1867: Empire

Cela devient fou et démesuré. On est menacé d'une nouvelle Babylone.

[This is becoming crazy and out of hand. We are threatened with a new Babylon.]

Flaubert to George Sand, Correspondence

Que l'Europe soit la bienvenue. (...) Qu'est-ce qu'une exposition universelle? C'est le monde voisinant. On va causer en peu ensemble. On vient comparer les idéals. Confrontation de produits en apparence, confrontation d'utopies en réalité.

[Welcome, Europe. (...) What is a World's Fair? The world as neighbors. We talk a bit together. We come to compare ideals. An apparent confrontation of products, in reality a confrontation of utopias.]

Victor Hugo, "Paris", Introduction to Catalogue for the 1867 Exposition Universelle

Quant au catalogue, je n'en parle pas; il est plein de telles irrégularités qu'il paraît avoir été fait pour égarer et non pour renseigner le public.

[As for the catalogue, I won't even talk about it; it is so full of irregularities that it seems to have been made to confuse rather than inform the public.]

Maxime Ducamp, La Revue des Deux Mondes

L'Exposition Universelle, le dernier coup à ce qui est l'américanisation de la France, l'Industrie primant l'Art, la batteuse à vapeur régnant à la place du tableau.

[The World's Fair, the final blow in the Americanization of France, industry triumphing over art, the steam engine reigning in place of the painting.]

Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal

As the second and last World's Fair of the Second Empire, perhaps the most striking difference between the Paris 1867 Exposition Universelle and that of 1855 was that this time the main attraction or clou was the Empire itself. In contrast to 1855, when private industry had been encouraged to subsidize the construction and operations of the Fair, the 1867 Exposition Universelle clearly displayed the mark of Imperial control, from the beginning of the preparations down to the distribution of medals at the awards ceremony, performed by the Emperor himself.

For the first time an official American commission visited a Paris Exposition Universelle, to oversee the American exhibition and to report on the Exposition as a whole to Congress. The United States had already exhibited at the 1855 Exposition, but the constitution of an official government commission in 1865 to visit the 1867 Exposition indicated the growing seriousness with which the Americans viewed the development of the Expositions Universelles in Paris. The Reports of the U. S. Commissioners to the Paris Universal Expositions, on file in the Library of Congress, offer a variety of official American views of the French and the Parisian World's Fairs, beginning with 1867.

The American Commissioners noticed a number of significant differences between the first two Parisian Expositions. One of the first differences was the change in sponsorship, from heavily privatized investment to direct government involvement.[1] Increased government intervention may be partly explained by the necessity of rescuing failed investors in the Palais de l'Industrie in 1855, or the general trend towards Haussmannisation that stressed heavy government investment in public works such as the construction of new streets and parks, sanitation and improved water supplies for the city.

Like the 1855 Exposition, the 1867 Paris World's Fair has correctly been viewed as a response to British initiative. That initiative, the 1862 London International Exhibition of Industry and Art, was itself conceived as a response to the 1855 Exposition Universelle, which had been mounted in large part as a response to the London Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851... In many ways, the staging of world's fairs from 1851 to 1867 appears as a kind of dialogue or extended potlatch between Great Britain and France. As these were the only two powers with enough interest, resources, and knowledge about the business of mounting a large-scale world's fair, they enjoyed a distinct if short-lived monopoly.

After 1867, however, two things would happen to change in the direction of the fairs. The British attempted unsuccesfully to mount a series of five consecutive annual fairs beginning in 1871 in response to the success of the Paris 1867 Exposition. Each one lost more money than its predecessor, such that by the close of the fourth fair in 1875 the project was abandoned. Britain would not see another Great Exhibition until the modestly successful (and seriously scaled-down) fair held at Wembley in 1924-25. Though no one realized it at the time, the London 1862 Exhibition effectively marked the end of serious British participation in the arena of world's fairs.

Meanwhile, the United States would arrive on the exposition scene in 1876 with its Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, held in Fairmount Park. The "dialogue" between Britain and France would eventually give way to a dialogue of sorts between France and the United States. This dialogue, in turn, would gradually take the form of a "conversation" as other nations would host their own expositions. Both participation in world's fairs as well as the lack thereof (and especially the abandonment of participation in fairs) say something about a country's resolve to demonstrate its own importance in world affairs; indeed, there is much to be said about the "world of fairs in world affairs".[2] Between what would be the last major British exhibition on the international stage in 1862 and the entry of the United States into ExpoCulture in 1876, France welcomed the world to Paris to celebrate Industry, Art, Progress, Brotherhood, but most of all herself.

Grands Travaux

Preparations for the 1867 Exposition occurred en pleine Haussmannisation, that is, in the midst of radical upheavals in the urban fabric of Paris. With so many changes occurring at the same time, it was difficult for most Parisians to distinguish which projects related to the Exposition and which ones were part of the ongoing transformation of the city. Given that Baron Haussmann oversaw many of the different undertakings in both domains, the effect was one of continual and nearly ubiquitous demolition, construction, expansion — in short, a transformation whose different phases and constitutive elements were often very hard if not impossible to distinguish. Like the workings of capitalism itself, Haussmannisation and the Expositions Universelles could never be perceived in their entirety but rather through their product. For Haussmannisation, this meant new, wide avenues, boulevards, apartment buildings, parks and improved water and sanitation; for the Expositions, this meant buildings, fairgrounds exhibits and multitudes of visitors.

Another reason for the blurring between Haussmannisation and the 1867 Exposition derived from the decision to move the location of the fairgrounds. Whereas the previous Exposition had occupied a relatively modest site between the Champs-Elysées and the Seine between the Place de la Concorde and the Arc de Triomphe (already a considerable area, as anyone who has walked the length of the Tuileries will attest), the 1867 Exposition was returned to the site of previous exhibitions, the Champ de Mars. This grassy rectangle between the Ecole Militaire and what is now the Eiffel Tower had been the scene for most of the fêtes and exhibitions prior to 1849, most notably the first Exposition publique des produits de l'industrie francaise (Public Exhibition of the Products of French Industry) in 1798. In some ways it was altogether fitting that this site should welcome what was to be the largest display of industry undertaken to date.

