Medieval and Colonial Attractions

1889, Republican Medievalism

The first exposition that brought Réunion and the Middle Ages to Paris during Bédier’s residency opened on 6 May 1889—about a year and half after Bédier returned from a visit to Réunion, and soon after he returned from studying in Germany. At the time, he worked as an instructor at the École Normale Supérieure, leaving for his first professorship in Fribourg, Switzerland, shortly before the exposition closed in early November. Bédier’s closest friend Joseph Texte writes of the exposition in detail, although there is no direct evidence that Bédier himself visited (he certainly spent time with his cousin De Mahy, Réunion’s elected deputy, both in the capital and in the Touraine).9 Regardless of whether Bédier visited the exposition, Réunion’s participation gives some sense of his diaspora community: Bédier and his compatriots considered themselves fully “French,” while metropolitans often judged them inferior “colonials.” Representations of the colonial and the medieval at the exposition, moreover, manifest in popular form the nationalist discourse that traversed medieval studies as Bédier began his career.

Official assessments of Réunion’s displays in the brightly painted Palais des Colonies (Figure 2) reveal Réunion’s double bind within colonial ideology. On the one hand, the Guide bleu describes Réunion as the “jewel of the Indian Ocean” and notes the “opulent” display of local products, from household objects to plants to maps.10 On the other hand, the exposition’s goals excluded Réunion from significant imperial participation: the inhabitants did not need to be “pacified”; the small economy could not alleviate the challenges of foreign competition.11 And because colonial ethnography assigned immigrants and their descendents to their original homeland, regardless of their place of birth or residence, Réunion technically had no “indigenous” culture.12

Réunion’s Eurocentric elites responded with a display that largely erased the island’s cultural particularities: scenes from the eighteenth-century novel Paul et Virginie made entirely of ferns.13 The novel was very popular in the metropole, authored by a metropolitan (Bernardin de Saint-Pierre), and set on the island of Mauritius. In other words, it had no direct relation to Réunion (except that metropolitans frequently confused Réunion and Mauritius). Réunionnais nonetheless made themselves the guardians of the novel’s legacy after France lost Mauritius to Britain in 1810.14 As an emblem of “Réunionnais” identity, Paul et Virginie represents the island’s dependence on immigration and imports. In the end, metropolitan commitments to exoticism and economic opportunity left Réunion isolated from the rest of the empire.

Opposite the Palais des Colonies stood the Ministry of War, with the façade of a medieval fortified castle (Figure 3).15 From the top of the central alley of the Esplanade des Invalides, then, visitors could see simultaneously the pointed towers of exhibits evoking medieval and colonial France—with the “national” dome of the Hôtel des Invalides in the background (Figure 4). From within the colonial gardens, visitors could see across the alley to the castle’s crenellated towers, portcullis, and drawbridge (Figure 5). This view is particularly poignant from a Réunionnais perspective because the gardens also included a statue of Paul and Virginie sheltering themselves under a large leaf (lower right corner). This image was widely used to refer to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s novel (cf. Figure 6), referencing an even more popular image of the two sheltering under Virginie’s skirt.16 The statue reinforced Réunionnais attachments to the novel represented inside the Palais. In sight of the medieval façade, Paul and Virginie stood for the chivalric and aristocratic lineages claimed by creole elites. In the frame of the Palais and the medieval façade, Paul and Virginie gesture toward the romantic dimensions of Bédier’s own creole medievalism as developed in his Tristan et Iseut (see chapter 4).

The exhibit inside the Ministry of War illustrated the persistent interpenetration of medievalism and colonialism, with displays of ancient weapons, reconstructions of historic sieges, and numerous pieces of Asian military equipment.17 While the organizer Émile Monod lamented the popularity of colonial belly dancers, he took solace in visitors’ attraction to Napoléon’s sword at the Ministry of War.18 The constructions along the Esplanade des Invalides underscored the intimate relation between these two phenomena. From the threshold of the portcullis, looking toward the Palais des Colonies, France’s military successes appeared to lead directly to its colonial achievements, which in turn brought exotic women to dance in the shadows of French history. On the centennial of the Revolution, then, exposition organizers sought to solidify the idea of the Republic as the guardian of the nation’s medieval and colonial legacies—a message given elaborate form along the Esplanade des Invalides.19

The parallels between colonialism and medievalism implied along the Esplanade des Invalides appeared throughout the exposition. Vendors everywhere, not just in the colonial section, sold food and drink from the colonies.20 And many thematic exhibits included retrospectives that stretched back to the Middle Ages, along with comparisons to the colonies.21 The “rage for retrospectivity,”22 in other words, went hand in hand with colonial exoticism.

The popularity of these compressed “world tours” translated into large profits for both medieval and colonial attractions, like the reconstruction of the fourteenth-century Bastille on one side of Avenue Suffren and Cairo street scenes on the other. At the Bastille, performers reenacted the taking of the fortress that launched the Revolution (a dramatization that drew more on the “negative” valence of medievalism).23 Meanwhile, in the “Rue du Caire,” visitors admired exotic dancers, tasted “strange” foods, and shopped for souvenirs.24 Nearby, at 15 Avenue Bosquet, stood another reconstructed medieval tower, housing a panorama illustrating the life of Jeanne d’Arc, surrounded by relics from the period.25 A popular theater production, Paris après l’Exposition, brought Jeanne d’Arc together with the denizens of the Rue du Caire and other popular exposition scenes.26 All of these events placed distant times and places in the service of republican celebration.

Near the resurrected Bastille, directly in front of the Eiffel Tower, stood yet another juncture of medievalism and colonialism—an exhibit of architectural history designed by the famous architect of the Opéra, Charles Garnier. Like the colonial section on the Esplanade des Invalides, L’Histoire de l’Habitation Humaine offered “a tour of the world in one hour.”27 Garnier’s installation, a kind of architectural phrenology, aimed to reveal the most “evolved” civilizations through their architecture, “progressing” from a troglodyte cave to a medieval French house, passing through the Bronze Age, Greece, Africa, Aztec Mexico, and Scandinavia, among other civilizations.28 Each of the forty-four houses was surrounded by gardens of native plants and inhabited by “simulated natives” offering handcrafts and “appropriate native refreshments.”29 For houses representing areas under French imperial control, costumed “natives” represented the “primitive” stage of their own cultures. “Ancient” scenes performed by colonial actors suggested that colonial time had stopped in the Middle Ages: one Sénégalais worker complained that tourists refused to believe that his house had electricity.30

At the medieval house (known as the “house of Charlemagne’s lineage”), costumed actors also served refreshments, while others demonstrated glass making (Figure 7).31 As one commentator noted, “Our most distant contemporaries and our oldest ancestors will thus parade under our eyes.”32 Representing the culmination of “Aryan” architecture,33 the medieval house entered seamlessly into the racialized discourse of colonialism. Juxtaposed against the iron foot of the Eiffel Tower, which rose immediately behind the house (and which Garnier detested), it stood for France’s most ancient histories as well as its most recent achievements.34 As the official seat of the French president at the exposition,35 the medieval house placed republican authority at the culmination of world history. L’Histoire de l’Habitation Humaine thus strategically conflated medievalism, colonialism, and republicanism.

