Tag: France stamp

At a time when all this stuff is just being erased as evil, I thought it might be fun to travel back to a time when things could at least be debated. 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.

I am fond of many French colonial stamps with their exotic views of far off colonies. So a total Empire set should really be exciting. Alas this stamp has too much going on and the rest of the issue is a small bulk mail stamp of a Fachie woman that is very familiar to stamp collectors.

Todays stamp is issue A42, a 1.5 Franc stamp issued by France itself in 1930. It was a five stamp issue in various denominations. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 65 cents used. The exposition was a few years too early for the stamp souvenir sheets that would have been part of later expositions. It should be remembered though that French colonies themselves issued stamps as part of the exposition, and often were available to collectors at the colony’s pavilion at the expo.

World War I had a big negative effect on the prospects for European power’s colonial experiment. Most of the fighting was in Europe but there was a widespread sense that the natives of the colonies did not do their part in service to the mother country. There was further contreversy coming from the left in the Soviet Union and Weimar Germany that the whole endeavor of colonies leads to decadence, and race mixing. Our friends on the left don’t phrase things that way any more but it was an earlier time.

The six month long Exposition Coloniale Internationale was set at the Bois de Vincennes, the largest park in Paris. The park was laid out by Napoleon III who remember had lost a European war while much of his Army was tied down in the colonies. A reaction to the criticism was that France would be portrayed as not assimilating the colonies but their partners. Pavilions were in the local style and natives were brought in to demonstrate the native culture of the colonies and create art and crafts. One of the most popular pavilions was a recreation of the Angkor Wat Cambodian Temple. Smaller colonial powers like Portugal, Belgium, Holland and even the USA participated.  The expo was well attended and there was a spike afterward of French applying to serve in the colonies.

There was however some pushback. A Dutch recreation of Balinese Mero temple burned down under mysterious circumstances. The pavilion contained a great deal of the collection of the Batavia Museum. The was also a counter expo put on by French Marxists that had displays of the horrors of forced labor and compared in a positive light the Stalin era Soviet nationalities policy to the European colonial experiment. The Marxist expo attracted few visitors.

The legacy of the Expo was not great. A Permanent Colonial Museum was opened at the edge of the park. It proved not permanent, the building now houses a museum to immigrants in France and the former collection is mainly in storage at a museum honoring former French President Chirac. The biggest legacy seems to be a spike in the consumption of North African and Vietnamese food in Paris that has yet to dissipate. Maybe the 1920s lefties had a point? The Batavia Museum in the Dutch East Indies used the fire insurance payout to fund a major expansion back home. This is now the Indonesia National Museum. So in a way the colonial power is still there teaching the natives of their own culture. Funny how that works.

Well my drink is empty and here’s hoping that our hobby is not itself erased as part of our current leftie friends’ desire for a new year 1. Come again soon for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting. First published in 2020.

After the war, France like so many nations had a mixed fleet of America DC3 and German Ju 52 war surplus. They were old designs more suited to passengers than cargo. Thus France contracted a design for a proper freighter well stressed for heavy loads and  convenient rear cargo doors. However the need turned out to be moving paratroopers to far flung outposts under attack. 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.

The stamp came before the Noratlas’s many uses in combat. So here we get not a formation of the plane with paratroopers being dropped, but a peaceful blue single example perhaps on a regular supply run. So a stamp near the end of the planes life instead of the begining might have presented a different picture.

Todays stamp is issue C30, 1 200 Franc airmail stamp issued by France on January 16th, 1954. It was a four stamp issue displaying French aircraft. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents used.

The development of the Noratlas had it’s ups and downs. The prototype with French engines was underpowered so a licence to manufacture the more powerful British Hercules engine was arranged. In practice the plane was still underpowered so late production examples had two small jets added to the wingtips just used for takeoff only. The program received a huge boost when the newly reconstituted German air force placed a big order, as they read their situation as similar to the French. In practice the modern German military didn’t move around much so the planes were not much used. Soon Germany began giving them away to countries like Israel, Greece, and Portugal that had much use for the Nortalas. Israel had been forced to buy two from France in order to also get the Mystere fighters that they really wanted. Once in service, they proved useful in all the Arab-Israeli wars to come, so they allowed Germany to gift many more.

