“He probably caught cold from his own response!”
The visual joke here is quite simple, with the title punning on the original Italian sense of influenza as influence. Yet the underlying source of its amusement to contemporaries is not readily apparent to us today. The bedridden figure depicted is Austrian Minister-President Count Taaffe, who came down with a mild case of influenza late in December 1889, at the height of the European epidemic that winter. A masterful coalition-building aristocrat who had balanced Austro-German nationalism against Bohemian-Czech nationalism for much of the 1880s, mostly in service to conservative Liberal and noble landowning interests, Taaffe had finally been stymied by the Bohemian diet elections a few months earlier, when the Young Czech nationalists gained the upper hand. Taaffe’s failing confidence in his own rhetorical ability to sustain coalition politics seems to be the central object of the satire here. At his bedside is a bottle of János Hunyadi Bitters, a real product borrowing on the fame of a fifteenth-century Hungarian military hero–a marvelous touch.
(Šípy, Prague, 1889)
Taaffe’s declining fortunes are satirized in the Polish magazine Szczutek (Lwów, 1892):
Sic Transit Pestilentia 