World Expos in France with Charles Pappas

Gary: Today's special episode is an interview with Charles Pappas. Pappas is the author of Flying Cars, Zombie Dogs, and Robot Overlords and Expo 2020 Dubai: The Definitive Edition, both of which focus on the transformative power of World’s Fairs. In Expo 2020’s official list of its top 50 attractions at the Dubai event, he was ranked #12 as the Expo Historian. He’s an advisor for the US effort to win the 2031 International Horticultural Expo and a co-chair of the Institute for the Study of International Exhibitions. He has also covered the expo industry worldwide for Exhibitor magazine for more than 20 years. His articles have won several national/regional ASBPE, MAGGIE, and TABBI awards. Today we are talking about his new book Nobody Sits like the French: Exploring Paris through its World Expos

Charles:  I have an origin story like everybody. And for me, I've been the senior writer at Exhibitor Magazine since about 2002. So almost a quarter of a century, and we cover exhibitions, corporate events and branched out eventually to the World Expo, the world's fairs. And in that meantime, I started consulting with Expo 2020 in Dubai, the Minneapolis, Minnesota bid for Expo 2027. The countries are rather that city's current bid for the 2031 International Horticultural Expo, and I'm also advising Serbia because they won the right to hold the Expo 2027. But before that, as a child, I had actually been imprinted by the 1964-65 World's Fair. My father drove us out from Wisconsin to New York in our maroon Studebaker. And it was chock full of the most amazing things that changed you as a child. But perhaps the greatest one, the one that sticks with me to this day. Even beyond the guy, the Bell telephone guy, and also the guy with the rocket pack. It was the IBM Pavilion. And you stood in line under these steel trees, about 45 steel trees. And the top of it was actually the ball, the rotating ball in the then high tech Selectric typewriter. But the ball was embossed 3000 times with the IBM logo. Now you wait outside there and then it opens up like a giant mouth. It hauls 500 people at a time into the dark, into a nine story tall main theater, where the Eames, Charles and Ray Eames had designed 14 projectors in nine screens, all synchronized. That told the story of computers. There was an animated puppet show on them with binary logic. There were football coaches describing it being like a football play. There were housewives saying they thought like recipe cards. All these accessible metaphors inside this incredible gob smacking pavilion. I have never forgotten that. I have never forgotten the way it imprinted on me. The idea of IBM as the last word in computers and how long that experience lasted. That's the power of just one pavilion at just one World's Fair or World Expo. That's where I got my start. And that's why I am where I am talking to you today in 2025.

Gary: That is a fascinating story. I think many of our listeners are familiar with the idea of a World Expo. But for those who aren't. Can you explain what these are, how they originated, and why they are important?

Charles: Well, first I'm going to say blame it on the French. Now I'm going to leave that there for just a moment, and then I'm going to come back to it. But in 1851, Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, with his mutton chops and his vision, he marshals all the forces of Victorian ambition. And he says, basically let there be an exhibition. It was his response to the French, whose own industrial expositions had kind of set the European continent abuzz, but they weren't really, truly international. So he worked with Henry Cole, who, by the way, had invented the Christmas card and they held it in what was the Crystal Palace, which was really; think of it this way a greenhouse on amphetamines. It was about 1851 feet long, 408 feet wide. Consider the size of that, and it was one of the first biomorphic or biomimetic structures. That is based on something in nature. The designer who essentially was Paxton. Who essentially was a designer of greenhouses for the 1%. He based it on a giant Amazonian waterlily named of course, for Queen Victoria. So the official name was the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations. It's a steam powered dream of empire. 6 million people attend. And again, it kind of comes back to the French because their industrial expositions gave them the idea, the British the idea of doing a truly international version. So this world's fair, the very first one had 14,000 exhibitors and about half were from countries outside Britain. And they totaled about 100,000 different exhibits. It's pretty astounding. Now, to give you some context for that or a comparison in modern comparison. The International Consumer Electronics Show that takes place yearly in Las Vegas, massive worldwide now the world attends it. There were something like about 4000 exhibitors at that in its most recent iteration this year. Compare that to 14,000 exhibitors in the year 1851. But they came from France, Germany, Russia, Spain, Portugal, even the US. The lesson was that you could attract the world through the soft power of, As the political scientist Joseph Nye said in the 1980s, attraction not coercion.