Frédéric Le Play reprised his role as Commissaire Général, and he reported for a time to Prince Napoléon until the latter's growing political disagreements with the Emperor moved him to resign his post. Le Play's most striking contribution to the Exposition was in its organization, both physical and intellectual. The classificatory system developed for the 1855 Exposition was revised and expanded dramatically, from eight sections to ten and from 30 classes to 90. (London's 1862 Exhibition, in contrast, featured only four sections and 40 classes.) A few sections, like fine arts, remained unchanged; other sections were combined or reconfigured from the previous Exposition.[3]

The creation of new sections reflected technological innovations and especially new social concerns. Most noteworthy among the new classes created was number ten, "Objects Devoted to the Improvement of Physical and Moral Conditions of the Population". In one form or another, this classification would reappear in all subsequent Expositions Universelles with the exception of 1878. It would be designated as a separate group called "Social Economy" in 1889, "Social Economy, Hygiene and Public Assistance" in 1900 and "The Social Question" in 1937. In 1867, the improvement of physical and moral conditions of the population was "demonstrated" or spectacularized through exhibits devoted to children's education (which would not become compulsory until the Third Republic), indigenous dress (spécimens des costumes populaires des diverses contrées)[4], affordable housing featuring hygenic conditions and well-being (spécimens d'habitations caractérisées par le bon marché uni aux conditions d'hygiène et de bien-être), and processes and products created by workers. The invention of this class represented a strategic move on the Emperor's part to demonstrate Imperial concern for "the social question", specifically the condition of workers.

Organizers of the Exposition saw the inclusion of the social question as part of the movement towards universality. One particular advertisement showed how each Exposition had improved on the previous one by adding a category or categories that had been neglected in the past. London's Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851 highlighted material progress; France in 1855 added fine arts and introduced domestic economy; in 1862, London added exhibits devoted to education. One of the main innovations of the Paris 1867 Exposition Universelle would be whole sections devoted to workers.[5] In fact, Napoléon III sent a delegation of workers to London in 1862 to visit the Exhibition, and so the creation of special workers' sections in 1867 seemed a logical next step.

Another indication of Imperical concern was expressed in the formidable expenses undertaken by the government to stage the Exposition. Rather than authorize a private holding company to finance the construction of the main exhibition building as had been done in 1855, the government took it upon itself to finance the entire construction, for the sum of more than eleven million francs. Despite its high cost, the main exhibition building was intended as a temporary structure, to be torn down after the close of the Exposition. This was another important difference with the previous, permanent — and already outdated — Palais de l'Industrie. The temporary nature of the already expensive exhibition space, added to the fact that total government expenditures for the Exposition were projected at slightly over twenty million francs, scandalized at least one anonymous observer:

Est-il possible d'utiliser les vingt millions destinés à l'Exposition Universelle de 1867 en dotant la ville de Paris d'un monument durable et le pays d'une institution utile? .... L'édifice projeté pour recevoir l'Exposition de 1867, doit-il après cette Exposition, servir à une destination déjà prévue, ou, construction purement temporaire, doit-il, au lendemain du jour où ses portes seront fermées, tomber sous le marteau des démolisseurs? Lorsqu'on songe que vingt millions devront être dépensés pour l'établissement de ce palais, condamné d'avance à une destruction immédiate, que ces vingt millions de cet édifice somptueusement établi il ne restera rien .... l'on se prend à se demander s'il ne serait pas possible d'éviter cette perte sèche d'une somme considérable, et d'utiliser cette construction et ces millions, en donnant à ce Palais éphémère une destination durable.[6]

[Is is possible to use the twenty million {francs} destined for the 1867 Exposition Universelle to give the city of Paris a durable monument and the country a useful institution? ... Must the planned building for the 1867 Exposition serve a pre-determined function, or, as a temporary building, will it fall under the demolition hammers the day after its doors close? When one thinks that twenty million will be spent on the construction of this palace, which will be already condemned to an immediate destruction, and that of the twenty million spent on this sumptuously built edifice there will remain nothing ... one begins to wonder whether it might not be possible to avoid this blatant waste of such a considerable sum and to use the building and the money to give this ephemeral palace a durable function.]

Form and Ideological Power

This "sumptuously built edifice" would house the majority of exhibits and occupy nearly the entire Champ de Mars. Learning from the shortcomings of the 1855 Palais de l'Industrie (which was still standing at the time), Le Play designed a vastly larger building following a novel organizing concept. Original plans called for a circular building made up of seven concentric galleries. Each gallery would be devoted to a specific theme or group, with each nation allotted a section or sections of the circle. Thus the visitor could compare the state of the art in a given industry "around the world" by simply walking around a given gallery, or s/he might view all the products and works of art in a given country by exploring that particular section or sections, moving outward from the center or inward from the periphery. In theory, the concept had significant potential. In reality, however, the actual mechanics of the design created some unanticipated problems.

First of all, as had been the case in 1855, the selection juries admitted many more exhibits than the exhibition space could hold. Accommodating the added exhibits required a significant disturbance of the design metaphor of the circle. With considerably less elegance, the circle was split and separated to insert a rectangle, thereby transforming the plan of the exhibition space into an oval (figure 1). Thus the metaphor of the circular exhibition space-as-the-world had been altered, entailing subtle ideological implications. The (two-dimensional) circle and (three-dimensional) sphere have always carried a powerful symbolic charge when associated with public space. Spheres in particular have enjoyed considerable prestige as privileged forms in exhibition spaces. The examples of the Perisphere and Unisphere from the New York World's Fairs of 1939 and 1964 come to mind, as do the geodesic dome of Epcot Center and the mirrored dome of the Géode in the Parc de la Villette on the outskirts of Paris. Perhaps the most important ancestor of all these large spherical forms remains Etienne-Louis Boullée's (1728-1799) unbuilt project for a Cenotaph for Isaac Newton (1784), which utilized the sphere as a metaphor for the cosmos, with dramatic effect (figure 2). Like the circle, the sphere derives its ideological force from containment. Thus the design of the main exhibition space of the 1867 World's Fair works to "contain" the world symbolically in the same way that the Newton Cenotaph contained the universe, or in much the same way that Epcot Center and Disney attempt to prove, with unrelenting cheerfulness, that it's a small world after all.

As applied to the 1867 Exposition Universelle, the totalizing metaphor of the circle/sphere as world/universe worked to "fit" the entire world under one specifically French roof. This effect was by no means accidental but rather intentional. Architectural historian and critic Siegfried Giedion quotes an unspecified "official publication" of the time which states that

[T]o make the circuit of this palace, circular, like the equator, is literally to go around the world. All peoples are here, enemies live in peace side by side. As in the beginning of things on the globe of waters, the divine spirit now floats on this globe of iron.[7]

In this statement we find many of the same arguments and sentiments as those invoked in 1855. A magnanimous France plays host to the happy brotherhood of nations, casting a world in its own image and welcoming all (or nearly all) under the banner of a Pax Gallicana. But while France indulged its own magnanimity in 1855 after having successfully subdued Algeria and the Crimea, the world situation in 1867 would not provide France with the same relative advantages. The Emperor's foreign policy, increasingly bold and risky, was in fact starting to lead France through a series of disasters that would finally erupt with the Franco-Prussian War. But while the preparations for the Exposition proceeded, it did indeed appear as if Paris would provide the stage for a Pax Gallicana.

