular prime minister. Put together, it made it impossible for Foot to carry victory.
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| This cartoon was published in the Daily Mirror the day after Thatcher's longest-serving cabinet minister, Geoffrey Howe, delivered a scathing resignation speech, voicing his discontent over her refusal to better integrate the United Kingdom with European economies: |
Trog [Wally Fawkes], Observer, 20 Mar 1988,
Thatcher retired from Parliament at the 1992 General Election, but she left a lasting legacy. This cartoon by Brookes shows her as an elderly and surprisingly masculine figure, rejoicing in the success of her offspring - the New Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Steve Bell on the revelation that Tony Blair thought Gordon Brown 'mad, bad and dangerous'
Steve Bell’s career at The Guardian started in 1981. He was born in London in 1951, he studied art at Leeds University and worked for magazines including the New Statesman and Time Out before joining The Guardian. His job gives him the chance to comment through humour on some of the biggest events of the past 25 years and mercilessly rib the people that made history. But altogether he was handed such ridiculous looking characters as Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev to work with, it was not always easy to produce a daily strip. He recalls struggling with Neil Kinnock, the Labour leader from 1983 until 1992. He said: "Kinnock was very hard to draw, because all there was to him was the fact he was basically ginger. I always used to go big on the freckles, just to add some definition. It wasn’t very fair, he wasn’t that freckly but that was all I could think of for those nine long years.
Peter Brookes, The Times, May 25, 2010
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne's £6.2 billion of budget cuts included banning first-class travel for government departments, and scrapping chauffeur-driven cars for specific ministers.
Dave Brown, phone-hacking scandal at The News of the World with Rupert Murdoch, Rebekah Brooks and David Cameron, The Independent, July 6, 2011
The phone-hacking by its journalists has led to the closure of the News of the World newspaper, the establishment of the Leveson Inquiry, an MPs' inquiry and the launch of three police investigations. According to prosecutors Andy Coulson ( News of the World's editor between 2003 and 2007 and Prime Minister David Cameron's spokesman who quit in January 2011) and Rebekah Brooks ( the former tabloid editor and News International chief executive) were among five people being charged in connection with alleged payments to police and public officials. In the conclusion of his lengthy investigation into the phone hacking and other scandals surrounding News Corporation's British tabloids, Lord Justice Brian Leveson, accused Rupert Murdoch, his son James and News Corporation of either failing to address allegations of "widespread criminality within the organization” or — if they didn’t know about it — being guilty of a "significant failure in corporate governance."
Gary Barkers, David Cameron, Rupert Murdoch and Paul Stephenson, snug as a bug political cartoon, The Guardian
Rupert Murdoch's once-commanding influence in British politics dwindled to a new low on July 12th 2012, when all three major parties in Parliament joined in support of a sharp rebuke to his media empire and a parliamentary committee said it would call him, along with two other top executives, to testify publicly next week about the phone hacking scandal enveloping his media empire. The following day, Murdoch's News Corporation announced that it is withdrawing its bid for BSkyB.
Cameron's judgment, and that of the chancellor, George Osborne, in appointing the former editor of the News of the World Andy Coulson as their director of communications looked increasingly inexplicable. Cameron was being accused of an improperly contractual relationship with Neil Wallis, a former News of the World deputy editor, as his meetings with News International executives in a year exceeded those with all other news organisations put together. Not a single figure from the BBC was granted an audience.
Implying that he could not impart operational information to Cameron since he was too compromised with the chief suspects, Sir Paul Stephenson announced he was stepping down as the UK's most senior police officer. Just hours before his resignation, Deputy Prime Minister Clegg, told the BBC that a growing public perception of police corruption was deeply concerning. Stephenson dated his relationship to Wallis back to 2006. From October 2009 to September 2010, Wallis's part-time work at the Met involved strategic communications, advising the commissioner, as the force said there was no need to reopen the investigation into phone hacking at the News of the World.
