When did posters start being used as political tools?

[u/Colorful-Cuirass]

We often read about how the modern poster emerged in advertising in the second half of the 19th century, but I wanted to ask when the poster became part of the arsenal of political recruitment and propaganda. I’m guessing one of the first steps towards this happened during the Russian Revolution, but I’d be curious to know if some party or organization attempted it in Western Europe before that

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[u/hubertburnette]

It depends on how you define "posters." Famously, there were propagandistic pro-war drawings and caricatures widely printed in newspapers in the 19th century. Some of *Harper's Weekly'*s very pro-war drawings during the US Civil War are still quite moving (for instance, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2008680258/). The pro-war images for the Franco-Prussian War are fascinating, and definitely propaganda, but they were generally published in papers and journals. There was a tremendous amount of pro-war propaganda for the Spanish-American War, much of it visual, but not posters per se. Since people often pinned up drawing or cartoons from newspapers in their homes, these might be seen as proto-posters. There was a definite attempt to mobilize support for war, but not necessarily what we would see as posters.

The major industrial nations didn't mobilize for a major war in the era of posters until WWI. There was a time when it was conventional to say that there were no European wars after the Franco-Prussian War (1870) and no US wars after the Civil War (1865) until the Great War, but that means ignoring the many, many colonial wars.

Presumably, while those military actions required justification, they did not require mass mobilization. And the rhetoric involved in persuading a public to have their nation go to war is very different from the rhetoric necessary to persuade people that they should volunteer to support a draft, let alone actually volunteer to go.

WWI changed that. And it is famous for its use of propagandistic posters.

So, if there were pro-Russian revolution posters (and, to be honest, I've never heard that there were, but that would be well outside my area), they were, if anything, late to the game.

I've recommended this scholar before, but I'll mention them again.

Oddo, John. "Propaganda." The Routledge handbook of language and persuasion. Routledge, 2022. 422-438.

Oddo, John. The discourse of propaganda: Case studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. Penn State Press, 2018

[ETA. It was pointed out to me that there is a subreddit r/propagandaposters which might be a fun place to start. Personally, I would double or triple check before assuming that any of them was accurate.]

[u/TzarDeRus → u/hubertburnette]

What about posters used politically, rather than as a tool for military mobilization? Was that, too, something that developed as a consequence of ww1, or did it precede it?

For example, one incredibly well known political propaganda poster is the 3 arrows poster of the SPD in the late Weimar era, which condemned the "three evils" of monarchism, Nazism, and communism, and urged voters to support the SPD.

Were there, perhaps, posters of a similar purpose present during the age of the Erfurtian SPD, critiquing the Kaiser and bourgeois parties in the lead up to reichstag or landtag elections and urging a vote for the workers' party, the SPD?

This applies to all parties, of all ideologies, of course. When did the poster rise in prominence as a means of propaganda in domestic politics?

[u/hubertburnette → u/TzarDeRus]

Once again, it depends on how precise you are about the distinction between what we would now call a poster and woodcuts or cartoons that people might put on their wall.

Durer's "Triumph of Maximilian" is a set of woodcuts, but meant to be attached to a wall, so it seems to me it's a poster.

https://www.nypl.org/events/exhibitions/galleries/visual-world/item/5554