Introduction

The Bureau International des Expositions (BIE), the intergovernmental organization that currently oversees the planning of all World Expos, describes on its website the goals of the upcoming Expo 2020 Dubai in sweeping terms. This major event, the BIE maintains, will constitute the first of its kind to be held in the Middle East and will gather together

nations, entreprises, organisations non gouvernementales, et visiteurs du monde entier et permettra de découvrir les toutes dernières innovations et les progrès techniques […] l’Exposition constituera une opportunité de goûter les cuisines du monde entier, d’apprécier différentes cultures, et de prendre part à de multiples spectacles et représentations artistiques et culturelles des plus variées.¹

Expo 2020, postponed until 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, will feature arts installations, a panoply of international food and beverages, architectural innovations, technological and industrial displays (notably tied to one of the event’s sub-themes: sustainability), and of course, pavilions aimed at showcasing the cultures of many nations.

France’s pavilion, whose slogan is ‘Lumière, Lumières’, aims to promote ‘le modèle français d’innovation qui permet de concilier développement durable et compétitivité des entreprises à l’international’.² Indeed, the building set to represent France, still under construction, is projected to be sleek and spacious, covered with thousands of solar panels generating nearly all the energy it requires, encapsulating a modern, beautiful, and sustainable vision of France on the international stage. The BIE and France’s Expo 2020 pavilion administrators address overtly twenty-first century themes (‘Opportunité, Mobilité et Durabilité’) and rely on a modern vocabulary (‘L’Exposition Universelle 2020 vise à libérer le potentiel de chaque individu’). Nevertheless, these promotional materials expose many points of intersection between the upcoming international event and the Parisian expositions that dominated the second half of the nineteenth century. Just like its nineteenth-century predecessors, Expo 2020 projects geopolitical importance, industrial and technological accomplishment, and a wide range of aesthetic achievements; most notably, it also seeks to entertain visitors and generate revenue. We see still further overlap in the idealistic and nationalist language with which the Expo's organizers market it. The nineteenth-century Parisian expositions, in other words, are alive and well in today’s permutations. Such contemporary connections make manifest the continued relevance of Paris’s universal expositions to scholars of art history, history, literature, colonialism, urban studies, environmental studies, among other disciplines.

Paris hosted five universal expositions during the second half of the nineteenth century (1855, 1867, 1878, 1889, 1900), each of which brought industry, arts, architecture, culture, along with millions of people from around the world to the capital city. The forty-five years of expositions corresponded with the rise and fall of the Second Empire, the Franco-Prussian War, the Commune, and the establishment of the Third Republic; the different political and cultural values of each particular moment were mirrored in the organization of each of these major events. Like the contemporary expos, the nineteenth-century Parisian expositions functioned as spaces where scientific and technological innovations were exhibited to reinforce the nation’s industrial power and as sites of encounters and exchanges about such developments. At the same time, the expositions allowed France to show off the massive urban reconstructions of the capital city first undertaken by Baron Haussmann in the 1850s and 1860s; Paris itself became a sort of attraction. The five expositions were also the scene of vigorous debates on art and architecture, all the while displaying France’s geopolitical ambitions through colonial pavilions and exhibitions. Thanks to their engagement with and impact on so many facets of nineteenth-century French culture, the expositions are key moments to study in the history of nineteenth-century France.

