Paris 1900: The World at the Dawn of a New Century

In the summer of 1900, Paris became the centre of the world. Fifty million visitors — one in thirty of every person alive on earth — passed through the gates of the Exposition Universelle to witness the future. It was the Belle Époque at its most luminous: an age of electricity, of art nouveau, of boundless optimism about what the new century might bring.

The Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 was not the first world’s fair — Paris had hosted four before it, and London, Vienna, Chicago, and Philadelphia had all staged their own — but it was, by almost any measure, the greatest. It occupied two hundred and thirty hectares along both banks of the Seine, from the Trocadéro to the Invalides. It introduced the world to the escalator, the diesel engine, the talking film, and the first Olympic Games of the modern era. It opened the Paris Métro. It inaugurated the Pont Alexandre III and the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais, three of the most beautiful structures in a city that had never lacked for beautiful structures. And it drew, over the seven months of its duration, fifty million visitors — a number that would not be surpassed by any world’s fair for more than half a century.

To stand at the Trocadéro in the summer of 1900 and look south across the Seine was to see something that no one alive had ever seen before and that no one alive would ever see again: a city transformed, for one extraordinary season, into a vision of what human ingenuity and human beauty might achieve when given sufficient ambition and sufficient resources. The Eiffel Tower — built for the 1889 exposition and still, in 1900, the tallest structure in the world — presided over the scene with the calm authority of something that had already proved its critics wrong. Around it, the pavilions of forty nations rose in a bewildering variety of architectural styles, from the neo-Byzantine to the art nouveau, from the Moorish to the Japanese. The Seine itself was alive with riverboats and barges, carrying visitors from one bank to the other in the warm summer light.

Lucien Baylac and the Panoramic View

It was this scene — the exposition grounds along the Seine, the Eiffel Tower, the pavilions, the river traffic, the whole magnificent spectacle of Paris in 1900 — that the French artist Lucien Baylac (1851–1913) captured in his Vue panoramique de l’exposition universelle de 1900. Baylac was a painter and illustrator who had made his career documenting the great public events of the Third Republic — exhibitions, ceremonies, architectural projects — with a combination of topographical accuracy and compositional flair that made his work both useful as a record and genuinely pleasurable as an image.

The panoramic view was a genre with a long history in French illustration — the bird’s-eye perspective that allowed the viewer to take in, at a single glance, the full extent of a scene that no human eye could actually encompass. Baylac used it here to brilliant effect: the exposition grounds spread out below the viewer in their entirety, the Seine curving through the middle of the composition, the Eiffel Tower anchoring the left side of the image, the Grand Palais and the Pont Alexandre III visible in the middle distance, the pavilions of the nations arranged along the riverbanks in their extraordinary variety. It is an image that conveys, with great economy and great skill, the sheer scale of what Paris had achieved — and the beauty of the setting in which it had chosen to achieve it.

The Belle Époque at Its Zenith

The Exposition Universelle of 1900 was, in retrospect, the high-water mark of the Belle Époque — the “beautiful era” that stretched, roughly, from the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. It was an era of extraordinary cultural productivity: of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, of Symbolism and Art Nouveau, of Proust and Zola and Debussy and Rodin. It was an era of technological transformation: of electricity and the automobile and the cinema and the aeroplane. And it was an era of a particular kind of optimism — the belief, widespread among the educated classes of Western Europe, that progress was not merely possible but inevitable, that the future would be better than the past, that science and art and industry, working together, could create a world of unprecedented beauty and comfort.

The exposition embodied all of this. Its Palace of Electricity — illuminated at night by thousands of electric lights, a spectacle that drew gasps from visitors who had never seen anything like it — was a temple to the transformative power of technology. Its art galleries, which included a retrospective of a century of French painting from David to Cézanne, were a celebration of the cultural achievement that had made Paris the artistic capital of the world. Its national pavilions, each designed to present its country in the most favourable possible light, were a demonstration of the competitive nationalism that was, though few recognised it at the time, already preparing the ground for the catastrophe that would bring the Belle Époque to its end.

The Pont Alexandre III and the Grand Palais

Among the permanent legacies of the 1900 exposition, two stand out above all others: the Pont Alexandre III and the Grand Palais. The bridge — named for the Russian tsar whose alliance with France it was designed to celebrate — is perhaps the most extravagant piece of decorative engineering in a city that has never been shy about decorative engineering. Its single steel arch spans the Seine in a single leap of a hundred and seven metres; its four pylons are crowned with gilded bronze figures of Fame; its lampposts, its cherubs, its nymphs, and its garlands of flowers make it, in the words of one architectural historian, “the apotheosis of the Belle Époque style.”

The Grand Palais, built to house the exposition’s fine arts exhibitions, is scarcely less magnificent. Its great glass and iron nave — two hundred and forty metres long, forty-five metres high — is one of the supreme achievements of the architecture of iron and glass that the nineteenth century had been developing since the Crystal Palace of 1851. Its stone façade, with its Ionic columns and its elaborate sculptural programme, presents a face of classical grandeur to the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. Together, the bridge and the palace are the most visible surviving monuments of an exposition that transformed the city and defined an era.

A City That Knew How to Dream

The Exposition Universelle of 1900 closed on the twelfth of November, after two hundred and twelve days. The temporary pavilions were demolished; the crowds dispersed; Paris returned, gradually, to its ordinary rhythms. But the permanent structures remained — the Pont Alexandre III, the Grand Palais, the Petit Palais, the Métro — and with them the memory of what the city had been, for one extraordinary season, at the turn of the century.

Baylac’s panorama preserves that memory with a fidelity and a beauty that no photograph of the period quite achieves. It shows us Paris as it wished to be seen — luminous, ordered, magnificent, alive with the energy of a civilisation at the height of its confidence. It is an image of a world that was, within fourteen years, to be destroyed. But in 1900, standing at the Trocadéro in the summer light, none of that was visible. There was only the river, and the tower, and the pavilions of the nations, and the sense — overwhelming, intoxicating — that the future was going to be very beautiful indeed.

If the Paris of 1900 and the golden light of the Belle Époque resonate with you, the Paris 1900 Exposition Journal brings Lucien Baylac’s panoramic illustration to a hardcover journal — 150 lined pages, ready for travel notes, Paris dreams, or whatever your days require.

References

• Mandell, R.D. Paris 1900: The Great World’s Fair. University of Toronto Press, 1967.
• Silverman, D.L. Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France. University of California Press, 1989.
• Ory, P. L’Exposition universelle de 1889. Complexe, Brussels, 1989.
• Loyrette, H. (ed.) Entre le théâtre et l’histoire: la famille Halevý. Fayard / Réunion des musées nationaux, Paris, 1996.
• Findling, J.E. & Pelle, K.D. (eds.) Encyclopedia of World’s Fairs and Expositions. McFarland, 2008.