Libor, the London inter-bank lending rate, is considered to be one of the most crucial interest rates in finance, upon which trillions of financial contracts rest, and the exposure of its rigging has shocked many beyond the world of finance. Every day a group of leading banks submit rates for 10 currencies and 15 lengths of loan ranging from overnight to 12 months. Since the rates submitted are estimates not actual transactions it's relatively easy to submit false figures
At the height of the financial crisis in late 2007, many banks stopped lending to each other over concerns about their financial health with some banks submitting much higher rates than others. Barclays was one of those submitting much higher rates, attracting some media attention. This prompted comment that Barclays was in trouble. Following much internal debate and a controversial conversation with a Bank of England official, Barclays began to submit much lower rates. The Libor scandal has further undermined trust in banks. BBC
Economist David Blanchflower argued there is no longer a credible candidate among top UK bankers to take over as the next governor of the Bank of England in the wake of recent banking scandals. Professor Blanchflower, who served on the Bank's monetary policy committee between 2006 and 2009, believed the escalating Libor crisis meant Sir Mervyn King's replacement could not come from the banking sector. An internal appointment was also out of the question, he argued, with Bank staff such as deputy governor Paul Tucker facing criticism over their actions. He proved to be right.
George Osborne stunned the markets by announcing that Mark Carney, the Canadian central banker, will replace Sir Mervyn King as the next Governor of the Bank of England. Carney is "the outstanding central banker of his generation with unparalleled expertise in financial regulation" Osborne said." He has got what it takes to help bring families and businesses through these incredibly challenging economic times...my responsibility was to get the best for Britain, and with Mark Carney we've got that."
Canada came through the financial crisis of 2007-8 relatively unscathed, thus boosting Carney's reputation. Under his governorship, the Bank of Canada cut interest rates to record lows and supplied emergency liquidity to the banking system to prevent a collapse.
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According to Time magazine: "From the South Sea bubble in 1720 to the 1990s implosions of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International and of Barings Bank and through a gallery of rogue traders and dodgy deals that have posed existential threats to financial institutions on several continents during the past quarter of a century, the common factor is not that they were caused by foreigners in London. London itself, especially its compact financial district known as the City, is implicated. ... Individuals and institutions may end up on trial. Yet a swelling sentiment would like to see a bigger entity in the dock: London. It's no longer enough to explain the City's supremacy as a global incubator for scandals by citing its global supremacy as a center for international finance, the world's most potent competitor to New York City, a place where transactions covering literally trillions of dollars, pounds and euros are executed every day." |
France before and after Sarkozy
De Gaulle returned to power in 1958 thanks to the crisis of May 13. The crisis stemmed from the institutional weakness of the Fourth Republic, concentrating too much power in the parliament at the expense of the executive branch. As a result there were 24 governments in 12 years since the end of WWII. Meanwhile, the French army faced a daunting crisis due to the uprising of French Algeria. De Gaulle agreed to become President in exchange for constitutional reform
The German cartoonist reflects on the the oversized ego of General de Gaulle, President of the French Republic.
Paris customs officers Konrad Adenauer, German Chancellor, and Charles de Gaulle, French President, ask Harold Macmillan, British Prime Minister who tries to smuggle the Commonwealth into the common market despite the warning: 'Common market: imports of special favours for the Commonwealth and agricultural protectionism forbidden.'
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The cartoonist, Spinga, legitimately asks if Bonapartism is not one of the characteristics of French politics. Obviously, there are differences between Gaullism and Bonapartism. De Gaulle did not attack the civil liberty (assaults on the freedom of the press had begun under the Fourth Republic during the war in Algeria). De Gaulle never introduced aggressive militarist strategy ( in fact, his most resolute opponents were senior army officers). Furthermore, De Gaulle never aimed at establishing an empire. Nevertheless, some elements of Bonapartism may be detected in the regime that he established in 1962. The Gaullists are supporters of a strong sovereign state. They like a planned economy and a centralized authoritarian state led by a charismatic and powerful leader such as Bonaparte or De Gaulle. |
Charles de Gaulle's action plan towards the United Kingdom’s application for accession to the European Communities.
