Charles Philipon

Charles Philipon (19 April 1800 – 25 January 1861). Born in Lyon, he was a French lithographer, caricaturist and journalist. He was the editor of the La Caricature and of Le Charivari, both satirical political journals.

Charles Philipon came from a small, middle-class, Lyons family. His father, Étienne Philipon, was a hatter and wallpaper manufacturer. He enthusiastically welcomed the revolution of 1789. According to Pierre Larousse his ancestors included Manon Roland, Armand Philippon, and Louis Philipon de La Madelaine.

After attending school in Lyons and Villefranche-sur-Saône, Charles Philipon studied drawing at the École Impériale des Beaux-arts de Lyon. He left his hometown in 1819 to work under the artist Antoine Gros in Paris but returned at his father's behest in 1821 to join the family business, designing fabric for three years. Though this activity did not suit him, it left its mark on his subsequent work. During hard economic and social times in 1824, he took part in a Lyons carnival parade that was deemed seditious; he was arrested, but ultimately charges were dropped.

Charles Philipon finally left Lyon for Paris where he reunited with old friends from the workshop Gros. One of them, Charlet, a renowned artist, took him under his wing and introduced him to lithography, a technique spreading in France in the 1820s. Philipon found employment as a lithographer and artist drawing for picture books and fashion magazines; he showed invention by converting a lead chimney to a lithographic machine . He bonded with the Liberals and satirists of the day, attended the Grandville workshop(1827), and two years later joined forces with the creators of the newspaper La Silhouette, on which he worked as an editor and designer.

While Philipon's financial contribution to the company was small, his editorial contribution seems to have focused on the organization of the lithographic department, which gave the paper its originality inasmuch as the same importance was given to the illustration as to the text. Whereas La Silhouette previously had no definite political line, by July 1830 it had developed a more aggressive approach. It is in this journal that on April 1, 1830, Philipon published the first political cartoon, " Charles X Jesuit ."

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