L'aigle et la colombe: trade card with crowned boy and girl

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What sets this card apart is its pairing of a crowned boy and girl with the eagle and dove named in the title, *L'aigle et la colombe*. Trade cards like this were small printed advertisements that French shopkeepers and merchants handed out, often in color and with decorative, allegorical scenes meant to be kept and admired. The eagle is a long-standing emblem of power and flight, while the dove suggests gentleness, so the figures likely carried moral or sentimental meaning for buyers of the period. Its place on a ballooning board invites a closer look at how the image of flight, rising above the ground, was borrowed for other purposes in nineteenth-century French print culture.

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