"Well, for a start, Harold, can you do this?" French President Georges Pompidou and Prime Minister Harold Wilson
'Pardon, Monsieur The President, but as he was leaving, the New Zealand Deputy Prime Minister scribbled on your front door!,' A disgruntled Deputy PM has been to visit Pompidou to protest nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific without success. To show his frustration, the visitor has changed the name on the door to President Bombido and the presidential aide is telling the president about the graffiti.
The French President, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, and the German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt's recommended dose of European Economic Community (EEC) medicine for the British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson's ailment.
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| ‘Ludwig, why are you opposed to this union?", Hans Geisen, 1964 In January 1963, Konrad Adenauer signed the Franco-German friendship treaty with Charles de Gaulle in Paris. The "mystical communion" between the two old Catholics was strong, and both men shared the same political belief: Europe was no stronger than the bonds that linked France and Germany. It was a far-reaching treaty, unique for both countries in the kind of political machinery it set up. However, a few months later Adenauer and his "German Gaullists" were gone, and Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, an avowed Atlanticist, replaced Adenauer as party leader. He understood that France could not provide the protection the U.S. could, and noted the relative importance of America in the world economy, thus believed it would be best to stick with the Atlanticist approach. The Bundestag had added a preamble to the treaty that de Gaulle told Willy Brandt was a "personal offense," and the General, wearily, would remark that treaties, like young girls and roses, faded all too quickly. Erhard’s emphasis on the primacy of economics over concern for security and national interests first reflects a basic tenet of Atlanticist thought: the west is linked not just by common values and interests, but also by close economic ties that link the interests of countries in a way that makes a pure nationalist read on policy impossible. |
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| "After so many years ..." Hans Geisen, Swiss, 1980 President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and Chancellor Helmut Schmidt pursuit of a policy of rapprochement between France and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) is represented as the growing relationship of the nascent collaboration of their predecessors, the German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and French President Charles de Gaulle. |
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Mirko Szewczuk, "Better holding Acheson's hand when Stalin is on the roof!", 1949Dean Acheson was the first Secretary of State who visited the Federal Republic. He was Truman's Secretary of State, and he came here at the request of President Truman. It was extremely important and valuable for us that it was Dean Acheson, whom I esteem highly, who came at that time and the visit strengthened our morale profoundly. AdenauerDean Acheson visited Adenauer shortly after the founding of the Federal Republic in November 1949. American policy aimed at integration of the Federal Republic in the Western world. Gradually will Adenauer revitalize the potentials of the Federal Republic. However, the cartoonist suggests that the East German Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl and the President of the Republic Wilhelm Pieck, acting as Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's guard dogs, are the real threat. Otto Grotewohl began taking an active part in the revived Social Democratic Party of Germany after the defeat of the fascist regime in Germany. He fought for the unity of the German workers’ movement as a result of which the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party of Germany were united as the Socialist United Party in the eastern part of Germany. At the unification congress in April 1946, Grotewohl was elected to the Central Board of the Socialist United Party, and he and Wilhelm Pieck became its chairmen. After the proclamation of the German Democratic Republic on Oct. 7, 1949, he became the prime minister of the GDR. Wilhelm Pieck who had moved to Soviet controlled Germany after the Second World War, was elected President of the newly-established German Democratic Republic in 1949. He was part of the 1919 Spartakist rebellion, along with Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknechton, which had been crushed and most of its leaders were arrested and executed, but he was released unharmed, and remained active in the German Communist Party. |
The French President, François Mitterrand tries to sweeten the deal for the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl as part of his plan for the Eureka (European Research Coordination Agency) project, coordinating scientific and technological research at Community level .
