The Frogs Who Desired A King - Commentary, Analysis and Depiction

Commentary, Analysis and Depiction

The original context of the story, as related by Phaedrus, makes it clear that people feel the need of laws but are impatient of personal restraint. His closing advice is to be content for fear of worse. By the time of William Caxton, who published the first version in English, the lesson drawn is that 'he that hath liberty ought to kepe it wel, for nothyng is better than liberty'. In his version, too, it is a heron rather than a snake that is sent as king. A later commentator, the Royalist Roger L'Estrange, sums up the situation thus: 'The mob are uneasy without a ruler. They are as restless with one; and oftner they shift, the worse they are: so that Government or no Government, a King of God’s making or of the Peoples, or none at all, the Multitude are never to be satisfied.'

Yet another view was expressed by German theologian Martin Luther in his "On Governmental Authority" (1523). There he speaks of the fewness of good rulers, taking this lack as a punishment for human wickedness. He then alludes to this fable to illustrate how humanity deserves the rulers it gets: 'frogs must have their storks.'

The story was one of the 38 Aesop's fables chosen by Louis XIV of France for the labyrinth of Versailles, a hedge maze of hydraulic statues created for him in 1669 in the Gardens of Versailles, at the suggestion of Charles Perrault. It is likely he was aware of its interpretation in favour of contentment with the status quo. Jean de la Fontaine's fable of Les grenouilles qui desirent un roi (III.4) follows the Phaedrus version fairly closely and repeats the conclusion there. In setting the scene, however, he pictures the frogs as 'tiring of their democratic state', taking in 1668 much the same sardonic stance as Roger L'Estrange would do in 1692. La Fontaine was writing shortly after the restoration of the monarchy in England following a period of republican government; L'Estrange made his comment three years after a revolution had overthrown the restored regime there and installed another.

As soon as the French had their own experience of regime-change, illustrators began to express their feelings through this fable particularly. A cartoon dated 1791 pictures frogs fleeing into their pond from a party of armed frogs, in reference to Jean Sylvain Bailly's calling out the troops to disperse rioters after the decapitation of the king. In the following century, the caricaturist Grandville turned to book illustration after a censorship law made life difficult for him. In his 1838 edition of La Fontaine's fables, it is a recognisably imperial stork who struts through the water wearing a laurel crown, cheered on one side by sycophantic supporters and causing havoc on the other. Ernest Griset (1844–1907) was the son of political refugees from yet another change of regime. His horrific picture of a skeletal stork seated on a bank and swallowing his prey appeared in an edition of Aesop's fables from the 1870s. It is his comment on the second Napoleonic regime that had driven his parents into exile.

The gloom of 19th century illustrators was mitigated by a more light-hearted touch in the following century. In the 1912 edition of Aesop's Fables, Arthur Rackham chose to picture the carefree frogs at play on their King Log, a much rarer subject among illustrators. But the popular artist Benjamin Rabbier, having already illustrated a collection of La Fontaine's fables, subverted the whole subject in a later picture, Le Toboggan (The sleigh-run, 1925). In this, the stork too has become a willing plaything of the frogs as they gleefully hop onto his back and use his bill as a water-slide.