Collecting France postage stamps

Topical collections are always a popular choice among collectors. You can even limit a topical collection to one country. France has issued so many postage stamps that there is enough issues to build a nice topical collection.

I do have one myself: France Valentine day postage stamps

Here's a few ideas: fauna, flora, famous people, sports, aviation, Red Cross, art, architecture and buildings...... To the basic stamps, you can add the FDC's to make an awesome collection.

A first day cover is an envelope franked with a stamp and bearing a special cancel dated from the day the stamp was issued. The first official France First Day cover is the 1936 issue "Rouget de l'Isle" (YT #314). The first real "Premier Jour" (First day) cancel is from 1951 on YT # 878. Most of France FDC before 1950 are not illustrated.

First Day Covers of France make a colorful collection. The downside is the space it takes and the overall price of the collection. You can restrain your FDC to a few topic or an era. That will make the collection cheaper to complete, or leave you the possibility to add the rarest and most expensive pieces to it. You can also make an interesting variation by collecting covers, postcard or letters with a stamp canceled the same day it was issued. This is not an easy collection to make, but could be challenging. Finding these stamps on cover could be difficult and expensive. Stamps issued before 1950, alone on cover are quite expensive and the chance of finding one dated of the first day of issue is a real challenge.

Semi-Postal stamps are issued to raise money for a cause. These stamps are easy to spot: they show 2 values on it, separated usually by a + sign. The first value is the facial value of the stamp, and the second value is the amount that will go to the charity. In France, the first semi-postal stamps were issued in 1914 for the Red Cross. Between World War I and II semi-postal stamps were helping raise money for various causes: Red Cross, war orphans, intellectuals and artists among others. After World War II, only the Red Cross could be financed by these semi-postal issues.

These make a small collection. There is less than 1000 stamps and only a couple are issued every year. Some earlier issues are difficult to find in used condition and may cost more than their mint version. You can add to this collection some covers to beef it up.

Another collection you can start is a booklet collection. It will be quite an extensive collection, and too expensive if you try to collect everything. There is many hundreds of them, excluding all the possible variants. The best would be to focus on some of them: Marianne booklets, Red Cross booklets, or semeuse booklets. If I had the money I would definitely do a semeuse booklet collection. These are interesting because of the advertisings they are promoting. But with price ranging from around 50 euros to 50 000 euros a piece, they are pretty much unfordable. Not to mention really hard to come by.

France stamps on advertising covers are another very nice collection to make. You will never know what you can find, because there is absolutely no way to track down all possibilities. There are thousands of businesses who had their own commercial covers, as well as many exhibits and museum. Look around and buy those you find attractive!

The cover shown here is an advert for a philatelic exhibition on propaganda from 1944.

Some fascinating definitive issues such as the semeuse "sower", Marianne, Ceres, Napoleon, type Sage or Blanc are ideal for those who loves to collect varieties and spend hours spotting variations of colors and such.