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Sustaining The Republic: The Power Of Political Prints By Honoré Daumier, Édouard Manet, André Gill, And Alfred Le Petit, Maxime Valsamas

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The fight for the liberty of the press was an ongoing struggle in France since the French Revolution in 1789 and it remained a factor until July 1881, when liberal press laws were enacted by the Republican officials in charge of governing the country at the time. The press was the life and soul of political life in nineteenth-century France. Prints formed a core currency of communication; they were the most important vehicle of visual information as they reached a far greater percentage of the population than did artworks in other media, and they had the force to unite people. …