1Why is writing paper blue? Until fairly recently, airmail paper was distinguished by its blueness. I remember having to buy thin blue paper for letters going abroad, and I remember the rare thrill of finding a pale blue envelope among the white ones in my mailbox, signaling a letter from far away. The aerograms that I sent home from France when I was a graduate student were always blue. A friend remembers the thick blue notepaper she received as a child to use for writing thank you notes and letters to grandmothers. This was fancy, formal, grownup paper, stiff like the occasions for which it was used. For singer Dolly Parton, however, a letter written on blue paper brings on the blues. The words on the page don’t say much of anything; it’s the blue paper that tells the story:

Oh, it’s not the words you wrote that made me sad and broken-hearted That’s put me in this sad shape I’m in Between the lines are mixed emotions and there’s teardrops on the paper You said that’s all I’ll write today I’ll close for now old friend.1

2Teardrops have been staining letters for as long as there have been letters, but blue writing paper goes back to the eighteenth century – before airplanes, although surely not before the blues. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, writing or letter paper was recognizable by its blueness. Although a letter could certainly be written on paper of any color, and blue paper could be used for other purposes, from the nineteenth century on, blue was the standard color for letter paper. Why did writing paper become blue in the eighteenth century? And what did it signify to those who wrote and received letters written on it?

3Until the end of the eighteenth century, the ideal writing paper was the whitest, thinnest paper that would sustain the action of a sharp quill and fold without tearing; a paper whose fine grain would guide the pen, and whose finish would hold the brightest ink without blurring or absorbing it. The smooth surface of fine writing paper allowed the writer’s pen to glide over it gracefully; that grace would be apparent to the reader in the elegant hand in which words were formed. Postage was calculated on the number of sheets, not weight, so thinness should be seen as an aesthetic rather than an economic value, one that was shared by many fashionable goods of the eighteenth century. Thick incrustations of precious metals were no longer a sign of good taste. Rather, the thinnest veneers on light-weight furniture (such as the desks upon which letters were written); the thinnest porcelain tea sets; and at the end of the Old Regime, the thinnest gauze for dresses, were all signs of fashion and taste. The aesthetic value – lightness – complemented and supported the cultural value – grace; gracefulness in turn meant not overturning desks, tripping over skirts, spilling one’s tea, or blotting or tearing holes in one’s letters. It meant being able to negotiate a material world that was fragile and delicately balanced, as the art historian Mimi Hellman has argued brilliantly2.

4However, as the author of one of the articles on paper in the Encyclopédie stated in its (sometimes) matter-of-fact way, of all the qualities that were sought in writing paper, the most important was a good finish, which made it firm and smooth and allowed the nib of the pen to glide across it without getting caught. At the same time, however, the author noted that while writing paper should be white, « le papier le plus blanc n’est pas ordinairement le mieux collé»3. Therein lay the rub against which manufacturers of writing paper struggled throughout the eighteenth century: how to make their paper both smooth and white. At the same time, ink manufacturers were striving to produce a product that was black, glossy, and permanent. Stationers and manufacturers touted the blackness of their ink and the whiteness of their paper. The Almanach Dauphin for 1789 noted that the manufacturers of Annonay produced a whole range of paper for printing and writing, and that « chaque espèce de ces papiers se divise en cinq ou six qualités ou dégrés de blancheurs»4. Meanwhile, stationers such as M. Salmon on the rue Dauphine in Paris, advertised ink that « prend un beau noir par l’exposition à l’air»5. Scientists and inventors were at work as well, looking for new ways to achieve blackness and whiteness. Traditionally, the way to achieve whiteness was to use only the whitest linens and then to clean them rigorously. Because rags were the manufacturer’s greatest expense, really white paper was a luxury6. In 1777, the Almanach sous-verre was thus pleased to announce the discovery of a plant (probably a variety of cotton) that grew in pastures and could be used for making paper. Its virtues were softness, fineness, and whiteness. « On croit qu’en l’alliant avec du vieux linge, on en pourroit faire un papier blanc et luisant », the Almanach reported7. It thus may come as a surprise that in 1791, this same almanac reported the discovery by a M. de Vieville of Marseille of a process to make paper blue, rather than white:

