Jean-Jacques Renouard, seigneur de Villayer (24 June 1607,

Nantes Nantes (, , ; Gallo: or ; ) is a city in Loire-Atlantique on the Loire, from the Atlantic coast. The city is the sixth largest in France, with a population of 314,138 in Nantes proper and a metropolitan area of nearly 1 million inhabita ...

– 5 March 1691,

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...

) was a member of the French '' Conseil d'État'', which had been delegated special legal authorities by the absolutist reigning King

Louis XIV , house = Bourbon , father = Louis XIII , mother = Anne of Austria , birth_date = , birth_place = Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France , death_date = , death_place = Palace of Vers ...

. In 1653 as the tenant of the Paris City Post, Renouard de Villayer ordered

post box A post box (British English; also written postbox; also known as pillar box), also known as a collection box, mailbox, letter box or drop box (American English) is a physical box into which members of the public can deposit outgoing mail intend ...

es to be set up at different places in Paris. Letters, prepaid with a uniform postage of 1 sol, could be put in these boxes and were then delivered inside of the city within the same day. The receipts (''billet de port payé''), that were issued for this purpose and had to be attached to the letters as postage, are considered to be early precursors of the

postage stamp A postage stamp is a small piece of paper issued by a post office, postal administration, or other authorized vendors to customers who pay postage (the cost involved in moving, insuring, or registering mail), who then affix the stamp to the fa ...

. There are no examples still existing today. The so-called ''Petite Poste'' was an economic failure, but was later successfully imitated in other

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...

an cities (for example by the ''London

Penny Post The Penny Post is any one of several postal systems in which normal letters could be sent for one penny. Five such schemes existed in the United Kingdom while the United States initiated at least three such simple fixed rate postal arrangements. Un ...

'' as of 1680). In 1659, Renouard de Villayer became a member of the

Académie française An academy (Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of secondary education, secondary or tertiary education, tertiary higher education, higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membershi ...

, succeeding

Abel Servien Abel Servien, marquis de Sablé et de Boisdauphin and comte de La Roche des Aubiers (1 November 159317 February 1659) was a French diplomat who served Cardinal Mazarin and signed for the French the Treaty of Westphalia. He was an early member of the ...

. In 1944, the family coat of arms of Renouard de Villayer was depicted on a commemorative stamp by La Poste, the French post office, on the

Day of the Postage Stamp A day is the time period of a full rotation of the Earth with respect to the Sun. On average, this is 24 hours, 1440 minutes, or 86,400 seconds. In everyday life, the word "day" often refers to a solar day, which is the length between two s ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Renouard, Jean-Jacques 1607 births 1691 deaths Politicians from Nantes Members of the Académie Française Postal pioneers