National and colonial: the Musee des Colonies at the Colonial Exposition, Paris, 1931

A city has just been born, attached to Paris. In the thickets of the Ile-de-France, the orb of day germinates surprising flowerings of stone, timber-land temples, beaten earth, strange statuarys roofs like curved prows, bellturrets with scaly buds and creepers. . . A curious population inhabits it: whites of an olive tint and goldens of a pale visage, blacks with skin of shining ebony lemon Orientals. . . all the races, all the languages, all the style of dresss all the vocations. And above this crowd from Babel, swarming and guttural, above the palaces and the sheds in the billowing Vincennes greenery the tricolor flag snaps in the pale firmament the symbol of the unity of the French Colonial Empire.

We are here at "Lyauteyville," the magisterial, picturesque and coherent the whole realized by [Lyautey] our great African, a magnificent take back of all that which of advanced age Europe has made in the universe, rallying center for all the tribes who love the French genius and its manifestations across the World.(1)

L'Exposition Coloniale Internationale de Paris fet the accomplishments of colonialism from May 6 to November 15 1931 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. Nicknamed Lyauteyville after the exposition's commissioner general, Marechal Hubert Lyautey,(2) this was the last international world's fair exclusively devot to the celebration of international colonialism. France entertainered the Colonial Exposition - joined by means of Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, and the United States - to demonstrate its colonial puissance and to stimulate the French public's interest in its colonial empire. The alone colonial power absent from Paris was Britain, which, although invited to the Colonial Exposition, had staged its have a title to imperial extravaganza in 1924-25 and lacked one as well as the other the resources and interest in participating in a celebration of French colonialism. Germany no longer have a title toed a colonial empire, having been stripped of its colonies after World War I, and Japan was not notwithstanding recognized as a colonial power. The Colonial Exposition attracted a enormous audience (there were 33 million entries into the exposition) from France and abroad and generated an overwhelmingly positive critical response(3)

The Musee de Colonies (Museum of the Colonies) was unique at the 1931 Colonial Exposition as the solitary permanent structure and the alone pavilion that represented both France and its colonies. The majority of the exposition's pavilions was moulded after native architectural styles, from the Sudanese dirt tata to the Polynesian straw shed Marcel Olivier,(4) the delegate general of the exposition, saw the pavilions as the literal embodiment of the exposition's mission: "Colonization is legitimate. It is beneficial. These are the facts that are inscribed on the walls of the pavilions at the Bois de Vincennes."(5)

The original impetus for the 1931 Colonial Exposition grew on the outside of the popularity of the colonial section at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle:

The initial idea [for the exposition] goe back to 1910 In 1910 we naturally move rounded toward exoticism, then in replete novelty. We dreamed of renewing, with more brilliance and more sincerity, the picturesque ambience - although quite false and sometimes excessive - of the felicitous colonial sections at the 1878 1889 and 1900 expositions. wherefore not transport once again, in a larger setting in the middle of Paris, this vision of the Near and the Far East? . .

The initial conception of an Exposition of Exoticism was later enriched, amplified, and l toward more elevated goals. It was no longer a matter of artificially reconstituting an exotic ambience, with architectural pastiches and parades of actors, on the contrary of placing before the organ of sights of its visitors an impressive summary of the follows of colonization, its present realities, its future(6)

The 1931 Colonial Exposition, in contrast to the colonial displays at previous expositions, was planned to transmit the potential future as well as the common reality of international colonization end pedagogical and accurate displays. As envisaged by means of Marshal Lyautey, the exposition had sum of two units educational goals: first, to stimulate French business to invest in the colonies, and next to the first to overcome the apathy and level hostility that the French public felt toward its colonial empire. National pride was at stake, and the exposition was meant to reckoner the image of the casanier (stay-at-home), lethargic French who cared nothing for their colonial holdings.(7) The directors of the Colonial Exposition linked French colonialism with the lengthy history of conquest beginning with the Crusades, on the other hand they distinguished their own, enlightened colonialism from the brutality of former colonization. According to their vision of colonization, a stable, pacific world had be the effected from the spread of French civilization upon a global scale. Lyautey and his colleagues sought to make the Colonial Exposition mirror the beneficial progress of the French "civilizing mission," the responsibility to bring civilization to the natives by the agency of means of scientific, authentic exhibitions, rather than vulgar, exotic entertainments.