Bleu azuré du papier. Découverte du moyen d’imiter le bleu azuré que les Hollandais donnent à leur papier. On vient, après nombre de tentatives instructueuses, de parvenir à composer une liqueur qui donne au papier cette nuance si recherchée.8

5Why would anyone want to produce blue writing paper? The answer to this question lies with the Dutch. In the early eighteenth century, the Dutch invented a wind-driven paper mill and a new process of pulping rags for it that revolutionized the paper industry and allowed them to dominate the rapidly expanding market for fine writing and printing paper. The Dutch triumph was at the expense of the French, who were the main exporters of paper until the 1720s. As Joseph de Lalande explained in a treatise on papermaking that he wrote for the French Academy of Sciences in 1761, « l’Europe entière tiroit de France, il y a environ un siecle, la plus grande & la plus belle partie de son papier; mais soit que cet Art ait été négligé parmi nous, soit que les Hollandois ayent fait des efforts plus heureux que les nôtres, ils sont venus à bout d’en faire le plus grand commerce»9. The Dutch enjoyed this supremacy because their paper was superior to the finest French product. The best that one of France’s premier producers could claim was that his paper « is looked upon as the handsomest paper of the kingdom; we have even frequently equaled the paper of Holland if we haven’t surpassed it»10. Jean-Baptiste Reveillon once claimed that the only glory he sought after wresting the wallpaper market from the English was to do the same to the Dutch in the matter of writing paper – but that triumph was to elude him11.

6In 1766, Diderot switched from French paper to Dutch paper for his letters. That same year French paper makers admitted privately to selling their paper domestically under false foreign names in order to attract customers; by 1789 one of the most prominent among them was advertising his letter papers openly under Dutch names; and as late as 1814 the Netherlands was forced to prohibit the importation of paper bearing false Dutch watermarks. In 1782, a paper maker from Rouen who was seeking industry protection from the French state realized that the paper on which the contrôleur général des Finances had responded to his plea was Dutch: « Vous-même, Monsieur, dans votre Cabinet de votre propre main, vous honorez des manufactures étrangères d’un suffrage et d’une préférence », he complained12.

7After repeated failures by French manufacturers to produce paper using the Dutch mill, the Bureau de Commerce, an agency of the Ministry of Finance, resorted to industrial espionage: in 1768, the Bureau sent an inspector on a tour of Dutch mills to learn their secrets. The results of Inspector Desmarest’s investigation were made public in two reports he presented to the Academy of Sciences. In 1775, the Tablettes royales de renommée announced the publication of the first of these with the good news that the changes suggested in it would « bientôt affranchiront la France d’un tribut payé trop longtemps à l’industrie étrangère»13. Both memoirs were distributed to all French paper manufacturers.

8Desmarest explained Dutch superiority with a narrative that began dubiously with French Huguenots bringing papermaking to the Netherlands in the 1690s, where they were forced to adapt French technology to local conditions. This meant shifting from water power to wind power. The major implication of this shift was the abandonment of the first stage of the papermaking process – the rotting of rags for at least a week to break down the fibers – since one could not count on having enough wind to process the rotted rags before they spoiled and were ruined. Dutch manufacturers thus developed a new process that used fresh rags. They thereby saved considerable time, but produced paper of rough and uneven grain. This problem forced them to develop new processes of sizing and finishing, which resulted in a better glaze, finer grain, smoother paper, and thus the overall finer quality of their paper14. They were now able to produce fine paper that lacked only one of the qualities of the ideal: whiteness. This is no doubt what the author of the Encyclopédie article meant when he noted that the paper with the best finish was not, however, the whitest.

