Hugo Cabret Tidbit #19 ~ Exposition Coloniale de Paris 1931

DeppInTheHeartOfTexas · **Posted:** Fri Jul 09, 2010 3:47 pm

DITHOT note: On pg. 492 Hugo says he and Isabelle visited the World's Fair in Paris the year before...Paris had hosted several " Exposition Universelles" in the 1800's and in 1900. There was a Exposition coloniale internationale", in 1931 which was a six-month colonial exhibition that (according to Wikipedia) "attempted to display the diverse cultures and immense resources of France's colonial possessions." Paris would host a true World's Fair in 1937, but that doesn't jive with the timeline in the book so I believe Hugo is referring to the 1931 event.

A colonial exhibition was a type of international exhibition intended to boost trade and bolster popular support for the various colonial empires during the New Imperialism period, which started in the 1880s with the scramble for Africa.

The British Empire Exhibition of 1924–5 ranked among these expositions, but perhaps the most notable was the rather successful 1931 Exposition Coloniale in Paris, which lasted six months and sold 33 million tickets.
The exposition opened on 6 May 1931 on over 500 acres of the Bois de Vincennes on the eastern outskirts of Paris. The scale was enormous; Sculptor Elizabeth Prophet called it "the most spectacular colonial extravaganza ever staged in the West." Some 33 million visitors came from around the world.

After the first World War, France found herself in possession of the most extensive colonial empire in the world: some 47 nations whose official language was French and whose governments were under some degree of obligation to France. To bring these peoples together in the capital city in order to educate the French nation as to the importance of their colonies, this was the primary goal of the Exposition Coloniale et Internationale de Paris.

The unspoken philosophy of the exposition, however, was the same mission that had guided and justified French foreign policy for more than a century. "To colonize does not mean merely to construct wharves, factories, and railroads, wrote Le Maréchal Lyautey, Commissioner General of the exposition. "It means also to instill a humane gentleness in the wild hearts of the savannah or the desert." One of the goals of the exposition, therefore, was to demonstrate that the French colonial effort was achieving those goals, and that colonial industry, however primitive when compared to the achievements of the "civilized" world, was showing promising signs of advancement from savagery to civilization.

But if the exposition coloniale were to be more than an elaborate display of French policy, it had to be shown that other civilized nations had the same goals, and that the will of the West to continue its civilizing mission was still strong.

The exhibition included dozens of temporary museums and facades representing the various colonies of the European nations, as well as several permanent buildings. Among these were the Palais de la Porte Doree, which today serves as the Cite Nationale de l'Histoire de l'Immigration, as well as the Musee Permanente des Colonies, designed by architect Albert Laprode.

The French government brought people from the colonies to Paris and had them create native arts and crafts and perform in grandly scaled reproductions of their native architectural styles such as huts or temples.

Some nations, for a variety of reasons, chose not to erect national pavilions. England, who harbored similar feelings about her own empire on which the sun never set, could see little profit in bringing her subject peoples to Paris. Germany had been stripped of her colonial possessions as a result of her defeat in the First World War, and felt the urge to come to Paris simply to gaze on former possessions that were now protectorates of France. Many countries, including England and Germany, contented themselves with informational displays in the City of Information building next to the main Entranceway of Honor.

Those nations that did erect pavilions did so with a variety of motives. Italy, which had little to show in the way of grand colonial enterprises, proudly displayed the history of her colonizing in the days of the Roman Empire. The Italian pavilion itself was a reconstruction of the basilica of Septimus Severus, erected in Libya during the era of Imperial conquest.

Commissioner general Lyautey himself commented on the "union of force and beauty" of the Italian pavilion. The new Italian colonial ventures in Tripoli and Somalia were thus given historical perspective and, in the eyes of the exhibitors, justification.

Other exhibiting European nations proudly set forth, in pavilions built along the lines of native architecture, the efforts of the mother countries to improve the life of the indigenous peoples in their colonies. Displays of schoolhouses, medical equipment, and improved transportation all pointed to the good done by Holland, Belgium, Portugal, and other European powers in the lands they had chosen to occupy. Close by these exhibits were others that told the story of why the European powers were there in the first place: raw materials. Displays of coffee, rubber, precious metals and exotic foodstuffs were accompanied by impressive statistics showing how valuable colonial products were for their master countries.