French President François Mitterrand and the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl are standing at the door to welcome the accession of Austria, Finland and Sweden to the European Community, but the quality of life inside the house is not much different.
Jacques Chirac gently decried George Bush's plan to reform Arab states with free elections, independent media and improved legal systems. Democracy was not a commodity that could be exported. It had to be an Arab model of democracy not a western one.
On 4 March, President Jacques Chirac announced that France will hold its referendum on the European Constitution on 29 May 2005. Chirac’s statement came less than two weeks after the Spanish people had voted overwhelmingly in favour of the Constitution, albeit with a low turnout. Just a few days before the announcement of the French date, the Dutch government had decided to hold its consultative referendum on 1 June. Against the background of the Constitutional Treaty’s rejection in the referendums in France and the Netherlands in spring 2005, the referendum euphoria changed into a referendum phobia. All member states except of Ireland where a referendum was legally required decided to ratify the Treaty of Lisbon via the parliamentary procedure only.
Carla Bruni- Sarkozy's wife claimed to journalist Nathalie Saint-Cricq that "Nous sommes des gens modestes". This invited ridicule in her bid to recast her husband Nicolas a “man of the people". According to Daily Telegraph reporter Henry Samuel; "The comment from the heiress to a tyre fortune who earned almost £5 million per year at the height of her catwalk fame has turned Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy into a laughing stock on the internet. One commentator on Le Monde’s website describing the claim as coming from “Marie Antoinette in Sarkoland.””.
Sarkozy's expulsion of Roma gypsies was a dark episode in the history of France. According to Libération: “France stands accused”. It stated that "the degraded image of Sarkozy’s France isn’t just an image. It’s a reality as reported day after day in the foreign press.”
Dave Brown, The Independent 2012. Nicolas Sarkozy tried to exploit a Toulouse shootings in March to boost his chances of re-election and keep the focus on security.
Sarkozy as the train bearer for the Miss France, who's no other than the far-right candidate Marine le Pen
After his electoral victory Francois Hollande went to Berlin to talk with Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel. He stated "I want growth to be not only a word, not just a word that can be uttered and followed by tangible acts in proof. The best method is to put everything on the table." and Merkel responded: "I am pleased that we have agreed on talking about the different ideas in terms of growth. And I'm not worried that we could not have common ground. Possibly we have some different opinions but I really look forward to our cooperation."
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When al-Qaeda-linked insurgents who had took over the northern half of the Mali in 2012, and then in the early January 2013, moved farther south, imperilling the capital, Bamako, France’s Socialist president, François Hollande, who has been wary of throwing his weight around in his country’s former colonial domains, send troops to bolster Mali’s feeble and fractious administration . According to Economist: Getting into a war is always easier than getting out. France therefore needs to limit its ambitions. ... Europeans and others should help with economic development and military training. But for the country to have a hope of working properly, Malians must also sort out their chaotic politics. A year ago, soldiers at the head of Mali’s ragged army overthrew an elected government. On paper, civilians are back in charge, but no one is sure who really pulls the strings. Outsiders can clear the way, but in the end it is the Malians who must mend Mali. |
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Berlin was uneasy about Hollande's war. Experience has shown that those involved, no matter what their capacity, can quickly become enmeshed in war, said one source in the Merkel government. Germany feared that if the French meet more resistance from the Islamists than expected, Paris could request additional urgent military support from its partners. Such a situation would have placed Berlin in a difficult dilemma, having to choose between solidarity with France and its own declared unwillingness to become directly involved in the fighting. |
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Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany frequently stressed the limits of Germany’s powers to bail out other countries and rejected joint efforts like eurobonds to pool debt. Behind the scenes, however, Ms. Merkel was pressing allies in Paris, Rome and elsewhere to cede more power to Brussels over their national budgets before Germany would agree to provide further backing for efforts to bolster the euro zone. |
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| Vive l’Independance Européenne! (Three Cheers for European Independence!), Plantu (Jean Plantureux), 2012 |
