"Race" As Spectacle in Late-Nineteenth-Century French Art and Popular Culture

In 1900, a confounded black man dressed in top hat, coattails, and sporting a monocle and cane enthusiastically recorded in a journal his impressions of the universal exhibition held in Paris in that year: "France is superior over all other peoples by the number of blacks that populate its colonies. Also because of its delightful colonial exposition! There one sees blacks of all shades. Those from Senegal are the darkest and they have beautiful glistening torsos before which the Parisian women stop and admire." ¹ The sights recorded by the black man were not real but were a fiction created by the true author and narrator of the story, Gaston Bergeret. Bergeret (1840–?), a white French writer and member of the Chamber of Deputies of the Third Republic, regularly participated in projects of the late-nineteenth-century literary avant-garde. ² He wrote a variety of books and essays on politics and finance, as well as novels, novellas, theatrical pieces, and whimsical tales. ³ Journal d'un nègre á l'Exposition de 1900 was one of his more fantastic pieces. It was published one year after the exhibition and was a combined diary, semi-fictional tale, and exhibition guidebook possibly intended as a satirical critique of French colonialism in general and the universal and colonial exhibitions in particular. Although critical ribbings of this kind were not uncommon in the literature of the period, it is hard to determine if Bergeret's story constitutes a spoof on French colonialism and its inherent racism or if the author was himself expressing a deep-seated racism through satire. ⁴

The cover illustration for Bergeret's book, created by artist Henry Somm, the pseudonym of François Clément Sommier, depicts a black man in profile bedecked with all the accoutrements that mark him as a dandy and/or bourgeois gentleman of leisure (fig. 1). He is dressed in a frock coat with flowered lapels, high stiff collar, white gloves, and top hat. In his right hand he carries a cane with a finial carved in the shape of a Negroid head. An exposition pavilion, barely visible in the background, locates the scene at the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris. The setting in which Bergeret's story unfolds is significant, for the universal exposition provided the opportunity for France to show the world its believed superiority in matters cultural and scientific. The fact that Bergeret communicates the idea through a black protagonist indicates to what extent racial and cultural distinctiveness played an important role in the ideological rationale for French international influence. At the end of his tour, Bergeret's black man equates what he had seen with the French promotion of world peace by noting, in a satirical echo of Napoléon III's notorious claim "L'Empire, c'est la paix," that "l'Exposition, c'est la paix." ⁵

The significance of how the black figure is dressed and his relationship to Bergeret's text will become apparent shortly, but for now it is important to note that Somm and Bergeret collaborated closely, making certain that text and image complemented one another. Through Bergeret's prose, we relive the exhibition through the eyes of this black man, who writes from the point of view of a bewildered [Begin Page 354] man-child encountering the marvels of French culture, industry, and technology for the first time. Throughout the book, small watercolors by Somm show the black man taking in the various sights and sounds of the exhibition. He ventures around the exposition grounds, all the while comparing the numerous types of blacks seen there—relating the darkness of their skins with their corresponding level of civilization. ⁶ After sizing them all up, Bergeret's observer concludes that not everybody can be perfectly black as himself, for there are, he notes, "incomplete" nègres, who are limited to having skin that is...