Across the Seine, visitors walked past a reconstructed medieval ruin before entering the Palais du Trocadéro36—a more permanent tribute to republican efforts to conjoin medievalism and colonialism. Built for the exposition of 1878, the Palais housed the Musée d’Ethnographie and the Musée de Sculpture Comparée. The architect and medievalist Eugène Viollet-le-Duc participated actively in the foundation of both museums, with special attention to the French Middle Ages in the sculpture museum. Together, the museums made the medieval past key to understanding the colonial present. They built upon earlier research that had applied the techniques of phrenology to medieval skulls, extracting proof of their closer proximity to modern “primitives” than to modern Europeans.37 The museums thus cast Africa as the living vestige of medieval Europe.38 These conflations encouraged a “temporal” approach to colonial societies (“they live in the past”) and a racial approach to medieval societies. Indeed, one observer in 1900 applied the principles of phrenology to Charlemagne, concluding that the first French monarchs were all “tall, blond, with elongated craniums.”39 The museums, in more durable forms than the exposition itself, fostered this kind of ethnographic medievalism.

During the exposition, the Palais du Trocadéro housed a medieval art exhibit that included an ivory oliphant, or horn, from Toulouse (Figure 8).40 At the time, such decorated horns were attributed “Oriental” origins, meaning that their medieval history overlapped with France’s colonial present. They had arrived in France, or so people thought, in the wake of the nation’s first colonizing ventures—the eleventh-century Crusades. Schoolchildren in the 1880s and 1890s learned that Roland itself had inspired the Crusades,41 directly implicating surviving oliphants in triumphalist colonialism. In the poem, Roland uses an oliphant to call Charlemagne back to Roncevaux to avenge his defeat (see chapter 5). Indeed, the oliphant displayed at the art exhibit was popularly called “Roland’s horn.” This oliphant thus references all that Roland had come to mean in both academic and popular circles by the late 1880s—patriotic heroism, valiant conquest, and ancient national prestige. For Bédier, the oliphant could activate quite specific memories of Réunion, where he had first read Roland ten years earlier.

The exposition’s yoking together of the medieval and the colonial in the service of national identity is crystallized in the seal of the City of Paris, widely associated with the Republic itself after 1889. The seal attached the Republic symbolically to monarchical and imperial tradition: it originated as the emblem of medieval water carriers, was later adopted by Louis XIV, and in 1853, it was elaborated by Baron Haussmann, who added the phrase Fluctuat nec mergitur [It is tossed by the waves, but does not sink].42 The seal captures the mix of medievalism and colonialism that fortified republican nationalism: the crown has the form of a medieval fortified wall (with crenellated towers similar to the façade at the 1889 exposition); the ship evokes overseas domination.43 The emblem appeared on at least one souvenir booklet from the exposition and had already been adopted by Réunionnais republicans in 1879.44 The seal’s evocation of aristocratic prestige and colonial ambition speaks directly to the aspirations (if not the achievements) of creole republicans. Their precocious claim on national symbolism suggests the special affinity of elite creoles for republican medievalism, an affinity given a scholarly dimension by Bédier and of which he himself eventually became a symbol.

1900, Twentieth-Century Medievalism

The Fluctuat nec mergitur seal adorns several structures built for the Exposition Universelle of 1900 and still visible today, including the Petit Palais (entry gate [Figure 9], interior ceiling, two front corners, and at regular intervals around the roof) and the Pont d’Alexandre (center of one side over the water, on each of the lamps along the sidewalks). In 1900, it also greeted visitors at the entrance of the temporary Palais des Armées.45 Thus imprinted on prominent structures, the seal popularized the associations between medievalism and colonialism that once again characterized organizers’ approach to representing France to itself and the world.

Throughout the exposition, exoticism and nostalgia brought popularity and commercial success, from art exhibits to military displays to foreign pavilions to restaurants.46 Exhibits in 1900, even more than their 1889 counterparts, underscored continuities between past and present and between the medieval and the colonial. And in 1900, Bédier undoubtedly witnessed at least some of these displays: he writes that he took breaks from his duties teaching modern literature at the École Normale Supérieure with “walks through the Exposition.”47 As a potential visitor to both “Réunion” and the “Middle Ages,” Bédier represents a unique audience—living the effects of creole medievalism and actively producing scholarship that sustained republican nationalism.

Réunion’s relationship with metropolitan culture was as fraught in 1900 as in 1889. While Réunion had its own pavilion in the colonial section on the Trocadéro hill, the building looked exactly like the Guadeloupe pavilion next door and so did not capture a distinctive identity in its architecture (Figure 10). According to A. G. Garsault’s Notice sur la Réunion, however, the pavilion’s place on the hill mirrored Réunion’s place in the empire. Garsault writes that it “dominates” the Seine and the other colonial edifices from on high; “from the verandah, dear to all creoles, one discovers a splendid panorama” encompassing the French and foreign colonies as well as the Champ-de-Mars across the Seine. He asserts that the site was so charming, metropolitans and colonials alike flocked to its cool breezes and exquisite refreshments.48

Inside, the Réunion pavilion was decorated in collaboration with the Kervéguen family (relatives and friends of Bédier’s family). In the bar-kiosk, one could buy Garsault’s Notice and listen to a young Réunionnais pianist sing the best-known creole tunes.49 For diaspora creoles like Bédier, the pavilion offered a recollection of home, filled with familiar sounds and flavors, brought, improbably, to the heart of Paris.

Beyond describing the pavilion, Garsault’s guide highlights Réunion’s cultural value. Despite economic challenges (largely blamed on imperial policies that favored newer colonies), Garsault depicts Réunion as an exemplary model of French culture: it had produced as many men of influence and achievement as entire countries with much larger populations.50 Indeed, the island offered nothing less than a miniature summary of the entire world:

It is a microcosm of the known world, which summarizes the whole world, which contains a sample of all the climates and all the products of the soil, which offers, in a small space, an example of the greatest phenomena of Nature, from the bottomless lake to the volcano crowned in flame.51

Whatever your dreams, Garsault concludes, they could be fulfilled in France’s own Eden. This idealized portrayal granted Réunion special status on multiple levels. Untouched by the ordinary foibles of mankind, the island had the potential to restore both “innocence” and prosperity to France; having perfectly preserved the best aspects of “old” French culture, it could contribute to national rejuvenation. Garsault’s idealization directly counters metropolitan tendencies to identify Réunion with primitive “medieval” practices.52

Despite these natural wonders and cultural achievements, Réunion failed to attract metropolitan attention because it in fact lacked the requisite economic prosperity and ethnic exoticism. Colonial exhibits were designed to showcase commercial values; Réunion’s stagnant economy ensured its marginalization.53 Moreover, Réunion did not present indigenous “specimens” of various “races” like other colonies.54 Metropolitan visitors were thus more likely to ridicule the Réunion exhibit than to admire it. One commentator described Réunion (along with Martinique and Guadeloupe) as “a little melancholic, like honorable old people whose story is over.”55 Another visitor referred to two “useless” items on display: the portable chair (filanzane) of the deposed queen of Madagascar and a painting of Christ attributed to the sixteenth-century Flemish painter Van Dyck.56 These items represented, respectively, Réunion’s “imperial” aspirations (its politicians claimed responsibility for the conquest of Madagascar) and its identification with European culture—not the metropolitan image of a valuable colony.

