Name/Title
Grandes Marionettes Politiques ou la Minerve en Goguettes [Lithograph]Description
A large and entertaining hand-colored lithograph caricaturing the subscribers to a campaign by the French newspaper La Minerve that was designed to assist the Bonapartists who had taken refuge in Texas in the preceding year and whose colony was failing. The colony, known as Champ d'Asile was short-lived. It had been established by former soldiers who served under Napoleon, led by Generals Lallemand and Rigaud. The exact location of the colony is lost to history, though it was about a hundred kilometers from Houston up the Trinity River. After threats of Spanish intervention, the colonists withdrew to New Orleans after less than a year. The financing of the colony came from several large investments by private subscribers, a process which is lampooned here. One of the characters in the scene asks, "Pekin laurois je une Baronie au Texas?" Another asks, "Bobo pour le polits garcois du Texas?" The title of the lithograph is translated roughly to "Large Political Puppets or Minerva in Goguettes." The word "Goguettes" is a reference to a contemporary singing society in France and Belgium. Handwritten captions in pencil in the bottom margin identify a half dozen of the actors involved in the caricature, chiefly Benjamin Constant, the publisher of La Minerve and an early and vocal supporter of the Champ d'Asile colony.
"After Waterloo, Constant fled to England, where he published Adolphe (1817), the first psychological novel. In 1818 and 1819 he supported the Bonapartist colony of Champ d'Asile, Texas, first through his newspaper, the Minerva. In this publication he built an exotic image of Texas, which he manipulated as a political tool in opposition to the restored monarchy of Louis XVIII. The Minerva sponsored a fund-raising campaign for half-pay imperial veterans going to Texas. Although the 'subscription' was initially successful, Constant's role as a political voice was damaged when the colony failed and a scandal erupted over the donations. His newspaper collapsed, but the image of Texas propagated by the liberal Constant and his Bonapartist allies endured in France for several generations" - Handbook of Texas online.
This rare lithograph is not mentioned in Ron Tyler's Texas Lithographs, nor do any copies appear in OCLC. It is the first copy we've ever seen, and we hadn't known about it before acquiring it.
