French Commemorative Postage Stamps as a Means of Legal Culture and Memory

Abstract

This chapter will explore the way that French stamps (intermedial texts) over the last two centuries reflect the problems of constructing national identity in a small country with rich and heterogeneous cultural, legal backgrounds. Taking the Peircean principle of the triadic structure of semiosis as a theoretical frame, this chapter focuses in particular on the role of historical, cultural and linguistic ­interpretants in the reading process of stamps. The classification and interpretation of ‘intermedial texts’ (i.e. texts combining words and images) depend on the point of view taken in the context of communication, which implies either the production or the reception of such texts. Production is in some cases simultaneous (posters, comic strips, advertisements) and in others consecutive (art criticism, ekphrasis, illustrations). The reception of an intermedial text is mostly simultaneous (illustrations, posters, advertisements) and in some particular cases (art criticism, ekphrasis) consecutive. Based on these criteria – simultaneity and consecutiveness – a distinction can be made between different degrees of interweaving word and image in intermedial discourse. A third criterion, that of distinctiveness (i.e. the physical possibility of separating word and image), can be applied. The commemorative stamps, almost always an intermedial discourse, demonstrate perfectly the descriptive power of the theory proposed here, at the same time as it illustrates the specific artistic creativity evident in each stamp. An analysis of word and image relations in a corpus of contemporary French stamps supports the validity of the categories of intermedial discourse suggested and the possibility of combining them in a single commemorative stamp.

Science may, without absurdity, be called a monster, being gazed at and admired by the ignorant and unskillful. Her figure and forme is various, by reason of the vast variety of subjects that science considers; her voice and countenance are representated female, by reason of her gay appearance and volubility of speech: wings are added because the sciences and their interventions run and fly about in a moment, for knowledge like light communicated from one torch to another, is presently caught and copiously diffused; sharp and hooked talons are elegantly attributed to her, because the axioms and arguments of science enter the mind, lay hold of it, fix it from, and keep it from moving or slipping always.... Sphynx has no more than two kinds of riddles, one relating to the nature of things, the other to the fable: when Sphynx was conquered, her carcass was laid upon an ass; for there is nothing so subtle and abstruse but after being once made plain, intelligible, and common, it may be received by the slowest capacity. (Sir Francis Bacon 1922, 138)