Even those receptive to Réunion’s value found the exhibit disappointing: L. Meillac complained of the absence of colorful items related to Réunion’s famous poets, quoting several stanzas from Leconte de Lisle’s poem “Le Manchy” (both so well known that he does not name them). Ironically, later exhibits highlighting poetry and other cultural accomplishments met with no greater success; whatever the approach, Réunion seemed to disappoint metropolitan expectations of colonial performance.

The colonial section at large emphasized exoticism, as expected, but organizers also made medieval history an important source of validation for France’s modern ambitions. Jules Charles-Roux, the organizer of the colonial section, wrote that the colonial installations should “prove, history in hand, that the French have always been one of the most colonizing peoples”; he aimed to show “the continuity of the French colonial tradition.”57 Both the medieval and the colonial represented cultures “alien” to modern French life, yet they also demonstrated the durability and desirability of French influence.58 Much like in 1889, these assertions of continuity integrated the medieval and the colonial into a lengthy national history whose prestige now supported republican ideals.

The exposition’s layout and presentation in guidebooks encouraged visitors to connect the colonial section to the reconstruction of “Vieux Paris” [Old Paris] further along the Seine (Figure 11). In a savvy display of republican medievalism, the French president opened the whole exposition from a medieval house.59 Official itineraries directed visitors from Vieux Paris to the colonial exhibits, recommending approximately the same amount of time for each miniature city.60 Between the medieval and colonial buildings, visitors passed along the Rue des Nations, with its similar silhouette of stylized historical towers (Figure 12). There, they could pause to enjoy the medieval performance “Andalusia in the time of the Moors.”61

This continuous itinerary from medieval times to colonial spaces underscored uncanny similarities between the two installations. Both included urban street scenes (the Kasbah of Alger and Tunisian souks in the colonial section) and costumed performers, and both featured artisans crafting souvenirs by hand.62 The popular Algerian exhibit also included a reconstruction of “Vieil Alger,” the colonial counterpart to Vieux Paris.63 (And oddly enough, quinine could be purchased both at the Réunion pavilion and in the boutiques of Vieux Paris.)64

For Bédier the creole medievalist, both installations carried strong personal interest, from the Réunion pavilion to medieval boutiques named “Aux quatre fils Aymon” (title of an epic) and “A L’Oriflant” (oliphant, which sold coffees) and houses decorated with fabliaux scenes (the subject of his 1893 university thesis).65 On the right bank of the Seine, then, the medieval and the colonial formed complementary representations of both national and creole identity.

Throughout the exposition, numerous other venues represented both distant times and distant places. Avenue Suffren once again hosted a popular pair of attractions, Paris en 1400 and the Rue du Caire—“too successful” not to repeat.66 Paris en 1400 presented many of the same attractions as the Bastille in 1889—artisans, jongleurs, and costumed performers (Figure 13). Theater performances included the Duc d’Egypte—while medieval Egyptian dress inspired a special research project at the Palais du Costume.67 Other medieval installations included La Vielle Auvergne (with Romanesque church and castle), the façade of the Ministry of War (including a large painting of the Fluctuat nec mergitur) (Figure 14), and the “epic” military exhibit featuring medieval knights and crusade references.68 “Roland’s horn” even returned from Toulouse (accompanied by five other oliphants and a reliquary of Charlemagne).69 In fact, visitors encountered history everywhere, flocking to “picturesque” retrospectives.70 They so expected the Middle Ages that many mistook a statue of François I (sixteenth-century monarch) for Jeanne d’Arc.71 Medieval references demonstrated that the monarchical past was a palpable component of republican identity.72

Meanwhile, colonial-themed attractions made the empire seem equally “at home” in France. Le Tour du Monde featured a “live panorama” of some of the “exotic” countries served by the Messageries Maritimes; the Panorama Transatlantique depicted views of Algeria and Tunis; the Maréorama simulated a trip through the Mediterranean, with views of Marseille and the North African coast; and the Cinéorama simulated a balloon ride, partly over an African desert.73 These colonial diversions mirrored the medieval reenactments taking place along the same streets.

The juxtaposition of medieval and colonial exhibits compresses both time and space, facilitating a sense of possession across impossible distances. Tourist guides note, for example, that Vieux Paris and Paris en 1400 enabled visitors to “relive” the life of their fathers, while the colonial section and the Tour du Monde provided access to vast territories in a few hundred square meters.74 These conflations brought the Middle Ages and the empire into the heart of Paris. Conversely, Paris became the source of vast temporalities and geographies. As Paul Combes concluded about Paris en 1400: “Today, in fact, evokes yesterday.”75 Similarly, one could say that here evoked there.

These contortions of perspective became persuasive through “illusions” that promised true knowledge of authentic realities.76 In both the medieval and colonial contexts, the aura of authenticity emerged from the confluence of physical artifacts, creative performances, and visitors’ imaginations. Tellingly, Charles-Roux explains this principle by comparing colonial artifacts to medieval ones:

A museum composed of objects of torture, arms, clothing, and utensils from the Middle Ages is as insignificant as the exhibition of fetishes and Béhanzin’s sacrifice table [from Dahomey], if the imagination does not supply everything that is lacking to give these objects their true meaning.77

Serving authenticity through artifice, the colonial and the medieval exhibits conjured an alluring magic that made their lessons irresistible: the colonies were “enchanting” and the medieval was “charmed.”78 Paris en 1400 could not fail to seduce its visitors: “If I did not like the Middle Ages, I would have liked them on the Avenue Suffren”; the exhibit would please even “the most indifferent.”79 The colonial displays were also touted as utterly convincing: “How can one avoid a renewal of pride and faith in the vitality of the nation?”80 Once inevitably educated by the exposition, citizens could assimilate the historical or exotic “other” into their vision of national belonging, without fundamentally altering their idea of France.

This philosophy of national cohesion also characterizes Bédier’s writings at the time. He began his career by nationalizing the origins of the esprit gaulois when he argued in Les fabliaux (1893) that the comic tales were quintessentially French (rather than derived from Indian sources); he made the esprit colonisateur a defining characteristic of French identity. At the time of the exposition, he was engaged in the same kinds of popularizations as the designers of Vieux Paris and Paris en 1400: his Tristan et Iseut turned fragments of the medieval tale into a properly modern novel (see chapter 4). Like the exposition’s medieval installations, the book entertains with “authentic” history, conjoining medieval to modern, popular to elite (it was available in both paperback and luxury illustrated editions).81 During the exposition, Bédier collaborated with his cousin Louis Artus on a stage adaptation of Tristan et Iseut (intended for either the Comédie Française or Sarah Bernhardt’s theater).82 Dramatic enactments of the Middle Ages enjoyed something of a vogue at the time,83 rendering Bédier’s efforts “popular” in every sense. Bédier’s modernizations thus supported republican desires to link ancient histories to imperial value.

To the extent that the national imaginary relied on both medievalism and colonialism, Bédier enjoyed a unique position. As a medievalist, he had professional knowledge of a historical period made vital to republican national values. As a creole, he shared in the dislocations of other colonial subjects. Charles-Roux notes that men from the tropics lose their “true” character under the Paris sky.84 This was so even for fair-skinned men, for what was exceptional in the colonies passed unnoticed in Paris. Bédier’s medievalism transformed these geographical moves into temporal relations, much like the exposition exhibits; it brought “France” back to itself from “far away.”