If the 1851 Great Exhibition in London was the ‘first event identifiable as an international exhibition’ (Greenhalgh 1998, 3), the phenomenon of the universal expositions had its origins in industrial fairs held at the end of the eighteenth century and by mid-century, such events were held regularly not only in Paris but throughout Europe.³ After observing first hand Britain’s success at the Great Exhibition, Louis-Napoléon (future Napoléon III) was motivated to organize a similar event in Paris, thereby launching the phenomenon of the universal expositions – as opposed to the smaller industrial ones – in France. Paris quickly became a benchmark for the other international expositions throughout the century; indeed, as Vanessa Schwartz has put it, ‘Paris did not merely host expositions, it had become one’ (1998, 1). 1900 was France’s last universal exposition, though Paris continued to host smaller and more focused events, such as a decorative and industrial arts exposition in 1925, and colonial expositions in 1906 and 1931. The phenomenon of the world’s fairs continued in different iterations across the globe: St. Louis 1904; Ghent 1913; San Francisco 1915, to name just a few. This special issue will take as its exclusive focus the five Parisian universal expositions that took place from 1855 through 1900. These events were so massive in scope, touching upon topics as wide ranging as colonialism, art and art history, technology and science, politics, entertainment, architecture, foodways, literature, among others, that it would be an impossible task to summarize them all thoroughly. Nonetheless, a cursory overview of each of these five major expositions will help ground the reader’s understanding of the events and provide context for the articles in this special issue.

Official decrees in 1853 set the parameters for the first Parisian universal exposition that would include not only agricultural and industrial products but also the fine arts; as Patricia Mainardi notes, this additional focus was meant to quell any impressions that France had been upstaged by Britain’s 1851 event (1987, 42). The lead organizer, Prince Napoléon (cousin to Napoléon III) reinforced the importance of this novel combination in December of the same year, stating that ‘Pour la première fois, à une exposition universelle de l’industrie se trouvera réunie une exposition universelle des beaux-arts. Il appartient à notre pays de donner l’exemple de cette alliance, qui va si bien à notre génie initiateur’ (Catalogue 1855, v). This ‘alliance’ offered a way for the newly formed Second Empire to assert itself on the international stage, even if, as Marta Caraion remarks, ‘la mise en scène, dans un même espace symbolique – si ce n’est dans un même espace concret – de produits industriels et d’œuvres d’art’ produced a certain malaise (2012, 50). The grandiose Palais de l’Industrie was constructed of iron, glass, and stone to house the industrial exhibit; the Palais des Beaux-Arts was home to the arts exhibit alongside the additional Galérie des Machines, which served as an annex. Visitors to the industrial exhibits far surpassed those who visited the fine arts, even while the latter gave rise to vigorous debates between traditional and avant-garde artists. The Exposition ran from May until November of 1855, garnered more than five million visitors over the course of these six months, and, despite the controversial innovation of paid admission, resulted in a rather spectacular deficit of over eight million francs for France.

Between April and October 1867, Paris hosted the second and final universal exposition of the Second Empire, whose centrepiece was the immense, elliptical Palais de l’Exposition on the Champs-de-Mars. A key difference between the 1855 and 1867 Expositions lay in the fact that ‘pour la première fois, l’exposition sort du palais, une innovation qui séduit particulièrement le public et qui deviendra la règle dans les expositions suivantes’ (Demeulenaere-Douyère 2012, 431). The concentric exhibition space housed industrial innovations, cultural artifacts, and works of fine art, whose importance was, however, ‘downgrade[d]’ from the previous exposition (Mainardi 1987, 133). Meanwhile, numerous pavilions, eating establishments, and attractions could be found outside of the building. Many of these pavilions (notably the Algerian pavilion, but also others like New Caledonia’s) represented France’s growing colonial ambitions; the event itself also coincided directly with the culmination of the Empire’s botched intervention in Mexico (Emperor Maximilian I was executed in May of 1867). Nevertheless, France’s prosperity and the shiny modernity of Haussmann’s extensive urban developments were on display for the over eleven million visitors during the event, which, this time, resulted in a profit of over three million francs for France.