To grasp this three-dimensional metaphor of a peaceful world coexisting in harmony required first of all some distance from it. The best vantage point from which to take in the Champ de Mars is the Butte de Chaillot directly across the Seine (the current site of the Palais de Chaillot). Deciding three months before the opening of the Exposition that the Butte was too "irregular", the organizing commission ordered Haussmann to lower the hill by some twenty feet and make it more level. In itself this job was not excessively complicated from a technical point of view, but the timing of the order required exceptional, ceaseless labor. As had been done for the main exhibition space across the river, a temporary railroad line was lain. In this case, the line served to remove earth — some two hundred railroad cars' worth — while squadrons of excavators worked all day and all night (under arc lamps) to lower the hillside by approximately twenty feet.[8]

The View from the Butte

The Butte de Chaillot did in fact turn out to be a favorite vantage point from which to "take in" a view of the Exposition. Numerous postcards and souvenirs of the Exposition portrayed it from this spot (figures 3 and 4). One of the more famous depictions of the fairgrounds is Edouard Manet's L'Exposition Universelle de 1867 (figure 5).[9] Monet's treatment of the Palais and the fairgrounds seems at first somewhat incongruous given the painting's title. While we might expect the Exposition to be the center of the painting (in the figurative as well as the literal sense of the word "center"), the Palais and fairgrounds are in fact relegated to the background of the painting and placed off-center in the right half of the canvas. Why is this? T. J. Clark interprets the seemingly unfinished — in reality, blurry — treatment of the Exposition as a satirical comment on the Empire itself, the supposed "flatness" of the Palais and fairgrounds reflecting the "flatness" or blandness of the Second Empire.[10] The numerous criticisms of the mediocrity of the Empire and especially Imperial taste in art might support such an interpretation, but this view seems more like hindsight than criticism. To understand the apparent contradiction between the painting's nominal subject and that subject's treatment within the painting, we need to consider some of the other elements that comprise it.

The painting's foreground features various people on the Butte de Chaillot, many of whom are looking across the Seine at the Exposition. The object of popular attention, then, becomes the painting's nominal subject: The people in the painting are looking at the Exposition. These same people, meanwhile, become the object of the viewer's attention, placed as they are in the foreground. They are rendered with more clarity than any of the other elements and are thus the most legible elements of the painting's composition, unlike the blurry Exposition space in the background off to the right. Rather than interpret this as a criticism of the Empire itself, however, a less ideologically determined reading might interpret the painting as a commentary on the difficulty of grasping or "seeing" (in a larger sense) the Exposition at all. Given the enormous dimensions of the Palais on the one hand and the overwhelming number of exhibits on the other, such an interpretation seems plausible. When we recognize that all our "views" of the Exposition are filtered through the reactions and interpretations of the thousands of visitors who experienced it, the picture seems very blurry and quite "unfinished" indeed. In this sense, Manet is commenting on the indeterminate nature of interpretation itself as well as the impossibility of ever achieving a totalizing view of a phenomenon like the Exposition or, for that matter, the Empire itself.

Opening Day

Even finding two similar accounts of the opening day of the Exposition proves to be something of a challenge. The popular illustrated weekly l'Illustration (which bore the subtitle "journal universel", not to be confused with Le Moniteur Universel, the official daily of the Second Empire), confidently reports a beautiful, cloudless opening day on April 1st.[11] With equal certainty, Jean-Jacques Bloch and Marianne Delort evoke scenes of visitors stumbling around in the mud on that same April 1st, under a rainy, unfriendly sky.[12]

Putting the weather aside and entering the Exposition and the Palais itself, the results are somewhat less contradictory and generally less pleasing to the visitor. We are closer, but now we find ourselves confronted with hundreds of thousands of exhibits and, as with the view from the Butte de Chaillot, we are again unable to take in the Exposition in its entirety. We are simply too close now. Visitors such as Maxime Ducamp disparagingly noted the display of art works, commenting that "Les vastes galeries qui les contiennent, noyées de lumière, visitées par un incessant courant d'air, ressemblent à des salles de gymnastique" [The vast galleries that contain them {the artworks}, drowning in light, visited by a ceaseless current of air, resemble gymnastics halls].[13] While favorably disposed to many of the works of art he saw, Ducamp judged their success to be in spite of rather than thanks to the setting in which they were displayed:

[I]l faut que notre école soit singulièrement plus forte que toutes les autres pour conserver encore sa supériorité dans les déplorables conditions où elle se trouve placée. ... [L]a France ... exposait ses toiles et ses statues avec une négligence qui, sans détruire la valeur des œuvres d'art, les amoindrit, et pourrait les faire paraître douteuses à des yeux non exercés (113).

[(O)ur school must be particularly stronger than all the others to maintain its superiority amidst the deplorable conditions where it has been placed. ... France ... exposed its canvases and statues with a negligence which, without detracting from the value of the artworks, reduced them and could make them seem dubious to untrained eyes.]

Ducamp's observations walking around the exhibition space provide a rare glimpse of what it felt like to be a visitor to the fair. Once we step back from his witheringly hostile criticism, we can see

ces vastes granges où les murailles, couvertes de tableaux, ressemblent à des murs placardés d'affiches. Le sol est un béton que ne garantit nulle natte, qui s'effrite sous les pieds, répand une poussière permanente, et qu'on est obligé d'arroser comme un trottoir. Un calicot blanc et transparent forme le plafond et laisse pénétrer un soleil criard qui détruit l'effet des tableaux, leur donne d'insupportables luisans, fait saillir en relief le grain de la toile, peut compromettre la solidité des œuvres exposées (114).

[these vast barns whose walls, covered with paintings, resemble walls plastered with posters. The floor is a concrete that no matting protects, which crumbles underfoot, spreading permanent dust and which has to be hosed down like a sidewalk. White transparent banners form the ceiling and let a raucous sunlight pass through that destroys the effect of the paintings, giving them unbearable glossiness and making the grain of the canvas stand out, compromising the durability of the works displayed.]