The first big combat was taking French paratroopers into Port Said during the canal crisis. Then the combat swiched to Portugal, when a squadron of the second hand German transports was located in each African colony Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea Bissau on call to take paratroopers to reinforce outposts under attack. The never ending war was so unpopular, that when the colonies were abandoned in the mid 1970s, the Nortalas planes were just left there. The post war Portuguese military was no longer going to move around much, German style.

The last large scale combat was deep into the 1970s when the planes were quite old. Greece had been given a large fleet or Noratlases by Germany and when Turkey invaded Cyprus, the planes were tasked with moving a battalion of Rangers to Nicosia airport from Crete so it would not fall to the Turks. The Greeks were able to get 13 of their 15 planes flying and enough reinforcements were flown in to hold the airport. One Noratlas was however shot down with a great loss of life, it is believed by friendly fire.

The last user of the Noratlas was France. A few examples called Gabriel were used for electronic warfare into the late 1980s.

Well my drink is empty and the German Noratlas pup is now closed. Come again soon for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.

President Charles de Gaulle longed for a time when France itself was a major center of power. Thus when the USA and the USSR were busy going to space, it was a natural that France became the third country to start a space program. 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.

This stamp celebrated the twentieth anniversary of CNES, the French space agency. The single issue crams a lot of space activity onto the stamp. However the reality was that de Gaulle’s vision of a proprietary space program was no longer operative. The facilities had been integrated into the wider European program and even the active French astronauts transferred.

Todays stamp is issue A938, a 2.60 Franc stamp issued by France on May 15th, 1982, a little late for the 20th anniversary being celebrated. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 50 cents used.

Things went fast for the French space program under de Gaulle. The CNES was to manage the program and train astronauts. By 1963, a small payload unmanned rocket named Berenice was launched from a launch site in Algeria. As that site would not be available much longer, new space centers were built in Toulouse and in French Giana.

They eventually built 12 Berenice rockets but they were small and could only get satellites into a low, 600 mile up orbit. It was a start though, and since France has been the spearhead behind the European Space Agency’s long line of ever bigger but unmanned Ariane rockets. French astronauts have been to space, but only as guests on American and Soviet/Russian space missions.

That is not to say there is nothing going on these days at the French CNES space agency, which has a near 3 billion Euro a year budget. In 2020 an unmanned solar orbiter was launched by a private company in the USA for a seven year mission to study the heliosphere of the sun. There is also a seven year program in collaboration with Germany to develop a reusable, cheaper, and more environmentally sensitive replacement for the Ariane one use rockets. They hope to have the new rocket flying by 2026. A program that takes over 10 years is not very likely to have any cost advantage short of some wild accounting.

President de Gaulle was older by the 1960s so could not be around to keep the early momentum of the French space program going. I wonder if he realized what a do nothing Eurocrat boondoggle it would degenerate into, he would have skipped the whole thing?

Well my drink is empty. I notice on the quite fancy website of the CNES, there is a place for PhDs to apply for grants. I have a PhD, how about a grant for a stamp gasbagger? I bet you have funded stupider. Just kidding. Come again soon for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.

The ancient or the modern. It is easy to both idealize the ancient and get bogged down with the modern. It was understandable that a modern elite might view backwards toward Greece as a roadmap toward self improvement. 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 of The Philatelist.

An athlete celebrating his victory wearing a toga. Not how the Olympics are seen today. A fitting way to show the games as they were the last ones organized  by the Frenchman Pierre, Barron de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics. Coubertin believed that emulating the ancients was a way to uplift modern elites to be better. The 1928 Olympic stamps showed modern athletes and showed additional modernity by having a surcharge to help pay for the elite’s games. I don’t think the Barron would have approved.

Todays stamp is issue A27, a 50 Centimes stamp issued by France on April 1st, 1924. It was part of a four stamp issue for the Olympics in various denominations. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth $5.75 used. A imperforate version of this stamp is worth $1,000.

Pierre de Coubertin was a French nobleman who was dismayed by the French loss in the Franco-Prussian War. In the same period the British Empire was at it’s height. He attributed the relative success of Britain to the elite public school system that many of it’s leaders passed through. The English public schools had played each other in athletics modeled after how they imagined the ancient Greek Olympic games. Coubertin thought the lack of athletics in the equivalent French schools left the aristocracy worthless and weak. He conceived a revived Olympics as a way to turn the system around. The events chosen were demonstrations of manly strength and soldierly skills. Intrinsic in the vision were amateur athletes and gentlemanly sportsmanship that tended to keep out potential participants from the working classes.

