Generating desire: Chocolate, chromolithographs, and Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy's fairy tales

Abstract

There existed a fascinating means of collecting fairy tales in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that has hitherto remained unexplored: the collection of chromolithographs or “chromos,” used as a marketing tool by French department stores like Le Bon Marché and by chocolate producers like Poulain. Scholars such as Emily Cormack, Laura Kalba, and Pearl Michel have carried out essential research on the deployment of chromos in the rise of consumer society, but this is the first study with a specific focus on chromos that feature fairy tales. In mid-century, Victor-Auguste Poulain, a French chocolatier from Blois, found the means to mass produce chocolate and sought to transform the nineteenth-century conception of chocolate from being an elite privilege or a medicinal product to being a plearurable food accessible to the middle classes. It was under the direction of Victor-Auguste's son Albert that chromos, including fairy-tale themed chromos, became an important marketing tool for the company in the 1880s. Children in particular were encouraged to purchase the mass-produced chocolate by the insertion into the packaging of fragments of tales like “The White Cat,” “The Doe in the Woods,” and “Beauty with the Golden Hair.” Each chocolate bar would include a beautiful color chromo of the tale on the recto, with the narrative fragment on the verso. This marketing strategy becomes a desire-generating machine: the desire for more story fuels the desire to purchase more chocolate, which subsequently fuels the desire for more story. In effect, as I hope to show through this case study of Poulain's use of tales by d’Aulnoy, narrative desire gets converted into consumer desire through Poulain's marketing campaign.