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On The Pear, The Bellows, and The Prison: J.J. Grandville & War with the Crown
A 19th-century illustrator—Grandville. Radical absurdity. Shattering royal censorship.
The History
In July 1830, King Charles X of France made a fatal mistake. Terrified of a
growing liberal press, he signed the repressive July Ordinances.
suspending freedom of the press and demanding absolute censorship of all
printed graphics. He believed that by snuffing out the ink, he could control the
minds of Paris.
He underestimated the power of the satirists, artists, and thinkers.
The cartoonists didn’t back down; they revolted. Led by publishers like Charles
Philipon and artists like J.J. Grandville and Honoré Daumier, satirical journals
transformed into weapons of war.
When the government claimed it was bringing “order” to France, Grandville responded with Let’s Put Out the Light and
Rekindle the Fire!—exposing the regime as monstrous, bird-beaked bellows
actively choking human enlightenment.
The crown’s reaction was swift and brutal. Seizures, heavy fines, and prison
sentences were handed down. Daumier was jailed; Philipon’s presses were
raided. By 1835, political caricatures were entirely outlawed.
But censorship never stops the truth; it merely forces it to evolve.
Banned from drawing the King’s face, Grandville turned his eyes to nature—and the satire around the pear was created. The king’s face was likened at the time to the shape of a pear. If the free-thinking satirists could not mock the system, they would mock the society that built it.
In the following gallery, we track Grandville’s psychological transition from overt political warfare to the deep, subversive portrayal of the absurd.
Ⅰ. THE INOCULATION
Cultural inoculation to eradicate culture.
Led by the king and supported by the establishment/system, there was a ‘mindset’ that was ‘set’ to censor ideas as well as the principles of ‘the enlightenment’. In 1830, the French state realized that raw force alone could not kill an idea. They needed something far more insidious than force to accomplish this dampening of the mind: a controlled, everyday dose of manufactured nonsense was devised to dumb down and preoccupy the herds, using this diversion as a method to assist them in achieving their goal.
Before the Crown banned his political ink, Grandville targeted the physical vanity of the bourgeoisie. He saw the massive, ballooning 1830s sleeves and towering, wire-framed bonnets not as style but as symptoms.
Lithographie dans La Caricature. Légende : « Adoremus in aeternum sanctissimum philipoirum. » Grandville et Deesperret
Date June 1833 Paris Musées
Ⅱ. THE SEDATIVE OF STATE
When fashion cinches the waist and pinches the mind.
Floodgates opening, the media with trivial obsessions DULLED the public’s senses. The system used the very tools of culture to systematically hollow out the critical thinking of society.
While the population obsessed over the inflation of their sleeves, they ignored the deflation of their liberties.
Folly was the sedative that prepared the herd to accept the cage.
Happened then…happened before…still happens again…and again. Then it was the ‘sleeves’—throughout history, the focus of folly changes, but the resulting blissful ignorance is the same.
The Fashions of 1830: A Further Degree of Perfection (Encore un dégré de perfection: Modes de 1830) Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ⅲ. THE ENFORCERS
When knowledge was as threatening as the plague.
We have witnessed a fact to be true—throughout history to the present day—that when the population is thoroughly numbed by state-sanctioned nonsense, the herd willingly transforms into the enforcers of their own captivity.
In this lithograph from 1830, citizens loyal to the ‘censorship cause’ wear ‘bellows’ that are disturbingly portrayed like the unblinking, bird-beaked guise of the medieval plague doctors. This print shows them treating independent thought not as a virtue but as a dangerous and life-threatening contagion.
In this print, armed with fireplace bellows and candle snuffers, their mission is absolute: To stoke the fires of ignorance and to extinguish the flame of enlightenment.
Anonyme, dessinateur-lithographe, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Ⅳ. THE UNDERGROUND
When the truth is outlawed, hide it in the soil.
By 1835, the iron fist of royal censorship completely outlawed political caricature. It was a crime to draw the King’s face. Grandville’s response? He went entirely underground and began drawing flowers.
To the state censors, it looked like a harmless children’s botany book. Beneath the petals lay pure venom for the corrupt establishment. When this artist/thinker was stripped of his voice, his rebellion simply moved into the garden.
