Caricature, Ayant Pour Titre: Lequel Faut-il Donner?, Sujet tiré du Miroir, no. 378, 13 Mai, 1797 1797

Curator: Oh, this piece is delightfully absurd! It’s a print titled "Caricature, Ayant Pour Titre: Lequel Faut-il Donner?", dating back to 1797, pulled from an issue of *Le Miroir.* Editor: It just looks like a page of dense text. Is there something I’m missing? Curator: Look closer. It is *all* text, but the description! The central topic is about a dog who’s had a litter of pups with odd assortments of features from other species...quite eccentric indeed! It feels very post-Enlightenment anxiety meets fairytale strangeness. Editor: So, a satirical critique dressed as natural history? That’s clever. I am thinking about printing practices in late 18th-century France. How accessible would this broadside have been? The paper looks relatively cheap and readily available, suggesting mass production for a wide audience. The printing process itself—moveable type, presumably—implies a level of mechanization influencing content distribution. Curator: Exactly! And this points directly to who got to laugh at it all. The subject implies elite breeding practices. Remember, in the 1790s, concepts of aristocracy were literally under the knife, but they still very much dominated culture. This print makes me wonder, what new hierarchies are forming from the supposed ashes of the old? Editor: It makes one ponder who these “Marchands de Nouveautés” in Paris were! This circulation network is crucial. How much control did they have over content and distribution? And what implications did that have for the dissemination of politically charged caricatures like this one? This wasn’t just entertainment. Curator: Agreed. You know, I keep thinking about the choice of dogs, in particular. They are shown as emblems, representative of fidelity or foolishness. And there’s something wonderfully perverse about taking those archetypes and turning them into bizarre hybrid creatures. It exposes the artificiality of these roles, questioning tradition itself. Editor: Precisely. This print wasn't simply lampooning aristocracy but critiquing social construction through material culture. Print becomes an agent for interrogating inherited societal norms. Curator: So while on the surface, it reads as a simple period joke… Editor: It’s deeply embedded in the very material and social realities of late 18th-century France. I will walk away today thinking more deeply about printed pamphlets.