It is difficult but not impossible to "step back" from Ducamp's criticism. Most of his animus was directed not so much at the building or the exhibits, but at the Imperial Commission responsible for displaying artworks in a space that did not suit them:

Comment la commission impériale ne s'est-elle pas aperçue qu'il y a une certaine différence entre des œuvres d'art et des machines à vapeur, et que l'emplacement qui convient aux secondes n'est pas fait pour les premières? Pourquoi n'a-t-on pas fait cette réflexion, si simple qu'elle en est enfantine, qu'un local doit être modifié selon l'objet auquel on le réserve? ... C'est à n'y pas croire. A qui donc l'idée viendrait-elle de faire une lecture dans un champ de foire ou d'exécuter une symphonie dans une usine en travail?[14]

[How is it that the Imperial Commission did not take note of a certain difference between works of art and steam engines, and that the most suitable placement of the latter might not be the most suitable for the former? Why has no one made the childishly simple observation that a space ought to be modified according to the object displayed in it? It's unbelievable. Who would think of holding a public reading in fairground or a symphonic concert in a factory?]

The problem, then, becomes the "fit" between Art and Industry, specifically the effects of displaying sculptures and paintings in a distinctly industrial (iron and glass) setting. Modern sensibilities, of course, do not find such juxtapositions jarring — on the contrary, since Surrealism, many modern works of art take such incongruous encounters as their point de départ —, but many French sensibilities of the late 1860s were scandalized by them.

"Les Augustes Visiteurs", continued: Presence and Absence

Conversely, certain events that we as modern "visitors" to the fairs might find shocking or, at the very least, richly ironic, passed largely unnoticed to contemporaries. L'Illustration mentions a detail during the Imperial visit on opening day visit that stands out conspicuously in the light of the fall of the Empire. Passing through Room 13, the reporter could not help but notice a near life-size statue of Napoléon Bonaparte by the Italian sculptor Vicenzo Vela.[15] We do not know the reaction of Napoléon III before this statue, "Les Derniers Jours de Napoléon Premier" (The Last Days of Napoléon the First), but the irony is of course striking. Victor Hugo or Emile Zola could hardly have created a more ironic tableau to depict this symbolic meeting between Napoléon Bonaparte and his doppelgänger, "Napoléon le Petit".

Bonaparte's symbolic presence at the Exposition was in large part overshadowed by the near-constant stream of foreign rulers throughout the summer of 1867. Zola gives an exaggerated account of Paris under the weight of so many important visitors:

Depuis mai les empereurs et les rois étaient venus en pélerinage des quatre coins du monde, des cortèges qui ne cessaient point, près d'une centaine de souverains et de souveraines, de princes et de princesses. Paris était repu de Majestés et d'Altesses; (...) il s'était jeté sous les roues des carrosses pour voir de plus près le roi de Prusse que M. de Bismarck suivait comme un dogue fidèle. (...) Presque chaque semaine l'Opéra allumait ses lustres pour quelque gala officiel. On s'étouffait dans les petits théâtres et les restaurants, les trottoirs n'étaient plus assez larges pour le torrent débordé de la prostitution.[16]

[Beginning in May, emperors and kings had made the pilgrimage {to Paris and the Exhibition} from the four corners of the Earth, endless corteges, nearly a hundred sovereigns, princes and princesses. Paris was bloated with Majesties and Highnesses; (...) it threw itself under carriage wheels to get a close look at the King of Prussia, whom Monsieur von Bismarck followed like a faithful mastiff. (...) Nearly every week the Opera lit its chandeliers for some official gala. People suffocated in the small theatres and restaurants, the sidewalks were no longer wide enough for the unleashed torrent of prostitution.]

Of the four main entrances to the Exhibition, one along the Avenue de la Bourdonnais was reserved entirely for royalty, who were exempted from the admission fee. A special Imperial pavilion was constructed for the purpose of receiving visiting dignitaries. Theater and royalty merged comically on one occasion when the popular actress Hortense Schneider stormed the royal gate in her carriage, loudly announcing herself as "Duchesse de Gerolstein!", her role in an Offenbach operetta of the period.[17]

An equally colorful but much more real sovereign arrived in the form of Ludwig II of Bavaria, traveling incognito as the Count von Berg in the company of his valet. The Count and his valet shared rented rooms in the Hôtel du Rhin on the Place Vendôme; their official reception before the Emperor and Empress made a vivid impression. Bouin and Chanut note: "The Court judged him mad."[18]

One of the major theatrical events outside the exhibition grounds during the period was a revival of Hugo's Hernani, which had caused a succès de scandale when it premiered on 21 February 1830. Like the exhibition of the statue Les Derniers Jours de Napoléon Premier, much irony has been read into the performance of Hernani. Many of the similarities between Napoléon III and both the aging patriarch Don Ruy Gomez and the bandit Hernani seem somewhat forced, although the parallels between the question of legitimacy and the Spanish context (Empress Eugénie's Spanish lineage) are worthy of note. Still, it would be too easy in one sense to read too much symbolism into this performance.[19]

Despite his continuing exile, Hugo's presence at the Exhibition was nevertheless very much felt. Much more significant than the revival of Hernani and of direct importance to the Exhibition was Hugo's contribution to the official exhibition catalogue. Hugo's participation in the Imperial festivities despite his self-imposed exile suggest that Napoléon III realized that Hugo's explicit exclusion would be unwise; likewise, Hugo himself no doubt realized that to ignore the Exhibition would also be ill-advised. However, return to Paris would mean breaking his vow to remain off French soil for as long as Napoléon III remained Emperor. His contribution to the catalogue represents a fairly shrewd calculation to participate and be noted in les fastes without actually having to be present or acknowledged.

Hugo's text originally appeared as the introduction to the two-volume Paris-Guide published by Lacroix in May 1867. In view of its length and especially its author, the text was excerpted and published separately as a brochure entitled simply Paris.[20] While Hugo's collaboration on this effort may appear at first glance a surrender of his principles, the five different section titles reveal Hugo's subversive agenda: "The Future", "The Past", "Supremacy of Paris", "Function of Paris", "Declaration of Peace". Nowhere do we find a reference to contemporary events or especially Napoléon III. Hugo's closest allusion is a thinly veiled one, however: "Cette ville a un inconvénient. A qui la possède elle donne le monde. Si c'est par un crime qu'on l'a, elle donne le monde à un crime" (577). [This city has one disadvantage. It gives everything to the person who possesses it. If one possesses the city by a crime, the world is given to a crime.] Contemporary audiences would have been well aware of the opposition slogan "Le 2 décembre est un crime!" ["December 2nd is a crime!"]; Hugo's invocation of the word "crime" would have been immediately understood by his readers as an allusion to the coup d'Etat of December 2, 1851. Zola goes so far as to suggest in l'Argent that the 1867 Exposition was staged by Imperial organizers at least partly with the intent of stifling opposition from the left.[21]