Delord, Taxile; Grandville, J. J.; Raban, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Ⅴ. THE SENSORY BLACKOUT
The architecture of distraction began with vanity
Anne, Duchess of Cumberland (1743-1808) Gainsborough By the 1700s, the damage had deeply set in. Manure and mice found their way to adorn the faces of the elite. 1
By the mid-19th century, who is to say how damaged the faculties of the elite were because of centuries-old traditions of poisoning their minds and bodies?
Centuries before Grandville, the elite suffocated by their own stifling, decaying, and incapacitating physical blackout that led to death. This was not a sudden trend; it was de rigueur. A generational poison of mind and body passed down like an inheritance.
To achieve the uniformity of compliance to elite aesthetics, the herds of the elite, throughout history, willingly rubbed corroding lead paste into their pores, used arsenic and venetian ceruse; dropped deadly nightshade into their eyes, and wore towering and weighing hairstyles sculpted out of the hair of the dead, plastered with rotting animal fat. They locked themselves in a non-stop sensory overload of chemical and physical pain.
A mind consumed by the agonizing noise of its own biological decay has no capacity left to demand liberty. 2 3
Citations:
- https://artuk.org/discover/stories/dead-pretty-the-perils-of-georgian-beauty-regimes ↩︎
- https://blog.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/dangerous-beauty-hazardous-chemicals-and-poisons-in-historic-cosmetics/
↩︎ - https://www.facebook.com/SimpleHistoryCartoons/posts/venetian-ceruse-epitomized-the-pale-skin-ideal-in-16th-18th-century-europea-thic/1314652497355763/ ↩︎
Intrigued? Related Reads from Marginalia & Co:
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Pursuing the Illusion.
Besides masks and social status—vanity, beauty, and appearance—the pursuit of these illusions distorts and destroys all sense of self.
“The less talent they have, the more pride, vanity and arrogance they have. All these fools, however, find other fools who applaud them.“
– Erasmus
Pursuing The Illusion. A Collage by Sosanni V. “People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”
– Paolo Coelho
Coquèterie. Felix Vallotton, 1911 You May Also Like
Walking The Wigs So They Can Be Aired.
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Walking The Wigs So They Can Be Aired.
The powdered wig was the ultimate wearable symbol of all things overindulgent, dramatic, fashionable, and social prominence, all in one. The powdered wig became the vehicle of grandeur and the proof of status. A whole lifestyle eventually grew around it—positions developed for those who created, tended, or stole these ‘things.’
The powdered and elaborate wig was not without its problems. They were notoriously heavy, difficult to maintain, and a hygiene menace.
“…So where did the hair for all these perukes and poufs come from? Cheaper wigs could be made from the hide of cows, goats and sheep, or from horses’ manes, but the majority used human tresses from the poor, peddling their locks to raise some desperately needed funds. Vendors travelled between villages, seeking young or elderly peasant women; silver, white, blonde and grey hair – curly being the most sought after. More alarmingly, hair was also taken from the corpses of prostitutes and criminals and even from plague victims. Once assembled, the peruke was not washable, and as you can imagine, soon smelled terrible. An entire wig care industry developed to try to combat this problem, producing items such as scrapers, salt flasks, lice and flea traps (one advantage was that lice lived on the wig rather than the wearer whose hair was often shorn) and wig curlers. …”
from Messy Nessy – Wig Holes and Other Mysteries of Powdered Hair History Explained
by Claire Shepard
Walking The Wigs…Because someone had to.
Walking the wigs
A collage.
Made by Sosanni Vcoffee table the look:
Taking ‘wigs’ a bit further along as a metaphor…and moving further along the timeline, I couldn’t resist adding this book to the post…witty, to the point. forward. a timeless read, and Nancy Mitford, a writer with a talent rarely seen today.
You May Also Like
Pursuing the Illusion.
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creativity. on the weaving of the wig. a metaphor.
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Kings of Bluffs & Queen of Masks
The King of Bluffs is The Poker Face—a classic ‘mask’—an expression—actually an intended ‘lack of expression’—a skill of the card shark that wields persuasion and creates action.
But that gambling table performance isn’t the only ‘mask’ worn in society. We wear masks daily—everywhere—in so many roles—as if society and its expectations are the directors and we are the performers.