China of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jantao
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| Edd Uluschak, “Deal me in!”, Edmonton Journal, April 29, 1970 |
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| Edd Uluschak, "Funny, you don't look like a decadent, warmongering, depraved imperialist, capitalist dog." "Yes, but would you buy a used rick-shaw from him?"February 21, 1972 In the mid-1960s, having failed to win either the presidency or the governorship of California, Richard Nixon had ample time to think about international relations, his primary policy interest. Like most China specialists, he concluded that the United States should end its efforts to isolate China. After winning the presidential election, Nixon's initial overtures to Chinese leaders won a favorable reception. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was burning out, and Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai were uneasy about what they perceived as the rising Soviet threat. The invitation they issued to their suitors from Washington indicated that a high-level mission to China would be welcomed -- provided the Americans understood that resolution of differences over Taiwan would be the price of rapprochement.. |
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| Herbert Block, “Mushrooming cloud,” Washington post April 1, 1965, Communist China exploded its first atomic bomb in October 1964, and the State Department warned in February 1965 that the Chinese, under Mao Zedong, were preparing another nuclear test. The Soviet Union insisted that the Chinese tests did not pose a threat, |
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Although he brought stability to China, violence was central to Deng Xiaping's formation. As Roderick Macfarquhar and Michael Schoenhals have shown in their epic book “Mao's Last Revolution”, Deng was responsible for purges in the later years of the Cultural Revolution that matched the Gang of Four for brutality. In 1975 he ordered the army to crack down on a Muslim village in Yunnan province, an action which resulted in 1,600 deaths including those of 300 children. Deng's response to the student and worker protests 14 years later was hardly out of character. |
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Deng Xiaoping will be remembered as the man who put China on the path to economic reforms. He launched capitalist-style market reforms in 1978. They helped push China through a metamorphosis from a drab Leninist state solely dependent on its staid state economy to a dynamic economic powerhouse. But according to state media, the Gini Coefficient for China climbed from 0.18 in 1978 to 0.452 in 1995, and reached the warning level of 0.51 in 2002. The index is an economic measurement of the rich-poor disparity used by the United Nations and the World bank and a reading between 0.3 and 0.4 is regarded as normal but 0.4 or above is considered serious. |
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Tiananmen Square was followed by a period of repression marked by mass arrests and executions. Thousands were jailed, harassed and threatened. Some were executed, shot in the back of the neck, and photographs of the bodies were posted all over the country as warnings. Human rights groups reported that 50 to 100 people were executed in the wake of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, some for things as minor as setting a police motorcycle on fire or taking photographs of tanks around the square. Another 15,000 to 20,000 were detained, with 99 of those still in prison in ten years later. |
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Jiang Zemin's rise to power stemmed from a politburo purge of liberal leaders in 1989, after the ruthless suppression of the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. Paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, who held all the real power, needed to find a new protege to lead the Communist Party. Jiang, who as Shanghai party chief had weathered the student protests without resorting to violence, fitted the bill. By the time Deng finally died in February 1997, Jiang Zemin had been given enough time to establish himself. |
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| Ingrid Rice, Vancouver Sun, November 26, 1996 |
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Jiang Zemin who brought China into the World Trade Organization and rebuilt ties to the United States after a breakdown in 1989, favored deeper ties to the West and more opportunities for China’s private sector. He did not possess the indomitable behind-the-scenes power of Deng Xiaoping, who ushered in market reforms after the death of Mao Zedong. But a year of division and uncertainty at the end of Hu Jintao's tenure created openings for him to influence the election of Hu's successor, Xi Jinping. The Tiananmen Square massacre was a pivotal event in Jiang’s political career. In 1989, as Party chief of Shanghai, Jiang suppressed the liberal newspaper the World Economic Herald and, while other provincial officials waited, very promptly supported the Central Party’s call for martial law in mid-May. According to The Real Story of Jiang Zemin, Deng Xiaoping, pleased at Jiang’s show of toughness, secretly made him general secretary in the days before the massacre. After the massacre, Jiang was responsible for chasing down and suppressing the remnants of the democracy movement. |