Hugo's plan in Paris is to extol the capital without giving credit to Napoléon III, to impose exile on the Emperor rhetorically by distancing him from the city through silence. Hugo had employed a similar strategy of distanciation in his brochure Napoléon le Petit, in which he excised the Emperor from his times as an aberration, an unrepresentative excretion of the century in which he lived: "Pourtant, ne pas confondre l'époque, la minute de Louis Bonaparte avec le dix-neuvième siècle; le champignon vénéneux pousse au pied du chêne, mais n'est pas le chêne."[22] [However, we should not confound the age, the minute of Louis Bonaparte with the nineteenth century; the poisonous mushroom grows at the base of the oak, but it is not the oak.] The "supremacy" of Paris stands metaphorically for the supremacy of the author of Notre-Dame-de-Paris, who gazes down from the top of "his" oak at the fungi and other lower life forms below. The last section of the introduction, "Déclaration de Paix", works on at least two levels. Hugo may be declaring a truce in his vitriolic attacks on the Emperor, which had had little effect at any rate up to this point. Another possible interpretation would be that in his declaration of Paris as the capital of world civilization, he is staking a cultural claim in attempting to make something true by simply declaring it to be so. (Recall Balzac's tautological argument-masquerading-as-observation from "La Fille aux Yeux d'or" that "Cette vue du Paris moral prouve que le Paris physique ne saurait être autrement qu'il n'est." (373) ["This moral view of Paris proves that the physical Paris could not be anything but what it is."]) For different reasons, Napoléon III and Hugo shared a desire to see Paris as the center of the cultural universe. For the Emperor, "culture" meant political culture and the imposition of a political will; Hugo's culture was necessarily a literary one, and the shadow that he has managed to cast across French literature and le patrimoine culturel attests to the strength of his own cultural will.

"L'Empire à son apogée":[23] the View from the Top

Comments such as Hugo's characterization of Napoléon III as the poisonous mushroom at the base of the "oak of state" contribute to a view of the Second Empire as an already doomed political regime. Through the distorted lens of hindsight, the 1867 Exposition is typically cast as a last fanfare before the inevitable fall. In reality, however, a number of events and exhibits pointed to a general sense of unease that permeated the Exposition from opening day despite the incessant festivities and pomp.

The month of June 1867 was particularly fraught with social unrest. Among the many visitors to the Exposition was Tsar Alexander II, who was confronted on the 4th by a group of hostile French lawyers loudly proclaiming "Vive la Pologne!" ["Long live Poland!"][24] Two days later, an assailant opened fire on the Tsar during a military revue at Longchamp. A quick-thinking Imperial guard threw himself between the would-be assassin and his intended target. One bullet struck the guard's horse in the head; a faulty second bullet caused the pistol to explode in the attacker's hands. Only vigorous intervention by quickly thinking spectators prevented the assailant from being killed on the spot.

Far from Paris, another assassination attempt, this one successful, had more serious consequences for the fortunes of the Empire. News of the execution of Maximilien, the 35-year old Emperor of Mexico installed by Napoléon III, stunned a Paris en pleine fête. Unlike the fall of Sebastopol in 1855, which had helped to galvanize French public opinion at the same time that it solidified the Emperor's ideological hold on the country, the news from far-away Querétaro, Mexico marked the beginning of a series of diplomatic and military disasters that would erode public confidence and end with the debacle of Sedan.

The account of the announcement of Maximilien's execution to Napoléon III during an official reception at the Exposition on June 19 was dramatic enough to have been written by Victor Hugo himself. The news arrived ironically at the moment that an orchestra of 1200 musicians began playing Rossini's "Hymne à la Paix" (Hymn to Peace), a work commissioned for the occasion. As the performance began, an aide de camp approached the Emperor to give him the news that Maximilien had been executed by Juárez. In a display of Imperial sang-froid, Napoléon III remained motionless, listening to the words of the hymn:

De nos héros dans les combats

Braves comme eux, suivons les pas! [...]

A leur secours,

On risque ses jours.

Pour nos amis bat notre cœur! [...]

Aide au vaincu! gloire au vainqueur![25]

[Let us follow in the footsteps of our heroes in combat,

Brave like them ...

In their aid,

We risk our lives.

For our friends beats our heart! ...

Aid to the vanquished! Glory to the victor!]

The irony of these lyrics is all the more piquant given that demands made by the United States for the withdrawal of French troops from Mexico in 1866 had essentially left Maximilien stranded and at the mercy of Juárez. During the period between the French withdrawal in February 1867 and Maximilien's execution on June 19, Napoléon ignored the increasingly desperate pleas for assistance from the Empress Charlotte, Maximilien's wife, who went mad shortly after her husband's execution. Immediately following the performance of Rossini's "Hymn to Peace", the Imperial party retired. Public announcement of Maximilien's execution was delayed until the following day.

"What Does a Big Cannon Prove?"

While news of the troubles in Mexico provided a momentarily somber counterpoint to the festivities of the Exposition, equally dramatic exhibits at the fair cast a rather long and continuous shadow over so much brightness. Curiously, many of the French visitors were unaffected by the most ominous exhibit of the Exposition, the largest cannon ever built to date, forged by the Prussian arms manufacturer Krupp. Few if any of the visitors in that summer of 1867 could have imagined the irony of the fact that, three years after fixing their gaze on Krupp's cannon, they would find themselves the terrified objects — targets — of that same cannon's "gaze".

What is perhaps most striking about popular French reaction to Krupp's cannon is the nearly universal misreading of its deadly significance. Victor Hugo's brief mention of the cannon in his Paris-Guide was not atypical of general sentiment. Blinded by his belief in positivism and his own utopian longings, Hugo saw the giant cannon as an aberration of science rather than the harbinger of a militaristic future:

Les énormes boules d'acier, du prix de mille francs chaque, que lancent les canons titans fabriqués en Prusse par le gigantesque marteau de Krupp, lequel pèse cent mille livres et coûte trois millions, sont juste aussi efficaces contre le progrès que les bulles de savon soufflées au bout d'un chalumeau de paille par la bouche d'un petit enfant.[26]

[The enormous steel cannonballs, which cost a thousand francs each, shot from the titanic Prussian cannons forged by Krupp's gigantic hammer, which weighs a hundred thousand pounds and costs three million {francs}, are just as effective against progress as soap bubbles floating off the end of a pipe blown by a small child.]

