An Interesting Colonial Diversion (aka French Chocolate Bar Trading Cards...)

The internet is a wonderful thing for getting you to go off on completely weird tangents and lose hours of time!

Yesterday I was reading the Osprey MAA on Louis XIV's Army, which I picked up to improve my knowledge on the period 1660 to 1700 with a view to picking up some Dixon Miniatures for Donnybrook. I was only a couple of pages into the book when I read that the French army was sent to Madagascar in 1666. Ooh, interesting I thought and went off to Google about it.

I found diddly squat but did get rather distracted by the late C19th French Wars in Madagascar (thinking dual use with the Dahomey French) and then I discovered some images of these lovely period trading cards from bars of chocolate...

The images I found initially where quite small so of course this necessitated me trying to find larger ones on Google.fr with some limited success. I'm not sure how many are in the set, one page seemed to indicate at least 20, and it is a shame that they are so rare as I really like them.

I also found some other illustrations in magazine periodicals from the period and am planning to hunt down more. The Hova (Madagascan) army is really interesting looking and it will be interesting to see what figures can be used for them if I decide to expand the Dahomey project...

More on the Donnybrook plans another day! :-)