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Marquis Scholar Lucile Smith ’03 (Neptune, N.J.) is learning about French culture from those who mocked it in a senior honors thesis examining caricature.
Smith, who is collaborating with Robert Mattison, Marshall R. Metzgar Professor of Art, and George Rosa, associate professor of foreign languages and literatures, is seeking departmental honors in both French and art history. She is exploring the works of Honore Daumier and the historical, social, and political events that fostered caricature from 1798 to 1848.
“I’m thrilled to be writing my thesis on this topic and in French,” says Smith, who speaks the language fluently after spending a year in France. “First, I love caricature. It is truly amusing, and the more you know about the time and the society, the more you get out of it. Secondly, writing in French will permit me to use all the grammatical rules, and exceptions to those rules, that I learned living in France.”
Smith’s thesis is examining caricatures of the Marquis de Lafayette stored in Skillman Library and others by Daumier, Charles Philippon, and Paul Garvarni at Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Philippon and Garvarni were from the same era as Daumier, but were “less spectacular,” Smith says.
“Daumier went straight to the heart of the matter,” she adds. “It’s very clear immediately what he’s mocking.”
While caricature dates back to the Renaissance, Smith picked the French revolutionary period because it is considered the country’s birth of modern caricature. Prior to this time, the French king censored any form of satire.
“After Napoleon’s death he was caricatured, but it was suppressed during his reign,” Smith says. “Jacques Louis David, the official artist of Napoleon, only caricatured the British.”
Mattison views the project as a way for Smith to study French culture and society in the context of “who they made fun of and what they valued,” and apply some of it to the world today.
“The caricatures of the New York Times and Village Voice come out of 19th century France,” says Mattison, who is guiding Smith through the visual aspects of the project. “One of the goals of Lafayette is internationalism and multiculturalism, and I think this supports that.”
Rosa describes Smith as a very intelligent student, whose French is excellent and who seems well prepared to handle the topic. He explains that the subject is particularly challenging because of the complexity of the era’s historical events, including the Revolution of 1789, the “Second” Revolution of 1792, the period of the Convention and the Terror, Thermidor, the Directory, the Napoleonic period of the Consulate and the Empire, the restoration of the Bourbon Monarchy, the July revolution of 1830, the reign of Louis-Philippe, and the February Revolution.
“She is learning a good deal about French history, about French art, and about the ways in which they intersect,” says Rosa.
Smith describes the professors as “eminently qualified.”
“Professor Rosa knows a great deal about French language and history, and Professor Mattison has made a lot of very helpful suggestions about where to go to see prints and also books that are particularly pertinent to my subject,” she says.
Smith adds that Lafayette, close to both New York and Philadelphia, is well situated for such research.
Last summer, Smith worked as an EXCEL Scholar with Robert Weiner, Thomas Roy and Lura Forrest Jones Professor of History, on the translation of newsletter articles published by and for the Jewish community of Dijon, France. In EXCEL, students work closely with faculty on research while earning a stipend. She also worked to catalog a collection of scrapbooks dating from 1878-1915 at Skillman Library.
A member of French Club, Smith is a student assistant in the library’s Special Collections and belongs to Riding Club and Pep Band.