Emigration, from the series Les Actualités

In 1855, a new tax defined dogs as taxable luxury items. It was believed that workers’ dogs were dirty disease carriers, and that only well-to-do bourgeois families could give a dog a proper home. When the law went into effect in 1856, almost 80,000 dogs were declared in Paris alone. Here Daumier imagines the rest of France’s dogs emigrating to neighboring countries in an act of doggie tax evasion.