Postcards Were Social Media Before Social Media

In October 1899, Parisians could buy a colour lithograph of Émile Zola as a human-pig hybrid, spectacles and curly tail included, smearing a map of France with what the caption called 'caca international'. The image, titled 'Le roi des Porcs' (the King of Pigs), appeared just after French President Émile Loubet pardoned Alfred Dreyfus — and it's the centrepiece of an argument about how old our social-media pathologies really are.

The essay, contributed by Karine Macarez to La Revue Nouvelle 8/2025 via Public Seminar and Eurozine, marks the Belgian journal's 80th anniversary by revisiting debates central to its history: media and democracy, the prison system, mental health, and the politics of memory. Its central claim is precise: postcards functioned as a social technology, and they polarized France long before algorithms did.

How a poster became a postcard

'Le roi des Porcs' was one of fifty-one lithographs published under the title Musée des Horreurs by Victor Lenepveu between October 1899 and December 1900, until the Paris police banned distribution. Issued weekly, then bi-monthly, and sold as a collectible series, it turned the Affair's cast — Zola, Dreyfus, the Rothschild family, the politician Joseph Reinach — into a rotating gallery of hideous animal hybrids built to degrade and dehumanize.

The caricature wasn't invented from nothing. It gave visual form to a long-standing criticism of Zola's naturalist fiction as morally degenerate. Zola had become the public face of the Dreyfusard cause after his open letter 'J'Accuse…!' appeared in L'Aurore on January 13, 1898. The Affair itself had begun in 1894, when Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer, was falsely convicted of treason and deported to Devil's Island.

What does this change for how we read media history? Macarez's mechanism is miniaturization. Reproduced as postcards, large lithographs became portable, mass-reproducible objects that circulated beyond the private rooms where posters hung. Surviving copies sit in archives including the Lorraine Beitler Collection at the University of Pennsylvania.

The numbers behind the medium

Postcards first appeared in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1869, and France adopted them during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 so wounded soldiers could write home. Their boom as a mass medium coincided with the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle, where Léon-Charles Lebonis's image of the Eiffel Tower became the first postcard hit, thanks to photomechanical printing. With mail delivered several times a day, postcards extended everyday sociability — kept like family photographs, traded by cartophilist (postcard-collecting) associations.

The Affair's scale is hard to pin down. No reliable production figures exist, though thousands of political postcards circulated. The anti-Dreyfusard newspaper L'Intransigeant claimed on October 16, 1899 that the first Musée des Horreurs issue sold 300,000 copies — a figure Macarez flags as possibly inflated to stimulate demand. But the subscription price for the full series rose from 25 francs at launch to 40 francs in February 1900, suggesting collecting images had become a popular way of displaying political allegiance.

Echo chambers before the internet

Activists on both sides used the medium. The Dreyfusards had Édouard Couturier's eighteen-card series 'Histoire d'un innocent', published before Dreyfus's retrial in 1899; the Dreyfus family itself collected Affair postcards and later donated them to the Musée de Bretagne in Rennes. In 1899, Émile Straus, founder of the first collectors' association, wrote: 'From a political standpoint, the postcard will prove to be a strong ally of the satirical and polemical illustrated press. Let us welcome it: from the very beginning, it has served the cause of law, justice, and humanity by scourging the injustice of the Dreyfus trial and the crimes of the military.'

The key finding: most postcards didn't persuade anyone. They circulated through established networks of collectors and sympathizers, reinforcing existing commitments after the lines between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards had already hardened. The antisemitic imagery — the 'international poo' casting Jews as a foreign, corrupting force and Zola as their accomplice — worked precisely because it was familiar to its audience.

That's why Macarez sets the postcards against what author Eli Pariser calls the 'filter bubble': platform-driven personalization that feeds users affirmations rather than challenges. The Dreyfus postcards, she argues, support Cass Sunstein's 'echo chamber' thesis — people seeking sources that confirm views they already hold. Around 1900, nobody had the power to decide what people should read; collectors organized into pressure groups that publishers couldn't ignore, and people chose their cards, their recipients, and their images themselves. More than a century before platforms automated that process, political communities were already building selective information environments of their own.