Excerpt from Paris 1900 by Richard D. Mandell

The impression given by the Exposition of 1900 can only be imagines by one who has toured and tried to glean some message from a large local fair or a world’s fair. Typically at a large exhibition there are surging crowds, hawkers, flapping banners, and garish colours everywhere. In addition to the gaiety and the spendthrift atmosphere, the observer can sense about him a pervading rivalry as new products strive for his approbation, and businessmen, sleek representatives of great corporations, or hucksters of vulgar entertainment, vie for his cash.

The colours, noises, and crowds may mask purposeful competitions within a fair. The nineteenth-century exhibitions were occasions for the awarding of excellence by means of eagerly sought medals, ribbons, and richly engraved certificates of merit. The awards (or lack of them) could make or break an artist, craftsman, or inventor who offered his unique skills for judgment by the international juries. The expositions launched or ended careers, made or destroyed fortunes, and established or weakened the reputations of great firms. In all the large universal expositions nations too joined in expensive and earnest, though bloodless, battles for prestige.

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The nineteenth-century expositions, like the later ones, delighted their observers, but offered more and were less slickly organized than recent world’s fairs. They were great events for the political, scholarly, and literary elites of the world. Each of those fairs was itself the occasion for demonstrating several preoccupations of the intellectuals of its age. Examples were the courageous and often amended schemes to classify the geometrically expanding fund of scientific and technical knowledge. Other efforts were the scholarly and technical congresses and the attempts to promote universal education. Most of all, the fairs themselves were manifestations of the positivists’ faith in material and scientific progress as panaceas for all man’s ills.
The impressions of a twentieth-century tourist at a world’s fair are likely to be far paler than were those of a visitor at one sixty or more years ago. We of the mid-twentieth century all favour standardized clothing and rational architecture. Even at a great modern fair, such as the Universal Exposition in Brussels in 1958, one could distinguish the various nationalities by the cut of their trousers or the pointedness of their shoes, for in our vitamin-fed, mode-conscious world everyone looks and dresses almost alike.

In 1900 only the rich resembled one another. At that time, it was still expected that the bourgeoisie of each nation would dress distinctively. Peasants flocked to Paris in 1900 and wore their festive national costumes. This diversity of clothing was seen against the jewel colours—iridescent purples, deep greens, and sultry oanges and reds—that were the rage at the end of the century. These tones enlivened facades, banners, frescos, arches, columns, fountains, and arbours, and were just the two-dimensional aspect of a spectacle that changed constantly in sensuous intensity and in levels of intellectual appeal. For most observers during the summer of 1900, the dazzling, shifting, and ultimately chaotic impression of the exposition was stirring beyond all expectation, for in 1900 there were no movies or other amusements that could even feebly compete with that miracle in total effect. The novelist Paul Morand has recalled the Exposition of 1900 in Paris as

…a new and ephemeral city hidden in the centre of the other, a hole quarter of Paris in fancy dress, a ball, where the buildings were the masqueraders. To our childish eyes it was a marvel, a coloured picture book, a cave filled by strangers with treasure.

An exposition’s size can be gauged by its attendance (the usual indicator of grandeur), the number of exhibitors, and its extent of geographical representation, its comprehensiveness, its over-all cost, and the total areas it covers. By all these standards, except for the last two, the Exposition of 1900 was the greatest of all time. … Total admissions for one year at the exposition in Paris were 50,860,801. The Exposition of 1900 probably was the largest and most ambitious international gathering for any purpose ever. All the great nations tried to offer the pick of their art and industry for the judgment of the millions of visitors. Many of the remotest regions of the world were represented in the colonial exhibits. In one major respect, this world’s fair will never be equaled: it was the last time anyone tried to include all of man’s activity in one display. The pace of technical and artistic innovation since then has made inconceivable any plan for assembling the evidence of man’s creativity in one exhibit, however immense. That last festival of amusement and education, co-operation and competition, chauvinism and internationalism, could only be planned during a time that still had faith in optimistic philosophical systems, hopes for social reform, joy in expanding material wealth, and confidence in the moral benefits of art.

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Mandell, Richard D. Paris 1900. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967.