Bédier and his compatriots all grappled with the tension between the “negative” value of the colonial and the “positive” value of the medieval. The disconnection between creole experience and the metropolitan imagination could be measured at the exposition, where anyone like Bédier with memories of traveling across the Mediterranean Sea might have felt alienated rather than persuaded by the Maréorama or the Panorama Transatlantique. At the same time, colonial experience and medieval studies connected Bédier intimately to the foundations of republican France. Creole medievalism mapped a privileged path to national belonging, doubled by a sense of estrangement.

1931, Colonial Medievalism

Medievalism and colonialism remained vital to republican discourse in the decades following 1900. If anything, the war of 1914–18 increased their intensity: active hostilities with Germany made Frankish identity newly pertinent (tellingly, Roland figured prominently in public culture on both sides of the Rhine); the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France marked the end of continental “colonization”; Germany’s loss of its colonies after the war made colonialism an even more powerful sign of France’s supremacy. The Exposition Coloniale Internationale held in the Bois de Vincennes in 1931 conjoined colonialism to medievalism by consistently proclaiming the ancient origins of France’s expansionist success. The exposition also witnessed a concerted Réunionnais effort to secure an influential place in imperial politics by highlighting the island’s faithfulness to historic French traditions. This cultural strategy included a claim on medievalism through Bédier, who had become a figure of substantial international fame.

Prospects for metropolitan recognition of Réunionnais aspirations for imperial privilege seemed improved with the shift in colonial ideology from “assimilation” to “association.” Assimilation assumed that colonial subjects were fundamentally different from French citizens and then demanded that they “evolve” toward French culture. By contrast, association (theoretically) respected cultural differences and did not demand change.85 Associationism, somewhat counterintuively, fostered a new discourse of “saming” (alongside conventional “othering”).86 This shift seemed to open new opportunities for Réunion, whose elites had long proclaimed their “sameness.” And yet, despite the overt claims of associationist ideology, the colonial agenda remained largely driven by economic opportunism and metropolitan superiority, such that Réunionnais arguments could not really alter the imperial outlook.

The official exposition guide by André Demaison exemplifies the discourse of “saming.” Demaison “discovers” the absence of colonial difference and extols the virtues of “human solidarity.” He concludes that all imperial subjects think alike: “Today, the lifestyle of these peoples resembles your own more than you think; the ideas of other men are often your own, but expressed in a different way.”87 Demaison’s approach contrasts sharply with the dominant discourse of 1900, when commentators judged the idea of a bourgeois African ridiculous.88 His description of the famous Réunionnais creoles, moreover, casts them as ideal subjects of this newly homogeneous empire:

When someone speaks to you of Bertin, Lacaussade, Parny, Leconte de Lisle, Léon Dierx, Bouvet, Lacaze, Joseph Bédier, Roland Garros and Juliette Dodu, you are tempted to believe, so much is their genius our own, that they were born in Paris or in one of our provinces.89 However, they were born over there, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, on Réunion.90

By pointing to the “invisibility” of colonial identity among these famous people, Demaison portrays their perfect performance of metropolitan cultural and racial norms; they may have had unusual geographic origins, but they are essentially French. Metropolitan audiences were supposed to recognize them first as national figures and only secondarily, if at all, as colonial subjects.

The discourse of “saming” articulated by Demaison and others had the potential to ratify the longstanding efforts of Réunionnais elites to portray the island as France’s double. The Leblonds called the island the “Second Metropole for the French world of the Indian Ocean.”91 Other colonies, in other words, should look to Réunion as an imperial center. For the Leblonds, Réunion had achieved greater cultural unity than France itself, and they insisted that black Réunionnais farm workers spoke better French than many Bretons.92 Exposition organizer Marcel Olivier echoed Réunionnais claims when he described the island as a composite of the entire French empire, with coasts like Alger and an interior like the Massif Central.93 In the 1920s and 1930s, then, it seemed that the metropole might finally recognize Réunion’s “French” character as a source of imperial value.

Despite Demaison’s laudatory discourse, his guide ultimately reinforces the traditional terms of colonial difference—exoticism and capitalism.94 Réunion’s page in fact features an “empty” graphic: a stylized palm tree and skyline. There are no people like on the other pages. The photo representing Réunion is similarly unpopulated: grouped with Somalis [Djibouti], Guadeloupe, New Caledonia, and Guyane, Réunion stands out as the only colony not represented by “colorful” local people. Instead, its photo portrays the coastline railroad, a mass of cliff on one side and an empty sky on the other (Figure 15).95 The guide thus illustrates Réunion’s tenuous purchase on metropolitan attentions: the literal inability to picture Réunion’s inhabitants suggests that even colonial propagandists had difficulty “placing” Réunion.

The islanders’ own Francocentric ideals led them to erase “colorful” details that might have met metropolitan expectations for exoticism: references to Hindu and Malagasy influences were deleted from drafts of the official exhibit description; filmed scenes of Hindu festivals were not sent on to Paris; furnishings deemed “foreign” were not displayed.96 By censoring the island’s multiracial and multicultural reality, Réunionnais elites effectively wrote themselves out of the imperial narrative.

Thus, despite major investments and vigorous propaganda (the Réunionnais senator Léonus Bénard considered the exposition a question of life or death for the colony),97 the exposition achieved little. Lacking (or refusing to acknowledge) a recognizably “ethnic” population, Réunion remained marginalized within colonialist discourse. And to the degree that it could “profit” from the ideology of “saming” articulated by Demaison, it could only lose.

The architecture of Réunion’s pavilion materialized the island’s precarious status in the empire. For the organizers, the building’s neoclassical style insinuated an aristocratic pedigree that mirrored the genealogical claims of the white creole elite (Figure 16). The pavilion drew inspiration from two of the island’s most exceptional nineteenth-century buildings, the Villa du Chaudron (Figure 17) and the Château Morange (Figure 18), both partly inspired by the eighteenth-century neoclassical style of the Petit Trianon at Versailles.98 Both of these buildings represented the island’s wealthiest landowners—those most likely to claim descent from families who frequented Versailles. Réunionnais organizers selected this design (Figure 19) to maximize the island’s associations with prestigious national history, rejecting (among others) a “typical” creole house and a modern deco-style building (Figure 20).99 The pavilion, in other words, claimed metropolitan legacies as indigenous by using models unique to Réunion that nonetheless derived from recognizable French forms. At the same time, organizers maintained Réunion’s difference from the metropole by rejecting the contemporary fashion of deco. The pavilion thus distinguished Réunion from both the metropole (by referring to history) and from other colonies (by referring to France).

While the building’s aristocratic allure pleased some, its obvious Frenchness contrasted sharply with the exposition’s official program for colonial architecture, which demanded historical reconstruction as well as cultural exoticism.100 Although Réunion escaped the criticism leveled against the modern designs adopted for Martinique and Guadeloupe (Lyautey complained especially about Guadeloupe’s lighthouse, which “interrupted” the view of Angkor Wat), some visitors expressed disappointment at the pavilion’s lack of exoticism.101 Organizer Olivier strove to reclaim the Réunion pavilion’s “colonial” identity by emphasizing the few “exotic” elements he could discern—namely, furniture made from tropical woods and the shallow water basin in front.102 Contrasted with the immense reconstruction of Angkor Wat just down the alley (Figure 21), however, Réunion’s “exotic” details seem minor enough to have barely registered. In the shadow of Angkor Wat, the very elements meant to signal the pavilion’s prestige diminished its impact.

