Hot Chocolate: The Social Question in the Chocolate Exhibits at the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition

Chocolate exhibits in the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition told tourists the legend of chocolate's long journey from French queen to French worker and then gave them a taste of the French chocolate trade.! More than fifty million visitors eagerly purchased their blue tickets to visit the Paris world's fair in 1900. Those who saw and tasted the story of French chocolate could learn that achieving social peace between labor and capital might be as easy and pleasant as drinking a cup of hot chocolate. The state used its Universal Exposition to demonstrate that only the Republic could unite the diverse French nation to achieve a program of socialand economic progress. This article is the story of how French chocolate was pressed into the service of the Third Republic at the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition. French world's fairs were always affairs of state, whether that state was directed by revolutionary committee, king, emperor or elected republican officials. At the turn of the twentieth century the seasoned Third Republic government was sorting out the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair, the latest national crisis. During that same two-year period the 1900 Paris world's fair was built and ran. Both of those complex events took place during the twoyear crisis of an unprecedented number of labor strikes all over France.