THE EXPOSITION COLONIALE OF 1900

Abstract

In recent years there has been an academic focus on the exhibition of the French comptoirs (trading posts) in India at the Expositions coloniales (Colonial Exhibitions) of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by scholars such as Catherine Servan-Schreiber (2002). This essay builds upon such works, and uses the French colonial exhibition of 1900 as an exemplar of the exhibitions between 1870 and 1931 to consider how France's loss of India in 1763 acted as a preface to the period of colonial expansion that followed the Franco-Prussian War. Furthermore, it demonstrates how the failure of the ancien régime colonial venture in India was apparent in the representations of both the French trading posts in India – namely, Pondichéry, Chandernagor, Karikal, Yanaon and Mahé – and French Indochina alike, and explores how the creation of this colony was significantly displayed by the exhibition as a direct compensation for what Claude Farrère dubbed in 1935 ‘l'Inde perdue’ [lost India]. Finally, through the analysis of the mythologized accounts of the French colonial venture on the subcontinent, this essay highlights how this lost and essentially imaginary empire was used as a metaphorical battleground to conduct comparisons with the colonies of France's ‘frère ennemi’ [a brother who is also an enemy], the British.