Two things I have observed over the years:
- Masks have been worn throughout history. Visible masks as well as the ones we create ‘internally. ‘ It is these ‘invisible’ but ever-present masks that are interesting and disturbing.
- Although the term ‘influencer’ today has attracted all sorts to the ‘career’—including the dullest crayons in the box—some influencers that have done ‘their thing’ throughout history have been brilliant—perhaps even unaware of their ‘feat.’ And speaking of influencers and the power of persuasion, we shouldn’t underestimate the power of a skillfully deployed meme—again, it has the power to transform society effortlessly.
Two Fascinating Examples:
An Influencer par excellence & An internalized mask that is still being worn today.1. The Influencer: The Earl of Sandwich. – Speaking of gambling tables and society…
- The Reputation: John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, was reputed to be an obsessed gambler. It is widely believed that he spent twenty-four hours at a card table, refusing to leave the game to eat or take a break. Legend has it that he asked for meat to be placed between bread slices so he could eat while at the card table, keeping his cards and playing hand grease-free.
- The Etiquette: Today, neither his obsession with gambling nor the idea he came up with for his meal at the card table seems shocking.
- But for that time, it was radical. This was an era of suffocating aristocratic protocol, where dining was a performance and a ritual. Tables were set with a repertoire of specialized forks, knives, fine china, and crystal for the flowing stream of courses and paired beverages, wines, and spirits.
- A chunk of bare meat gathered by the slices of bread—to be held in one’s hand. Bringing it to one’s mouth and tearing off pieces from this ‘thing’ with one’s teeth. These two acts would have been rendered a social death sentence if anyone had dared to engage in this barbaric display at the dinner tables of the ‘elite.’ It would have been ‘asylum-worthy’ behavior.
- The Tweak: Because a wealthy Earl purported this “invention” to fuel his vice, the gilded herd didn’t call it vulgar, barbaric, or insane. They considered it iconic. They copied it. It became the done thing. Seen. Memed. Done.
- The Side Effects: Gambling became more openly seen as “entertainment” as the bored bon vivants were. now endowed with new and rebellious elitist stage directions. The reckless card-shark narrative was intoxicating because it became associated with a new rebellious behavior—eating with one’s hands—and the meme ‘took.’
- Every time you grab a sandwich on a rushed break, you are unconsciously reenacting what may have been a 250-year-old high-stakes bluff.
A little time travel: I found a first-hand account of ‘the sandwich.’
Excerpt from “A tour to London”; or, “New Observations on England and its Inhabitants”. By M. Grosley. Translated from the French by Thomas Nugent in two volumes. 1772: Translation of the 1772 text into contemporary print: “A minister of state passed four and twenty hours at a public gaming-table, so absorbed in play, that, during the whole time, he had no subsistence but a piece of beef, between two slices of toasted bread, which he ate without ever quitting the game. This new dish grew highly in vogue, during my residence in London: it was called by the name of the minister, who invented it.”
2. The Mask: Ginevra de’ Benci. Wearing what I consider to be the ‘queen of masks‘.
- The Modern Gaze: The unyielding, tight-lipped expression—the quixotic smirk and the indifferent gaze—the classic characteristics of many Renaissance portraits appear to be the centuries-old prototype for today’s identical counterculture gaze.
Ginevra de’ Benci, by Leonardo da Vinci. Chic Tote Bag available here - The Subcultural Split: Today, that flat gaze and indifferent look are intentional. Emos wear indifference as an armor to portray internal sensitivity, pain, and the heavy burden of feeling too much. Goths wear a darker, colder ambivalence to signal a rebellious, ‘anti’ stance against the mainstream setup.
- The Renaissance Mask: In Florence, Ginevra de Benci’s flat and severely indifferent look wasn’t a rebellion. It was the done thing. Her sullen expression? A rigid, heavy mask worn by women of noble birth—a part of their uniform—declaring their total submission to society’s standards of chaste moral virtue and predetermined place in society and role in the family.
- Advertising the Self: Today, we have the link in the bio to list our contacts and credentials. Centuries ago, they had the information in the painting to encode any message that needed to be ‘publicized.’ In Ginevra’s case, her portrait, painted by Da Vinci, includes wreaths of juniper (a symbol of ‘virtue’ that happened to also serve as a pun on her name), symbolically screaming to the viewer that Ginevra de Benci was virtuous. Ginevra de Benci: Official portrait—Officially ‘labeled’ and ‘stamped.’
