Postcard of the Day No. 75 – Street-running en France

These postcards show that it wasn’t unknown for trains to take to the highway in France. It seems to be something more commonly seen with small trains in small towns although in Nantes mainline express trains ran alongside the city streets making for a fine spectacle. The village of Barbizon is close to Fontainebleau Forest and gave its name to a group of 19th. century landscape painters who made a virtue out of painting in the open-air. On the day the Second World War broke out Picasso travelled from Paris to the Atlantic coastal resort of Royan. He was chauffeur driven in his Hispano-Suiza with an entourage including Dora Maar and his secretary, Sabartés. For almost 12 months he would alternate between Royan and Paris before settling once more in Paris for the rest of the Occupation. Lunéville was described as the Versailles of Lorraine – the Château de Lunéville was the seat of the Dukes of Lorraine. Georges de La Tour, the master of candle light and chiaroscuro lived most of his adult life in Lunéville and died there in 1652. Nantes has a reputation for slave trading, ship building and manufacturing biscuits. The great French brand LU (Lefèvre-Utile) was born in Nantes but like so much else has ended up in the clammy embrace of Mondelez – a neologism created to divert attention away from any negative associations that might cling to the name of Kraft. 

Postcard of the Day No. 38, Gentlemen of Nantes

The ancient city of Nantes, famous for biscuits and shipbuilding, is the location for today’s expedition into the postcard universe. The sunlight is strong, the shadows are short and three smartly dressed males stride out of the past, one with great self-assurance, the other two are more posed in appearance. Behind them water streams from a complex multi-level fountain crowned by an allegorical figure representing the river Loire. On the far right, a small group of gentlemen of leisure have collected around a stall selling ice cream and sorbets, enjoying much needed relief from the heat of high summer.

The extended facade in the background resembles a painted backdrop and brings a theatrical note to the scene. It is just one instant in the life of the city but no less compelling for that. We are presented with a manufactured spectacle from which any documentary realism that was present in the original photographic image has quietly faded away leaving a poetic reconstruction of the past. A brief look at Street View confirms that the fountain is still present in the Place Royale and the buildings appear little changed. It does seem that the fountain has been repositioned and given the amount of war damage inflicted on Nantes it’s quite likely that substantial rebuilding has taken place.

Crossing Seine and Loire

A small selection of vintage postcard views of the gondolas on two of France’s most notable transporter bridges, in Nantes and Rouen. These wonderfully fragile contraptions conveyed passengers and vehicles across the rivers Loire and Seine respectively. Their transpontine voyages were supported by some very serious engineering steel. Horse power rules the roads in these images with only a single, primitive motor vehicle to be seen. In the fashion of the times, each card features an impressive gallery of exclusively male characters in a variety of nonchalant poses exercising the basic human right to stand and stare. The French army destroyed the Rouen bridge in 1940 to inconvenience the advancing German troops. The bridge in Nantes survived until 1958 when it was demolished. Rochefort is the only remaining place in France where this method of transport can still be enjoyed and while the bridge in Newport remains out of action, Middlesbrough has the only working example in the UK.