Gary: Your book notes that world expos had enormous influence on virtually every part of a country they took place in. Let's start by talking about your title. How did the World Expo make French people sit differently?

Charles: You know, I'm glad that the title is getting attention, but it is literally true. So let's go back. Let's go back to the world's fairs in the 1860s and 1870s. In 1867, the French held the second of their world's fairs. And one of the exhibitors was a guy named Thonet. it. He designed what we understand to be the bistro chair. Michael Thonet was a German cabinetmaker. He was from the Rhine Valley. So the invention was not French at all. It took him years to bend the wood just the right way to kind of create the perfect design. He created a kind of impeccable blend of form and function. He did half a dozen pieces of beechwood with steam. He would press the segments together in these curved cast iron molds, and then they would dry in the shape that we know today. Comfort was paramount, and they were made with woven palm or cane, which were both pleasant, comfortable. But if you spilled things or threw things on them, they would just drain through, you know, the upholstery, so to speak. It won the gold medal at the 1867 fair. And from that moment, it spreads throughout the world. It becomes more French than French. The fact that its origins were German, that's kind of lost. But through the years, it became the first mass produced piece of furniture. By the 1930s, it had sold an estimated 50 million units. Even Ikea had a version of it at one time, I believe, in the 1960s. Everywhere you go in France, everywhere you go in Paris, you see it. It is one of the staples in our popular imagination, in our mental image of Paris, of what the city is about. And yet, where did it originate? A world's fair.

Gary: Another area that world expos changed was food. Can you explain how these important events in Paris. Altered French cuisine.

Charles: Well, you're talking about two essential food groups as far as I'm concerned. Cheese and champagne. Now, cheese was always a big part of world expos, oddly enough. In fact, in 1893, in Chicago, there was one that stood six feet high, about 1.8m, and it weighed 22,000 pounds, or, I believe, about 907 kilos. But Roquefort Cheese had a special relationship with the World Expos that actually kind of created it and ensured its niche among cheeses. So the first time it exhibited in a World Expo was 1855, the first of Paris's seven world expositions. Now, it was just one of the estimated 24,000 exhibits at that fair, and it was presented behind odor inhibiting glass because some didn't want people to smell it, though frankly, I think that might have been a better idea. But nonetheless, it starts making inroads as a very delectable cheese. They try again in London's next World Expo in 1862, and they wanted to really show it in its highest, most mature form, which is basically tinted green and spotted with red and blue. That indicates all the various bacteria and how it's affected Roquefort. The English organizers sniffed at the French and they rejected Roquefort because, quote, it could spoil and it smelled bad. Now that left the organizers behind the Roquefort exhibition, the Society of Caves in kind of a tough spot. What do you do?  At that time marketing through smell and taste weren't necessarily a widespread marketing technique, but with the next expo in Paris in 1867, they tried something different. They put a simple one page brochure outside the entrance of its pavilion. Now, this seems like marketing 101 today, right? I know, but it was a radical idea because anyone passing by attendees, competitors, even the media could just grab it and then they could just go home and they would spread the news about Roquefort. In those days before mass communication. Obviously, that could be effective. And indeed it was. Thousands of people picked that up and they started spreading the word. Now we move ahead a little bit more. They became even more successful with their exhibitions. So they keep having to up themselves. Now in 1889, at the famous exposition where the Eiffel Tower debuted. There was an ongoing economic crisis at that time that made the company a little bit more risk averse to showing the cheese. So they put Roquefort cheese on sheets of velvet in these gorgeous glass cases under crystal domes. Now still beautiful. And in the background they had photos. And I compare it to something like an anthropologist might take of some exotic tribes tools where they were put on display. They had a large salting tub, a pictures of those machines necessary to cheesemaking. ET cetera. ET cetera. But in 1900, I believe the Society of Caves really outdid themselves. They hired a famous model maker from Paris, Dijon, to kind of recreate the caves themselves, in which the cheese is aged. This was an immersive experience. It was decades ahead of any other kind of marketing. It allowed you to walk in and experience it without even needing text. And one of the things I like to point out to people who still wonder about why would the Expos be so good at this? Why would Roquefort have succeeded so wildly? And the answer is in the name of the thing itself. World Expo the world came. If you took the combined audience for the World Expo that Roquefort appeared at. It would be about 120 million people total. Compare that to a Taylor Swift tour, the last tour she was on last year in 2024. She appeared in front of 10 million people. That's a lot of people. But it's dwarfed by what Roquefort did.

