Honore Daumier (1808-1879)

Ratapoil was an imaginary character which Daumier invented to attack the politics of the government of Louis Napoléon. Ratapoil, which means "ratskin," represented Daumier's conception of an agent-provacateur, one of the leaders of the group of thugs known as the "Society of December 10" that Napoléon had hired to bribe and coerce votes on his behalf in 1848-1850. Daumier was a staunch Republican and he also denounced Napoléon's regime with pointedly satirical images of Ratapoil in print. During the period 1850-1851, when he was working on the clay statuette of the present bronze, Ratapoil's image appeared in about forty satirical prints that he published in Charivari. Unlike his character busts of identifiable individual supporters of Louis-Philippe, Ratapoil is not modeled on a specific figure. The moustache, goatee beard and beaked nose are features based on Napoléon III himself and would have been easily understood as ironical by his contemporaries. On viewing the finished work, Jules Michelet told Daumier, "You have struck at the enemy full force! Here is the Bonapartist idea pilloried by you forever!" (quoted in J.L. Wasserman, op. cit., p. 161).