The artist Honoré Daumier (1808-79) gained early notoriety after being jailed for a notorious caricature of King Louis-Philippe. He continued to test the electric fence of shifting censorship laws throughout his career, using experimental portrait strategies and subversive reinterpretations of seventeenth-century literature. This book examines Daumier's deep and abiding engagement with the authors Jean de La Fontaine, Molière, and Miguel de Cervantes, all of whom were masters of dissimulation and critique in their own time. The resulting artworks functioned as critiques of authority in large part because their publics understood Daumier's appropriations as coded forms of dissent. The authors offered vital representational strategies to the visual arts, and their famous characters, narratives, and motifs allowed Daumier to filter his political statements through a newly glorified literary past. Featuring more than a hundred illustrations, Art against censorship offers a compelling account of this remarkable artist's work, in which literature, theatre, and politics converge in a way unique in art history.