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| Hu Jintao succeeds Jiang Zemin |
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| China’s top Communist leaders, including Mao Tse-tung and Deng Xiao-ping, edge out Tibetan deities before a horrified Tibetan monk. This refers to the government’s mandate that a photo of the leaders be placed in Tibetan monasteries at a time when monks continue to light themselves on fire to protest Chinese rule. |
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Hu Jintao ensured that China would not repeat the same mistake as the Soviet leaders, reforming politics before fixing the economy. He and his Standing Committee colleagues focused nearly single-mindedly on economic growth. The question facing him when he came into office was what to do about the huge differences between the rich and the poor across the country. But beginning in 2007, after the dramatic collapse of Western export markets, he and his colleagues decided to focus on economic growth, no matter how unevenly wealth was spread across society. His original plans to lift taxes on farmers and concentrate on social welfare were quickly shelved as the party bet that, by keeping the economy humming above all else, it could stay a step ahead of the lower classes' growing anxieties. Hu's legacy included creating 96 Chinese billionaires - in US dollar term, but 150 million Chinese still lived in poverty. The country became the second richest in the world on aggregate, but per capita income hovered near 90th, similar to per capita income in Cuba and Namibia. Shanghainese enjoyed a per capita income of more than $12,000 a year. Residents of Guizhou, China's poorest province, earned a mere $2,500 a year. |
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| “The Dear Leader’s Death.” Chinese President Hu Jintao wipes tears off the cheeks of Kim Jong Il’s successor with a special handkerchief, as leaders of the United States, South Korea and Japan anxiously look on. |
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The Chinese government continues to systematically erase from the public record any mention of the events of June 1989 that do not conform to the government's assessment of the bloody crackdown as a "political disturbance." China's online censors quickly remove any references to the 1989 crackdown, and internet search engines in China are carefully calibrated to filter out any images or references to the deaths of unarmed civilians for search requests on topics including "Tiananmen Square" and "June 4." Web searches for such terms typically yield "page could not be found" messages, and generally do not inform the user that the search has been censored. Under dictates of China's official Propaganda Department, the domestic print media are forbidden to publish articles on the events of June 1989 inconsistent with the government's version. In 2003, then-US Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton pulled her memoirs from sale in China after it was revealed that her Chinese publisher had without her approval omitted her references to the 1989 democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. |
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In contrast, the women married to previous Chinese leaders, from Deng Xiaoping to Hu Jintao, and stayed largely behind the scenes, Peng Liyuan, the wife of Xi Jinping appeared on national television in January 2012 as the closing act of a military-themed Chinese New Year gala. "People are who the Party cares about forever," Ms Peng, wearing a white military uniform, sang to a rapt audience which included President Hu Jintao and her husband. Peng Liyuan was already famous when she met Xi Jinping in 1986. Nicknamed "The Peony Fairy", Peng Liyuan joined the Chinese People's Liberation Army early in her career and made her name as an entertainer approved by the Communist Party, appearing frequently on state television to sing propaganda songs with titles like Plains of Hope and People From Our Village.Peng Liyuan did not always enjoy a rosy relationship with the Communist Party. Like Xi Jinping, her family was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution.In an interview with Chinese television in 2004, Ms Peng said her father was categorised as a "counter-revolutionary" because some of their relatives served in the Taiwanese army. |
References
- Parton James, Caricature and other comic art in all times and many lands, New York, Harper Brothers, 1877.
- Wright Thomas, A history of caricature and grotesque in literature and art, London, Chatto & Windus, Piccadilly, 1875
- Kris, E. (1934). The Psychology of Caricature. The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis
- Kris, E. and Gombrich, E. (1938). The Principles of Caricature. British Journal of Medical Psychology,17
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