Paris 1900: The Exposition Universelle as a Century’s Protean Synthesis

Abstract

In the wake of →Walter Benjamin and numerous other cultural critics, it has become an oft-repeated, though equally disputed, cliché to characterize Paris as the capital not only of the nineteenth century, but also of modernity itself.² Another less well known but more tangible metaphor is that of Paris as the ‘Queen City of Expositions’ or the ‘Fairie City of the World’. In the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, the French capital hosted five of the most important Expositions Universelles, held at regular 11-year intervals in 1855, 1867, 1878, 1889 and 1900, whose impact on the capital’s urban fabric and cosmopolitan image of itself cannot be overestimated.³ ‘Paris is par excellence the city of expositions’, an Austrian visitor avowed in the spring of 1900: ‘If it has not invented the techniques of the art of exhibiting, it has at least pushed them to their most refined development. When Paris undertakes an exposition, it puts itself on the stage.’⁴ Since the city’s fame as ‘a center for great exhibitions’ was globally acknowledged and never seriously challenged abroad, it seemed only appropriate that the finale of the nineteenth century should be enacted there. Not only did the 1900 exposition prove to be synonymous with the end of the French ‘monopoly of the international exhibitions of the Old World’, as →Pierre Baron de Coubertin put it, but it also proved to be the conclusion of the era of great universal expositions as such (Plate 2 and Figure 3.1).⁵