Gary: That is pretty incredible. You note that a lot of businesses made their name at the World Expos. Can you tell us a few of the important figures and firms that emerged from these expositions?

Charles: Gladly. Because there are so many luxury names that are just a part of the French and Parisian landscape, but you don't realize their rep was made by World Expos, Baccarat, Maxim's restaurant, but Louis Vuitton. Not many people realize what he did at Expos. Now, his story is kind of wonderful. It's kind of a rags to riches, if you will. And he had left his home. He walked about 250 miles to Paris when he was 13. He got a variety of drudge jobs there. And then, through a series of coincidences, the likes of which you see in Charles Dickens novels. He got a break when he became a worker for a company that essentially consisted of packing the positions of very well-to-do travelers. Now, early 1850s, the president of France, Louis Napoleon, he aspires to a more impressive title. He has a coup, rebrands himself, Napoleon III, and he marries a Spanish countess, and afterwards the Countess, who is now the Empress of France, hires Louis Vuitton as her personal box maker, and she charged him with making packing the most beautiful clothes in the most exquisite way for me. Here was his eureka moment. Here was his world defining moment. He thought, why shouldn't there be a standardized design for luxury luggage that could be mass produced. So he opens his first boutique in 1854, but in 1867 he takes a leap forward, where he decides to appear at the exposition that year in Paris against really high dollar, high status trunk makers like Meunier. In fact, Meunier was known for waterproofing their canvas trunks and luggage, and that was quite popular at that time. And the English luggage manufacturers were there too. And they even were smart enough to put their trunks under live demonstrations to show off how durable they were. But nonetheless, Vuitton emerges is basically the first among equals who wins a bronze medal. And because of that, because of the exponent of publicity, he becomes the official luggage supplier for King Alfonso the 12th of Spain and the future Czar Nicholas the Second of Russia. Later the 1889 Expo. He wins the gold medal there, and those gold medals to him become what Michelin stars are to restaurants now. That's really where he made it. And this allowed him to grow and grow and grow and become so famous that by the end of the century, he was essentially the world's greatest luggage maker, the best known. There's even some mythology there that says when he introduced special locks to protect people's luggage, that he dared Harry Houdini to try to escape. Now, that's probably not true, because this the timeline here doesn't work. Houdini wasn't really famous in that way. about the time Vuitton says that he issued the challenge. But another aspect is in this time, Vuitton created the trunk that was stackable and easier to carry, and that affected how we make luggage today. So it's not just that it's a luggage brand, it's that it affected all the designs of any kind of luggage we get from that point forward. Expos made Louis Vuitton.

Gary:  Aside from food, furniture and firms, we have fame from Sarah Bernhardt to Auguste Rodin and Paul Gauguin. How did the world expositions play a role in celebrity culture?

