The Crayfish at Longchamps

In March 1822 the French government instituted new restrictions on the press that would bring to trial any newspaper or journal expressing opinions perceived as potentially damaging to the Crown, to the church, or to public peace and morality. Delacroix's political satires created in the months following the institution of this law ridicule the backward-looking censors. Two enormous crayfish carry a surreal set of riders. The one in the foreground bears an old woman who stands for the Royalist newspaper La Quotidienne, which had nothing to fear from the new law, as well as several press censors and academicians in old-fashioned dress. One of these shouts, "En arrière, marche!" (Backward, march!). The second crayfish bears a conical sugarloaf (pain de sucre) seated on a chair (chaise) alongside a banner displaying the scissors of the censor - an allusion to the censors Marie-Joseph Pain and La Chaize. A long explanatory text accompanying the image in the leftist newspaper Le Miroir refers to the crayfish mounts as "perfectly suited to these men who never rose to any heights and usually walked backward." In the background, elegantly dressed horsemen ride toward the unfinished Arc de Triomphe, a symbol of the opposing liberal Bonapartist ideology.