Here is a rare copy of La Menagerie Imperiale.   It is a cover containing all 31 prints and a cover sheet.  There is foxing and chipping to the edges but almost all of the prints are present and colorful.

Here is a brief history from Napoleon.org:

The Second Empire, it is true, was built upon the idea of the First, but the liberalisation of the Second (from 1861 on) was not a step that the uncle ever took; at least not until the extraordinary Hundred Days, and even then only half-heartedly. As a result, the political caricatures that assailed Napoleon I (though remarkably effective) came from abroad. With the acceptance of a loyal opposition, Napoleon III was to prepare the ground for political caricature that would first destabilise the regime and then later destroy its reputation, this time from within France.

The artist of the caricature here (signed simply as ‘H’ on the cover of the collection) was Paul Hadol, born in Remiremont in north eastern France in 1835. He later moved to Paris where he would establish himself as an illustrator and portrait cartoonist, working under his own name, or sometimes under his pseudonym ‘White’. Throughout his career he worked for newspapers and magazines such as ‘Charivari’, the ‘Gaulois’, and ‘La Vie Parisienne’, producing at the beginning of his career portrait caricatures of figures from the world of music and the stage before later turning to political figures and subjects. He also created many theatre posters. He died in 1875 in Paris.

His best-known work today is “La Ménagerie Impériale”, an undated series of 31 broadsheet, unbound portrait caricatures negatively portraying the Emperor, his family members, and key figures of the Second Empire as animals in a sort of zoo. The collection was produced by the printers Coulboeuf and sold at the Bureau des Annonces, 11 rue Taitbout in Paris and also at the office of the satirical journal L’éclipse¸ a paper that Hadol worked for, founded in 1868 out of the remains of a periodical called La Lune that had been banned for offensive caricatures of Napoleon III.

The cover for the caricature series shows Marianne wearing the Phrygian bonnet of the Republic as a female fairground figure, pointing to the sign for the Imperial Menagerie/Zoo. She bids viewers go behind a curtain to see the show. At the entrance stands the inscription “Le grand vautour de Sedan” [The Great Sedan Vulture] under a very rough copy of the caricature of Napoleon III, thereby offering the date of the defeat at Sedan (1 September 1870) as a terminus post quem for the series. This, the first of the 31 illustrations to be found inside, shows Napoleon III as a ‘fierce’, ‘cowardly’ vulture, clutching a maimed woman (marked as ‘France’) in his bloody talons. Other images from the collection include the Empress Eugenie as a crane in a ‘foolish pose’ and Pierre Bonaparte as a ‘wild’ and ‘brutal’ wild boar (he killed the journalist Victor Noir in a duel earlier in the year (10 January), causing outrage in opposition and republican circles). Ministers and other Second Empire figures such as Rouheur, for example, are likewise brutally pilloried.


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