Antique French La Normandine Pig Fattening Feed Supplement Box NOS Farmhouse Decor 🐖

Size: 9.5 x 4.75 x 2.75 inches assembled (13 x 7 1/2 inches flat) ~ little to no wear. They vary a little one to the next.

🐷 Pig Feed, Sold at the Pharmacy

Here's an odd bit of French commerce: if you wanted to fatten your pigs faster, you didn't go to a feed merchant. You went to the chemist. This box says so, right on the front, plain as anything: "EN VENTE: Dans toutes les pharmacies et drogueries" — on sale in every pharmacy and druggist's shop. La Normandine called itself an "aliment merveilleux phosphaté" — a marvelous phosphated food — for the rapid fattening of pigs, and it made a food's promises sound like a great deal more. This one never made it into a trough. It's new old stock: printed, folded flat, and never filled.

🇫🇷 The Front Panel

Above a deep blue banner reading LA NORMANDINE in cream capitals, the pitch runs: ALIMENT MERVEILLEUX / PHOSPHATÉ / POUR L'ENGRAISSEMENT / RAPIDE DES PORCS — a marvelous phosphated food for the rapid fattening of pigs. Below that is the whole sales pitch drawn out as a little scene: a farm woman in a white cap pours the powder from a box into a wooden tub, a farmer in a wide hat and a red sash stands by with a long pipe going, a church spire and a red-roofed house sit on the skyline behind them, and a crowd of spotted pigs push in to eat. At the foot of the panel the box names its route to market: "DÉPÔT EN BELGIQUE: PHARMACIE-DROGUERIE DE L'ÉTOILE, A. VAN LIER, Pharmacien, 30, RUE SAINT-JACQUES, NAMUR. PRODUIT FRANÇAIS." A. Van Lier, pharmacist, kept the Belgian depot for this French product at No. 30 on the Rue Saint-Jacques.

🐽 Turn It Over

The back panel is where the box really lets loose. Two pigs stand up on their hind legs, each holding a pole, and between them they're waving a full French tricolor. Across the flag: "LA NORMANDINE EST UN ALIMENT MERVEILLEUX POUR L'ENGRAISSEMENT DES PORCS" — La Normandine is a marvelous food for fattening pigs. Underneath, the copy just keeps going: it's "indispensable à tout Fermier et Eleveur," indispensable to every farmer and breeder, the one product that guards pigs against every ailment — "mal de pattes, rachitismes, manque d'appétit, etc., etc." — bad legs, rickets, loss of appetite, and so on. Five million boxes sold in France every year, the box boasts, and calls that the unarguable proof it works. It closes with no subtlety at all: "Donc GROS BÉNÉFICES!!" — so, big profits!! The side panel next to it asks the farmer outright what he's really after — fattening pigs as fast and as cheaply as possible — and promises pigs ready for market "plusieurs semaines," several weeks, ahead of schedule.

🥄 Two Spoons, Three Spoons, Four

The dosing panel is exact almost to a fault. Piglets get two soup-spoons a day, to help them grow. Grown pigs get three, to guard against bone trouble and keep up their health and vigor. Sows carrying a litter get four, the whole way through gestation, "car l'alimentation doit être riche en éléments minéraux pendant tout ce temps" — because their feed has to be rich in minerals the entire time. General weakness, double the dose. And for an everyday ration, one spoonful stirred into the regular feed — potatoes, bran, wheat — does the job, with weaning named as the moment a young pig needs it most.

🦴 Why "Phosphaté"?

The word doing the real work on this box is phosphaté. The back panel promises La Normandine "renforce l'ossature" — builds up the bone frame — and names the thing it's fighting outright: "le rachitisme ou mal de pattes, qui n'est qu'une faiblesse provoquée par une nourriture incomplète" — rickets, or bad legs, nothing but a weakness caused by an incomplete diet. A pig raised heavy on potatoes and bran and light on minerals really could end up with weak, bowed legs, so there was a real idea under the sales pitch, even if the pitch outran it by a mile. That idea is older than the box: in 1854 the French chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès - the man who later invented margarine - published a study of phosphate of lime, 'the salt of the bones,' and its place in feeding animals.

🐖 Pigs That Look the Part

La Normandine calls up Normandy right in its name, and the pale, black-patched hogs crowding that feed tub look a lot like Normandy's own pig, the Porc de Bayeux — bred in the Bessin country of Calvados in the nineteenth century by crossing the old Norman pig with the English Berkshire - a pig that did well in the barn on the whey left over from Norman cheesemaking - with its own breed syndicate at Bayeux from 1928, common on Norman farms before the Second World War, until the 1944 landings marked a turning point that nearly wiped the breed out. By 1984 there were just five boars and fifteen sows left on four farms, and a conservation programme has been bringing it back ever since. The box never says the artist meant that pig, but the resemblance is hard to miss once you know what to look for.

🏰 A Pharmacy in Namur

The depot address takes this little box across the border into Belgium, to Namur, where the Sambre meets the Meuse. The street it names, Rue Saint-Jacques, shares its name with the Tour Saint-Jacques — built around 1388 as part of the town's third medieval wall, guarding one of its gates. From 1570 its bell rang the gates open and shut, and after fire took the old Saint-Pierre-au-Château church in the 1745 siege, it became Namur's own belfry in 1746. It's been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1999, one of the Belfries of Belgium and France. A druggist on that street was keeping company with more than six hundred years of Namur history, whether he thought about it or not.

📦 Flat, Folded, and a Printer's Slip

These come to me flat — 13 by 7 1/2 inches as a sheet — and fold up into the standing box shape, 9.5 by 4.75 by 2.75 inches, a clever bit of paper engineering. Look close at the photos and you'll catch something fun: the flat sheet promises to "renforce l'ossature," but the assembled box reads "renforce l'ossatine" - two printings, and a typo that got past somebody on one of them. And if you find a strip of paper poking out at both ends, that's not damage - they slipped that paper in to keep the boxes from being damaged when they made them.