In the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, the Commune, and the establishment of the Third Republic, France sought to rebuild its global image through yet another universal exposition. Held from May through October 1878, this exhibit was larger in terms of visitors, cost, and size than the previous two had been, but once again resulted in a financial loss. The architectural centrepieces of the event were the Palais de l’Exposition built on the Champ-de-Mars and the Palais du Trocadéro, as well as the Rue des Nations which, as its name suggests, featured a variety of national pavilions. In terms of technological achievements, this event was particularly notable for its exhibits on electricity and telegraphy: inside the exhibition halls, Thomas Edison’s electric bulbs and Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone offered two important examples, and outside, Yablochkov electric candles illuminated a limited number of streets. Other remarkable curiosities included the hollow head of Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty, which exhibition goers could visit for 5 centimes (Ageorges 2006, 50).

As Pascal Blanchard points out in his essay in this issue, 1878 also represented a turning point in the representations of the colonies at the universal expositions: ‘on entre dans une nouvelle dynamique qui rend proche le lointain pour les visteurs parisiens’ (149). Indeed, exoticized cultural representations of the colonies became increasingly central to the expositions beginning in 1878. Such ethnographic displays of people from the colonies that took the form of pavilions, villages, spectacles, or zoos humains were seen to testify to France’s national prowess, as colonization expanded under the Third Republic. In staging stereotypical, often highly inaccurate representations of foreign cultures and people, these exhibits ‘répondent aux fantastmes et aux inquiétudes de l’Occident sur l’ailleurs et donne une réalité au discours racial alors en construction’ (Blanchard et al. 2011, 5). In the context of the expositions, it is critical to recognize at once the popularity of this phenomenon, the highly problematic underpinnings of these colonial exhibits, and the role the expositions played both in shaping Western notions of the Other and in reinforcing the project of colonialism. Many of the essays in this issue engage explicitly or implicitly with themes of colonialism whether through analysis of exoticized attractions (Demeulenaere-Douyère, Emery, and Blanchard) or with the fraught legacy of colonialism (Pappas).

As it became clear that colonial exhibits were a major draw to audiences, the 1889 Exposition featured what Paul Greenhaugh has called a ‘massively enhanced imperial Parisian display’ (66). In addition to the numerous colonial villages and pavilions, one of the extremely popular centrepieces of Paris’s fourth exposition was the Rue du Caire: an entire street of Egyptian architecture, alongside people in Egyptian garb promoting displays of foods, arts, music, and dance. This event also commemorated the one-hundred-year anniversary of the French Revolution and sought, according to the Commissaire général de l’exposition Georges Berger, to demonstrate to ‘nos fils ce que leurs pères ont fait en un siècle par le progrès de l’instruction, l’amour du travail et le respect de la liberté’ (613). Best known, of course, for Gustave Eiffel’s controversial tower, this Exposition boasted other massive structures built of iron like the Galérie des Machines, which housed many of the latest technological developments.⁴ Though technology and industry did play a central role at this event, the importance of spectacles and attractions for purely entertainment purposes grew in significance as well, as Christiane Demeulenaere-Douyère explores in her essay below. These included attractions as varied as a reproduction of the storming of the Bastille to the wildly popular Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.⁵ The exposition grounds covered not only the Champ de Mars, but also Trocadéro, the Esplanade des Invalides, and some of the banks of the Seine; it was viewed as having been a major success, with a profit of eight million francs and over double the number of visitors of 1878.

The 1900 Exposition’s theme – ‘le bilan du siècle’ – effectively encapsulated the overly ambitious goals of the event, which was, as each of its predecessors, conceived to outdo the previous exposition in size, attendance, and scope. Highlights of this Exposition included everything from the newly constructed Métro (analyzed here by Grubbs) to the elaborate Panorama du Tour du Monde – a visual visit around the world housed in a hybrid architectural space – a ‘Cambodian temple […]; a seven-story Chinese pagoda; an entrance based on a Japanese gateway; and an apparently North Indian balconied main structure’ (Benjamin 2003, 116), studied in this issue by both Elizabeth Emery and Demeulenaere-Douyère. Visitors might pass alongside the immense Grande Roue,⁶ immerse themselves in living history at the Vieux Paris attraction by Albert Robida that attempted to ‘bring Old Paris back to life’ (Emery 2005, 78), or view a retrospective of French art at the newly constructed Petit Palais, studied here by Pappas. As many of the essays in this issue point out, this Exposition indeed exceeded previous ones in its efforts to showcase France’s achievements and importance. Nonetheless, the extravagance of the event also hinted at the unsustainable nature of the universal expositions for France. Alexander Geppert notes that ‘the Exposition Universelle of 1900 marked a decisive turning point after which the entire medium became irreversibly spectacularized and commercialized, losing much of its former seriousness’ (2010, 64) and Peter Soppelsa situates 1900 as the moment of ‘Paris’s declining reputation as a model modern metropolis and leading producer of international expositions’ (2013, 276). While other, more specialized expositions were held in Paris after this event, 1900 was indeed the final universal exposition in Paris.