Charles: Let's take Bernhardt first, because she was, as I like to say, a human exclamation point. Now, expos didn't make her famous per se. They made her immortal, per se. And I'll explain what I mean. By the time of the 1878 Expo in Paris. She was already famous. She had just, uh, come off a six year sprint where she did several famous plays that made her famous from the revival of Kean by Alexandre Dumas, the count who had written The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. She starred as Cordelia in King Lear. She really was the top of her game. But Expos made her more of an iconic figure, almost a mythological figure. 1878 she goes into a hot air balloon with the French painter Georges Clairin. This was at the Expo, and it allowed you to see the long, wide expo site from a great height. Now at that time, they didn't have the Eiffel Tower. Of course, that was 11 years away. So that's what they did in the meantime for this. Now this was tethered to the ground, but a storm comes up. It snaps the tether. They go gliding off into the wild blue yonder. And now they're a little bit scared because they've been slurping champagne and tossing the empties overboard, and they've been chomping on foie gras and oranges, and they go sailing over the site. Fortunately, they land outside of Paris unharmed. But it magnified her reputation for wild adventuring for essentially being a feral creature. Kind of amazing, really. What happened then. But it goes on after that. She wants to branch out. She's not satisfied being an actress. She wants something more. She felt hemmed in in many ways by the more restrictive world of acting. What did not hammer in was art itself. She started sculpting and her first items, her first works of art were shown in Chicago at their famous 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. But later, at the 1900 Expo in Paris. That's where she really, really becomes, in my mind, immortal. She is one of the first to do movies, and not many people realize that about her. She starred in a kind of mini hamlet. It was a one minute film, which was actually kind of long for that point, with the technology available at that point. And it's a duel with Laertes, So she has the dual. The actor playing Laertes is kind of out of the scene, because really, all they're going to focus on is Sarah Bernhardt. So she touches and and guards, and then she's until she gets felled by a cut from Laertes poisoned sword, and she sort of swoons into the afterlife. But after this was done, she began to see this film and a few others she made afterwards as her guarantee of immortality. Her sculptures live on after her. The movies do live on after her. Her reputation lives on after her. But the things she cared about most, the artworks. That's what World expose allowed her to present to the rest of the world. More than her plays, more than her acting. That's what really counted to her in many ways. That was what she wanted. Now compare that to Rodin. He was also at the 1900 Expo. And I like to think of him as being to France what Van Gogh was to the Netherlands. Or I'm being slightly sarcastic when I say what Andy Warhol was to the United States, but Warhol was a larger than life figure, so I think the comparison is fair. At the Expo of 1900, he begins to think he should have an autonomous retrospective exhibition. No one in the history of expos had ever had that. Not Van Gogh, not Cezanne, not Degas, only Rodin. So he needs to raise 80,000 francs. 20,000 comes from himself, 60,000 from his investors. They build a gorgeous pavilion. It was a six sided Louis XVI style garden house. Now, even though his creative process included many other people besides himself, it was only going to be about Rodin. There were 165 works in there. Enormous bronze, marble, some just molded in plaster. There was The Thinker, The Kiss, the Gates of Hell, all these daring creations that we associate with him. It was kind of a one man Louve. Think of it that way. One critic called it a revelation of the human soul. People gushed over it. Critics praised him to the skies. He charged, by the way, a one franc admission on weekdays, but five francs on Fridays, when he would appear personally to meet and greet attendees. Oscar Wilde came there. Is a Dora Duncan came there, and Isadora Duncan remembered it this way as much as she liked the art. She regretted not taking the chance to lose her virginity to Rodin at that point. But more than that, the works actually were set in such a way that they weren't on high pedestals. They weren't necessarily pictures on a wall that you should sort of just pass by. They allowed you to kind of course, your way between them, almost like a forest of works. It allowed you to see them in a new way, a very unconventional way. This made his reputation once and for all at that point. He is basically Zeus with a chisel. Today you can get an idea of what that look like at the Museum Rodin. It's not in the same place as the pavilion was. But after he died, the government to whom he had willed his works took all of them and put it in the Musée Rodin, where you can see them today and enjoy them. But the elegance of it today reflects the elegance of it in 1900. These were ways to take people who were famous yes, or about to be famous, but pushed them over the top. Very often you had people like Buffalo Bill, Cody, Thomas Edison were there. They became even more famous at the French Expos because of that, because of the power and the amount of people, the sheer number of people who would attend.

Gary: Another fascinating element of your book is how these expositions often took place amidst important political happenings and even facilitated change. What role did these events have on politics within France and beyond?

