Politics and Postage Stamps: The Postal Issues of the French State and Empire 1940-1944

Abstract

Since the mid-nineteenth century, postage stamps have ratified political change in France. The first French postage stamps were created a few months after the proclamation of the Second Republic and issued in 1849; these stamps were engraved with the head of the goddess of agriculture, Ceres, symbol of liberty and the Republic, and later with the head of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, president of the Republic. The establishment of the Second Empire necessitated inscriptional changes: in 1853 EMPIRE FRANC. replaced REPUB. FRANC. Seventeen years later in 1870 the leaders of the newly proclaimed Third Republic restored the symbol and the legend of the Republic to postage stamps; for seventy years French stamps bore the words REPUBLIQUE FRANqAISE, the abbreviated REPUB. FRANC., or the initials R.F.1 With the collapse of the Third Republic in 1940 and the creation of the French State, the Republic's successor, French postage stamps once again documented the realities of French political life.