Flyers can come flying into your life in many ways. Local takeout restaurants are always putting them in your mailbox, they can hand you flyers as you walk through a mall, and you can even pick them up at a church service. They are a cheap and easy mass marketing tool that can quickly and effectively generate local interest. But why are they called flyers? In fact, they are also brochures, circulars and flyers, but for some reason the name has stuck, and that reason is actually quite interesting.

Small advertising brochures have been around since the invention of mass printing over 400 years ago and have been used as a way to spread commercial, social and political messages to a wide population for as long as that. But they had to be distributed, and this required time and often the efforts of a large group of people. However, the development of flight offered an entirely new way of getting the message across to large numbers of people. As early as October 1870, when Paris was besieged by the Prussian army, leaflets were collected in a balloon that flew out of the city and over the Prussian lines. The pamphlets proclaimed:

“Paris defies the enemy. All France unites. Death to invaders. Fools, shall we always strangle one another for the pleasure and pride of kings? Glory and conquest are crimes; defeat brings hatred and desire for revenge. Only one war is just and holy, that of independence.”

Once over the enemy, the printed leaflets were dropped by the thousands in the hope of discouraging the troops on the ground, who could not be prevented from getting the message by their commanders as they read the fields below. So, with the birth of this form of aerial propaganda, the term “flyer” was born.

The invention and development of airships in the early 20th century allowed the practice to expand in proportion to the range and capacity of the aircraft that carried them. The printing of leaflets became a key activity for those in charge of transmitting a message, and in addition to serving to send messages to enemy forces, they were used to inform, encourage, discourage and threaten the civilian population, depending on the objective of the campaign. propaganda. Those targets were often humanitarian, as in the case of US planes dropping flyers over Japanese cities in World War II before the bombing to give civilians a chance to leave the area before factories and military bases were bombed.

The printing and distribution of flyers was also seen as an effective way of countering the propaganda that civilian populations received from their own governments. Dictatorships, in particular, paint a picture of an attacking force as a rampaging evil bent on destruction that only the ruling regime can keep at bay, and use this fear as a means of keeping a disgruntled population at bay. In turn, the force that seeks to remove the dictator tries to assure the population that they are in fact liberators who are making great sacrifices on his behalf to free them and the world in general from their oppressors. We say this recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since modern planes allow flyers to spread across the country without much interference from the dictator and his forces, they are a low-cost, peaceful way to encourage dissent in the hope that it will lead to a surge in support. of the local population. population is willing to offer to the invaders.

This method of using printed brochures has been used with varying degrees of success over the last hundred years and covered every major conflict from the world wars to the latest occupation of Afghanistan. So the next time someone hands you a brochure, just think about why the name on that little piece of paper can mean so much.