Mix The New Masses and The New Yorker together, shake hard, Gallicize, move back a century to the time when to be Left in France was to be Republican, and you have something like La Caricature and its daily successor Le Charivari, the periodicals by which Honore Daumier earned 30 years' living, six months in jail, and undying fame as an artist. Beginning in the second decade after the Napoleonic Wars, hardworking lithographers including Traviès, Gavarni and Grandville filled these sheets with caricatures of Bonapartist reactionaries and canting bourgeois. Daumier, who worked hardest...