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Dissertation Information for Aaron Jeffrey Segal

NAME:
- Aaron Jeffrey Segal

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (1995)

ADVISORS:
- Debora L. Silverman
- Eugen Weber

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Albert Boime

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: The republic of goods: Advertising and national identity in France, 1875-1918

Abstract: Between 1875 and the Great War, advertisements penetrated schools, farmhouses, urinals and studies, selling commodities and carrying trademarks deep into the French countryside. Advertising and the market spread common symbols and goods and promoted political integration, while arousing fears for national identity.

This work traces the rise of a national advertising industry and demonstrates the importance of private forces and the periphery to national integration. Under the Third Republic, street fairs and charlatans, printing, sales, journalism, psychology, the decorative arts, and a "naturalist" language of concise idioms converged in an industry designed to attract attention and vend wares. Aided by guides and new organizations, advertisers attempted to sell their services and create markets. Parisian businesses competed with provincial firms, posters and newspapers spread in cities and towns, and companies struggled to develop national markets. As advertisers sought provincial and rural customers, ads sped the circulation of symbols from city to country and region to region and promoted local products as national goods. Advertisers transformed aristocratic, Catholic, and other symbols and filtered regional culture through metropolitan sensibilities to acculturate buyers and promote integration into the market.

Although critics celebrated posters as republican and national culture and the courts recognized posters as works of art, painters, writers and officials feared advertising and trade were contaminating French culture. Conservatives decried advertising as a product of republican rule and a threat to national identity, while republicans struggled to quarantine advertising to preserve consciousness from contamination.

Politicians employed commercial publicity techniques to market personae and policies on a national scale. Boulangists sold propaganda and depended upon advertising firms to appeal to popular traditions and beliefs. As advertisers gained election to parliament, government officials promoted advertising in the face of competition for foreign and colonial markets and employed publicity for domestic ends. Clear, redundant and bold, advertising became a model for efforts to reform, transform or manipulate citizens. With the First World War, posters and publicity--the esthetic and the commercial--forged lenders into a national community.

MPACT Scores for Aaron Jeffrey Segal

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2009-02-01 20:06:02

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Students under Aaron Jeffrey Segal

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None