Antique WWI Marshal Foch Chromolithograph Cigar Box Label 🚬 Embossed NOS Portrait French Military Hero 1918 - 1920

Marshal Foch Cigar Box Label 🎖️ Embossed Outer Label, WWI Victory Years, 1918 - 1920s

Size: 4 1/2" x 4 1/2"

Here's the man a whole lot of people credited with winning the Great War, on a cigar box. This is the square outer label that went on the outside of the box, new old stock that's never been used - embossed so deep you can read his profile from the back. I have a stack of them, so yours will look just like this one.

🇫🇷 The Word "Marshal" Dates It

Ferdinand Foch was born in Tarbes, down by the Pyrenees, in 1851, and spent most of his career as the French army's big thinker - he taught at the École Supérieure de Guerre and later ran it. Tarbes is in the Hautes-Pyrénées, and before the army he'd been through the Jesuit schools - Saint-Michel in Saint-Étienne, then Saint-Clément in Metz - and on to the École Polytechnique, which he got into in 1871. At the Marne in 1914 he had the Ninth Army, and the story goes that he sent back the most famous message of the war: "My center is giving way, my right is retreating. Situation excellent. I am attacking." There's not much evidence he ever sent it, but France loved it anyway. After the Somme he was sacked - the telegram came late on December 15, 1916, after he'd gone to bed - and he was back as chief of the general staff by May 1917. Then in the spring of 1918, with the Germans breaking through, the Allies finally put one man over all their armies, and it was Foch. The German Spring Offensive opened on March 21, and five days later, at a meeting in Doullens on March 26, the French and British gave him the job of coordinating their armies. On April 14 he took the title of commander-in-chief of the Allied armies - the first time the Allies had fought under one strategic commander. As supreme commander he ran the Hundred Days, the run of Allied attacks from August on that pushed the Germans back until they asked for terms. Pershing's American Expeditionary Forces fought inside that plan too - their Meuse-Argonne attack, opened on September 26, was the American share of the general offensive Foch had rolling along the whole front.

France made him a Marshal on August 6, 1918, so a label that calls him MARSHAL Foch was printed after that. Three months later the Armistice was signed in his railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne, early on the morning of November 11. The German delegation had been handed the Allied terms and given 72 hours to agree, and Foch himself came in only on the first day and again to see to the signatures. Matthias Erzberger's party signed a little after five that morning, and the guns stopped at eleven o'clock - the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Britain made him a field marshal in 1919 and Poland made him a marshal in 1923, and his tomb at Les Invalides carries all three batons. The British one came by the king's order, dated July 19, 1919, making him a field marshal in the British Army.

🌴 A Tampa Smoke

The label doesn't name the factory, but it's turned up where Florida cigar labels live. This same outer label is in the Osterweil Collection at the University of South Florida - John Osterweil started chasing down Tampa cigar labels in 1979, and the library now has more than 600 brands from over 100 factories. Its big partner, the inner label that went inside the lid with the same portrait, his signature and an RF tricolor shield, is there too, and in the Museum of Florida History in Tallahassee, which dates it to about 1918 into the 1920s. That points straight at Ybor City, back when Tampa really was Cigar City: by the 1920s its factories were rolling close to half a billion cigars a year by hand, with something like ten thousand people at the benches. The whole country hit its all-time high in 1920, about 8.5 billion cigars sold.

🎉 When Foch Came to America

In the fall of 1921 Foch toured the United States, and people turned out by the hundred thousand. New York gave him a ticker-tape parade up Broadway on October 28. On November 1 he stood on a platform in Kansas City with Pershing, Admiral Beatty of Britain, General Diaz of Italy and General Jacques of Belgium to dedicate the site of the Liberty Memorial at the American Legion convention - the first time all five had ever been together, with more than 100,000 people in the crowd and a young Harry Truman among them. I added a Keystone stereoview of that platform to the photos; it's there for the history and isn't included. Foch died in Paris in 1929.

📜 The Stories

Local legend among Philadelphia paper collectors has it that in the months after the Armistice, tobacconists asked for the Foch boxes by name, because the boys home from France would see that face on the lid and reach for it first - a little private salute. Another old story says some shops kept a Foch box out on the counter well into the 1920s because customers kept asking for the box with "the General" on it. And collector lore holds that the label houses had their Allied commanders' portraits drawn and waiting before the Armistice so victory labels could hit the shelves in weeks, and that the best of the WWI portrait labels came from a handful of old stone artists who'd been drawing since the 1880s.

Wonderful framed next to a family doughboy photo, a WWI medal, or on the wall of a cigar room.