Premiere Armes 

Théophile Alexandre Steinlen made this lithograph, Premiere Armes, on paper at an unknown date. It depicts a young uniformed soldier offering a cigarette to a fashionable woman. Steinlen's image invites us to consider the cultural expectations of gender and class in France at the turn of the 20th century. The soldier, just beginning his military service, extends a gesture that might be interpreted as flirtatious or merely polite, but either way the act reinforces social hierarchies. We can imagine him learning to perform his masculinity, perhaps awkwardly, while she, with her hat and parasol, embodies the bourgeois elegance of the era. We might investigate how the military and gender roles were represented in popular culture at that time, perhaps by consulting periodicals, posters, and other printed ephemera. How did the rise of mass media shape social attitudes, and how did artists like Steinlen engage with these shifting norms? The historian's role is to uncover the complex interplay between art, culture, and society, revealing the hidden meanings embedded within seemingly simple images.