From the New York times magazine

AN OLD TYPE OF EPHEMERA IS BEING REINVENTED IN PARIS IN 2025. A NEW COMPANY PRESIDENT FOR A CHOCOLATIER FOUND ‘a cellar full of old packaging, drawings and recipes’

The Parisian chocolate company Debauve & Gallais was founded 225 years ago by Sulpice Debauve, a pharmacist to Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette who later became the official chocolate supplier to the kings of France. He introduced the confection as a health remedy to the royal court and, according to the brand, invented the era’s first chocolate one could bite into instead of drink. Those chocolats à croquer — flat medallions shaped like old coins — became a signature that remains a Debauve & Gallais best seller today under the name Pistoles de Marie-Antoinette. Along with chocolate bars, truffles, Croquamandes (chocolate-covered almonds created for Napoleon Bonaparte in 1807) and other confections whose recipes have seldom changed, the Pistoles are still displayed like jewels behind the shop’s original semicircle apothecary counter. But when Domitille Jollois joined the company as its president in 2022, she unearthed a cellar full of old packaging, drawings and recipes that inspired an update to the institution. The packaging got a light refresh, while the U.S.-based illustrator Ilya Milstein worked on reviving a long-forgotten Parisian tradition: chromos. A form of advertising in the mid-19th century, these small pictorial cards depicting scenes from daily life or fables were created by the era’s leading illustrators and printed using chromolithography; they were popularized by Le Bon Marché’s founder, Aristide Boucicaut, and released weekly for decades. Debauve & Gallais would hide their own illustrated cards in chocolate boxes that children could collect and trade. Beginning this month, customers can find five new chromos inside all chocolate boxes featuring the likenesses of Marie-Antoinette, Louis XVI, Napoleon, Marcel Proust and Sonia Rykiel. “We wanted [an artist] who would capture the childlike spirit of the tradition and highlight our most illustrious clients,” says Jollois of Milstein. “It’s chocolate that connects them all.” 

The cards we are using to illustrate this are from a wonderful collection at the Port Melbourne Historical Society – cards produced for Swallow & Ariell, postcards, 1930s, Achille Mauzan.