The word “advertising” only became established in the French lexicon in the 19th century, with a stabilized commercial meaning. Before this date, promotional practices existed under various scattered names, rooted in law, trade corporations, and urban customs. Understanding the terms that preceded the word advertising allows us to grasp how long the advertising function was framed by legal and corporatist logics, rather than by the market.
Legal vocabulary of the Ancien Régime: publication, proclamation, and street cry
In the royal ordinances of the 17th and 18th centuries, the act of making information public is not related to commerce. It pertains to law. The term used is publication, in the strict sense of “making an act public”.
Related reading : Discover the Spiritual Meaning of Lemuria: Origins and Deep Symbolism
The established phrases in administrative texts specify that such an edict will be “cried and published to the sound of a trumpet” in the public square. This procedure grants enforceable power to the decision. Here we observe a logic opposite to that of modern advertising: it is not the advertiser who seeks to sell, but the authority that imposes the listening.
The proclamation is another recurring term in the collections of ordinances preserved in the National Archives and the BnF. It refers to the official oral announcement made by a mandated agent (sergeant, usher, town crier). The context is that of public authority, not trade. When we ask what advertising was called before the emergence of the modern term, the answer first goes through this state vocabulary.
Read also : What is the use of a miter saw?
The distinction between “publishing” (making public) and “advertising” (promoting a good) only formalizes late. For centuries, the two functions coexist under the same word, which blurs the retrospective reading of sources.
Sign and street cry: the vocabulary of trade corporations
Medieval and modern commerce does not speak of “advertising” or “promotion”. The statutes of corporations frame two distinct practices: the sign and the street cry.
The sign refers to the visual marker (panel, symbol, suspended object) that identifies a workshop or shop. It functions as a marker of location and trade, not as a sales argument. The statutes of the trades of Paris strictly regulate the size, location, and nature of these signs, to prevent one craftsman from encroaching on the symbolic territory of a colleague.
The street cry, on the other hand, pertains to mercantile orality. Analyses by trade historians, particularly those published by CNRS Éditions between 2018 and 2022 by Philippe Bernardi and Patrice Beck, show that the statutes of corporations frame “the sign and the cry that it is permissible to make”. This is not a freedom of commercial expression: it is a permission bounded by the professional community.
- The sign identifies the place and trade, without modern promotional argumentation.
- The street cry announces the availability of a product (fresh fish, hot bread), with codified phrases and regulated hours.
- The call, a term sometimes used in corporate archives, refers to the oral invitation to enter a shop, also subject to restrictions among colleagues.
None of these terms encompass the notion of mass persuasion. Medieval commercial promotion is local, oral, and corporatist, in contrast to the advertising model that emerges with printing and then the press.
Ancient Rome and proto-advertising: practices without the word publicitas
Recent studies on ancient Rome confirm that Roman proto-advertising forms almost never use the term publicitas in the sources. This Latin word refers to the state of what is public (a space, a right), not an action of promotion.
The practices that we would today qualify as advertising fall into distinct categories in Roman vocabulary:
- The titulus refers to the painted or engraved inscription on a wall, often for electoral purposes (the famous programmata of Pompeii are the best-preserved example).
- The praeco is the public crier, mandated to announce auctions, shows, or official decisions.
- The alba (whitened boards) serve as temporary display supports for public and commercial announcements.
Applying the concept of “advertising” to these practices constitutes a frequent anachronism in popularization. The Romans do not distinguish commercial communication from political or administrative communication. Everything goes through the same channels (crier, wall, forum) and the same generic terms.
From the word réclame to the word advertising: a French transition in the 19th century
In France, the term “advertising” appears in dictionaries as early as the 1630s, but with an exclusively legal meaning: the quality of what is made public. Its shift to a commercial meaning only occurs in the 19th century, with the development of paid press.
In the meantime, the dominant term for commercial announcement is réclame. The réclame refers to a text inserted in a newspaper, often at the boundary between information and promotion. It carries a more direct, more popular connotation than the word “advertising,” which retains an administrative veneer for a long time.
The professionalization of the sector at the turn of the 20th century gradually imposes “advertising” as a generic term, partly because it sounds more noble than “réclame,” which is deemed too commercial. This lexical choice is not trivial: the word advertising borrows its legitimacy from law to dress a commercial practice.
The transition from a scattered vocabulary (publication, cry, sign, réclame) to a single term reflects the birth of an industry. As long as promotion remained dispersed among corporations, criers, and painted walls, no unified word was necessary. Advertising as a word and as a concept is born at the moment when the practice becomes professionalized, centralized, and monetized through the press.