Twentieth Century - but Limited
by "Napoleon"
napoleon@voyager.net
| In 1900, France issued the Liberty, Equality, Fraternity stamps and started using many new cancel formats. Some literature on French cancellations stops naming (Type 16, Type of 1885, etc.) cancels at this point. This article reviews a few of the more interesting ones from the early 20th century.
By this time, France had settled on what would be its long-term use of the term affranchissements. Earlier this term appeared in circular date stamps when paying a fee for some special service. Starting in 1922, precancels have AFFRANCHts in a line between two semi-circles. Figure 1 shows two examples, one on the Liberty, Equality, Fraternity issue and the other on the later rectangular Liberty and Peace issue. The Liberty and Peace stamp existed in both ordinary and precancel form; the used precancel is worth about forty times the ordinary stamp. |
Figure 1 |
 Figure 2 |
Figure 2 shows the 20th century large wavy-edged, ondule, railpost cancel. The next article in this series will have more information on ondules and other railpost cancellations. |
| Figure 3 is an octagonal cancel for overseas mail, in this case going from le Havre to New York. The mail was serviced by postal brigade E, as shown at the bottom of the octagon. |  Figure 3 |
 Figure 4 |
For stamps canceled with triangles, here’s much of the story. Triangles indicate postage due use. Figure 4 gives examples of such use. In the upper left is a basic postage due cancel. The upper right has an R in the triangle, for payment of a document fee. The lower two stamps, one with an A and the other with a B, are postage due precancellations.
During the first world war, most of Belgium was occupied by German troops. The Belgian army continued to fight, often being in France. Mail from the Belgian government and Belgian forces in France was identified by special cancellations. The government mail had a circular date stamp with "LE HAVRE (SPECIAL)" at the top and "SEINE INFRE"(Department of the Lower Seine) at the bottom. |
| An example appears in Figure 5. In the same figure is an example of an army mail cancel; note the number 8 in this cancel. The number designates the origin of the mail. Infantry divisions 1-6 used their own division number. Cavalry divisions 1 and 2 used 7 and 8 respectively. The central headquarters cancel had no side numeral. The cancellation in Figure 5 was from the second cavalry division on the date of the armistice, 11-XI-18. |  Figure 5 |
Detective Case
 Figure 6 |
The diamond-of-dots, losange, cancel had gone out of normal service long before the Liberty, Equality, Fraternity issue was released. Nonetheless, the stamp in Figure 6 was canceled with an anchor in a losange. Why was the anchor cancel used?
New Year’s Day cards were extremely popular in France at this time. This created a massive mail surge at New Year’s, and all available cancels were used, no matter how old! It is a very nice strike of the cancel, so while the postal clerks may have been rushed, they took the time to do a nice job. |
