Eugène Vaillé: first curator of the French postal museum

The Société des amis du musée de La Poste^[1] is just publishing this month a special issue of its magazine dedicated to the first curator of La Poste's Museum: Eugène Vaillé, born in the high cantons of Hérault and a postal servant.

The book's cover, available for fifteen euros.

Laurent Albaret piloted this project of an illustrated and well-referenced biography: act of nominations, philatelic souvenirs of the museum's first exhibitions, familial archives.

Page 10, you discover the acts of a new postal servant's life in the late 19th and young 20th centuries. On the act naming Vaillé, the justice clerk stuck a fiscal stamp of dimension. I think the new employed young man had to pay for it.

Those, fluent in French, who read Albaret's recent articles in L'Écho de la timbrologie will now go deeper into the character's life and career.

If you are in Paris on 19 September or Bédarieux and Poitiers on 19 and 20, you can put the stamp issued for the fiftieth anniversary of Vaillé's disappearance, and the first day cancellation. The first pages of the magazine has got enough blank spaces for that, I think. The stamp designer, André Lavergne, will be signing artworks at the Paris first day site: La Poste's Museum, near Montparnasse Station.

The life of Eugène Vaillé in Hérault (Google Maps).

Hérault now, my native department. Vaillé was born there in 1875 in Bédarieux, a canton seat in the high grounds of the coastal department. He studied in Lodève where his father traded wool. After his successful competitive examination for a postal employment, he was named in 1894 at the telegraph center of Montpellier.

Then, like many public servants in France, even now, transfers by service's needs or will moved him to Normandy and Lyon. He finished in Paris where - happily for the French philately - he reached in 1920 the Ministry of Posts' Library...

He finished his life in the village of Riols, in Hérault, and was buried in Bédarieux.

[1] The Society of the Friends of La Poste's Museum, founded 1947, when the Museum opened.