The first issue of French stamps hit the post office counters 175 years ago. The design, famous and loved as ‘Cérès’, bears witness to an eventful period in history.
As the Musée de La Poste in Paris demonstrated in an exhibition, the primary aim at the time from a postal history perspective was to standardise the price of postal mail. Before 1849, the French only received an average of three letters per year. The postal rates were complicated, and the graduated prices for a letter were sometimes very high, with the recipient paying the postage. Up to 40km, a tax of 20 centimes was charged for a letter weighing less than 7½g. If the distance was more than 900km, the same letter cost six times as much, one franc and 10 centimes.
WRITER BECOMES POSTMASTER GENERAL
The government of the Second French Republic, founded on 25 February 1848, endeavoured to offer the population concrete improvements to their living conditions. This was to include a postal reform, initiated by the writer Étienne Arago (1802–92), who became Postmaster General as a result of the barricade battles (). On 24 February 1848, the day of Louis-Philippe’s abdication, he succeeded
