“I say to myself: would anybody imagine that we are coming from the Rue des Lombards?... We really don't look like confectioners at all,” plate 2 from Coquetry 1839

Honoré Daumier made this lithograph called “I say to myself: would anybody imagine that we are coming from the Rue des Lombards?... We really don't look like confectioners at all,” in France, sometime in the mid-19th century. Here we see a bourgeois couple, dressed to the nines, trying to pass themselves off as aristocrats. The title gives us an idea of what's going on here: they're trying to escape their origins as confectioners. Daumier was a master of social satire, and this print is a great example of his sharp wit. It’s making a point about class aspirations in 19th-century Paris. The cultural context is crucial: post-revolution France was a society in flux, where social mobility was becoming more possible, but old prejudices lingered. You can find a lot of Daumier’s work published in periodicals such as *Le Charivari*, a satirical magazine, which gives some idea of how the work circulated at the time. To really understand Daumier, we need to dig into sources like these, to understand how the artwork challenged or reinforced existing social norms.