Only one pavilion seemed to show unqualified altruism. Denmark's building at the exposition featured her efforts to colonize Greenland. Dioramas showed "Esquimeaux" and their dog trains surrounded by the bleak landscape and bitter cold of the largest island in the world.

No shipments of gold or cinnamon, pepper or petroleum: only an unremitting battle against the elements, with the Danish government contributing its scientific expertise to make life in Greenland more tolerable.

The United States was the only non-European country exhibiting as a colonial power. The American building at the exposition was a close replica of George Washington's house at Mount Vernon, complete with the bedroom set aside for Lafayette, a gesture that pleased the French hosts enormously.

The inherent irony of the American exhibit, that it was housed in a building of the man who led the fight against colonial tyranny in the United States, was evidently completely lost on both the French and the Americans. Flanking the Mount Vernon building, but constructed in a style that blended harmoniously with the main structure, were a series of cottages featuring displays of America's burgeoning colonial empire: Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Samoa ‹ all of which were presenting themselves for the first time at a Parisian exposition.

But the American and other, non-French pavilions were mere side shows compared to the splendor of the exhibits of the French colonies. A circular train, mounted on a narrow-gauge railway, would carry visitors around the Lac Dausmenil, stopping at the foreign pavilions, and finally depositing voyagers at the head of the Grande Avenue des Colonies Françaises.

On this grand avenue, and on several of the radiating streets, stood the splendid and exotic structures representing the indigenous architecture of the French colonials in Africa, the Near East, the Fair East, and Oceania.

North African nations had long been present at Parisian expositions; and visitors who had attended earlier fairs could recognize the familiar perfumes, carpets, ornamented brass and hand-tooled leather, the exotic food served by colonials who spoke French in clipped, harsh accents. Still, the experience of dining at exotic eateries was new and strange to many visitors. One woman, having ordered "pilaf" in a Moroccan restaurant, sat waiting in anticipation of some bubbling concoction of native plants and the flesh of wild beasts. When the dish was served, she could only berate the waiter, in tones of disappointed outrage, "Why, this is only rice!" Two observers, Jean Camp and André Corbier, complained in their account that many such restaurants "offer us dishes with barbarous names which only attempt to disguise vegetable soup, stewed chicken, and little peas à la Française."

But to most Parisians, the Arabic colonies were familiar stuff. Far more interesting were the West Indian and African nations, some of which had been acquired only since the time of the First World War. French audiences had been primed to appreciate more of black culture since the triumphant conquest of Parisian entertainment by American jazz musicians and the talents of Josephine Baker. She had captured the imagination of the Parisian chic monde, and many of the lily whitest of women were now sporting tans as signs of their own inner tropic nature.

Josephine Baker as "Queen of the Colonies" with her troop at the Exposition Coloniale 1931 – Pernod advertisement with Josephine Baker and her song J’ai deux amours... for the 1931 exhibition – Pavillon Togo-Cameroun

In the pavilion of Guadeloupe, one could attend a festival where brightly-garbed performers mixed French, African, and Indian moods in their dances, while onlookers could enjoy the tangible pleasures of native rum or cocoa.

To "go native" became the "in thing" to do among trend-conscious Parisians and international fellow travelers.

The African pavilions were huge structures of wood covered over with bulky thatching and designed by French architects. Inside, dioramas told of the history of French civilizing influences in each country, and of the native handiworks. Graphs showed the decline in mortal illnesses and an improvement in physical health throughout the French protectorates. To preserve the authenticity of feeling at these pavilions, an exposition regulation stipulated that no Africans, or any other colonials, could wear European clothing on the fairgrounds.

The Madagascar display saw two distinct variations on the otherwise unvarying African displays of French pride and native artisanship. For one event, two authors, Pierre Camo and Roger Chardon, conceived of the idea of tapping into the great African oral tradition by creating an epic hymn to colonial enterprise. A Madagascar actor was hired to memorize the text; and he then appeared at one of the evening fetes to recite such ecstatic tropes as : "Every year our factories send forth six thousand tons-worth of cooking pots to France." Perhaps the authors hoped that this prose and prosaic epic would work its way into native oral culture, and instill the natives with a sense of ritual awe at their own contributions to the mother country.

