[AFFAIRE DREYFUS] Musée des horreurs - Affiche originale lithographiée en couleurs - n°27 "Ministre-bâillon"

Original color lithographed poster depicting Georges Leygues as a donkey.
Transverse folds and minute marginal tears without loss.

Distributed between October 1899 and December 1900 in a France inflamed by the Dreyfus Affair, these immense satirical color portraits are the work of Victor Lenepveu who announced the publication of 150 then 200 drawings and ultimately produced only about fifty. Despite the 1881 press freedom law allowing the distribution of politically subversive imagery, the publication of this nightmarish pantheon was interrupted by order of the Ministry of the Interior.

The fragility of the paper and the imposing format of these extremely violent posters, as well as their almost immediate seizure by the police, contributed to the disappearance of these caricatures which nevertheless strongly marked public opinion.

These horrors benefited from extensive promotion by antisemitic newspapers which announced a fantasized print run of 300,000 copies, thus insinuating the success of antisemitic ideas among the population.

On October 1st, 1899, L'Intransigeant announced the publication of the Musée des horreurs in its columns: "A draftsman of great wit, with a pencil stroke of intense comic effect, M. V. Lenepveu, has had the happy idea of inaugurating a series of portraits of the most famous sellouts from the Dreyfusard rabble. The title of this series 'Musée des Horreurs' is sufficiently suggestive and clearly indicates what it promises. [...] It is the Hayard house that will put on sale, starting today, number 1 of this hilarious series." First a street peddler then a bookseller-publisher, Napoléon Hayard (known as Léon Hayard) specialized in the commercialization of ephemera and anti-Dreyfusard and antisemitic posters.

However, only very rare copies in fine condition of these pamphleteering caricatures that participated in the social and political fracture of France survive today. Published during the boom of the written press - at the same time as Émile Zola's famous "J'accuse...!" - these propaganda documents had a significant impact particularly on younger generations and prefigured the ideological violence of the 20th century.