With the Sun, Moon, Mars and Pluto in conjunction in the 8th house, we could be forgiven for expecting another Sutcliffe. Daumier was certainly aggressive and extremely sharp in dishing out his attacks. But of course the whole stellium is in Pisces so its unlikely to be expressed through direct physical violence.

Satire as an art form has incredible power to undermine preconceptions in an indirect way. This is how Pisces attacks its targets.

Daumier’s acid pen quickly earned him a notoriety that was not without its downside. His 1831 engraving of the bourgeois King Louis Philippe in the guise of an enormous glutton with a pear-shaped head–which became the caricaturist’s shorthand for the pudgy monarch, landed Daumier in prison for six months.

Like many people with Pluto aspecting the Sun and Moon at birth, Daumier did not live long enough to experience a major transit of the planet, but his experience in prison coincided with Saturn being in Virgo opposite his 8th house stellium.

Undeterred by this experience, he followed up by heaping scorn on the entire government with a collection of clay busts. These were portraits of politicians and magistrates, pompous asses with ravenous mouths, bulbous noses, triple chins, ruthless and mean spirited.

Daumier’s political protest is evident through his paintings. He powerfully depicts the cold-blooded massacre of poor, innocent dwellers by troops called out to quell an uprising. He also portrays insurgency with workers, arms raised in protest and sketches of immigrants fleeing some invisible catastrophe or misery.

Honore Daumier was one of the most popular artists of his time, who inspired Cezanne and Picasso. Charles Baudelaire called him  “One of the most important men I will not say only in caricature but in the whole of modern art.”

Charles Baudelaire was a poet and one of the major innovators in French literature. His works show the rejection of the belief in the supremacy of nature and the fundamental goodness of man as typically espoused by the romantics in favor of a new urban sensibility, an awareness of individual moral complexity, an interest in vice, decadence and sensual and aesthetically pleasures.

He is credited with coining the term “modernity” to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture that experience.

In many ways he is a much more classic 8th house stellium character than Daumier. But then again his planets were in Aries, a much more directly assertive and self centred sign.

Daumier’s Piscean concern for the suffering of the masses is absent. Baudelaire’s view of politics and ordinary people can be understood from this quote

“There is no form of rational and assured government save an aristocracy. A monarchy or a republic, based upon democracy, are equally absurd and feeble…. There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable, that is to say, to practise what they call professions.”

His Sun’s conjunction with Saturn showed a liking for the dark side and an Arien 8th house tendency to explore it in depth, come what may. It is alleged that Baudelaire advocated satanism, he certainly experienced drug altering states of mind.

His view on love – “There is an invincible taste for prostitution in the heart of man, from which comes his horror of solitude. He wants to be ‘two’. The man of genius wants to be ‘one’… It is this horror of solitude, the need to lose oneself in the external flesh, that man nobly calls ‘the need to love’.”