This web site presents digitized versions of 105 posters published in France during the First World War, representing a time of national volatility and a visual culture of lithography, illustrations, earlier posters and paintings. The original posters are housed in the University of Illinois Archives. Repairs and encapsulation were accomplished prior to 2001 using funds provided by a gift of Marian H. Thompson, and the posters were scanned between 2001 and 2005.

We have highlighted some areas of the collection which may be of interest: poster themes, artists, and a timeline can be explored, which provide material additional to the image database, or you may browse the entire collection through CONTENT dm, our digital collections database which houses other UIUC digital collections as well.

A brief history of the posters

The latter part of the nineteenth century witnessed the first affichomania, or “poster craze”, with the advent of the poster as an art form, arising from new printing technologies that steered away from the small, single color, mainly textual broadsides of the past. Artists such as Toluse-Lautrec and Theodore Steinlien contributed to this new art form that was more affordable and collectable.

WWI inspired a second movement of affichomania, and like the first, posters were collected as soon as they were produced. Collectors of wartime ephemera thought that the image was just as important as the text in understanding the government's attempts to forge a French national identity.

These posters represent a landmark in poster history, WWI being the first large-scale use of the poster for political purposes. Coinciding with the rise of the mass media and the emergence of advertising, it was natural that national governments should embrace the poster as a primary instrument for mobilizing their peoples for war, and appropriate that a democratized art should be employed in a new kind of war that involved entire populations, civil as well as military.

The posters were issued by institutions and organizations such as the French War Ministry, French and British banks, the American Red Cross, YMCA Union Franco-Americaine, Comite Nationale de Prevoyance et d'Economies, and associations Francaise contre la Propagande Ennemie.  Established French artists such as Jules Abel Faivre, Maurice Neumont, Atelier Pichon, and Theodore Steinlien contributed to the effort through their design work.

Additional Information

Website content referenced, and further information on the posters can be explored from the links below.

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