Love ads in the newspaper have now almost disappeared. With the rise of the Internet, these have been replaced by online dating applications, which serve the same role. Back in time through ads that flirt between poetry and comedy.
Exactly a century ago, in February 1924, Fleurette Beaurivage, from Quebec, extended a pole to love in the pages of the magazine The modern magazineancestor of the magazine Chatelaine.
“Little thrush fallen from the branch seeks a heart as big as hers – would correspond with serious and cultivated gentlemen (35–40). Purpose: while chatting, I will tell you…” wrote the single woman.
Today, Fleurette would rather have downloaded Tinder, Bumble or Fruitz, and swiped looking for a soul mate. History does not say whether his missive was echoed.
For the writing of his series in three volumes, Popular history of love in Quebec, Jean-Sébastien Marsan took pleasure in delving into archives of magazines and newspapers. “The oldest dating ads I found dated from 1832. It was in a Montreal newspaper called The Minerva “, he explains.
“There may have been some before, but it was difficult to have access to all the archives. In fact, small dating ads are probably as old as the mass circulation press,” says Mr. Marsan.
He immediately cites The modern magazine, founded in 1919, as a teeming source of this kind of little buoys in the sea, some being quite comical. We find them collected in a section entitled The little post office.
“Jean Marc de Rouville is a nice guy. Which of you pretty Canadian women will come and chat with him? » we can, among other things, read in the pages of the magazine in 1924.
“A 24-year-old brunette, with eyes said to be meditative and expressive, desires a match for a noble soul and a confident heart,” wrote Angèle Denys the same year.
“Having only known the disenchantments of life, who will prove to me that friendship is not an empty word, that there are happinesses lasting more than one day and that there can still be sunshine on my road ? » launched Monique Tristan in 1927, visibly short of hope.
A guilty pleasure
For several years, The duty also has a “meetings” section in its pages. For example, in the weekend edition of September 30 and 1er October 2006, we found there in particular “a little fish” in his sixties looking for “his mermaid” or even a fifty-year-old “refined, without snobbery, urban and elegant”.
Today, although romantic classified ads have been almost completely eclipsed by social networks, the guilty pleasure associated with reading them has not completely died out.
On the Instagram account Oldnymagwhere archives of the famous New York Magazine, we find them regularly. And these generally garner several hundred likes.
The defunct newspaper Metro had for its part launched “metro flirts”, modern classified ads intended to find a crush at first sight during a trip on public transport or elsewhere in the city. It was Catherine Bégin, long responsible for classified ads of all kinds in the Montreal daily, who came up with the concept.
“In fact, I first saw this idea in the edition of the newspaper Metro in Belgium and I found it super charming,” remembers Mme Bégin, who was inspired to revive interest in the “declining” classified ads section.
“We made sure that the metro flirts were free and that spelling mistakes were kept,” she explains, in order to arouse the interest of a greater number of people and preserve the authenticity of the pen. of the authors.
A sign of the interest in this type of written declarations of love, “people got on board really quickly and it became so popular that we could no longer publish them all,” recalls Mme Begin.