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Title: Société National des Coupons-Caisse
Description: An aircraft—perhaps an Antoinette VII monoplane (designed by Léon Levavasseur and made famous by the pilot Henri Farman)—flies overhead. The pilot drops a cascade of paper notices informing those waiting below about a new way to invest their money. While banks, organizations, and the French government promised reliable returns with such financial schemes, this particular Coupons-Caisse, at least according to the poster, was “the best,” offering “hard cash” every month When the poster was produced, in 1918, France was borrowing millions of francs from Britain to finance its war effort, and was also quite successful at lining up private sector investors to help pay for the costs of the conflict. The nation also issued war loans, as did Britain and America, with France’s first coming in November 1915. One interesting note about cash payments to French citizens is that the French had a long-standing distrust of cash versus gold, extending back to the late eighteenth century and the French Revolution, when revolutionary bonds, or assignats, had been devalued, taking the finances of many with them. |
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Thus, much private wealth in France had been in gold, and when World War I broke out, French citizens went to banks to exchange currency for gold, although banks limited the extent to which this could be done, in order to keep control over gold stocks. All this spending had come at a tremendous cost: the nation had a gigantic public debt by the time the war ended, with spending for 1918 at 54.5 billion francs. Public revenues had seriously declined during the first period of the war, then had risen to about their 1913 levels. Efforts to involve civilians in public fundraising, including new taxes, played a significant role in this rise. Here the artist has created an image of excitement amidst what was otherwise a very hard and difficult period for the country, in the final year of the war. The airplane is not one of the war machines common in the skies of the Western Front, but a reminder of pre-war aerial fun and thrills when aviation meant speed, records, and new discoveries. There is no hint of the fact that the country is in the middle of a terrible conflict, and the citizens crowd the streets in their finery to gather up the cash raining on their heads. Perhaps also a sign of hope in the future? Certainly an image that disconnects the new and grim role of aviation in wartime and takes the viewer back to a period when an airplane overhead might drop money, but never bombs. |
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