Trappist monks from the abbey Notre-Dame in the Rhône-Alpes region of France started making chocolate to help support the abbey and make money for the Catholic Church. In 1868, they created the Aiguebelle Chocolate Factory.
Starting around the same time engraving methods advanced along with industrial capitalism. Companies started to make colorful cardboard cards, called chromolithographies, to help promote their products. These cards were used for advertising through the early 20th century.
The Chocolaterie Aiguebelle started to create their own beautiful advertising cards to help sell their chocolate. They had lovely color images on them. The subjects were often educational showing pictures of dinosaurs, insects and animals, royalty, scenes from abroad, maps, illustrated fables, etc.
People would collect the cards and go back and buy more chocolate so they could collect more.
The cards worked. For some time, the Chocolat d’Aiguebelle was among the top 10 French companies selling chocolate.
This article was posted on Friday, May 4th, 2018 at 8:01 pm and is filed under Arts and Crafts, Belgium, Countries & Cultures, France, Illustrations, Mama Lisa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
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