The Universal Exposition of Paris in 1900 succeeded that of 1889 for which the Eiffel Tower had been built. It turned out to be the last in a cycle of such world’s fairs that had been staged in the French capital at eleven-year intervals from 1867. From visits to its exhibition spaces, Henry Adams emerged both awed and filled with unease by technological advances. He lacked the unruffled certainty of the art critic John Ruskin, who by chance died in that numerically memorable year, retaining a confidence in the staying power of the Middle Ages. In the Englishman’s estimation, the medieval period could hold its own, especially where cathedrals were concerned, against modern technology. In contrast, the American’s whole sense of past and present, never complacent, was first shaken and then altered by the spectacles he witnessed in the nearly two hundred and fifty acres of the display. Nowhere was he more keyed up than in the Gallery of Machines.
In Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, Adams even avowed that shows such as the Parisian ones had replaced the great churches. He flipped this same conceit on its head
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in a letter, labeling a thirteenth-century cathedral “a Chicago Exposition for God’s Profit.” His correlations of Gothic places of worship and World’s Fairs merit serious consideration. Especially from the mid-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, nations and cities set out in displays of themselves to project concomitantly their utmost modernity and the medieval, or at a minimum imagined medieval, roots of their collective identities. The American writer’s insight could be probed and extended, with attention to the two visits he paid to the exhibition of 1893 in the Windy City. The Middle Ages were only a bit player in the Midway Plaisance, but they had a presence. As we have seen previously, the medieval was grouped with the oriental, chrono-exotic with topo-exotic.
Adams described his reactions in a chapter of his autobiography entitled “The Dynamo and the Virgin.” In turn, this twenty-fifth chapter set the stage for the thirty-third, “A Dynamic Theory of History.” The symbolism of the dynamo and the Virgin has spellbound many readers, although the fascination may not always have rested on a clear-sighted and even-keeled understanding of the early twentieth-century context for the author’s juxtaposition of the two concepts or principles. Over the large public green space known as the Champs de Mars towered the cavernous Palace of Electricity, which itself was topped by a statue that represented “the Genius” of this form of energy (see Figs. 2.16 and 2.17). To Adams, the heart of this centerpiece to the whole Exposition was the Great Hall of Dynamos. This space housed forty-foot steam-driven electric turbines, generators that produced 15,000 horsepower (see Fig. 2.18).
Where an earlier generation had contrasted the cathedral of Notre-Dame and the Eiffel Tower, he presented as complements or contrasts Mary, inspirer of the Gothic house of prayer, who embodied the ongoing might of the feminine in history, and the shed where the machinery whirred: it was a match between great church and great hall.
Alongside Adams’s reverence and gusto for leading-edge science and technology ran a deep fear of apocalypse. He had lived through most of the second scientific revolution in which a concatenation of discoveries had ushered in better comprehension of electromagnetism and light. In 1895 he made the ten-day tour of French cathedrals that pushed him on the road toward Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. Unbeknownst to him, around the same time Alexander Stepanovich Popov in Russia demonstrated the applicability of radio waves for communication, Rudolf Diesel in Germany invented a high-compression and thermally efficient engine, and Wilhelm Röntgen in Germany discovered the basis for X-rays. To say that human scientific mastery of the world and universe was evolving with almost indescribable rapidity would be an understatement, even an anticlimax. The American historian would have grasped few if any particulars of the latest developments, but he understood the general features enough to crave the equivalent of a general theory for his own field. He endeavored especially to subject history to the second law of thermodynamics, that of entropy. Things fall apart.
An even more remarkable evolution was at hand. The third stage in the emergence of modern science was poised to begin in the early twentieth century with the
relativity and quantum theories of Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and others. Adams had no foreknowledge of the insights into physics that would make nuclear fission first imaginable and then achievable. All the same, he sensed that the command of physical powers at the disposal of his fellow human beings already surpassed their level of spiritual civility. Were people witnessing progress or the mere phantom of it?
He had his qualms that the potentials of technology had outdistanced its capacity to advance civilization. Have times changed very much—or gotten even worse?
Already in the thick of the Civil War, Henry Adams pronounced to his sibling Charles his anxiety that human science had outstripped the capacities of the species and that it would enable humankind to cut off its own existence. Much later in life, he adumbrated a similarly alarmist view to his other brother Brooks. A pregnant passage on powerful machinery appears in Democracy, as the novelist characterizes the widowed Madeleine Lee and her zeal to fathom the rough-and-tumble of politics in the United States. The steam engine energized the industrial revolution and industrialization. He had no way of intuiting that this age of vaporized water would cede before long to other types of industrial-strength energy and engines—that soon the era of internal combustion would usher in new fossil fuels and oil derricks.
Fig. 2.16 Le Palais de l’Électricité et le Château d’Eau at the Exposition universelle 1900, Paris.
Photograph, 1900. Photographer unknown. Published in Neurdein Frères and Maurice Baschet, Le panorama: Exposition universelle (Paris: Librairie d’Art Ludovic Baschet, 1900). Providence, RI, Brown University Library, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Le_palais_de_l’éctricité_et_
le_Château_d’eau,_Exposition_universelle_1900.jpg
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Fig. 2.17 Postcard depicting le Palais de l’Électricité at the Exposition universelle 1900, Paris (Paris: Météor, 1900).
Fig. 2.18 Machinery Hall at the Exposition universelle 1900, Paris. Stereoscopic photograph, 1900.
Underwood & Underwood, New York. Kyoto, National Diet Library.
Image courtesy of the National Diet Library, Kyoto.
The Paris Exposition of 1900 was exuberantly and vigorously schizophrenic. In its split personality, it utterly typified its times. Among other things, it celebrated in French culture the unexpected counterpoint between cutting-edge modernness and romanticized medievalism. It took place in a city that had doubled in population in fifty years, that had been remade in its urban planning, and that concretized new political, economic, and technological realities. But the old was ineluctably present too, at least as processed through the retinas of the new. The bygone too came with the territory. In the World’s Fair of 1889, the consummate modernity of the Eiffel Tower had been accorded an opposite pole to the Middle Ages epitomized in Notre-Dame.
A chronological otherness of culture was promoted alongside the geographical one of aboriginal peoples from regions under the thumb of colonialism around the globe.
The shows, particularly that of 1900, were concerned with the reconstruction and even regeneration of the medieval period, as well as with the display of its artifacts as unearthed through archaeology. The spirit was anything but “in with the new, out with the old.” On the contrary, the Middle Ages were back, with a vengeance. The new millennium was greeted with a reenactment of times deep within the one being left behind.