While the architectural and racial politics of colonial ideology sidelined Réunion, its claims on national tradition fit perfectly with France’s historical mythologies. And Bédier, quite prominently, provided a creole source for the colonialist medievalism on display throughout the exposition. In addition to the renown of his scholarship in academic circles, Tristan et Iseut (1900) had made him almost a household name as a novelist; his propaganda writings during the war of 1914–18, moreover, made him an exemplary patriot. Elected to the Académie Française in 1920, he was undoubtedly the most famous living creole; during the exposition, he presided quite publicly over the celebration of the 400th anniversary of the Collège de France. Not surprisingly, Réunionnais organizers capitalized on Bédier’s reputation (they had already done so at expositions in Marseille in 1922 and Saint-Denis in 1925).103 On the wall of the pavilion’s spacious verandah, Bédier’s name appeared in gold letters (along with nearly twenty other famous creoles, including Parny, Leconte de Lisle, Dierx, Dodu, De Mahy, Garros, and Lacaze).104 Inside the pavilion, the exhibit included copies of Bédier’s prize-winning school essays from Saint-Denis; images of his family home appeared in the accompanying propaganda film shown during and after the exposition.105 Guides to the exposition routinely cite Bédier’s name as one of the reasons to visit the pavilion; the Leblonds exalt his name as “shining in pure glory throughout the universe.”106 By promoting Bédier’s creole identity (alongside other nationally recognized figures), Réunionnais organizers aimed to claim a privileged place within the empire.

Bédier’s name brought to Réunion the national prestige of medievalism. Throughout the exposition, the Middle Ages served as a legitimizing precedent for the modern empire. Bédier thus made Réunion the sole colonial guardian of France’s most exalted imperial origins. Since Réunion itself harbored no ancient histories, its elites claimed France’s as their own. In the French exhibits, the Middle Ages initiated France’s esprit colonisateur—first expressed in the “epic” endeavor of the Crusades in the eleventh century. The pavilion of the Missions Catholiques, for example, included an elaborate “Salle de l’Epopée” [Exhibit of the Epic] illustrating global evangelization from the first through the nineteenth centuries. The “missionary epic” reached its apogee with the French Crusades, figured by a “colossal” knight in saintly form.107 Other European powers showcased their own lengthy colonial histories by constructing pavilions with the façades of medieval castles.108 The exposition’s medieval imperialism extended to the colonies themselves, most elaborately with the reconstruction of Angkor Wat—“restored” from the surviving ruins to an image of “original” grandeur. This project showcased French archaeological expertise, more than Khmer culture. France thereby took possession not only of its own Middle Ages but of global history. Frequent comparisons between Angkor Wat and Notre Dame (each monument was visible from the towers of the other) illustrate the ease with which colonial and medieval legacies joined forces to serve imperial nationalism.109

The newly constructed Musée des Colonies (a building that still stands) inscribed the exhibition’s colonial medievalism in monumental form on its façade. The bas-reliefs of metropolitan France that surround the front entrance doors represent Bordeaux and Marseille with fortified castles, medieval churches, and the names of medieval saints. Around the corner, Réunion appears in a small corner, its iconography subsumed by the more obviously exotic traits of Madagascar (Figure 22).110 Further along the same side of the building, medievalism returns with a lengthy list of French colonizers that begins with eight medieval entries (Figure 23). Above the names, an inscription reads: “A ses fils qui ont étendu l’empire de son génie et fait aimer son nom au-delà des mers, la France reconnaissante” [To its sons who have extended the empire of its genius and made its name loved across the seas, a grateful France]. This colonial monument echoes the Panthéon at the center of Paris, inscribed “Aux grands hommes, la patrie reconnaissante” [To the great men, a grateful country]. Olivier in fact refers to the museum as the “Pantheon of colonial France.”111 The building façade thus declared the unity of colonial and national history, granting the Middle Ages foundational force while simultaneously ennobling modern colonialism by associating it with holy heroism.112 Colonialism, rather than any particular political regime (like the monarchy or the republic), provides the basis for a continuous and prestigious national history. In this view, France and its empire emerged simultaneously and have always functioned as one.

Inside the museum, the Salle des Croisades [Crusades Exhibit] reinforced the façade’s medieval colonialism. Saint Louis appeared as the “first French colonizer,” and the sword of Godefroy de Bouillon (the first name on the façade list) was displayed as a sign of France’s heroic conquest of the Holy Land. Other items included a basin used by Hughes de Lusignan (also named on the façade), a model of the Krak des Chevaliers in Syria, photos of other eastern crusader castles, reproductions of twelfth-century statues from the Church of Nazareth—and an oliphant “de fabrication sarrazine” from the Musée de Rouen.113 This “Saracen” oliphant apeared to arrive in France as the result of crusade conquest; it marked the beginning of the imperial practice of ethnographic collecting (prominently featured throughout the museum). Since by now French citizens knew Roland as an inspiration for the Crusades, the oliphant also reminded visitors of the patriotic lessons of epic nationalism. In the wake of Bédier’s popular edition of Roland (1922), dedicated to “Bourbon,” the oliphant from Rouen symbolized both the creole origins of Bédier’s medievalism and the medieval origins of the French empire.

The Crusades exhibit demonstrated that France had always had “l’esprit colonial” [the colonial mindset]. According to Pierre Deloncle, medieval colonialism was humanistic rather than oppressive, just like modern colonialism. He cites an example that underscores the durability of medieval colonial legacies: Arabs continued, he asserts, to characterize elegant and noble gestures as “franque” [Frankish, or French].114 In a volume of historical essays commemorating the exposition, Paul Deschamps also defines the Crusades as a formative national moment, attributing the very idea of crusade to French kings and French popes. According to him, the imperial nation immediately became a universal source of culture: “France is the oven that bakes the intellectual bread of humanity; France has created for all peoples.”115 Deschamps and Deloncle both articulate an imperial vision of France’s medieval origins, one given visible form in the museum’s exhibits. In the 1930s, Bédier also attributed France’s origins to its first colonial gestures:

The eleventh century! It’s the one in which France expands (essaimer) for the first time and founds durable establishments in southern Italy and in Sicily, then in Portugal, then in England.116

Through the potent metaphor of swarming bees (essaimer), Bédier portrays France’s natural and defining propensity for territorial expansion.117 He goes even further than Deschamps and extends French universalism into history: “Can we also say that [France] has created for all times, and particularly for the ones in which we live?”118 With this explicit reference to contemporary imperialist ideals, Bédier forges inextricable links between medievalism and colonial ideology. Indeed, given his established connections with the organizers of the museum exhibits—who included the Leblonds as well as Lyautey and Gabriel Hanotaux (Bédier’s colleagues at the Académie Française)—Bédier’s medievalism may even have shaped some of the public discourse around French colonial history during the 1920s and 1930s.

While the Crusades exhibit implicates Bédier’s medievalism in republican colonialism, the museum’s portrayals of Réunion embedded his creole identity within a narrative of imperial privilege. As the retrospective moved beyond the Middle Ages, it featured a number of images related to Réunion, including paintings of landscapes and daily life, portraits of the famous creole poets (Parny and Leconte de Lisle), and a diorama of the abolition of slavery in 1848; similar images (portraits of Parny, Bertin, and Leconte de Lisle) appeared in the Section de Synthèse.119 These exhibits, like those in the Réunion pavilion, insinuated Réunion into an established national history; its “surprisingly” creole poets (so often associated with Bédier in exposition guides) stood apart from the “racial ethnography” presented in the Section de Synthèse.

