The 1889 Exposition: Century's End Spectacular

The exposition sprawled across the Champ de Mars and Trocadéro, transforming central Paris into a global village. Fifty-six million visitors came—more than France's entire population. They found a world in miniature, or rather, a particular vision of the world that placed Paris at its center.

The colonial exhibits revealed the era's imperial mindset with disturbing clarity. A "Negro Village" displayed 400 Africans living in "authentic" conditions for visitor entertainment. Javanese dancers performed in a recreated temple. "Cairo Street" featured belly dancers, causing scandals and sellout crowds. These human zoos, presenting colonized peoples as exotic specimens, drew huge audiences who saw confirmation of European superiority.

Yet the colonized sometimes subverted their assigned roles. The Javanese gamelan orchestra, intended as primitive contrast to European sophistication, mesmerized Claude Debussy. Their complex polyrhythms and non-Western scales would influence his revolutionary compositions. The dancer Saharet, imported from Algeria, became a sensation who dictated her own terms, earning more than established French performers.

The Galerie des Machines showcased industrial might. This iron-and-glass cathedral to progress, larger than any building previously constructed, housed massive turbines, locomotives, and the latest inventions. Visitors rode a traveling crane above the machinery, experiencing the vertigo of technological sublime. "I felt as if I were inside the belly of some mythological beast," wrote the journalist Octave Mirbeau, "digesting the century and giving birth to the future."

Thomas Edison's phonograph pavilion drew endless queues. For a franc, visitors could hear recorded sound—voices of the dead preserved, music captured and replayed. The implications unsettled many. "If we can trap sound," worried one priest, "what becomes of the soul?" But most marveled at speaking to friends through Alexander Graham Bell's telephone demonstrations or watching the first public projections of moving pictures.