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Posters
 As a vehicle of information and thus of
propaganda, the poster was massively used by all the belligerents.
During the war, a political or financial slogan was substituted for a
commercial one. And, coming full circle, advertising agents in turn
used patriotic allusions to the war in order to sell their products.
Because they were such a direct and rapid means of communication, these
posters have become powerful documents of the daily reality of the war
as it was lived behind the lines, and the manipulation of the popular
imagination. Our collections include a thousand drawn posters (mainly
lithographs) and texts, most of which are German.
 Poster artists, who had an academic training, were
widely commandeered for the war effort, and this meant that, as shown
by the French images, the style remained traditional, with the
exception of certain avant-garde trends in Germany, the United States
and England. In general, the First World War did not make contribute to
the advancement of poster art, but it heralded the Modernist generation
of the 1920s.
Certain themes are tied to specific countries, such as
the need for recruitment in the British Empire because there was no
draft system, or in the United States during the call for volunteers in
1917. All the belligerents largely exploited the theme of war loans. As
the war dragged on, the governments launched a massive campaign for
“Liberty Loans”, “Emprunts de la Défense nationale” or “Kriegsanleihe”.
 The
imagery used by France evokes the manifold themes of the soldier in his
tragic or comic aspects, the color of the colonies, the nuclear family,
the unity of the Allies, rural life or the provinces, sometimes with
their architecture in ruins, as well as the recurring theme of imminent
victory. After the war, the theme of reconstruction was widely
developed in order to promote building activity but also to encourage
farming on lands that had been laid waste.
The comparison among the
different countries--France, Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the
United Kingdom, Russia, the United States, and Italy--brings out the
graphic diversity. This variety is expressed in the typography (Gothic,
Latin or Cyrillic characters) and the iconography alike. Some posters
use traditional or even mythological images, while others adopt a
realist vision that evokes the daily life at the front and behind the
lines.
All the weapons of persuasion, and that of culpability,
were used by associating an easily decoded image with a short, direct
text, controlled by the censors, to mobilize the entire population. In
order to draw the random viewer immediately into the collective war
effort, each country used symbolic figures caricaturing its enemies and
exalting its national heroes (Joan of Arc, Uncle Sam, St. George, etc.)
or allegories and stereotypes (the Republic, the German eagle, the
Gallic cock) and appealed to such diverse feelings as anger, pity, fear
or hope.
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