Charles: Let's take the very first Parisian World Expo 1855. Who shows up? Queen Victoria, Little Vic herself. She was the first English sovereign to set royal foot in Paris since Henry VI was installed as the King of France at Notre Dame in 1431. That's how long it had been. This begins the most cordial of relationships between the countries. This is huge in the detente between the two countries. But more than that, I would say that there was something in 1855 that overshadowed it. There was much greater than Then even that event for the 1855 Expo. That's when Napoleon III hired Baron Haussmann to change the city to give it a makeover. The expo was the catalyst for that. So we're talking about the increased the number of arrondissement from 12 to 20. They stretched its modern boundaries that way. They had sewers that would make the Romans jealous. Haussmann took a wrecking ball to the city. 20,000 buildings came down with a snap of his fingers. The 120,000 homes inside those 20,000 buildings vanished. Gone. He was a human siege engine e replaced them with 34,000 new buildings that housed something like 215,000 apartments. Most of those narrow, five meter wide roads where you could barely squeeze through before. Gone. He plowed them over with a series of boulevards that he carved out that were about 24m, or about 80ft wide. And those roads, Napoleon III had hoped, would in the phrase air, unify and beautify Paris. And in a pinch, they could conveniently kind of accommodate wide rows of soldiers to put down social disturbances like they had in 1848, just a few years before. Now, by 1870, Haussmann had engineered something like nearly 20% of the streets in central Paris. He had established four major parks. He enlarged the water supply from 87,000 to 400,000m³ of water per day. Even the Court of Band stands in the parks and squares. He controlled, he designed. This was all because of the Expo. This all created the Paris we see in our heads today. It was one of the most politically significant things in Napoleon, recreating something that he wanted to solidify his power to glorify his regime. But beyond that, I would say that one of the other most significant factors was the 1878 Expo, and that was the separation of church and state. Before that, at the various expos in France and even the other countries. This one reflected, though, a political shift in France that was more towards secularism. The 1878 fair deliberately excluded any religious statements or rituals from its opening ceremonies. This was snubbing the church. This was thumbing its nose at the church. They attacked back. They, one pamphlet at that time that was passed around called it the Exposition without God. Others in the church asked their congregants to boycott the fair. They called it an atheist exposition, but it didn't work. But it was hugely socially and politically significant because of the effect it had. And because they used that platform of millions of people who would see this and experience it. The last one I'll mention is an uglier one. It took place in 1937, the last of the Paris World Expos, where Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, their pavilions are set apart from each other. And in between them, almost like a referee, is the Eiffel Tower. This gorgeous tower of beauty separates these two horribly ugly political systems. The German pavilion had been built by Hitler's architect Albert Speer, and the Soviet one was built by Boris Iofan and with a giant, giant 65 ton piece of art by a sculptor named Vera Mukina, all socialist realist, it was an ugly and it was a horrible part of that fair. But of course those regimes fell, fortunately. But expos are never free of political content. And sometimes, sometimes they can be right at the boiling point of the political conflict of the day.

Gary: Finally, is there one particular anecdote or fun fact from your book that you wish everyone knew?

Charles: You know, there are so very, very many. But you won't be surprised to hear that very often, it all circles back to the Eiffel Tower. For instance, and this is not the one I'm going to praise as the most interesting, but it's a small idea. There was a model of the Eiffel Tower at one point made entirely of diamonds, about 3.5ft tall, a little over a meter tall that was shipped off to America. I love that, and another time someone wanted to fill it with mirrors, to try to communicate with Mars by reflecting sunlight off of it. But my favorite is when people were suggesting ideas for what would be the Eiffel Tower. There were many, many ideas put in to the public realm, and one of them that I find fascinating is a 1000 foot tall guillotine. Now, because the 1889 Expo celebrated the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution, of which the guillotine is a part, a lot of that obviously raised a lot of hackles. On the other hand, I think there were many who probably would have liked it. Now the Eiffel Tower went out, obviously, but because because it was celebrating a revolution where monarchy lost its head, many countries that still had monarchies in 1889 Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Russia, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom. They took a hard pass on the expo that year because they didn't want to have any part in celebrating an exposition whose achievement again was celebrating separating royals from their heads. That, to me, is one of the most unusual parts of the Parisian expositions, but one that never fails to astonish me.

Gary: The book is Nobody Sits like the French: Exploring Paris through its World Expos. Thank you very much for being on the show Charles Pappas.

Charles: Thank you so much. It was a delight.

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