Manufacture du Catholique

This hand-colored lithograph satirizes Catholic religious instruction, depicting a workshop where clergy literally manufacture religious devotion. Figures in clerical dress operate at desks and furnaces, producing what appears to be sanctified goods for an eager public. The scene mocks ecclesiastical authority and mechanized faith during a period of intense church-state conflict in post-Napoleonic Europe. The print inherits the visual language of eighteenth-century satirists like Hogarth and Gillray—theatrical staging, symbolic objects, and grotesquely characterized figures—while employing the lithographic process favored by Daumier and his contemporaries. It participates in a broader tradition of political caricature using workshop and factory imagery to critique institutions as corrupt, formulaic enterprises.