Réunion’s special contributions to national culture also appeared in the exhibit illustrating colonial influences on France. Organized by the Leblonds, the exhibit featured materials related to Paul et Virginie; it included paintings, engravings, household items, and over two hundred editions of the famous eighteenth-century novel.120 In claiming the popular novel as their own (as they had in 1889), Réunionnais elites cast themselves as the guardians of colonial culture for metropolitan audiences. For his part, Bédier claimed a personal connection to the novel’s origin: according to his father, the models for the novel’s protagonists were Bédier’s distant uncle (Paul Thuault de Villarmoy) and cousin (Virginie Caillot). From the perspective of creole medievalism, moreover, Paul et Virginie looks something like a colonial Tristan et Iseut—a story of tragic love transited across the seas (see chapter 4). The exhibit, in other words, placed Bédier’s personal and family histories within a larger vision of national imperialism, one that repeatedly looped back to medieval legacies.

The museum, and the exposition as a whole, conjoined the empire to France’s primordial identity. They encouraged visitors to see the nation as an empire at heart—and to see the empire as the heart of the nation. This vision rested partly on an imperial interpretation of the Crusades. The 1931 exposition’s concise collocation of medieval and colonial memories promised to sustain Réunionnais claims to a privileged place in the imperial Republic. The Leblonds explicitly tied the “genius” of French imperialism to its dual debt to the medieval and the republican: “the spiritualism of our Middle Ages was enriched by the tragic lesson of our Revolutions.”121 The national use of the “positive” valences of both medievalism and colonialism coincided with Réunionnais’ own use of medievalism (through Bédier) to distance the island from more recently acquired colonies. Within this ideological fantasy, creole medievalism represented a uniquely privileged form of national belonging. In the end, though, the pragmatics of the imperial economy and persistent desires for exotic “otherness” overrode the ideals on display at the exposition. A significant gap remained between metropolitan and Réunionnais views of the island’s place in the empire.

1937, Modern Medievalism

Not long after the colonial exposition, a new international exposition opened in the center of Paris. In the intervening years, economic and political pressures in France (and throughout the world) had increased, and the use of medievalism and colonialism in republican discourse changed significantly. The exposition’s subtitle, “Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne” [Arts and Technologies in Modern Life], captured the official rejection of the medievalism that had characterized previous expositions. In place of nostalgia for past glories, organizers promoted modernity and future development. The Guide officiel, for example, proclaimed confidently: “This world that we imagine as old has only the age of those who live in it.”122 The guide’s cover symbolized this view with a “modernized” Fluctuat nec mergitur seal—a ship atop a globe, no crown or medieval walls in sight (Figure 24). The image, replicated throughout the exposition,123 encapsulated organizers’ efforts to excise history from representations of collective identity—whether provincial, colonial, or national.

In reality, though, historical references, including medieval ones, appeared throughout the exposition.124 This tension between official claims and actual practice demonstrated the longstanding dualism of republican medievalism: the 1937 exposition displayed the medieval in positive and negative terms simultaneously. The colonies also appeared in double fashion, as both valuable sources of national diversity and irremediably distant from French culture. National concerns about the homogenizing effects of global industrialization led organizers to promote regional cultures—both colonial and provincial—as essential to France’s distinctive identity.125 While this approach (like associationism) implied parity between continental and overseas regions, it also retrenched metropolitan demands for colonial “difference” (leaving largely untouched the ethnography of authenticity established in 1889).

In this environment, Réunionnais characterizations of their island as a “second France” signaled failure rather than achievement: their appeals to tradition marked their lack of “modernity.” Bédier’s creole medievalism captured these tensions: featured at the Réunionnais pavilion as an icon of creole culture, he hardly represented “authentic diversity” not otherwise available in the metropole; as a popular translator, however, he exemplified a “modern” medievalism that distinguished French culture from other European traditions.

Organizers promoted a unified yet diverse imperial culture by applying the concept of “modern regionalism” to both provinces and colonies.126 According to Edmond Labbé, each region was to represent itself through a distinctive style, visible in architecture, costume, and crafts. Pavilions featured stylized versions of typical architectural features, but no historical reconstructions (in contrast with 1900).127 Within the pavilions, artisans produced crafts for everyday use as well as for art.128 Organizers claimed scrupulous respect for individuality and local tradition (even if in practice they directed and exploited provincial and colonial workers alike).129 These “commodified” traditions were meant to attract tourists and bolster the economy.130 Harmonious diversity, moreover, was expected to strengthen national unity.131 Indeed, the entire empire would labor in a unified brotherhood, from Boulogne and Brest to Niamey (Niger) and Papeete (Tahiti):“All these black and yellow peoples, without losing any of their own originality, brought under France’s protection or governance, became one in the hands of France.”132 By protecting (and often, creating) traditional differences in outlying regions, organizers aimed to safeguard France’s unique character.

“Modern regionalism” structured the entire exposition. On the left bank of the Seine, the Centre Régional presented “typical” buildings from over thirty different metropolitan regions. Elsewhere, the Centre Rural offered demonstrations of the techniques and architecture of modern farming; L’Habitation Rurale illustrated different types of modern rural housing; the Cité des Métiers et de l’Artisanat included twenty-two houses, each illustrating the lifestyle and production methods of a different trade; the Palais de l’Artisanat, a modernist building, contained further craft exhibits.133 All of these exhibits were intended to prove that France could modernize without losing its traditional identity.134 Finally, just across the bridge from the Centre Régional, on the Ile des Cygnes in the midst of the Seine, the Centre des Colonies featured sixteen pavilions that mixed modern architecture with traditional artisanry and tourist propaganda.135 Here, a “decorative silhouette” inspired by Angkor Wat marked a dramatic contrast with the “archeological reconstruction” of 1931:136 translating “modern regionalism” for Indochina, the purely decorative tower referred to the past but did not replicate it, suggesting that even colonial cultures could modernize. Overall, the colonial section appeared as the “prolongement” of the regional, and the “overseas provinces” naturally extended the metropolitan ones.137 Meanwhile, the regional section strove to match the colorful image of the colonial exhibit.138

For Réunion, whose politicians had argued since the Revolution that the colony should become a department, modern regionalism ratified a longstanding sense of closeness to the metropole. The discourse of imperial unity and equality, however, undermined Réunionnais claims for special treatment as France’s most faithful twin. Within modern regionalism, similarity meant that a regional culture had succumbed to imitation. For Réunionnais elites, what looked like imitation to Parisian observers meant “authentic” preservation of “indigenous” French culture.

Réunion’s pavilion captured these dilemmas. On the one hand, it responded perfectly to the ideals of regional architecture: it was designed like all the others through a centralized process and modeled on a “typical” creole house (rather than on historic monuments, like in 1931). Observers concluded that it blended tradition and modernity into a distinctive form adapted to its tropical milieu (Figure 25, Figure 26).139 On the other hand, Labbé felt that the pavilion would only appeal to creoles, rather than granting it national significance like other regions.140 The pavilion’s lack of general interest suggests that, for Labbé, Réunion had not achieved the “modernity” that defined national belonging.

