Un Costume National (No. 10) — Mœurs Britanniques - Cham c1845

Le Charivari, Paris, c. 1845. Original lithograph on newsprint — complete verso with Paris advertisements and theatre notices.

Overview

A cutting satire from Le Charivari’s celebrated Mœurs Britanniques series (“British Manners”), drawn by Cham, the era’s most prolific political cartoonist. Published in Paris around 1845, this plate takes aim at the Irish poor under British rule—rendering them as Europe’s moral outcasts—and by extension exposes both England’s colonial hypocrisy and France’s own voyeuristic detachment.

Caption & Translation

Un costume national.
– Monsieur est sans doute d’un pays chaud ?
– Non monsieur, je suis Irlandais.

“A national costume. — Sir, you must be from a hot country? — No sir, I’m Irish.”

A barefoot, ragged man stands beside a pig—his only possession—confronted by a well-dressed gentleman in top hat and checked trousers. Cham compresses an entire colonial stereotype into one exchange: the Irishman’s misery mistaken for exoticism, his poverty turned into spectacle.

Historical & Political Significance

Printed just before the Great Famine, this cartoon crystallises continental attitudes to Britain’s “Irish Question.”

• Class and empire: The elegant observer represents the liberal French bourgeoisie—amused, moralising, yet complicit.

• Colonial mirror: France, freshly scarred by its own July Monarchy and colonial ventures in Algeria, projected its anxieties about civilisation and barbarism onto the Irish body.

• Racialisation of poverty: The tangled hair and bestial posture echo the pseudo-ethnographic imagery circulating in both Punch and London Illustrated News, making this one of the earliest French echoes of that racialised visual vocabulary.

Cham’s Mœurs Britanniques series was a political export column: French readers could ridicule British society while reaffirming their own civility. Yet today, it reads as a document of pan-European prejudice—one that reveals how “Irishness” became a shorthand for destitution across the continent.

Rarity & Condition

• Authentic period leaf, verso complete with Le Charivari text: theatre reviews, classified notices, and advertising for “Grande Fabrique de Billards,” “Sirop Anti-Goutteux,” and other Paris trades.

• Printer’s credit “Chez Aubert & Cie, rue de la Bourse 29” visible below image—confirming first-issue printing.

• Moderate toning and foxing consistent with mid-19th-century newsprint; margins sound; a rare survival in full sheet form.

Scholarly Context

While British anti-Irish caricature is well-studied, French examples are seldom encountered. Cham’s plate extends the same visual hierarchy into continental satire, proving that ethnic mockery was not confined to London. The image circulated to a Paris audience that followed the Repeal campaign and the looming Famine through imported news, giving this print direct geopolitical resonance.

Comparable impressions appear in:

• Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Cham: Mœurs Britanniques,” c. 1845–47 (Aubert & Cie).

• Bibliothèque nationale de France, Le Charivari volumes, mid-1840s.

Rarity Justification

• Signed by Cham, master of French caricature.

• Part of the Mœurs Britanniques cycle satirising Britain’s empire—rarely seen complete.

• Pre-Famine portrayal of the Irish poor, continental in origin.

• Full newspaper verso retained, adding commercial and cultural provenance.

• Institutional comparables confirm authenticity; market survivals extremely limited.

Verso Overview

The verso of this Le Charivari leaf is not merely incidental printing — it is a direct window into Parisian public life in the mid-1840s, the same bourgeois audience that laughed at Cham’s depiction of the Irish. The advertisements and notices read like a catalogue of the French capital’s daily preoccupations: luxury, leisure, and self-improvement.

Among them are announcements for:

• “Entreprise spéciale des annonces” – an early proto-advertising agency headed by Norbert Estibal, who handled press advertising for Le Charivari and related journals, signalling the rise of the modern commercial media economy.

• “Sirop anti-goutteux” and “Médecine vétérinaire” – patent remedies marketed to the middle classes, reflecting both new consumerism and the era’s obsession with health and hygiene.

• “Grande fabrique de billards” and “Jalousies mécaniques” – luxury domestic goods aimed at Paris’s prosperous households.

• Short notices on university examinations, hunting albums, and the theatre, alongside a snippet of political commentary under the heading Carillon, discussing civic unrest in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

Together, these fragments document the bourgeois ecosystem that consumed political caricature. On one side of the sheet, the Irish are caricatured as barefoot and primitive; on the reverse, the Parisian reader is courted as cultured, wealthy, and rational. This physical juxtaposition — poverty on the recto, privilege on the verso — embodies the moral dissonance of 1840s Europe: the continent’s elites laughing at colonial misery while advertising billiard tables, tonics, and refined amusements.

Survival of such a leaf, intact with both sides legible, is extraordinarily rare. Most Charivari sheets were clipped for the image or discarded after a single day’s reading. Here, the verso anchors Cham’s satire within its precise social and commercial context, transforming it from a detached print into a complete historical artefact of 19th-century mass media.

Dimensions

Approx. 32 × 24 cm (sheet)