The nobility of Hugo's sentiment, with its poetically framed irony, appears in the post-Sedan light as sadly naive. Soaring to considerably lower stylistic heights than Victor Hugo, popular journalists proved they could be just as dismissive of the Krupp cannon but with less rhetorical flourish. Like Hugo, popular opinion could be just as naive or at least make an equally disastrous misinterpretation. One journalist of the time mistakenly assumed that the Kaiser's visit to Paris and the Exposition precluded any future outbreak of war. And, as if to further guarantee the continuation of peace, warfare was simply declared to be falling out of fashion:

Que prouve un canon, si gros qu'il soit? (...) Une exhibition de canons pouvait avoir quelque apparence d'opportunité au début de l'Exposition; aujourd'hui que le Roi de Prusse lui-même nous honore de sa visite bien accueillie, ces exhibitions ont perdu tout intérêt d'actualité.[27]

[What does a cannon prove, no matter how big it is? ... An exhibition of cannons might be appropriate at the beginning of the Exposition, but today when the King of Prussia himself honors us with his warmly received visit, these exhibits have lost all timely interest.]

Still another contemporary observer saw a parallel between the gigantic Krupp cannon and La Fontaine's fable about the frog who wanted to be as big as an ox and who destroys himself in the process, "La Grenouille qui se Veut Faire aussi Grosse que le Bœuf" (The Frog who Wanted to be as Big as an Ox {Fables, Book I, Fable III}). French hubris is rivaled only by the cultural practice of configuring real-world events (in this case, armaments manufacture) to make them fit a literary trope, in this case the well-established genre of the fable:

Par cet engin qu'ose exhiber la Prusse

Comme un chef-d'œuvre à l'Exposition,

Français, Anglais, Autrichiens ou Russes

On peut juger de son ambition;

S'arrondissant ainsi qu'une citrouille,

Pour s'agrandir elle risque son nom.

Enfle-toi donc, orgueilleuse grenouille

Et crève un jour à la voix du canon.[28]

[By this machine that Prussia dares exhibit

As a masterpiece at the Exposition,

Whether one is French, English, Austrian or Russian,

One can judge Prussia's ambition.

Making itself as around as a pumpkin,

In making itself bigger it risks its name.

Inflate yourself, then, proud frog,

And explode one day to the voice of a cannon.]

In one of the earliest examples of psychological projection at the level of the national psyche, the French poet accuses Prussia of the same ambition that it had itself been displaying for years, in the Crimea, in Mexico, and later at Sedan. (The anglophone reader finds an added level of irony in the fact that the French poet refers to the Prussian nation-state as a frog.)

Politics by Other Means: Art and Fashion

Disdaining the growing culture of warfare, certain visitors to the Exposition focused on supposedly nobler exhibits, primarily in the visual arts. Depending on their taste, what they saw left them either transfixed or underwhelmed. The most successful painters of the day included Meissonier and Cabanel, whose purportedly realistic representations of mythological figures such as Venus earned them more notice for their carefulness of execution than for the depth of their subject matter.

Zola relates an ironic epiphany of sorts when he finally understands the appeal of Meissonier by following a middle-class couple through the painting exhibition:

Après avoir regardé des centaines de tableaux qu'ils trouvaient fort laids, sans oser le dire tout haut, ils rencontraient des images qui leur convenaient. La grosse dame murmurait: «Seigneur, que c'est joli, que c'est joli» et le gros monsieur répondait: «Oh! oui, c'est joli, c'est bien joli». Alors le voile se déchira. Je compris tout d'un coup le talent, l'immense talent de M. Meissonnier [sic]. L'admiration des amateurs et du couple bourgeois venait enfin de me faire juger sainement ce peintre qui a le don rare de plaire à tous, même -- surtout, allais-je dire -- à ceux qui n'aiment pas la peinture.[29]

[After looking at hundreds of paintings that they considered very ugly, without daring to say it loudly, they {the middle-class couple} found images they liked. The large woman murmured, "Lord, that's pretty, that's pretty", and the large man answered, "Oh yes! It's pretty, it's very pretty." Suddenly the curtain was torn. At once I understood Monsieur Meissonier's immense talent. The admiration of his followers and the middle-class couple finally made me fairly judge this painter who has the gift of pleasing everyone, even those who don't like painting.]

Gautier, for his part, was even more direct and more mordant in his criticism: "Une seule chose lui manque: l'imagination."[30] [He's missing only one thing: Imagination.] Zola again, this time addressing himself to Jérôme: "[J]e cherche vainement en vous le créateur. Vous n'avez ni souffle, ni caractère, ni personnalité d'aucune sorte."[31] [Vainly I look for the creator in you. You have no life, no character, no personality of any kind.] He even goes so far as to thank the already-maligned Ludwig II for relieving France of Cabanel's Paradis Perdu:

Ce tableau est heureusement une commande du Roi de Bavière qui en délivrera la France et l'emportera dans ses Etats. J'avais une crainte horrible: c'était de rencontrer un jour cette toile dans un de nos musées.[32]

[This painting is fortunately a commission for the King of Bavaria who will deliver France of it and take it away to his country. I had a horrible fear of running into this painting some day in one of our museums.]

Despite the French disdain for a perceived American philistinism, the official U. S. delegation to the Exposition did include commissioners charged with the duty of visiting and reporting on fine arts exhibits. While not nearly as critical as Zola, the U. S. commissioners nevertheless displayed a perceptive eye. As foreigners, the Americans were in some ways even better situated to evaluate the French than the French themselves.

One point on which the French and Americans concurred was the supremacy of French taste in the realm of fashion. The American Commissioner charged with reporting on domestic economy acknowledged that "[t]he establishment of Paris as the central authority and oracle of fashion for the civilized world has been by no means the result of accident, nor has it been devoid of profound political significance and subtle design."[33] While the Commissioner does not make explicit the "profound political significance" of Paris's "central authority" in the realm of fashion, the implication is that this significance would have to do primarily with France's economic domination of the fashion market.

American and French visitors to the Exposition likewise agreed that their fellow visitors could often prove to be just as fascinating, or as insipid, as many of the exhibits on display. While Alphone Daudet dismissed the "flottes de nababs"[34] [flood of nabobs], the American Commissioner was struck by the diversity of representation by people from both outside and inside France:

But perhaps the most striking feature of the occasion, disconnected with classifications of the Exposition, was the extensive display of costumes upon the persons of many of the visitors and some of the attendants at the various sections. Of the male delegation there were Orientals in bright colors and flowing draperies, and people from the Western countries in garments of more somber material and more formal cut. There were Greeks and barbarians of the European world, and natives of the Celestial Empire, and their more flowery Japanese neighbors; and here and there, as strangely picturesque as any, peasants in ante-revolutionary costume, still preserved, coming from remote side villages of Napoleon[ III]'s home provinces.