Meanwhile, outside the exhibit building, an odd skit was taking place. A Madagascar woman rounded up one of her little boys, stood him up in a tub and proceeded to wash him down with clear water. As the scrubbing advanced, the child glistened with cleanliness, but the water turned progressively dirtier. Finally, the woman reached down, scooped up a bottleful of the liquid, and had the boy drink it down. According to Jean Camp and André Corbier, visitors came away persuaded that this was how the black race maintained its shadowy color.

The most imposing structure on the Avenue of French Colonies, indeed, the most impressive of all structures at the exposition, was the Temple of Angor Wat, a faithful rendition of the original Cambodian structure by the French architectural firm of Charles and Gabriel Blanche.

An iron model of the Angor Wat Temple, souvenir

Inside the temple, visitors encountered the dutiful array of statistics and displays of agricultural production, as well as a panoramic account of the history of Indo-China. But it was the sheer size and grandeur of the building itself that drew people to the Angor Wat temple. Surely here, visitors might think, is a symbol of grandeur from another culture, proof that they, too, had architectural traditions as lofty as any in Europe.

The urge to bring civilization to savage lands had not always been in the hands of governments, of course. For centuries, religious institutions had sent out missionaries to convert natives to Christianity and to halt practices which, in the views of their leaders, were abhorrent to God. The exposition coloniale featured an entire Pavilion of Missions, in which Protestant and Catholic missionary enterprises displayed their philosophies of assistance and conversion.

France, which had consciously begun to exclude the Church from any official connection to the universal expositions in 1878, now welcomed both Protestant and Catholic missionaries back into the official governmental fold as an important useful element of the Civilizing Mission.

In many important respects, the Exposition Coloniale Internationale de Paris could be counted a success. The total number of visitors to the fair, 33,489,902 paid admissions, plus an estimated one million free tickets, made this the second largest attendance of any Parisian exposition. And, according to one tally of the final receipts, the colonial exposition made a substantial profit of some 33 million francs.

In addition to the cash profit, the exposition coloniale left behind two permanent legacies to the city of Paris. The section of the fairgrounds that housed the display of exotic animals became the basis for the zoo in the park of Vincennes.

The art gallery for the exposition, designed by Jaussely and Laprade, with decorative murals by the Prix de Rome winner Alfred Janniot, became the Permanent Museum of the Colonies (today called the Museum of African and Oceanic Art). In 1931, this museum displayed not only the art from French colonies, but also works by renowned French artists, such as Cezanne and Gauguin, who at some point in their careers had drawn on non-Western art for inspiration and subject matter.

There still remains the question, however, of whether or not the exposition coloniale achieved its major goal: to educate the French people as to the importance of the colonies to France. For at least a century, the French nation, even and especially the intellectuals and artists, regarded the colonies as mysterious, far-away places where incomprehensible people practiced their inscrutable ways. What attracted people to the Turkish baths of Ingres, the harem scenes of Gérôme, or the island village women of Gauguin was precisely their strangeness. And it was this same exotic allure that drew people to Vincennes in 1931.

Most people, it seems, came to the exposition coloniale to enjoy themselves. They came away satisfied, much in the same way that people come away from a meal in a foreign restaurant. People opposed to colonialism did not change their minds; people already in favor of the enterprise could feel that their convictions were further reinforced. The vast majority of visitors went about their business as before. Governmental colonial policy went unchanged.
The one exception is the effect of the exposition on a sizeable portion of the French youth who attended the event. The colonial office was concerned that France needed the talents of bright young men to administer the Empire. As a consequence, there was a concerted effort on the part of exposition officials to attract students of all ages to the fair. Pupils from primary and secondary schools, trade schools, and teacher training institutions participated in the "Tour the World in Four Days" program, which involved an intensive study of all the major exhibits at the exposition. For the six months of its duration the exposition continued drawing visitors, especially school children. It inspired a large number of them to aim at overseas service. Many of the men who entered the colonial school in the 1930s mention the Vincennes exposition as having had an important influence on the choice of a career.