- The Side Effect: Labels. Sometimes they are created for a ‘good cause’—to draw positive attention to a characteristic or ‘trait.’ But labeling and singling out causes more harm than good within the ‘herd mentality’ of society. A ‘knee-jerk’ hate response is very common when the masses are confronted with a subgroup that is a bit ‘different.’
- The Disconnect: The sullen, indifferent look. It was the ‘done thing’ back then. We will never know if de Benci—or any other woman of centuries past—ever wanted to wear that enforced expression because it was expected of them. She and countless other ‘to the manor born’ women could have been silently screaming their way through life, and no one would have known.
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obsessed.
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On coffee time. & dress code at breakfast
Coffee: a delicacy, medicinal, and restorative when brewed with care. Or it can be a tragic beverage—when mass-produced.
It is an art—not to be taken lightly. Its method of preparation and how it is served, along with where and how we take our coffee, are details that create the experience.
Drinking coffee is an aesthetic moment that deserves its time.
“Coffee is a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your older self.” – Terry Prachett
And for those who don’t feel the need to be dressed for morning coffee—or require that of their mug—a collection of nudes awaits you at marginalia & co.
Speaking of coffee and time… Have you ever paired coffee with time travel?
Toshikazu Kawaguchi did, and it became a best-selling series.
Before The Coffee Gets Cold….Book 1 of the series.
A Collection of Books 1 – 3
Book 4 of the series
Book 5 of the series
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on revolutions & the scheme of things
Liberty and Equality.
Two ideas of the Enlightenment that many believed to have sparked the French Revolution.
My questions are
1. Whether or not these ideas sparked revolutions that actually delivered liberty and equality to the people.
2. If liberty and equality ever existed, do exist, or can exist in society.
So are liberty and equality the idealist essentials for a utopian society, or simply the slogans of a misled dystopia?
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on writing, writers, and reading.
The Typography Grid. Digital curation by marginalia & co. via Pinterest, 2026. Words. The weight of words.
Their meaning. Their hidden meaning.
on writing, writers, and reading.
Words can mean one thing and yet fill volumes with meanings that remain undiscovered by many readers. But if you search, you can uncover layers of meanings
There is a book—an amazing piece of speculative fiction called Babel by R.F. Kuang that is a must-read for those interested in this sort of thing.
It is dark academia, hidden meanings, language, identity, empire, literature, and society—it wraps itself around all of it. A literary epic achievement that begins in the throes of cholera in China, and the tale winds its way into the halls of Oxford University’s Royal Institute of Translation.
Words are powerful and they are tools – but not only to be used by publishing authors.
Words find their way when there’s a page waiting for them. And every thinking pen deserves its journal.
I seriously feel that everyone should have a journal. At least one.
You don’t need to be a writer to need a journal. It isn’t an amazing tool just for those who write books. Journals are for everyone. There are a million ways to enjoy having your own personal journal.
From filling its pages as a personal diary to jotting down all sorts of recipes, from expressing what can’t be said on its lines to working out one’s issues, or elaborating on creative ideas and writing about dreams, these journals are the perfect choice. High-end art and a high-quality notebook.
Portrait of Lilli Elbe with a fan by Gerde Wegener. available here Use code SUMMERJOURNAL at checkout for 20% off—through June!And for your next read? Babel…. It’s more than just a summer read…
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on symbols, hidden messages, culture yoga, and alice.
Well. These were an existentially strange past few days. I am so excited to be staring at a heap of folders, notebooks, and ideas for projects. At the same time, as I would get started, my mind would go to the geopolitical upheaval—this surreal, tragic reality that we are experiencing worldwide, where genocide and stock market results can be part of the same conversation. And THAT burst my bubble—throwing me to the waves of existential angst.
I would ask myself, “What are you doing?” People are being killed, nations are in turmoil, the darkest side of human nature is at the forefront, and you are putting down the blueprints, researching, gathering, and laying out the ‘intel’ ?
(“Intel” – that’s my code word phrase for preparing and creating plot outlines and character studies for books, artwork and projects.)
Speaking of intel…I HAVE TO SHARE THIS.
