London has it’s Tower of and France has it’s Vincennes Fortress. Now of course just for the tourists, it is fun to think of people like the Marquis de Sade and Mata Hari who paid for their crimes there. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
France post war does such a great job showing off their historic sights with tiny brightly colored, impressionistic images on the stamps. In the pre war, they were still showing the sights but with somber shading. When the subject is an old stone fortress used as a prison, it kind of works.
Todays stamp is issue A86, a 10 Franc stamp issued by France in 1938.It was a six stamp issue showing off various tourist sites. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 1.90. There is a version overstamped with a fifty percent denomination cut, put out during the German occupation. That stamp has the same value. It makes sense the defeat would be deflationary.
The site started has a hunting lodge for French Royalty around 1150 AD. Between the 14th and the 17th century it was expanded into what is shown on the stamp. By the 18th century, the area was becoming an eastern suburb of Paris and the structure was repurposed first for porcelain manufacturing and later as a prison. The first notorious prisoner was Jean Henri Latude. He would send a package filled with poison to aristocratic ladies anonymously and then warn them. This was in hopes of rewards. This worked but often got him arrested. Latute had a remarkable ability to escape both from Vincennes and the Bastille and wrote pamphlets of his exploits and prison life that made him sort of a folk hero at the time of the French revolution.
The next notorious inmate was the Marquis de Sade. He was an author of erotic stories and like Latude lived a desicated life. Prostitutes in Paris complained to the police of rough treatment and the police put him under surveillance. Soon he was under arrest and a death sentence but like Latude he escaped Vincennes. It would be years later that he would be punished by Napoleon, this time for the crime of writing his dirty books.
The last notorious resident against her will was in 1917 and known as Mata Hari. Her real name was Margaretha Zelle and was born into a well off Dutch family. When her father went bankrupt, her parents divorced and her situation darkened. She ended up in Paris as a cortesan and exotic dancer. Her native Holland was neutral leaning German and she was arrested for spying for the Germans during the war. She admitted taking money to spy but claimed she didn’t actually do it. She was convicted and blew kisses at her firing squad as she was executed. There is a group of mainly Dutch fans of hers that believe she was made a scapegoat.
In the late 1960s, a more urban Vincennes tried to rebrand by opening a large open admission university called University of Paris 8. It was a time of campus radicalism and it did not go well. In 1972, the janitors went on strike and invaded classrooms calling the Instructors scabs and demanding solidarity. A few years later the University lost accreditation when a philosophy professor was caught handing out course credit to random people she met on the city bus. She explained herself by announcing that she was a Maoist and that the University was a capitalist institution and so it was her job to make it function poorly. In the early 1980s France moved the University out of Vincennes.
Well my drink is empty and so I will have to wait till tomorrow when there will be another story to be learned from stamp collecting.