Enough with your pirate propaganda! How do you expect dead artists to pay the bills? You filthy utopian anarchist!
The artist pays the bills by selling the (commercial) rights to their work. Those rights will be more valuable, if they last longer. That calculation is independent of the vagaries of the artist's longevity. (And in fact, it might make more sense to give rights a flat x years since creation, instead of tying it to whether the artist eats her vegetables and exercises.)
In this case, Baldus died in 1889, so any of his works would have entered the public domain in 1939, in accordance with French law at the time -- the Literary and Artistic Property Act of 1793 established a copyright term of lifetime + 10 years, which was then extended to 50 years by the Literary and Artistic Property Act of 1866. The next extension to lifetime + 70 for general works* in 1992 came well beyond the point Baldus's work would have entered the public domain.
* Copyright term was previously extended in the 1950s to lifetime + 70 years specifically for musical compositions.