Tradition and Transformation: The Fables of La Fontaine and Their Nineteenth-Century Illustrations and Caricaturists

During the nineteenth century, the fables of La Fontaine provided artists with ways to link the achievements of the past to the concerns of the present. La Fontaine's fables were especially well suited for this purpose. Although written in an age of monarchical splendour, they treated themes that would become central to the age of revolutions. Artists merged past and present in fable imagery in a variety of ways. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, artists interpreted the fables in terms of historical eras that implied values of gradeur and nationalistic pride. The fables also suggested parallels to issues in natural history, a factor reflected in the ways in which animals were presented either as beasts or as surrogate humans. Furthermore, La Fontaine's poems enabled artists to comment on specific political issues and events, as seen in cartoons produced by Daumier, Grandville and others during the early 1830s and after 1848. Current social issues could also be alluded to, as illustrations by Jules David and Dore demonstrate. La Fontaine's apparent naivete, the feature most often commented upon by eighteenth and nineteenth-century writers, was reflected in the style and subjects that artists chose to illustrate and interpret the fables. Rustic themes were especially appropriate to match La Fontaine's naivete, and during the nineteenth-century works by such artists as Courbet and Dore praised the benefits of rural simplicity over urban artifice. Rural virtue also surfaced as a major concern. In the work of Millet, fables about peasant widsom form a counterpart to the urban associations seen in politicized imagery of the 1830s. The fables of La Fontaine offered artists an established textual and visual vocabulary which they could transform for their own purposes. By playing on words and punning on pictures, they pushed the fables to the limits of socially and ethically acceptable moral didacticism. Shielded by tradition, artists used the fables to lash out at the injustices they saw around them, so that the past spoke to the present in a revitalized language of timeless values.