I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,
I’ll never see a tree at all.
So wrote the American humorist Ogden Nash nearly three-quarters of a century ago. Some things never change. Billboards – hoardings or poster-sites, if you prefer – are, like the poor, always with us, but somehow they seem more apparent out of one’s own country.
Casual visitors to France, for example, or foreigners living here unfamiliar with other French media, are often led to conclude by the apparent simplicity or obscurity of messages and images that French advertising is relatively unsophisticated. Nothing could be further from the truth but the mistake is understandable when it is appreciated that a great many French posters – as, indeed, those of other developed countries – serve merely as reminders of the punch-line or salient image of a TV commercial.
One of the principal differences between posters in France and those in, say, Britain, is the citing of competitive claims. The approaches to every DIY centre, it appears, are lined with advertisements not for the outlet close at hand but for its rivals. The same is often true also of those close to a hypermarket. This is something rarely to be found in Britain, where the proprietors of such out-of-town shopping centres go to some trouble to monopolise all the surrounding poster-sites, presumably expressly to avoid any opportunity for competitors to get a nearby look-in.
Are there more hoardings in France than in Britain? Certainly that is often the impression one gets, but that may be little more than a subjective reaction, given that few of us travel sufficiently widely in either country to form a valid opinion. What does seem clear is that the planning restrictions affecting the siting of posters are less stringent – or perhaps merely applied less stringently – in France. In the UK, for example, it is unusual to see other than official signs on a motorway; from a French autoroute many more are visible erected in fields just beyond the hard shoulders.
The idea that France has too many posters has led to the creation of organisations campaigning for greater restrictions. Bodies like Paysages de France complain that many poster-sites are simply illegal, set up without any authorisation, and allowed to remain by the laxness or indifference of the local planning departments. Where local authorities fail to take action, such groups may themselves take the culprits to court. That is inevitably a slow process and that may be why some activists seek to take the law into their own hands by physically destroying the sites that offend them.
Bona fide campaign groups disown such actions, no doubt recognising the danger of unchecked extremism, as witness the criminal violence committed by the more rabid supporters of animal rights which deter popular support for their cause. Without a legal framework, it is no longer apparent whether those concerned are opposed to illegal hoardings or are simply against advertising in all its forms. That anti-advertising activists exist was demonstrated in a recent case in Paris where seven members of the Collectif des Déboulonneurs (debunkers) were charged with defacing posters. They faced potential fines of up to €750,000 and five years in prison, but escaped with a symbolic one euro fine.
One might have more sympathy with the anti-poster movement if its members took a similarly strong line on another form of sign that is undeniably illegal: graffiti. Hardly a square metre of surface visible in France seems to escape the attention of those determined to decorate it with their weird identities and cabalistic signs. What those concerned lack in aesthetic judgment and artistic skill, they make up for by their extraordinary ability to reach and work in the most inaccessible places. The expansion of France’s autoroute and TGV networks has led to the creation of bridges and viaducts which are both wonders of engineering and of outstanding beauty, but even these fall rapidly to this kind of vandalism.
It is unfortunate that the genuine talent of such as the self-styled ‘guerrilla artist’ Banksy, whose works now change hands for hundreds of thousands of dollars, has endowed the anti-social activities of the majority of graffiti-makers with a degree of unwarranted acceptance. The visual intrusiveness that mars both urban and rural landscapes seems to me infinitely more of an eyesore than a poster which, to do its job, must of necessity be well-designed.
If graffiti can ever be acceptable, its natural home must be where the idea originated and where it has been found since the days of Pompeii: the public lavatory. While most of us would dismiss the indecent drawings and scabrous remarks as the products of pathetically inadequate persons, there has always been a leavening of genuine humour and even wit. Some examples have become classics of the genre, such as the addendum to ‘My mother made me a homosexual’ which read ‘If I gave her the wool, would she make me one too?’
My personal favourite, discovered above the urinals in a French village at a time of an earlier election, was the ubiquitous ‘Vive le Pen’, which another hand aptly and devastatingly undermined with the addition of the two letters ‘is’.
This article first appeared in the July 2007 issue of The Connexion