As we have seen, the expositions featured an extremely broad sampling of modernity’s signal features, and the interdisciplinary essays in this special issue reflect this variety, covering a wide range of topics from underwater exhibits to women entrepreneurs to the regulating and consumption of food and drink. Some of the essays take a synoptic approach to the expositions, following the trajectory of a particular aspect of the expositions from the early Second Empire to the end of the century. In doing so, each of these essays that takes this approach – those by Blanchard, Demeulenaere-Douyère, Tran – not only trace how attractions, colonial exhibits, or the regulation of consumption changed from one event to the next, they concurrently demonstrate how the events themselves adapted over time. Other essays take a cultural studies approach to one of the ‘clous’ or centrepieces of an exposition. Promotional and administrative materials from the expositions described many features of the expositions as their ‘clou’. At the time, this practice highlighted the spectacular nature of the expositions; for current scholars, it allows for close readings of individual objects as interpretative keys to larger cultural meaning. In their essays, Haklin, Grubbs, Emery, and Pappas closely examine a single attraction, building, or figure (or in Pappas’s case, the legacy of one such attraction) through readings of the first-hand accounts, guidebooks, journalistic articles, images, or souvenirs and situate the topics in their specific cultural and historical contexts. Together these two forms of approach to the universal expositions provide a template for methodological possibility, showing how a ‘reading’ of a massive cultural event such as these might proceed.

Taking a thematic approach, Demeulenaere-Douyère’s essay follows the evolution of entertainment throughout the Parisian expositions. If the universal expositions began as international events to celebrate France’s technological and industrial advancements as well as its beaux-arts, by the end of the century, she argues, they were chiefly focused on entertainment. Through attention to specific attractions from each of the five expositions, she shows how scientific developments gave way to spectacles and illusion, colonial exhibits became increasingly elaborate and grandiose as France increased its colonial power, and even how eating at the exposition became less about function and more about entertainment.

Pascal Blanchard traces developments in France’s colonial exhibits from the Exposition of 1855 with its Algerian pavilion to 1900, when the dizzying spectacle of colonial displays had become omnipresent in response to popular demand. As France’s empire expanded, and as the notion of the Other further solidified in the French cultural imaginary, so too did the desire for exoticizing exhibitions, which trafficked in representing colonial stereotypes rather than reality, and which offered exposition visitors a vision of colonial cultures based on these exaggerated representations. Blanchard concludes his essay on Paris's first twentieth-century colonial exposition (1906), which marked a new era in colonial propaganda, one when such ethnographic exhibitions were critiqued for their exploitative nature for the first time.

Van Troi Tran’s essay studies the phenomenon of private concessions at the expositions alongside the regulatory responses to these ‘sites of consumption’. 1867 marked the beginning of the construction of places to eat and drink at the expositions, and, as Tran shows, they grew in importance in subsequent expos. With this expansion came the increased need for a framework to ensure the smooth functioning of consumption at the events. Some of the aspects that Tran explores include the exposition's police force, the establishment of concession fees, and general regulations to manage the construction and basic maintenance of these establishments, and in doing so this article exposes the complexities at the heart of this key aspect of the expositions.

