Return to history and scholarship index.
Return to history and scholarship index.
Part Three: war as metaphor
On March 31, 1916, for the first time, advertisers apparently felt confident enough to use humor in advertising on the home-front needs category. This also coincides with press developments: Le Bavard, a humorous weekly published by Le Petit Provencal, had suspended publication in August 1914. But on February 5, 1916, it reappeared, declaring that "it is vexing and abnormal that so much bavardage is being published without Le Bavard." French humor seemed to have reasserted itself in print during this period, first in news columns, then in advertisements. In a facetious reference to one of the famous silly news stories of World War I which had appeared earlier in the war, an ad in Le Petit Provencal begin:
"The Russians. The Russians, at the end of their munitions supply, will attack with their teeth. (communique, March 1915). That's because they have good teeth, those Russians! And why is that? Because they use Dentol...."
The home-front category is also shown in war-related classified advertising. Beginning in 1915 occasional personal ads referred to the war, as in this one from Le Petit Provencal dated September 21:
"Woman still young would like very much to marry serious rich gentleman of any age, even war amputee, very serious, address allees du Meilhan, 44."
Other classified specified "war widow" looking for a new spouse, and toward the end of the war soldiers themselves advertised extensively in the Marseille newspaper for female "pen pals," occasionally adding "in view marriage."
The fourth category of war-theme advertising takes readers a step beyond the more simple themes described above. Those used the war to sell products related to actual needs apparently engendered by the conflict, whether they be pens, pills, or prosthetics. I have entitled this category "war as metaphor." The idea was suggested by the 1916 ad referring to Russian teeth: wartime verities are used to sell a product unrelated to its use by soldiers or civilians with war-caused complaints. Pope noticed the literary comparison technique in his analysis of American magazine ads, observing how far advertisers could reach to tie their product to the war.(1) But Pope's example, structurally, is not metaphor, but simile (a comparison using the words like or as). In fact using metaphor to sell anything was very rare before the war.(2)
Modern advertising has developed elaborate ways to use metaphor, easily identified by glancing at nationally-circulated magazines. One critic calls this a "scooping out" process: a "pre-existing structure hollowed of meaning" is used by the advertiser to place the ad message, the "essence of all advertising."(3)
The metaphor-making process was not found in war-related advertising before 1916. But beginning that year, it lasted through 1917 and into 1918, until war-related advertising came to an end. An early example published in Le Petit Provencal March 8, 1916, is entitled, "The Artillery of Hygiene."
"Just as artillery kills the enemies of our fatherland, Goudron-Guyot kills bad microbes, which are the enemies of our health and even of our lives."
I believe this advertisement is different from those in categories discussed earlier: it does not use the war directly to sell a product, claiming soldiers can use it or war-weary women need it to perk up. It does not sell war history books, or ask for spouses due to wartime losses. Instead, it uses the war only as a metaphor to sell a product of use for general purposes, borrowing the serious theme of artillery attack as a vehicle to insert the product. This early copy is simple, the author apparently feeling it necessary for this new ad concept to actually explain the metaphor. Later ads in this category become increasingly more subtle.
An advertisement published in the Marseille newspaper March 23, 1916, under the headline, "Jubol cleans the intestine," portrayed in a drawing a German soldier fleeing a French soldier's bayonet. Written on the German character is "microbe," on the Frenchman, "Jubol." The caption read, "Just as our boys chase the Krauts [literally, "Boche," pejorative French slang for German] from the trenches, JUBOL chases bad microbes form the intestine."
The copy continued in great detail to expand on this metaphor. The drawing depicted one of the first examples of iconography as metaphor published in either of these newspapers.
A similar ad published a little later in Le Petit Provencal (July 24, 1916) no longer found it necessary to explain the metaphor. Above a headline, "Stomach aches," a soldier was shown shooting over a protective box of "Phoscao," which is labeled "the best bulwark against illness." The copy described illnesses in great detail, but said no more about the metaphor, now apparently considered to be abundantly clear to readers who had already been introduced to the new advertising concept.
French war themes to be borrowed by advertisers in all categories became more extensive in 1917. Instead of the obvious use of soldiers and guns, an ad published in Le Petit Provencal October 17, 1917, used an idea which in August 1914 was nearly unanimously revered by the nation, but which by 1917 had apparently lost respect to the point where advertisers felt safe in degrading it into marketing strategy. The union sacree, or "sacred union," a promise of politicians and French citizens to forsake pre-war political squabbles in a united front against the enemy, appeared in this ad published October 17, 1917, in Le Petit Provencal:
"UNION SACREE. Of all topics of discussion, there is only one which has never suffered the rigors of censorship. It is also the only one that, far from unleashing passion, has on the contrary the virtue of calming the tempest of the mind, calming the nerves....A bottle of Pink Pills is a pledge of 'union sacree' between the organs of the body."
This ad, which also appeared in the Montpellier newspaper, addressed a phenomenon by now tediously familiar to French readers, censorship. Wielding authoritarian power, wartime French censors actually carved offending pieces from newspaper pages on the press, leaving huge blank spaces in printed columns.
During the spring and summer of 1917, labor strikes followed troop mutinies in France, alarming the government and suggesting that "union sacree" had given way to unrest of possible revolutionary import. Censorship was tightened, the military high command was changed, and the government was to fall into the near-dictatorship of Georges Clemenceau a few months later. One advertiser in Le Petit Meridional again took advantage of the news columns to advertise serialized novels. Using the newspaper-style headline, "Strike of laundrywomen avoided in Paris," the copy explained that the women planned to walk out when "finally a conciliatory boss proposed that each laundrywoman receive, every Saturday evening, at the same time as her pay, the latest installment of 'Romans Cinema....'"
Another advertiser made use of the attention-attracting blank spaces which appeared repeatedly in the heavily-censored French newspapers. In Le Petit Meridional several times in 1916 a small display ad began, "In spite of the war...." It was followed by one-half inch of blank space, then continued, "L"Union Economique, 30 rue Nationale, facilitates purchases in 80 stores in Montpellier." This ad appeared several times, so the blanks had to have been intentional.
After the German final offensive beginning March 1918, war-related advertising fell to nearly zero in both newspapers. It is hard to explain why. Censorship may have been to blame, but an extensive study of the operation showed no special communiques relating to advertising during this period.(4) Readers by this time were more than fed up with the war; advertisers may have concluded that the war-related theme was becoming counterproductive.
ConclusionOften these advertisements paralleled developments in news columns. The use of ads to appeal to what was ailing soldiers (but ignoring the threat of imminent death) paralleled descriptions of ugly trench life finally appearing in the news columns. Strikes and censorship blanks saw their echoes in advertisements. When people apparently were fed up with the war, during the desperate year of 1918, advertisers too became fed-up with using the conflict as a vehicle. For researchers who believe advertising mostly reflects, but does not create, society's needs and interests, this research seems to add evidence to their case.
As well, at least in this limited study, we can see that wartime copy writers, perhaps casting around for new ways to use the war in their ads, discovered metaphor as a marketing tool-an apparently radical idea then, now become commonplace.
Copyright 2004 by Ross F. Collins <www.ndsu.edu/communication/collins>