A French Andrée advertising card from the 1900s

This card was part of a series of similar cards that could be found in biscuit boxes and chocolate bars in France and other countries in the 1900s.

This Andrée card is from the Guérin-Boutron chocolate brand and printed in colour on both sides. The advertisement can be found on the reverse side, which shows the various medals and awards that the Guérin-Boutron chocolates had won at the World Exhibitions, as well as the addresses of the factory and the company’s stores. On the front of the card, which is surrounded by a golden frame, one finds a portrait, an illustration and a short text.

In this case, the Nordic region is present in two ways. The card focuses on Salomon August Andrée (1854-1897), presented as an "Explorateur Suédois", a Swedish explorer. In addition, the Northern Nordic region is represented in the illustration, which shows Andrée’s hot air balloon flying from Spitsbergen towards the North Pole in 1897. The expedition failed, the hot air balloon crashed on the island of Kvitøya east of Spitsbergen, and Andrée and the other two participants died. It wasn’t until 1930 that their bodies were found.

Both the portrait and the image of the hot air balloon are based on photographs that circulated widely after the disappearance of the expedition members. Advertising cards were one of the media that gave polar explorers and other expedition leaders celebrity status in the late 1800s. The cards varied, but all of them gave a name and often showed at least one portrait so that one could recognize the person, as is the case for this Nansen card from the Potin chocolate manufacturer. Many trading cards, such as the Andrée card, also showed an illustration that said something about why the person was famous.  

Advertising card with picture of Fridtjof Nansen. Photo: Alexandre Simon- Ekeland.

As the back of the card states, Guérin-Boutron had already published 84 cards about explorers when they printed this one. In total, Guérin-Boutron published over 1000 different cards during the 1900s. A huge amount of cards were printed but the exact number is unknown, and many of them can still be purchased in second-hand stores. The purpose of such cards was not to make individuals famous, although they helped to maintain the fame of the persons they represented; instead, the point was to use this fame for advertising purposes. Guérin-Boutron and its rivals mass produced trading cards because they believed they had a commercial effect.

People collected these cards, swapping them with each other in order to get a whole series. Several historians have argued that the collection and circulation of such cards (and other images), especially those featuring explorers of Asia and Africa, helped spread imperialist ideas. However, the Andrée card and other cards featuring polar explorers helped to spread images about the Nordic region and the High North, and about those who made journeys there, rather than in the colonies.  

Through such cards, the French collected pictures of the Nordic region, and especially pictures of polar explorers: they collected collectors. In addition, the advertising cards show that collecting Nordic images in a capitalist society was often part of collecting practices in a broader sense, and was integrated into the printing culture in general and advertising in particular. The Nordic region was just a small part of these card series, but it was still considered a part of the world interesting enough that it could be used to attract customers.