Plein Jeu — Éclaireurs de France

Poster stamps issued for Plein Jeu, the rally the Éclaireurs de France held in Paris on 26 June 1938. The issue runs to three values in francs — 50 centimes blue, 1 franc violet and 5 francs brown — but carries no postal validity: cinderellas sold to fund the event. The 1 franc and the 5 francs are catalogued here as single stamps; the 50 centimes is held as a strip of five and is shown below.

One design serves all three. A glider banks over a file of Scouts climbing a slope with rucksacks and staves, a coiled rope in the foreground and pennants on poles behind; the legend PLEIN JEU · ECLAIREURS DE FRANCE · PARIS 1938 · 26 JUIN runs across the foot and the value sits in a shield at the upper left. The glider is the period detail: aviation was part of the programme the French Scout movement was selling to its members in the late 1930s.

The 1 franc was put to a second use. It carries a black overprint reading FEU DE CAMP · ARÈNES DE LUTÈCE · 1er Juillet 1938, converting the label for a campfire held in the Roman amphitheatre of Paris five days after the rally itself.

A note on attribution: these were offered as stamps of the Jewish Boy Scouts of France, but the labels name the Éclaireurs de France, the secular and non-denominational association founded in 1911. The Jewish scouts were a separate body, the Éclaireurs Israélites de France. Nothing on these labels connects them to it.

No printer or designer is named on the labels beyond an illegible monogram at the lower left, and no catalogue lists them.