"Ratapoil was not a person, but a political concept. Gustave Geffroy called him the résumé of an epoch, the agitator who prepared the coup d'état. For Daumier, Ratapoil exemplified the agent provocateur, the hired bully, who by means of threats and bribes, rounded up the votes which gave Louis Napoléon's power."
(J. L. Wasserman, op. cit.)

Daumier's original terracotta model dates from circa 1850. Daumier's colleague Victor Geoffroy-Deschaume took two plaster casts from the original and, after the artist's death, used one as the mould for a small numbered bronze edition cast by Siot-Decauville. The same plaster then passed from Madame Daumier to Armand Dayot, Arsène Alexandre, Roger Miles and Henry Bing. Bing then used it to make an edition of twenty bronzes in 1925, cast by Alexis Rudier.