Stuff You Missed in History Class · iHeartPodcasts

Théophile Steinlen Beyond 'Le Chat Noir'

March 4, 2026·38 min·3 clips

Steinlen smuggled a cat into prison to visit anarchist friends and co-wrote a book mocking the French legal system.

Steinlen appears here through his politics. The thread runs through Ernest Guigou, an anarchist publisher, Charles Malato, and L'Attaque, the weekly paper whose columns kept pushing readers away from almost every other political position. The stakes tighten around May Day. In 1890, the first May Day in France was planned as a worker strike with a demand for eight hours of work, eight hours of sleep, and eight hours of work. Political papers covered that pressure, including L'Attaque. Malato's lead-up article went further. It gave instructions for making bombs, and the state came down on both writer and publisher. Both men were arrested, convicted of inciting violence, and sentenced to 15 months in prison. Steinlen did not hover at a polite distance. While they were serving time, he visited them in Pelagie, made drawings there, and joined a three-man collaboration shaped by confinement. The book's title does some work. Prison fin de siècle, Souvenir de Pelagie is less a plain account of suffering behind bars than a sharp argument about legal absurdity. That matters because the excerpt is careful about where the anger sits. Pelagie may be darkened with age, but the book is not mainly selling prison misery. Guigou and Malato point at the French legal system as the thing worth exposing, with Steinlen's drawings pulled into the case. Even the preface has a dry smile. It admits prefaces are rarely read, then argues that these supposedly insignificant personalities deserve attention. That is the lane here: an artist caught up in strikes, newspapers, prosecutions, and prison humor as political critique.

As heard by us

A compact look at Steinlen's anarchist ties, prison drawings, and the politics behind more than Le Chat Noir.

Theophile Steinlen emerges as more than the artist attached to Le Chat Noir, with the episode placing him inside the charged politics of 1890s France.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Steinlen's art meets anarchist publishing, prison visits, and a French legal-system takedown.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Stuff You Missed in History Class