Coubertin’s vision of the modern Olympics was naturally watered down after his retirement. One of the most famous stories from the 1924 Olympics was told by the movie “Chariots of Fire” from 1981. The movie told the story of a Jewish English runner who competed and won despite his wealthy but less than Noble background. He further offended by hiring a coach as part of his training, that some felt violated the spirit of the amateur athlete. The story is told as a hero overcoming anti-Semitism and was that, but also demonstrates that the times were changing.

The 1924 Olympics were played at the Stade Olympique de Columbas first built in 1907. The stadiums renovations have seen it shrink from 50,000 to 15,000 seats. It is still slated to host the field hockey event when Paris hosts the 2024 Summer Olympics. The 1924 Olympics only had revenue of 50 % of the costs of the games, despite large crowds. The much more commercial 1928 games, after Coubertin’s retirement, almost broke even. Something gained, something lost.

Well my drink is empty and I pour another to toast the participants of all the modern Olympic games. The Barron believed that participating was far more important than who won. Come again for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting. First published in 2019.

In modern times TB kills a million and a half people a year. That is 15 percent of the people that catch the active form of it. So progress in fighting it deserves to be honored, even a 100 years later in the form of German physician Robert Koch. 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.

There is a lot going on on this stamp with a portrait of Dr. Koch, lab equipment. and even a rendering of the TB bacteria growing on a lad culture. Not sure the rendering in black and white was the best choice. It resembles a pre painting artist sketch rather than a finished work.

Todays stamp is issue A948, 2.60 Franc stamp issued by France on November 13, 1982, the 100th anniversary of Dr. Koch isolating the bacteria that causes tuberculosis. It was a single stamp issue. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 40 cents used.

Tuberculosis seems to have originated near the Horn of Africa around the time the first man also originated in Africa. Africa is still the most likely place to find an outbreak. Luckily 90 % of the people that catch it get the latent variety that can’t be passed and has no symptoms. The bacteria attacks the lungs and causes shortness of breath, bloody flem, night sweats, and weight loss. The weight loss is why the disease was traditionally called consumption.

Building on the earlier work of Bengamin Marten who postulated that consumption was caused by a micro organism that is itself alive in consumption sufferers, German Robert Koch tried to isolate the tiny organism. The goal was then to grow the bacteria in a lab from which a vaccination could be developed. Working with Koch was Mr. Petrie of Petrie dish fame, so one can see how new this stuff all was. Koch announced that he had succeeded in 1882 and soon he won a Nobel Prize for his work.

It was not without controversy. French rival Louis Pasteur claimed that the fact that the bacteria was present did not prove causation. The rivalry got quite nasty. The real beef was that the two men had rival TB treatments in testing and the one that was accepted would get rich. Unfortunately neither solution worked as hoped.

In fact, Koch’s Tubercullan treatment actually made the disease worse. You are after all injecting someone with more of the bacteria from which he was already sick. Koch tried to keep secret the negative results and when he was found out, he was fired from his German government supported lab in Berlin.

There is now a vaccination for TB, but it is considered too dangerous to give unless one is already exposed to an outbreak. The treatment today is to administer antibiotics. As with many other bacteria  caused diseases, over time the bacteria becomes itself more resistant to antibiotics that don’t change over time.

Well my drink is empty. I wonder if I have been a little hard on Robert Koch. His discovery was important and being human, can he really be blamed for trying to cash in on the discovery? Come again next Monday for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.

It helps to have talent and important friends. It will not save you from the bubonic plague, but it can allow you to get a lot done. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage. open your picture Bible, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

France offered these oversized, well printed art stamps in the late sixties. Notice how the presentation is much less gaudy than the concurrent middle eastern Dune stamps on similar subjects. Despite being real stamps from a real country, the stamps share with the Dunes the trait of having very little value. I am trying to decide if that is a pity or just a great place to start a stamp collection.

Todays stamp is issue A430, a one Franc stamp issued by France on September 25th, 1965. This was part of a multitude of similarly formatted art stamps all with the one Franc denomination. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 30 cents whether used or unused.

