Wednesday, 11 July 2012
By Sean Gleeson
Phnom Penh Post 
A
trading card depicting the Cambodian Royal Palace. Illustrators often
worked from Paris, and inaccuracies and creative liberties abounded in
their work. Photograph: Sean Gleeson/Phnom Penh Post
Think
back to the peak of French colonial power: 11 million square kilometres
of land spread across almost every continent; 100 million of the world’s
people, all of them subjects of the Third Republic.
Consider
the children of Paris lycees, looking at a wall in the classroom that
mapped their country’s overseas possessions, listening to the gallant
tales of explorers and missionaries who subjugated these lands for the
glory of the empire.
In a time when the distance between Europe
and the rest of the world was so vast, when dissenting views on the
morality of colonialism were seldom given a platform, it was inevitable
that propaganda and caricature abounded in France’s understanding of its
far-flung dominions.
Trading cards, one particular,
long-forgotten plank of France’s colonial ephemera, were recently the
subject of a public lecture by historian Joel Montague at Meta House.
Filling
the same function that sports trading cards did for recent generations
of youth, the art form came into its own in 1867, when the Bon Marche
department store printed scenes of colonial life on the obverse of cards
that advertised the store’s wares.
Colonial-themed trading
cards were a feature in life in many European countries with overseas
empires. England, Germany and Spain all had their own variants, which
were often included in cigarette packets.
What differentiated France was that the target audience was primarily children.
These lithograph pictures of life in Indochina and elsewhere came
to be sold with under-age indulgences such as chocolate, and were
potentially produced in their millions by companies specialising in
luxury goods.
Although they began as an advertising ploy – rather
than a state-sanctioned effort to promote colonialism’s virtues to
youngsters – Montague says trading cards without doubt played some role
in shaping French adolescent attitudes in many ways, including a
jingoistic notion of the French Empire.
Children adept at negotiating with their friends could aspire to complete special albums produced by the card manufacturers.
If they collected the set, albums could be redeemed for prizes such as a new bicycle or toys.
Although
the line between card manufacturers seeking to depict subjects of
interest to children and what Montague calls the “didactic intent” of
the manufacturers is unclear, in some cases the cards certainly skew
towards the propagantistic.
Some depicted the benefits of French control of overseas territories, allowing for the importation of cheap goods such as cocoa.
Others
featured statistics on the empire’s population and florid
pronouncements of France’s need to have unfettered access to global
trading markets.
Still others lionised the missionaries, military officers and even bureaucrats upon which the empire depended.
Inevitably,
France was cast as a grand benefactor, echoing the Foreign Office’s
image of a country locked in eternal marriage with its outposts, the
custodians of natives thankful for their rulers’ benevolence.
Southeast Asia, and particularly Cambodia, played a vital aesthetic role in this formulation.
“The
region’s history was portrayed as one of decline and chaos following
the Khmer civilisation,” Montague said in his lecture.
“Angkor
was recast as a symbol of a new Indochina reborn from its ruins, a
rebirth made possible by France – which was depicted as the ‘legitimate
inheritor of this ancient Khmer civilisation’.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Sean Gleeson at sean.gleeson@phnompenhpost.com
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