The Colonial Exposition provided a forum for the discussion of colonialism in general and of French colonies specifically. French authorities published over 3,000 reports during the six-month period and held over 100 congresses. The exposition served as a vehicle for colonial writers to publicize their works, and it created a market in Paris for various ethnic cuisines, particularly North African and Vietnamese. Filmmakers chose French colonies as the subjects of their works. The Permanent Colonial Museum (today the Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens) opened at the end of the exposition. The colonial service experienced a boost in applications.

Twenty six territories of the empire participated in the Colonial Exposition Issue of postage stamps issued in conjunction with the Exposition.

An anti-colonial counter-exhibition was held near the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, titled Truth on the Colonies and was organized by the French Communist Party. The first section was dedicated to the crimes made during the colonial conquests, and quoted Albert Londres and André Gide's criticisms of forced labour while the second one made an apology of the Soviets' "nationalities' policy" compared to "imperialist colonialism".

In the long run, of course, the effort was futile. France, like all other European countries, lost partial or complete control over her possessions. As the 1930s progressed, other events were taking shape that would have far greater immediate effect on France than the loss of her empire. The great Depression, the bitterly divisive election in 1936, and the acting out of the ambitions of Hitler and Mussolini. By the time of the next and last great Parisian exposition in 1937, France would find herself on the brink of losing far more than her overseas empire. Less than two years after the 1937 World's Fair, Paris would be under Nazi occupation.

fansmom · **Posted:** Fri Jul 09, 2010 5:06 pm

A 28 page tidbit. I think you've set a record! :lol:

DeppInTheHeartOfTexas · **Posted:** Fri Jul 09, 2010 5:27 pm

Nah, the pics are just big! :grin:

Buster · **Joined:** Thu Jun 26, 2008 10:07 am **Posts:** 288

Quote:

Meanwhile, outside the exhibit building, an odd skit was taking place. A Madagascar woman rounded up one of her little boys, stood him up in a tub and proceeded to wash him down with clear water. As the scrubbing advanced, the child glistened with cleanliness, but the water turned progressively dirtier. Finally, the woman reached down, scooped up a bottleful of the liquid, and had the boy drink it down. According to Jean Camp and André Corbier, visitors came away persuaded that this was how the black race maintained its shadowy color.

Truly bizarre. (Although when one of the old-timers at the local county fair dyed chicks and proclaimed that they came from Easter eggs, he was always able to convince a few folks. Of course, these were the same people who look up when you tell them that "gullible" is written on the ceiling.)

Great research - I'm reminded of the Expo in Montreal (1967?). Thanks.

DeppInTheHeartOfTexas · **Posted:** Fri Jul 09, 2010 8:31 pm

Buster, I'm not familiar with the Montreal Expo. Were there similar exhibits? :-O

lizbet · **Posted:** Sat Jul 10, 2010 3:41 pm

DeppInTheHeartOfTexas wrote:

Buster, I'm not familiar with the Montreal Expo. Were there similar exhibits? :-O

Much of what I remember regarding what we called "Expo '67" was a lot of flag waving as it were as it coincided with Canada being 100 years old - :canada:

We badgered my poor Dad to pack up the six of us in his beat up old woodie station wagon and head out across the 401 highway (basically Detroit / Windsor) to Montreal. No luck. Dad drove for a living and said why would he want to drive all that way just to stand in lines all day in the heat of the summer!? Needless to say we went to Algonquin Park instead of Montreal and all I know of that World's Fair is the unfortunate legacy it and the '76 Olympics left on Montreal which was and still is DEBTS :eyebrow:

Buster · **Joined:** Thu Jun 26, 2008 10:07 am **Posts:** 288

My memories of the actual Expo are pretty spotty, but I do remember the metro, which was brand new at the time.

DeppInTheHeartOfTexas · **Posted:** Sun Jul 11, 2010 9:58 am

We had something similar one summer when I was a kid. It was a sort of mini World's Fair in San Antonio called Hemisfair. There were a lot of pavillions there but mostly I just remember the midway rides! :lol:

gemini · **Posted:** Sun Jul 11, 2010 10:05 pm

Wow, They certainly seem to go all out for world fairs. I have never been to a worlds fair or an expo but there sure seem to be a lot of them.

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Hugo Cabret Tidbit #19 ~ Exposition Coloniale de Paris 1931

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