To the degree that the pavilion did fulfill metropolitan expectations, it could also have alienated the creoles who reportedly came in large numbers: it lacked the one element truly typical of island architecture, the varangue (verandah) (Figure 27). In creating “typical” regional architecture, in other words, the metropolitan planners suppressed the region’s most recognizable architectural feature (given grandiose form in 1931). The pavilion that signaled Réunion’s integration into the national project of modern regionalism thus also alienated its own “natives” from their homeland and the nation itself. Although some metropolitans considered creoles perfectly at home at the pavilion, and Réunionnais organizers had jealously guarded their right to an individual pavilion, they could not secure the visibility they craved.141

The pavilion housed an exhibit much like the one presented in 1931, showcasing nationally recognized creoles—the canonical poets (Parny, Leconte de Lisle, Dierx) and the medievalist, Bédier; the installation also highlighted the national achievements of politicians (De Mahy, the Brunets) and writers (the Leblonds, Jean D’Esme).142 These names illustrated the depth of “l’inspiration Réunionnaise,” figured in an allegorical statue in white marble at the entrance. The exhibit represented Réunion’s value by emphasizing its faithful adherence to mainstream national culture. Bédier in particular connected Réunion to France’s most distant origins through medieval studies. In 1937, however, arguments from history had no place in official discourse.

The famous creoles could not take the place of the one figure deemed essential for a nationally significant regional identity—the artisan. Unlike every other regional and colonial pavilion, Réunion had no live demonstrations or unique handcrafts.143 Indeed, Labbé remarked that Réunion had no obvious place in a program devoted to modern arts and technologies since it lacked indigenous arts and supported only agriculture and poets (however accomplished).144 With only a few handcrafted products, and those devoid of “local color,” Réunion had nothing to contribute to the imperial craft industry. Since the immigrants who brought artisanal skills to the island had since lost them, Labbé suggested that the government foster local schools whose best students could be sent to Paris for advanced training. In this way, the “creole hand” could soon achieve the same perfection as the “creole mind.”145

Labbé’s prescription for Réunion echoes his directive approach (artisanat dirigé) to metropolitan regional arts, where officials corrected and even invented local arts.146 The “local color” that authenticated regional crafts entailed both stylistic and racial standards. In the ethnography of regionalism, a single identifiable people inhabited each region, producing crafts that expressed their unique culture. For an immigrant society like Réunion, this approach meant that handcrafts produced on the island belonged ethnographically to the homelands of their producers, however distant in time or location. Réunionnais lace, for example, lacked “local color” because it preserved the regional style of immigrants from Brittany, Normandy, and other French provinces. For Réunionnais elites, this faithfulness to French traditions signified their special status in the empire; for metropolitan officials, however, it signified a lack of regional identity.

The lace industry illustrates well the miscalculations of creole identity politics. On the one hand, Marius Leblond, as an exposition commissioner, perfectly anticipated Labbé’s criticism, recommending in 1935 that Réunion’s government organize schools for producing lace based on original motifs (such as ferns and lychees); he admired and envied the distinctive styles he had seen in Martinique.147 On the other hand, Leblond attributed Réunion’s potential for success to its more substantial white and assimilated population. Promoting this Eurocentric standard could not meet the criteria of modern regionalism. Réunionnais thus perpetuated their own marginality by insisting on their fundamentally French identity. As Eurocentric Europeans from the southern hemisphere, white creoles had little to offer to metropolitan fantasies of the tropics.148

In designing their exhibit, Réunionnais organizers refused to engage one of the island’s most obvious regional distinctions—its exceptionally high percentage of mixed-race, or métis, inhabitants. Colonial officials had long recognized métissage as a desirable means of assimilating “inferior” races (an idea that had coexisted with virulent resistance to métissage since around 1880).149 From the perspective of modern regionalism, racial diversity (like craft production) strengthened the nation, compensating for falling European birth rates and curing economic stagnation.150

Exposition organizers manifested their interest in métissage by organizing a beauty contest for Miss France d’Outre-Mer, otherwise known as the Concours du Meilleur Mariage Colonial (Contest for the Best Colonial Marriage). Réunion’s participation reveals the refusal of creole elites to identify with the colonial ethnography valued in the metropole: contest participants were all the children of French fathers and African or Asian mothers—“with the exception of one of them, an admirable creole of white race from Réunion, and who, for this reason, knows she is out of the running.”151 As a self-proclaimed pure European, Miss Réunion (daughter of the island’s senator, Léonus Bénard) embodied the racial and cultural ideals of elite creole society. And yet, by selecting her, Réunionnais organizers literally disqualified themselves. Although they could have easily found a beautiful métisse, they preferred to mark their difference from other colonies and emphasize their identification with the metropole (where Miss Bénard could have participated without scandal in the parallel contest for Miss France). The dictates of colonial ethnography, moreover, would probably have classified a métisse as either “African” or “Asian” (according to her ancestral roots), once again disqualifying Miss Réunion.

Miss Bénard’s destiny lay outside the colonial circuit: rather than returning to daily chores in her homeland, she lived in Paris with her father the senator (in fact, several of the contestants lived in Paris).152 In a reversal of Miss Bénard’s official exclusion, she appears triumphant in the contest’s commemorative photo (Figure 28). Front and center, her wide white skirt spread across the other women’s feet, she alone holds a flag and a cascade of tropical flowers. This “white rose in a colored rosebush,” as the caption reads, presides as the winner in a photo that translates Réunionnais aspirations to prevail over other colonies in the contest for France’s privileged attentions. The difference between the photo and the contest outcome mirrors the difference between the self-image of Réunion’s elites and the island’s actual place in the imperial economy.

The conflict surrounding the beauty contest parallels the dissonance between official approaches to history and actual practices. Even as organizers endeavored to shift the terms of national belonging, history remained a vibrant factor—and medievalism and colonialism as intertwined as in 1889. While the modernized Fluctuat emblem appeared on the official guide, for example, other official materials, including entrance tickets and souvenir albums, as well as the façade of the Palais de l’Artisanat, featured the traditional version—complete with crenellated medieval towers.153 The official use of both a medievalizing and modernizing Fluctuat emblem reveals the dualism of Labbé’s own official pronouncements. He dismissed “passéisme” while also drafting the Middle Ages into the fight against industrial modernity, tying the term métier—a key concept for the craft politics of modern regionalism—to the Middle Ages:

With this word métier, memories surface: artisans of the Middle Ages, guilds of the Ancien Régime! At the Center for Trades [Métiers], is it not old France that reflected and extended itself into our contemporary life, thanks to Progress?154

The Middle Ages here facilitates France’s liberation from a national identity crisis. In the pleasant surroundings of the Centre des Métiers—a new urbanism based on the small streets of “old towns”—artisans could escape the horrors shown in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927, emblem of the soul-crushing effects of the machine age).155 Tradesmen embody what turns out to be modernity’s still-indispensable notion of history.

Official publications regularly presented similarly favorable attitudes toward history. The Guide officiel opens with praise for the artisan as the embodiment of historical memories:

These first gestures of the primitive individual, which are the source of everything, have not disappeared with them. Each generation has transmitted them to the next generation while perfecting them. They have become today the subtle heritage buried in the agile fingers of the artisans who, in the organizers of the Exposition, have found ardent protectors whose ambition is precisely to desire the reconciliation of that which we supposed capable of killing everything and that which must not die.156

Here, “primitive” encompasses all times and places—from the national past to the imperial present. The hands of living workers (metropolitan and colonial alike) express ancient ethnic memories, protected now by modern French politicians. The artisan becomes the instrument by which politicians craft a modernity (“capable of killing everything”) that champions tradition (“that which must not die”). At the same time, the artisan brings history into modernity, as handcrafting is portrayed as a precapitalist activity that protects France from the ugly effects of mass production.157 While the Guide officiel remains vague about the exact historical location of this “primitive individual,” the Livre d’or links colonial artisanry specifically to the Middle Ages, comparing the organization of North African craftsmen to the guilds of “our Middle Ages.”158 The medieval thus lives on in the colonies, and also in the traditional crafts of France itself.