I came across some info that had totally escaped my eye…and I was surprised that it escaped me.
Apparently, it is buzzed about that the CIA had studied ‘Macondo’—trying to take apart this fictional hometown of A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.
The accounts say that the intelligence couldn’t believe that something this powerful, intriguing, compelling, and impeccably crafted as Macondo could be ‘just a tale.’ They believed it must have contained some revolutionary messages encoded within.
Granted, according to the CIA, the times and happenings back then, Marquez held political views that were ‘observation needy.’ ‘ So he was being observed for those reasons regardless of the book he had just written. (If you want to read more, check out this article Fifty Years of Disquietude by Joel Whitney in The Baffler.)
But it’s not his views on politics that interested me—everyone should believe what they want and have an opinion as they please. That’s what people in democracies do.
(I know, they are becoming extinct -I don’t mean people and their views, I mean democracies—although people with a viewpoint that isn’t herd feed are becoming a rare sight… Birth rates are going down, AI is doing our thinking… LOLOL, I joke, but it’s not a laughing matter.)
Back to what I was writing… What intrigued me was intelligence people taking apart the fictional world of Macondo, looking for encoded hidden messages or statements.
That is intriguing. Codes are intriguing. Symbolism is intriguing.
Which brings me to
my favorite writer,one of my top five favorite writers—Umberto Eco, who was a professor of semiotics (symbolism & interpretation). Besides being a brilliant academic, he could tell a tale like no other—and when writing them out, his tales would become a complicated, layered series of fiction and facts.The ultimate testimony to that fact? Foucault’s Pendulum.
A must read. Seriously. A must read.
Conspiracy lovers, Foucault’s Pendulum is your book…
This paragraph best sums up what Foucault’s Pendulum is about.
An editor, a cabalist, and a Templar scholar walk into a bar—this, essentially, is the setup for Umberto Eco’s maximalist occult epic Foucault’s Pendulum—and, out of boredom or desperation or something like existential ennui, these failed or failing intellectuals launch a sadly cynical investigation into the various conspiracy theories, urban legends, and supernatural spook stories that have possessed mankind for millennia. Hilarity obviously ensues, but I say “cynical,” because none of these investigators, such as they are, believe in the supernatural designs in their work, or not at first. What they end up building through their satirical scheme, though, weaving together the myths of those Knights Templar, of the Bavarian Illuminati, the Rosicrucians, and every other famous cult or historical bogeyman is, ironically, nothing less than the secret history of the world. – Umberto Eco by Chris Wallace at Interview Magazine.“An editor, a cabalist, and a Templar scholar walk into a bar…” sounds like a joke, no? But this book is far from joking, and the review is spot on—a rare book and an intense and fascinating read. Maybe with a bit of a perplexing aftertaste…
Meanwhile…Are You Doing Your Culture Yoga???
It’s cardio for the mind. Do it!!! Stretch the mind!!
Your imagination will thank you.
How to ‘do’ the culture yoga exercise?
Below are 7 cultural yoga statements.
I create them using moments of the human experience captured in a few words.
They can be sensory, cultural, emotional, or historical—you get my drift.
These statements are your weekly focal points for the exercise.
Close your eyes and try to envision the imagery from the statement.
And go from one statement to the next….
That’s it… Breathe slowly… Sip your coffee… Take your time…
Writers do it all the time…artists do it all the time…it’s a part of our make-up…
Statement by statement… capture the feeling… awaken the senses… stimulate the mind… stretch the imagination.
This week’s 7 statements to ‘culture yoga’ …
- 1. a striped, crumpled apron, bearing the toils of the chef, tossed onto the chair after a long night in the kitchen.
- 2. the town square on a drizzly, cold morning, with market stalls placed where the accused were hanged the day before.
- 3. koi fish, hardly noticed, swimming in circles, forgotten, as they are held in captivity in the pond of the palace grounds.
- 4. an abandoned, derelict building filled with the homeless and destitute seeking shelter from the sleet and cold during a windy winter’s night in the midst of the holiday season.
- 5. the poet sitting under the tree, alone, misunderstood, and unable to understand the world.
- 6. the shrill sound of a whistle pierces the air like a barrage of arrows as the policeman tries to direct the traffic at midday in the city.
- 7. magenta.
“Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.”
― Lewis Carroll
