La cour ordonne que le cheval et le cabriolet…

Honoré Daumier's lithograph — stone-printed, with the velvety tonal range that made lithography the dominant satirical medium of 1830s Paris — crowds a courtroom with judges elevated on the bench, robed advocates, and a cluster of bourgeois litigants whose expressions range from anxious petition to smug confidence. Daumier's *Gens de Justice* series targeted the French legal profession with sustained contempt: lawyers are bloated with self-importance, judges remote behind institutional dignity, ordinary citizens dwarfed by a system that serves itself. This tradition — Hogarth's corrupt magistrates, Rowlandson's grotesque barristers — flows directly into the sequential panel narrative that became the modern comic strip.