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Description

Vichy France Lists a Litany of Defeats.

Dramatic large color-printed World War II propaganda poster featuring Britain in the form of bulldog gobbling up the world to the detriment of France.

The poster was issued in 1942 as part of a propaganda effort by the Vichy French government to awaken Anglophobia among the French people, which, it was hoped, would undermine the Free French Government in London and any potential Allied invasion of France.

The map shows areas of the world in which the British have "shed French blood", such as Madagascar in 1942, St. Helena in 1821 (when Napoleon Bonaparte died), all the way back to Rouen in 1431, when Joan of Arc was burned at the stake by a court overseen by English commanders.

The chronology at the bottom reads:

1300-1453   England sheds French blood. Our Country is devastated and dismembered. Joan of Arc is burned alive at Rouen.

1758-1821   England sheds French blood. She seizes our colonies in Canada, in India, in Arabia, in Senegal, in the Antilles, in Malta. Napoleon is dying at St. Helena.

1821-1900   England does not cease to be an obstacle to our colonial expansion. She humiliates us at Fachoda. She ousts us from Egypt.

1940            At Dunkerque, the sacrifice of our boats and our soldiers permits the re-embarkation of English troops.

1940-1942   England seizes or sinks the ships that supply us.

1940            England sheds French blood at Mers El Kebir... at Dakar... in Gabon.

1941            England sheds French blood in Syria.

1942            England sheds French blood in Madagascar.

Tomorrow?.... Where does England shed French blood? What will she take from us?

Though the poster may have been successful in awakening historical grievances among the French, taken from a different perspective the effect of the poster is rather counterproductive; it reads like a laundry list of catastrophic and hapless French defeats at the hands of the vicious and omnipotent English - hardly the kind of message that would convince a people of the use or desirability of continuing to fight. One almost wonders if the Vichy propagandist behind the poster did not have his heart fully in it either.

Rarity

Evidently very rare, with a sole example listed in OCLC, in the BnF, which attributes the poster to Edmond-Maurice Perot. Not in the PJ Mode Collection.