Most noticeable on the female side were the waiting girls at the different national shops, restaurants, and beer-houses, sharp-eyed for business, and ornately decked in the highest style of their quaint local modes.[35]

The American Commissioner, while betraying a fairly racist provincialism in her observation of "barbarians of the European world" (along with a condescening maternalism in the description of "quaint local" garb), ends up adopting the position put forth by Victor Hugo in his introduction to the Exposition catalogue, namely that Paris had indeed become the center of the civilized world.

Never content with mere hyperbole, Hugo fixes Paris, à la Balzac, as the center of Europe and ultimately the world. His comments display a remarkable prescience of the struggle for European unity in the late twentieth century, along with a persistently over-optimistic view of the perfectability of humankind:

Au vingtième siècle, il y aura une nation extraordinaire. Cette nation sera grande, ce qui ne l'empêchera d'être libre. Elle sera illustre, riche, pensante, pacifique, cordiale au reste de l'humanité. ... Une bataille entre italiens et allemands, entre anglais et russes, entre prussiens et français, lui apparaîtra comme nous apparaît une bataille entre picards et bourguignons. ... La nation centrale d'où ce mouvement rayonnera sur tous les continents sera ... plus que nation, elle sera civilisation; elle sera mieux que civilisation, elle sera famille. Unité de langue, unité de monnaie, unité de mètre, unité de méridien, unité de code; ... Cette nation aura pour capitale Paris, et ne s'appellera point la France; elle s'appellera l'Europe.

Elle s'appellera l'Europe au vingtième siècle, et, aux siècles suivants, plus transfigurée encore, elle s'appellera l'Humanité.

L'Humanité, nation définitive, est dès à présent entrevue par les penseurs, ces contemplateurs des pénombres; mais ce à quoi assiste le dix-neuvième siècle, c'est à la formation de l'Europe. ...

Avant d'avoir son peuple, l'Europe a sa ville. De ce peuple qui n'existe pas encore, la capitale existe déjà.[36]

[In the twentieth century, there will be an extraordinary nation. This nation will be great, which will not prevent it from being free. It will be illustrious, rich, thoughtful, peaceful, friendly towards the rest of humanity. {...} A battle between Italians and Germans, between English and Russians, between Prussians and French, will appear to it in the same way a battle between Picardians and Burgundians appears to us today. {...} The central nation from which this movement will shine on all continents will be {...} more than a nation, it will be a civilization; it will be better than a civilization, it will be a family. Unity of language, unity of money, unity of measurement, unity of meridian, unity of code; {...} This nation will have Paris as its capital, and it will not be called France, it will be called Europe.

It will be called Europe in the twentieth century, and, in following centuries, still more transfigured, it will be called Humanity.

Humanity, the definitive nation, has been henceforth conceived by thinkers, those contemplators of the shadows; but the nineteenth century is witnessing the formation of Europe. {...}

Before having its people, Europe has its city. For this people who do not yet exist, its capital is already here.]

Other observers echoed Hugo's assertion that these new happy European nationals did not yet exist. Their descriptions of what current visitors to the Exposition found most interesting suggested that these European citizens would be a long time in coming.

What most captivated the colorful crowds at the Exposition was not a vision of some imaginary new nation-continent but simply guns, and no longer any kind of guns. Visitors were most interested in seeing gigantic, new cannons such as the one manufactured by Krupp:

[I]l n'y a pas plus que les pièces de guerre monstrueuses, qui puissent capter le regard du public. (...) Les dames elles-mêmes ne veulent plus entendre parler que d'œuvres gigantesques, étourdissantes de l'artillerie moderne; il leur faut par exemple d'immenses canons de rempart se chargeant par la culasse tels que celui qui sort de la grande fabrique d'acier fondu de M. Krupp, à Essen.[37]

[Only monstrous war machines are capable of capturing the public's attention. {...} The ladies themselves don't want to hear about anything else except the gigantic, deafening works of modern artillery. They demand, for example, immense breech-loading cannons such as the one forged in molten steel by Mr. Krupp of Essen.]

The American Commissioners to the Exposition were likewise extremely eager to hear of, as well as observe for themselves, the Krupp cannon. Their report devotes three detailed pages and one illustration to it (fig. 6). Whereas the French were quick to dismiss the Krupp exhibit as arrogantly vieux jeu, the Americans responded with careful, quiet scrutiny. But while the French found it easy to dismiss the Prussians for being so out of fashion, they were disturbed, annoyed and dismayed by the growing American interest — and power — to become the arbiters of fashion. There seems to have been a marked difference between writers like Hugo and certain journalists on the one hand, who dismissed "big guns" as being out of fashion, and general public interest, which found the guns simply irresistible.

American Babylon

T. J. Clark notes a fascinating and particularly leading revision made by Edmond de Goncourt as the 1891 edition of the Goncourts' Mémoires de la vie littéraire [Memoirs of Literary Life] went to press. In the previous edition of 1860, les frères Goncourt had observed the beginnings of Haussmannization with a sense of despair and disparagement: "Je suis étranger à ce qui vient, à ce qui est, comme à ces boulevards nouveaux, qui ne sentent plus le monde de Balzac, qui sentent Londres, quelque Babylone de l'avenir" [I am a stranger to what is coming, to what is, as I am to these new boulevards, which no longer smack of the world of Balzac, which smack of London, some Babylon of the future.][38] By 1891, however, Babylon had crossed the Atlantic:

Je suis étranger à ce qui vient, à ce qui est, comme à ces boulevards nouveaux sans tournant, sans aventures de perspective, implacables de ligne droite, qui ne sentent plus le monde de Balzac, qui font penser à quelque Babylone américaine de l'avenir.

[I am a stranger to what is coming, to what is, as I am to these new boulevards without turnings, without chance perspectives, implacable in their straight lines, which no longer smack of the world of Balzac, which make one think of some American Babylon of the future.]

While the Goncourts turned a nervous eye first toward the British and then the Americans when they expressed their fears for the future, official Imperial organizers were considerably less apprehensive. To the contrary, the Exposition reveled in the technology that straightened boulevards and lowered the Butte de Chaillot by twenty feet. Mastery of this technology was essential, they perceived, and for this reason considerable attention needed to be focused on the training and maintenance of a skilled labor pool. Napoleon III's attention to workers had originated long before 1867, of course. It dated back even beyond the Exposition nationale des produits de l'industrie agricole et manufacturière [National Exhibition of Products of Manufacturing and Agricultural Industry] held in the summer of 1849 when he was still Prince-President.[39]

By 1867, however, the Emperor's energies took the form of action beyond speech-making. Napoléon III had sent a delegation of French workers to visit the London Great Exhibition of 1862 and report back to him. The aristocratic-sounding Edmond de Sommerard was charged with organizing a special commission devoted to the History of Labor. The selection of an apparent aristocrat to organize a section devoted to the working classes provided the first of numerous ironies in the Empire's studious attention to the social question generally and labor particularly. A second irony was to be found in the commission's organization of the history of labor. Divided into ten periods beginning with Gaul before the Age of Metals, the history of labor ends abruptly and unexpectedly with the reign of Louis XVI and the Revolution (1775-1800).[40] The first five periods corresponded to the ages of the Gauls, Franks and Carolingians; the last five periods all corresponded to specific rulers: from the Middle Ages through the reign of Louis XI (Period 6, from 1100 to 1483), the Renaissance from Charles VIII to Henri IV (Period 7, from 1483 to 1610), the reigns of Louis XIII and XIV (Period 8, from 1610 to 1715), and so on. The accomplishments of individual (and usually anonymous) workers were grouped according to the kings under whom they lived and served. The history of labor as presented by the special commission was in fact a history of patrons, patronage and patronizing, under the paternal auspices of the Emperor.

