Bidspirit auction | campagnes

campagnes - GUILLAUME (Albert) MES CAMPAGNES: Album Militaire Inédit . Préface de Georges Courteline. Paris: H. Simons Empis, s.d. [c.1896]. [8] pp., 19 est.: il.; 355 mm. Mes Campagnes is a satirical album with a distinctly military inspiration, in which Albert Guillaume brings together a sequence of scenes and characters—exercises, barracks life, command and troop figures, petty miseries and vanities of daily life—observed with a simultaneously biting and light eye, typical of Parisian caricature at the turn of the century. The preface by Georges Courteline , a master of critical humor and portraits of bureaucracy and institutions, frames the volume within a register of social comedy: it is not a ”memoir” in the strict sense, but a gallery of episodes and attitudes where the uniform functions as theater, exposing the contrast between the solemnity of official discourse and the prosaic reality of service. A curious and interesting graphic testimony to the Belle Époque's sensitivity to social criticism, combining visual narrative and spirit of the age. ! Please note that this translated text was generated by Google. !