9Thirty years ago, a couple of European chemists responded the frustration of historians who had concluded that it was impossible to determine the country of origin of most eighteenth-century paper carrying a Dutch watermark. Watermarks, which could easily be counterfeited, are notoriously untrustworthy. In addition, since the seventeenth century, Dutch wholesalers had been contracting with French manufacturers to produce paper for the international market. Dutch watermarks thus appear on paper manufactured in France and sold as « Dutch » – first in northern Europe, but eventually in France as well15. Chemical analysis of paper samples revealed to the modern scientists significant amounts of zinc, arsenic, and cobalt in paper known to be Dutch, but not in French paper. They thereby confirmed the observation of an eighteenth-century German scientist, who had written: « Dans le papier à lettres hollandais de la meilleure qualité, je remarque des traces d’arsenic; peut-être ceci tient-il à ce que, en Hollande, on donne au papier une teinte très légèrement bleutée en faisant un mélange de smalte bleu, d’amidon et d’eau que l’on fait circuler dans la pile hollandaise ». The modern chemists concluded that the Dutch manufacturers added the mineral smaltine to whiten their paper but did not reveal this secret ingredient to their French subcontractors, whose paper remained inferior to their own in the crucial matter of whiteness. They are also able to date the introduction of the secret ingredient precisely to 1746 and to correlate that date with the regular exploitation of mines in Saxony that produced it !16

10The modern chemists confirmed in a precise manner what eighteenth-century consumers observed in the stationers’ shops of Paris: that Dutch paper was a little bluish. Lalande did not know precisely what the Dutch were adding to their pulp to give it the blue tint, but he believed that they added it because the salt they used in their production process caused the paper to yellow quickly. « Pour déguiser ce défaut », he explained, « les Hollandois ont imaginé de mettre du bleu dans leurs matiers, & l’on voit actuellement plus que jamais cet oeil bleuâtre dans leurs papiers: ce n’est pas seulement un blanc de lait comme autrefois, c’est un blanc azuré, ou plutôt un bleu pâle»17. In the 1740s, the Dutch had set out to overcome a defect in their product; by the 1760s they had turned that defect into a distinction. The faint blue tinge was now a pale blue and it was the blueness of the paper that allowed customers to recognize Dutch paper. In a time of untrustworthy watermarks, the distinctive bleuâtre of true Dutch paper was its only trustworthy and recognizable mark. As this tint came to be valued as a mark of distinction, it became an object of emulation among inventors as much as the papermaking process of which it was a by-product.

11By the time the Encyclopédie méthodique came out in the 1780s, Desmarest (who wrote the article on paper making for it) had to revise the definition of good writing paper given in the original Encyclopédie. « Le fond de ce papier sera blanc, ou bien offrira la nuance d’un bleu très-léger, qui ajoute à l’éclat du blanc naturel… En indiquant les qualités qui sont essentielles au papier d’écriture, j’ai indiqué les qualités du papier de Hollande » he noted18. French consumers now expected fine writing paper to meet Dutch standards, and these included a blue tint: from defect to distinction to standard. By 1782, a manufacturer in Provence was producing « un beau papier azuré » and selling it as Dutch paper. A 1788 report on the state of French industry by the Intendant of Champagne claimed that a manufacturer in Troyes had managed to imitate fine blue Dutch writing paper so successfully as to have stolen away the monopoly on it19. And, of course, there was M. Nieville in Marseilles in 1791, claiming to have discovered the process by which to achieve the azured blue of Dutch paper.

12The French government did its best to protect the domestic paper industry. An arrêt du Conseil issued by Louis XV in 1771 detailed the many attempts by the crown to keep the raw materials of papermaking from leaving France. No fewer than ten arrêts had been issued between 1697 and 1766, and yet here he was issuing another: he increased the penalties for smuggling, prohibited the establishment of paper mills within four leagues of the coast or the frontier, and in a complementary arrêt issued the same day, imposed new duties on imported paper. Whereas before all paper had been taxed at the same rate, the new duties were graduated according to the quality of the paper, hitting writing paper hardest. And yet Parisian stationers continued to sell Dutch paper at premium prices20.

