The Saint-Aubin 'Livre de caricatures': Drawing Satire in Eighteenth-Century Paris ed. by Colin Jones, Juliet Carey, and Emily Richardson (review)

This is the first extensive study of the fascinating object of material, textual, and visual culture constituted by the Livre de caricatures tant bonnes que mauvaises, a book of nearly four hundred satirical drawings composed by Charles-Germain de Saint-Aubin and his family between the 1740s and 1770s. In their Introduction, Colin Jones and Juliet Carey make a modest claim — that this volume aims to bring Saint-Aubin and his extraordinary Livre to wider attention — but the book's significance far exceeds these goals. Through a collection of sixteen essays, scholars of eighteenth-century France from different fields (art historians, curators, cultural, economic, and fashion historians) bring their unique expertise to bear on this object by analysing selections from its pages through diverse lines of inquiry. While these essays certainly elucidate the Livre, offering insightful analyses of the drawings from their specialist perspectives, their even greater achievement is to reveal the rich possibilities that this object presents more broadly as a source for a deeper understanding of everyday life in eighteenth-century Paris. The Livre's comic and often dangerously seditious drawings, intended for the private entertainment of the Saint-Aubin family, offer sardonic commentaries on general happenings in the capital, from critiques of contemporary theatre, music, and fashion to gossipy exposés of court intrigues and parliamentary politics, and witty responses to wars and religious conflict. Beyond the explorations into specific topics that the essays yield individually, what is realized collectively is an enriched understanding of two elusive cultural spaces — private life and humour — which so often evade historical inquiry. These essays take the reader into the intimate space of the Saint-Aubin home, where, as though eavesdropping on conversations at the dinner table, we discover that what people said in private could contrast radically with what might be assumed from their public personas (perhaps nowhere more evident than in the Livre's depiction of Mme de Pompadour, one of Saint-Aubin's most important patrons, who nevertheless becomes the target of endless transgressive puns and misogynistic satire). While the humour of some of the drawings is obvious (crude or scatological), much of it is more impenetrably based on in-jokes, puns, and word games that deny easy access — joking is, after all, a cultural practice designed to exclude as much as include. But the essays in this volume provide ciphers for the difficult task of decoding (still a work in progress, as all the authors acknowledge), showing us how the jokes were made and what indeed was funny, so we find ourselves in the privileged position of laughing 'with', sniggering alongside the Saint-Aubins. Although the inferior quality of the illustrations (all black and white and sometimes too small to read the inscriptions) detracts somewhat from the enjoyment, overall this volume offers a rich analysis of a unique object, sneaking a glimpse into the private life and sense of humour of a family of artists in eighteenth-century Paris, and through them a deeper understanding of the political and cultural happenings that affected the lives of ordinary Parisians.