Le Rire and the Meaning of Cartoon Art in Fin-de-Siècle France

Abstract

As the foremost organ of the French satirical and illustrated press, the weekly Le Rire captivated a broad reading public in the final decade of the nineteenth century. At the crossroads of commercial entertainment and mass media, Le Rire sought to champion caricature and comic illustration as art forms worthy of serious merit and to make humor a powerful tool for political, cultural, and social commentary. This article aims to assess the periodical's impact in its time, and furthermore, contends that Le Rire was a determinative force in reshaping public mores toward comedy and satire, carrying the legacy of nineteenth-century developments in the history of French caricature into novel modes of expression and consumption at the turn of the twentieth.