As outlined above, other essays focus on a singular element of the expositions in order to open up larger questions about the events. For example, Kathryn Haklin analyzes the merging of nineteenth-century literary and cultural spheres through a popular aquarium at the 1867 Exposition. She shows how this attraction mirrored the underwater experience described in Victor Hugo’s Les travailleurs de la mer, and how the aquarium ultimately impacted Jules Verne’s Vingt mille lieues sous la mer. Caroline Grubbs’s essay explores both the Métro’s role at the 1900 Exposition, as well as the controversial lead-up to its construction. The expositions frequently occasioned urban infrastructural developments, and technological innovation served as a major focal point of the events. Nonetheless, as Grubbs shows, the underground public works project was less attractive to visitors of the Exposition than other innovations in locomotion because of the ‘Métromania’ that had dominated the decades leading up to the event.

The expositions were replete with spectacles exoticizing foreign women, a practice that increased throughout the century. Elizabeth Emery complicates our understanding of two such women – Sada Yacco, former geisha and actress, and Loïe Fuller, American actress, dancer, and theatre director. By analyzing accounts of Japanese women’s performances at the 1900 Exposition, Emery both underscores common tropes in the Western performance of Japanese femininity and demonstrates that some contemporary French critics did understand that these performances did not in fact depict real women, but rather women playing roles. Moreover, Emery shows, Fuller took keen advantage of her command of the demands and pressures of 1900 and her entrepreneurial nature to achieve success for her theatre and Yacco’s performances.

Finally, Sara Pappas studies a twenty-first century exhibition in Paris’s Petit Palais’s gallery that examines the history of the building’s construction during the 1900 Exposition. The Petit Palais, which hosted a retrospective of French art from 1800 to 1900 during the earlier event, offers the occasion to explore how today’s France deals with exhibiting the full picture of the expositions, that is to say, not only the question of industrial development and artistic achievement, but also its problematic history of colonialism. She seeks to move past traditional binaristic readings of museums in the context of the expositions that, left unexamined, can lead to an erasure of the more complicated elements of the events.

Following these seven articles, Peter Soppelsa’s response demonstrates the many connections – methodological and thematic – among the essays. Grounding readers in the field of exposition studies and then suggesting how the essays in this issue offer potential new scholarly avenues, Soppelsa’s essay argues for the ongoing need for analysis of universal expositions. Indeed it is crucial to understand these touchstone events on a large scale as well as to study what Tran has elsewhere called ‘la riche texture du quotidien de ces événements’ (2012, 7) By bringing together essays on the Parisian expositions covering a range of relevant themes, this special issue offers sustained engagement with the history and culture of the expositions in France over the course of the nineteenth century, thus providing a deeper and more nuanced understanding of Parisian events whose legacy extends into the present.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Anne O'Neil-Henry is an associate professor of French and Francophone Studies at Georgetown University. She is the author of Mastering the Marketplace: Popular Literature in Nineteenth-Century (University of Nebraska Press, 2017) and the co-editor of French Cultural Studies for the Twenty-First Century (University of Delaware Press, 2017).

Notes

1 Information about the BIE and Expo 2020 can be found at the following website: https://bie-paris.org/site/fr/2020-dubai

2 See this site for information on France’s pavilion https://www.francedubai2020.com/le-pavillon-lumiere-lumieres

3 For more on the precursors to the universal expositions see Greenhalgh (1998).

4 For a comprehensive overview of this exposition, see Pascal Ory’s L’Expo universelle, 1889 (La Mémoire des siècles).

5 According to Robert Rydell and Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill’s show ‘triggered an overwhelming response’ and its opening performance attracted ‘more than 10,000 people, including French president Sadi Carnot’ (2005, 109).

6 This Ferris wheel, as Geppert notes, ‘stood as the tallest structure on the site’ (Geppert 2010, 94).