13The premium consumers paid for Dutch paper was steep. The Almanach parisien for 1776 advised its readers that common writing paper could be had in packs of 25 sheets for 8 sous. Ordinary letter paper cost only a bit more: 6 sheets for 2 sous. Six sheets of Dutch letter paper, however, was sold at 3 sous, or a premium of 50%21. The willingness to pay this premium cannot be explained entirely by superior quality: through letter writing and other fashionable practices, such as découpage and wall-papering, paper was part of the fashion system, in which quality mattered, but also taste and a certain cosmopolitanism encouraged by the marchand merciers, whose stock in trade was scouring the world for the finest things22.

14As the state increased import duties on finished goods at the insistence of French manufacturers, Parisian merciers – including stationers – diplomatically assured customers that the finest products from throughout the world could be found at a fair price in their shops. On the rue de Bussy, the stationer Boissière announced his shop under the sign of « La Flotte d’Hollande » (fig.1) and advertised « toutes sortes de bons Papiers battus; coupés pour l’écriture; comme aussi Papier d’Hollande de toute grandeur; glacé, bordé, doré sur tranche, tant à vignettes que peint, ... Papier bleu d’Hollande de toute grandeur pour le Dessein, gris à dessiner, d’Hollande & autres ». Louis Boullanger; who operated « Au Puits d’Amour », announced that he sold « toutes sortes de Papiers fins tant de France que de Hollande. Louvet did business at « La Plume d’Hollande », while others advertised themselves under the signs of Dutch watermarks: Blanchard « Au Couronne d’Or » (fig.2) and Blanché « Au Griffon ». Stationers’ handbills advertised not only Dutch paper but Dutch goose quills and Dutch sealing wax23. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the material culture of epistolarity in eighteenth-century France was stubbornly Dutch.

15« La beauté des papiers fins de Hollande, & peut-être leur cherté ont fait toujours desirer aux François de pouvoir les imiter », Lalande had declared in the 1760s24. The abbé Jaubert concurred in his 1773 Dictionnaire des arts et métiers. He claimed that the French tried to imitate Dutch paper because they liked the way it looked: « À cause de sa beauté & de sa belle couleur»25. I would like to suggest that bluishness itself soon became an attractive quality both because it distinguished fine Dutch paper from its French imitations and because it satisfied eighteenth-century aesthetic sensibility – not only to the eyes of consumers, but to those of recipients of letters written on it. Because the paleness of blue writing paper had all the delicacy an eighteenth-century sensibility could hope for, it contributed perfectly to the subtext of a fashionable letter: the refinement and taste of the person who sent it. As André Joseph Panckoucke made clear in his pedagogical treatise, Les Etudes convenables aux demoiselles: « On lit, avec un double plaisir, une lettre composée avec goût; on ajoute l’estime à l’amitié; on se fait honneur du choix qu’on a fait de son ami; on montre ses lettres à d’autres personnes, qui jugent favorablement de nos sentimens et de notre esprit, par la légèreté et la délicatesse de nos correspondans»26.

16The discourse of fashion and taste did not coincide neatly with that of economic patriotism, and the merciers were above all practical men devoted to serving their customers. It was Parisian stationers, after all, who had once asked an honest French paper manufacturer to use false Dutch watermarks because their customers only wanted to buy Dutch paper27. Their market was a letter-writing public composed of women and men for whom taste and fashion were at least as important as status and wealth – respectable persons from the highest ranks of the court nobility to all those who could present themselves at the counter as ladies or gentlemen.

17Right into the nineteenth century, French paper manufacturers continued to fight an uphill battle against Dutch paper. And deep into the twentieth century, the use of blue paper for personal letters reminds us how an accidental quality of a product – in this case its distinctive color – can make it the vehicle of all sorts of unintended meanings. Whether it signifies formality and class; or taste, elegance, and refinement; or the cosmopolitanism of air travel and friends in distant lands; the truth is that bluishness came first, and these various associations later. This is why I find Dolly Parton’s reading of a blue letter the most compelling – the blue piece of paper is no longer the subtext; it is the text, over which meaningless words have been scribbled. In the end, what fascinates me is how the color of paper adds levels of meaning to the letters written on it, sometimes, indeed, saying all there is to say.