The Dying Art of French Adverts Painted On Walls - BBC News

The dying art of French adverts painted on walls - BBC News
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The dying art of French adverts painted

on walls
By Hugh Schofield
BBC News, Paris
6 November 2016
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Magazine
GETTY IMAGES
Adverts painted on buildings used to be a

common sight in France. But the art of
sign-writing is now in decline, and the
disappearance of these murals tells a
story about a changing country.
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Anyone who's spent any time meandering

through the quieter parts of France will
recognise those lovely fading mural
advertisements that you can still see on the
sides of houses or, indeed, on any old wall.
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You know the type of thing. In cobalt blue and

sunflower yellow, but all the colours now
attractively washed out - slogans for
motor-oil, or chocolate, or once-popular types of alcohol like Suze and
Dubonnet.
People go round collecting photos of these peintures publicitaires and
posting them online, and I don't blame them - because they are at the
same time things of beauty and symbols of a lost, more prosperous,
simpler, time.
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They were made to last, those ads. Just like the painted signs you can
just about make out still above old shops in small-town France Quincaillerie, Cremerie, Droguerie - perhaps with the name of the family
who set them up 100 years ago.
ALAMY
Sign-writing used to be an important skill, and it must have cost a bit to

hire an artisan to decorate the front of the establishment. But it must
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06-Nov-2016 09:49
have seemed worth it too. A good sign, painted all neat and properly on
a nice beam of wood over the door - that was a statement of confidence
in the future. And, as we can see, it worked - many have indeed
resisted the ravages of the years.
Contrast that with the sign-writing of today and despair. Today, if a
budding shop or bar owner in small-town France wants to announce
their presence, it'll be on a cheap strip of garishly coloured plastic
inscribed and laminated at the local printers. Or just possibly on a strip
of tin. Aesthetically about as sustaining as a slug of ersatz cola.
And I've seen worse. More than once I've seen a recently opened shop,
signalled only by a long piece of blackout material above the door with
the function scrawled on the cloth in white paint.
GETTY IMAGES
There's no blame to be attached to any of this. It's merely economics

playing itself out. The future of small French towns is grim, the chances
of a shop lasting any reasonable length of time are poor, so what is the
point of shelling out for fancy decor?
Take a town I know well, Cosne-sur-Loire in the unfashionable Nievre
department, south-east of Paris. About 20 years ago, a first layer of
supermarkets, garages and do-it-yourself stores sprang up on the
periphery.
The old-established shops of the town centre began to suffer. Now a
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second layer of even bigger stores has sprung up on the outer

periphery - toy-shops, clothes shops, sports shops in those huge
rectangular structures like children's building blocks.
Business is being sucked in from all around. No-one can possibly
compete, especially given the extent of rural poverty here.
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So Cosne, like hundreds of other French towns with romantic names
like Nevers and Montargis and Nemours, is emptying out.
It's luckier than most because it still has a twice-weekly market. But
more and more people are moving to new-build bungalows in the
surrounding region. The housing stock in the old centre is getting
run-down and too cheap to be worth renovating.
The old hotel, which used to take in motorists travelling south - that's
shut. The eateries are cheap kebab and pizza places - not inviting
bistros serving up classic French cuisine.
GETTY IMAGES
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This is happening all over France. We used to write nostalgically about

the decline of the French village: the disappearance of the bar and the
boulangerie from small rural communities.
That's ancient history. Now it's the turn of these small and
medium-sized towns to feel that their soul is being ripped out of them.
And how do the people react? Well, I have just checked the voting
results for the communes around the place where I have a house, near
Cosne-sur-Loire.
In both the European and the regional elections that were held last
year, the largest share of votes in the area went to the far right - to the
National Front.
ALAMY
We tend to build in our heads an idealised version of small-town

France. Don't worry - the French do too.
It's a land of beautiful mediaeval architecture, of narrow streets with
shops full of lovely local produce, happy farmers cycling in for market and, yes, those old painted murals advertising Pernod and Noilly Prat.
But they were the sign of those times. We have different ones now.
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Join the conversation - find us on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat

and Twitter.
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