From the AP story:
For the first redesign of this century, amateur artists will have a chance to take a crack at it - the first time the public has been invited to create a new Marianne stamp.La Poste, the French post office, has a website about the contest (in French, of course)--dessinez le nouveau timbre Marianne
The contests only guideline is that the new postage stamp must show a Marianne who "supports the environment and the fundamental values of the country".
A few sketched examples provided by the national postal service, which oversees the effort, show an innocent, childlike Marianne in the countryside with a flower in her mouth, or a seductive, doe-eyed Marianne.
A jury will select 100 finalists after next year's March 15 deadline.
The public will then weigh in, narrowing the choice to three by July 4. President Jacques Chirac will then select the winning design, which will be printed at an annual rate of three billion, starting in 2005.
UPDATE
I thought it would be fun to try my hand at this. A few years ago Laetitia Casta (super-model) was selected by French mayors to be the "new" Marianne (Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve have been other celebrity Mariannes.) But no Marianne stamp was creating using her image. So I thought I'd start with a bust of Casta as Marianne, using different colors for each denomination, except for the red liberty cap, which remains the same:|
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Here's some more about the iconography of Marianne, [and how well Laetitia Casta fills the bill: beauty and breasts] from the Brunswickian (the University of New Brunswick's student paper.)
Until Bardot, the common image of Marianne was of a lowly peasant girl leading the lowly peasants towards a greater ideal. After Bardot, and later Catherine Deneuve, it became a symbol of the well-groomed upper class.
According to Debra Ollivier, a writer for Le Monde and Salon.com, everything about Marianne is iconic.
"Her red bonnet symbolizes left-wing radical spirit. The beehive she often carries represents work and industry. The shackles and yoke at her feet evoke emancipation. Her hands are crossed in fraternity.
Ollivier underlines, however, the image of Marianne is, above all, about the bosom.
"It is undoubtedly Marianne's breasts -- flush, freewheeling, insolently raised in protest or subdued in a state of heraldic order, that have the most symbolic weight," she writes.
"The Republic prefers an opulent, more maternal breast, with its promise of generosity and abundance," explains writer/historian Maurice Agulhon, who adds that a pair of identically sized and shaped breasts are "an additional symbol of the egalitarian spirit."
When asked to explain how Casta, a model whose claim to fame is popularly expressed as 5' 7" and 36C beat out all other possible candidates, a spokesperson for the Association of Mayors of France let the truth slip out.
"Well," suggests Catherine Doumas, "perhaps because she's the prettiest. And Marianne, is of course, usually represented as a bust [i.e. a statue]. Casta obviously has the nicest bust of them all."
Well, the original Marianne was shockingly bare-breasted: see the painting La Liberte guidant le peuple by Eugene Delacroix:
I thought it would be neat to have the red Phrygian cap for every differently colored denomination of the stamp. But then I noticed the rules:
Couleur de la maquette ;
Le timbre de la serie courante est monochrome et imprime de diverses couleurs selon les valeurs faciales pour permettre de constituer les differentes valeurs deaffranchissement.
En consequence, le dessin de la maquette sera obligatoirement en noir et blanc.
Cette clause est imperative.
So, back to the drawing board. I thought Marianne should be more 'outdoorsy' and a supporter of the environment (although, not as 'busty')--
And now the results, using La Poste's TPP website:
The picture of Casta in the last stamp reminds me of this stamp from French Polynesia:
