The RATP, Paris’s public transportation administration, has produced advertising texts since the 1950s. As is common with outdated advertisements, many have been lost from the public record. Some of them are archived in the RATP’s Médiathèque archives. As could be expected, these texts have never been studied in the context of literature. This thesis applies Aristotle’s three-part definition of rhetoric to the continuum of ads produced by the RATP starting with the first ads, then working through the years of formal campaign-based advertising to arrive at the contemporary period. The ad campaigns are analyzed in function of their motivating rhetorical element: logos for logical appeals, pathos for emotionally based appeals, and ethos for appeals dependent on the character of the institution. This thesis concludes that the RATP ads, when viewed over time, show an alternation between reason and emotion in the goal to build the institution’s character. Once built, the institution uses that character to influence readers in the current ad campaign.