Numerous “modernizing” exhibits also integrated visible historical lessons. Alongside the mechanized farm of the Centre Rural, for example, stood the museum of the Village of Romaney-en-Bresse, showcasing its pre-Roman origins.159 Together, the installations authenticated local identity by positing continuity from Gaulic to Roman to medieval to modern times. Similar retrospectives appeared alongside working artisans in several of the colonial pavilions.160 And some of the folklore festivals organized through the Centre Régional were performed at the Parc d’Attractions in the midst of a reconstructed Village de Notre Vieille France (Village of our Old France) (Figure 29). Here, visitors found the nostalgic architecture banned from the regional section itself, most prominently that of Bretagne, Auvergne, and Alsace. The Parc also included the colonial picturesque, with reconstructed Tunisian and Moroccan souks. The Guide officiel presented these attractions as exotic extensions of the medieval village: “they add to this reconstitution of Old France a brilliant exotic note, evocative of our overseas empire.”161 In the Parc, then, regional folklore coexisted with colonial exoticism and medieval nostalgia. Indeed, the Parc was marketed as an amalgamation of past, present, and future, its entrance framed by medieval-looking towers and a steel roller coaster (Figure 30). The Parc suggested that France’s authentic future rested on a modernity that nonetheless remembered its past—a “nostalgic” or “medieval” modernism to accompany the vogue of technological futurism.162 Labbé may have opposed the Parc,163 but its popularity made it integral to the exposition’s message.

The lessons of history also played an important role in the institutions of the new Palais de Chaillot. Although designed to “modernize” the Trocadéro building (1878) that it replaced, the Palais actually maintained the early republic’s dual commitment to medievalism and colonialism. As James Herbert has shown, the Musée des Monuments Français and Musée de l’Homme represented, respectively, the “precapitalist feudal era” and the “extracapitalist primitive world” as defenses against industrial homogenization. The Musée des Monuments Français (like the Musée de Sculpture Comparée that preceded it) aimed specifically to inspire national pride through the admiration of medieval arts.

During the exposition itself, the Palais housed a basement exhibit, originating mostly from the provinces, illustrating the latest techniques for conserving historical monuments.164 The exhibit demonstrated that the Middle Ages benefited as much from modernity as craft production did. The display included the Krak des Chevaliers from Syria (a monument to medieval colonialism that was also featured at the Musée des Colonies in 1931) and maps of twelfth-century pilgrimage routes (central to Bédier’s famous thesis on the origins of the epic).165 Even in this small exhibit, the medieval, regional, colonial, and modern converged to teach mutually reinforcing lessons.

Even at the new Musée d’Art Moderne, history occupied a substantial place during the exposition, with a retrospective exhibit reaching back to the ninth century. Conceived late in the planning process by leaders of the leftist Popular Front, the retrospective underscored artistic continuity, much like the craft and folklore exhibits.166 Prime Minister Léon Blum wrote in the preface to the catalogue that the exhibit attested to the “continuous creation” and “eternal prestige” of French art.167 Labbé ascribed to the same theory of artistic continuity, despite his resistance to the retrospective itself. Historical art could rejuvenate national culture, much like authentic regional traditions: “a glance at the past, far from diminishing the present, would reveal the deep sources of contemporary art, from which it draws constant forces of renewal.”168 In fact, the retrospective exhibit forged direct connections between regionalism and historicism (including medievalism) because nearly all of the items displayed came from provincial museums. This logistical necessity ended up furthering the goals of modern regionalism. The most leftist government of the Third Republic, in other words, took up the same representational strategies as its more conservative predecessors.

Medieval artifacts at the retrospective included several carved oliphants, among them the ever-popular “horn of Roland” from Toulouse.169 Oliphants signaled in shorthand the broader continuity of republican medievalism. Like the oliphants of 1889, 1900, and 1931, those of 1937 referenced national patriotism, imperial prestige, and creole memories (for Bédier, but also for anyone familiar with him, his Roland translation, or the Musée des Colonies). Drawn from provincial collections, they now also referenced the ideals of modern regionalism. Against this background, Bédier’s Roland (republished in 1937) becomes the historical counterpart to the “regional novel”—a stylized construction that modernized an inherited tradition rather than only recovering it archeologically. Bédier’s Tristan et Iseut fits this paradigm even more directly: it takes a regionally specific tradition (Celtic Breton) and renders it fully French; it takes historic fragments and makes them coherently modern (see chapter 4).

Bédier claimed the past for the modern nation in terms very similar to Labbé’s. In Labbé’s modernity, experts authenticated national traditions; in Bédier’s Middle Ages, experts (clerics) created foundational literary monuments. In both cases, specialists mediated relations between local identities and national culture, protecting France from outside influences. Bédier’s views of medieval history may have influenced the art retrospective, for he had long been associated with Blum through common friends, and the two met for dinner at least once during the planning period.170 Regardless of Bédier’s involvement, the general resonances between his medievalism and Labbé’s regionalism suggest once again that creole medievalism coincided with many aspects of republican discourse—and that creole identity belonged both to the margins and the center of imperial France.

Bédier’s creole medievalism seemed ideally suited for placing Réunion at the center of the empire. With the colonial portrayed as much like the regional, and the regional so central to the forms of national belonging advocated by exposition organizers, Réunion would seem to have easily found a comfortable place in the metropolitan imaginary. Modern regionalism, theoretically, encompassed the key terms of Réunionnais aspirations: it recognized overseas regions as equal to continental provinces and valued regions as repositories of authentic historical traditions. And yet Réunion’s cultural particularities had even less purchase on metropolitan value than they did in 1931. In 1937, metropolitan terms of national belonging depended on mass consumption (if not mass production) and the commodification of the indigenous. And Réunion did not meet the demands of what Robert Rydell has called the “colonial modern.”171 The effort to make distant things “present” ultimately functioned more convincingly when distance also marked difference. Both too far and too close, Réunion fell outside the bounds of simulated cultural fantasy.

The Paris expositions that spanned Bédier’s lifetime consistently forged significant relations among medievalism, colonialism, and republican France. They presented lessons of collective identification in popular and entertaining forms, aiming to instill patriotism in French citizens and admiration in foreigners. Bédier’s engagement with both the academic and popular dimensions of republican medievalism (from his scholarship to his translations to his portrayal at the expositions) placed him at the center of some of the most visible and influential representations of France—conceived as an entity with a long history and a broad geographic reach.

Bédier gave imperial France prestigious medieval origins; he offered this same valuable lineage to Réunionnais elites dreaming of national recognition. While these representations shaped desirable images of national belonging for Bédier’s homelands, they ultimately thwarted Réunionnais aspirations for privileged status in the empire. Réunion could not meet metropolitan expectations of colonial exoticism and economic productivity. The complexities of Réunion’s place in the empire define the complexities of the creole diaspora, which in turn shaped much of Bédier’s social, political, and scholarly life.