The three Limbourg brothers were born in Nijmegen, Holland in the late 14th century. In 1398 their father died. They were then sent for by their uncle Jean Malouel, there are also Dutch versions of his name, who was a resident artist in the French and Burgundy Royal Courts. He got the three young men apprenticeships with the Paris goldsmithing guild.

On a trip home to visit their widowed mother, the young men were stopped and held for ransom in Brussels that was in a period of chaos. After their mother and the goldsmithing guild were unable to raise the ransom, Phillip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, boldly stepped in and paid the ransom. He did so out of respect for Jean Malouel. Once back in Paris, they were employed on a pet project of Phillip’s, creating an illistrated Bible, the Bible Moralisee. There exist still seven manuscripts of the work, intended for the French Royal families use. Phillip the Bold died in 1404 before the brothers Limbourg had finished the project.

The French Royal House of Valois was impressed with the work of the Limbourg Brothers, and Phillip’s brother, John the Magnificent, the Duke of Berry had a new project in mind for them. He imagined an illustrated devotional book called The very rich hours of the Duke of Berry. In it were over 200 illustrations that idealized Middle Ages life in the international Gothic style. This book is where the image on the stamp comes from. It is titled Leaving for the Hunt.

Keeping the Limbourg brothers working again became complicated. At age 24 Paul Limbourg fell for a French girl named Gillette. Her parents opposed the match, she was only 12. John the Magnificent had the girl confined until everyone agreed on the marraige. He may have been magnificent but that does not mean he did not overstep. The King intervened and had the girl released. Soon the couple snuck off and eloped.

In the first half of 1416, all under the age of 30, one by one John the Magnificent and all three Limbourg brothers died of the bubonic plague. The Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry  was unfinished. A later Duke of Savoy hired later Dutch painters to finish it. It is now in the pocession of the Conde’ Museum near Paris. Gillette survived the plague but hadn’t yet had children.

Well my drink is empty. You hear of course that having a Dutch uncle can be very helpful. For the Dutch brothers, having a French one wasn’t so bad either. Come again on Monday when there will be another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.

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.

Around the start of the twentieth century Paris was the center of the art world. Though many in Paris had traveled from elsewhere to be a part of it. First color was reimagined and then form itself was broken down to allow multiple perspectives within one work and then as war was darkening prospects, bright color was added by Orphist to break with a dark reality. All in 20 years in one city, well worth remembering. 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.

Todays stamp shows the painting “The Fourteenth of July” by French artist Roger de la Fresnaye. July 14 is Bastille Day in France. Given the politics of the avant-garde of the art world, it is a little surprising that patriotic themes were so common among the output. Of course the subjects are being treated to more than a grain or two of salt, but to modern eyes it is striking how much mind space this stuff occupied.

Todays stamp is issue A373, a 1 Franc stamp issued by France on November 10th, 1961. There was a long issue of oversize painting stamps in this format from the early sixties through the mid 1970s. Some of the first stamp issues displayed the most avant-garde paintings. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth $1.90 used.

Roger de la Fresnaye was born into a noble family from Falaise in Normandy. He received art training at many of the top Paris art school. As he was coming of age more established artists like Pablo Picasso and  Georges Braque were breaking down form into little cubes within their paintings. This allowed many paintings within a painting and was thought to be an allegory of the industrial revolution where people labor and one particular aspect of a product with no access to the overall diagram of what is being accomplished.

Into this comes younger man Roger de la Fresnaye. The upcoming war was more personally threatening to him and he became attracted to a new movement within cubism called Orphism. This dispensed with the small cubes forming a larger form and instead add a great deal of bright colors in order to portray a more infinite universe. In this way perhaps adding a purpose outcome to the patriotism which was proving so flawed.

One can see the conflicting attitudes within Fresnaye when the war came in 1914. He enlisted in the French Army as his father had done. While serving  he contracted tuberculosis and was released by the Army. Fresnaye late paintings took on a more linear style but he gave up painting in 1922 before dying at age 40 in 1925. One of his paintings sold in 2017 for 2,370,500 Euros.

Well my drink is empty and I will pour another to toast the French postage stamp designors from this era. Even with the oversized paper, it was no small feat transfering the painting images properly to a small scale. Come again tomorrow when there will be another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.