In the years before Delacroix established his reputation as a major painter, he produced some political cartoons and caricatures unlike anything he was to create for the rest of this life. This book demonstrates that Delacroix's interest in political cartooning was far more significant than has hitherto been assumed. Placing these cartoons against the events and ideas of Restoration political and cultural life, the author shows how they reveal Delacroix's youthful radicalism. In them he openly declared himself the defender of liberal Bonapartist bourgeois values, embracing the modern era and its belief in progress, renovation, and a democratic meritocracy, and heaping satirical scorn on royalty, court, nobility, and clergy. In these cartoons Delacroix also waged war against academic classicism as representative of the loathed political reactionaries, opting instead for romanticism, a movement full of the innovative promises of the new age. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer places Delacroix's caricatures within the context of contemporary ideas about the aesthetic value of the grotesque and naivete, the nature of romantic comedy, and the tragic-comic duality of the romantic hero.

She concludes that the cartoons witness Delacroix's early identification with the ideals and the aesthetic of romantic modernism. Illustrations in the book include not only Delacroix's early cartoons but also some of the later paintings to which his cartoons can be linked. In addition, the book has other satirical cartoons from the anti-Bourbon press, of interest not only in themselves but also as a means of elucidating the content of Delacroix's prints.