In addition to the special commission devoted to the history of labor, the new classes of exhibits created for the 1867 Exposition included the previously mentioned Class X, "Objets spécialement exposés en vue d'améliorer la condition physique et morale de la population" (Objects exhibited especially with the intent of improving the physical and moral condition of the population). Not content with merely overseeing the organization of the Exposition, the Emperor even submitted an original design of model workers' housing to the selection jury responsible for Class X. The upheavals of Haussmannization and the influx of laborers from the provinces made the problem of affordable housing in the capital particularly acute. (This dilemma continues to plague Paris to the present day, in fact; the Emperor's unresolved problem has been passed down to each of his successors.)

Napoléon III's plans for affordable workers' housing took material form in the outer gardens of the Champ de Mars surrounding the Palace (figure 7). News that the Emperor's design had won the highest award in its category (Section 93, "Spécimens d'habitations caractérisées par le bon marché uni aux conditions d'hygiène et de bien-être" [Examples of Housing Characterized by Affordability Linked to Conditions of Hygiene and Well-being]) caused little surprise.[41] Despite the general acclaim, however, the proposed workers' housing did not prove a success. While a number of model homes were in fact built, their intended occupants never moved in. "Affordability" was as relative a concept during the Second Empire as it has always been. The tenants of the "affordable workers' housing" were the middle-class families who could afford the mortgages, and not the workers for whom those houses were intended.

Disappointment inevitably turned to disinterest before turning to resentment and more. The paternalism of the Emperor and Imperial organizers such as Frédéric Le Play who had been steeped in the tenets of Saint-Simonianism found an ever-dwindling and increasingly less enthusiastic audience among workers. The same year that Paris saw its second Exposition Universelle it also saw the publication of Marx's Capital. Workers were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with government-sponsored delegations to World's Fairs and gestures such as "affordable" housing that proved to be anything but. An alternative strategy, one that was only beginning to be grasped in 1867, involved a total refusal of paternalism and the elaboration of an entirely different political and economic system. The impending defeat of the Second Empire and the arrival of a new Republic provided workers with considerable hope, one that, as we shall see, was only partly, briefly realized.[42]

Work and Play

Part of the prise de conscience on the workers' part that would mark the transition to a new economic and political order included the realization that industry needed skilled labor as much as individual laborers needed their jobs. Few of the workers visiting the Exposition Universelle in 1867 realized their own importance in the successful workings of industry. Industrialists and political leaders in Europe and particularly the United States, however, could see that skilled labor constituted a scarce resource. Securing scarce skilled labor became imperative for national industrial success.

The U. S. Commissioner General Beckwith, responsible for American presence at the 1867 Exposition, made two perceptive observations in his persuasive arguments for participation. The first was that massive displays of goods served to do more than create consumer demand where it had not existed previously (even though that in itself was already a considerable accomplishment). As Beckwith noted in a letter to J. C. Derby, the U.S. agent working in New York, "The Exposition will at the same time be, to a large extent, an advertisement of products for the direct interest of producers."[43] The millions of visitors to the Exposition included the exhibitors themselves, who would spend considerable time noting the products of their fellow exhibitors.

Beckwith relayed an equally revealing perception in a letter dated Nov. 23, 1865 to John Bigelow, the U. S. Minister to France. In its displays of American industry and industrial output, the U. S. was selling more than machines or individual commodities. It was selling America itself, to skilled laborers who would emigrate to the United States and in turn bolster American profits:

The emigration of the productive and industrial classes from Europe to America is an acknowledged source of prosperity, and has long received the encouragement of the government.

An exhibition of the products of America in the center of Europe, well selected, and complete enough to be national, showing the mineral and agricultural resources, the state of manufactures, the varieties and quantity of machinery, and the condition of the industrial arts in general, would, in my judgment, produce an impression of surprise analogous to that produced by the disclosures of the [Civil [W]ar. The strongest impression would naturally fall on the mind of the most appreciative in this sense, and have the best means of being informed. This is the class of skilled labor and of practical knowledge, whose emigration is highly desirable, but who are the slowest to risk the change. They would see and judge for themselves of materials and resources and products; of the existing conditions and opportunities open to them to better their condition in life.[44]

In a previous letter of April 12, 1865, addressed to Secretary of State William Seward, Bigelow recounted his meeting with his French counterpart, the Commissaire Général Frédéric Le Play, in which Le Play relayed the Emperor's keen interest in American participation: "He [Le Play] said that the Prince President had been very much astonished by the marvels of ingenuity and skill which he had observed in the United States, and was anxious to have them more known and appreciated in France."[45] It was a double game, then: Napoléon III saw American participation as first of all legitimizing the Exposition as more fully Universelle. If we were to take Le Play at his word, we might argue that the Emperor hoped to encourage French industry by exposing it to American accomplishments. A slightly more cynical interpretation might argue that Napoléon III was encouraging a variation of what is commonly referred to today as industrial espionage. The Americans, meanwhile, were only too eager to learn all they could from their French hosts while at the same time trying to lure the very best French and European skilled laborers to the United States. "Espionage" refers to one party's undetected surveillance of another; here, however, we are closer to Hugo's idea of nations "chatting" and comparing utopias rather than products.[46] While it is difficult to establish the precise motivations for the French interest in U.S. participation, the Americans saw their journey to Paris as not only desirable but essential for their prosperity. Caught between the two we find the melancholy Goncourt brothers, wandering down straight, Americanized streets toward some future Babylon.

Conclusions (1): Settling Accounts

Unlike its predecessor, the 1867 Exposition Universelle did not close with a deficit of 8 million francs. While some disagreement exists as to whether the Fair actually turned a profit — calculations vary from a break-even point to a profit of over 3 million francs[47] — the lack of considerable financial loss was nevert