ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Andre Michelin tyre company's attempts to create demand for its products in the Belle Epoque. It also focuses on poster and other representations of Bibendum as he revealed and generally reinforced gender, racial, and class hierarchies in early twentieth-century France. Combined with the importance of early French department stores' efforts to create demand and with French and other Europeans' use of world's fairs to sell lifestyles as well as mere products. Beginning in the late 1860s, Jules Cheret created boldly coloured poster advertising a product or a business. Michelin also worked to associate the company and Bibendum with royalty and the international aristocracy. By the 1880s, posters were recognized as a legitimate art form in France. Bibendum became a white European in a world dominated by European empires. In the original poster by O'Galop, Bibendum is clearly masculine, and one might read sexuality into his virility, but no women are present in the poster itself.
