Le Courrier Français, Géraudel Cough Drops, and Advertising as Art

Abstract

Jules Roques’s Le Courrier français, which published works by Montmartre artists and writers, blended art, entertainment, and advertising. The genre and quality of its illustrations by artists such as Adolphe Willette, Jean-Louis Forain, and Louis Legrand made it the most representative publication of the satirical and artistic press of the 1880s. From the 1890s its artistic contributors included Toulouse-Lautrec, Félicien Rops, Beardsley, and Mucha. Its satirical images often suggested the erotic. Realistically portrayed street and domestic scenes were also popular.¹ Raymond Bachollet has noted that “The woman” reigned in the “fantastical universe” of the journal’s images in countless suggestive figurations.² The journal’s enormous popularity coincided with the flourishing of the illustrated poster. It collaborated closely with Chéret, cleverly marketing and promoting his posters a decade before the onset of poster mania. Chéret’s images of the seductive chérette, innocent yet knowing, matched the tone of the journal. Rodin praised the artists of the Courrier français for “putting art back in circulation.”³

You can hunt a monster, you can evade a pest [but] Réclame, she, remains, she that dazes you with her sparkle, her noise; Réclame follows you and catches up with you … She is next to us, on our heels; she saturates the air, rushes into our lungs. She is an intelligent, tenacious miasma.

—Marcel Falaise, La Réclame (1901)