A man in a nightshirt and cotton cap lies dead on his back beside an unmade bed, with dark stains on the floor around him. Half hidden beneath him lies the body of a small child; an old man's head lies at lower right, and another body sprawls in the shadows at left. The printed title below reads Rue Transnonain, le 15 avril 1834. Honoré Daumier recorded a real massacre.

During the April 1834 revolt in Paris, set off by the uprising of Lyon's silk weavers, shots were fired at government troops from a house on the Rue Transnonain, and in reprisal the soldiers killed its residents indiscriminately, old men, women and children included. Daumier shows the victims in their nightclothes, surprised in their sleep. The lithograph was plate 24 of L'Association mensuelle, Charles Philipon's monthly print series, issued with Philipon's commentary in the summer of 1834. Appearing alongside Ledru-Rollin's pamphlet on the killings, the print seems to have helped set off the official inquiry.

It became Daumier's most famous lithograph and fixed his reputation as a political artist; Baudelaire singled out the child crushed beneath the father. This impression, on chine collé, was given by Ralph King in 1924. It is in the Cleveland Museum of Art in Cleveland.