French Exposition still from YouTube.
from this haunting era film/video
You know, before I discovered the Nicholson Letters in 2004, I had little understanding and no interest in the Laurier Era in Canada. (Perhaps this is because my high school history book, Canada Then and Now, had only two paragraphs on the era. Or more likely, because all the old grandmas around were relics from that era, with their smelly old Persian lamb coats and sensible shoes 
My mother did, however, like Sir Wilfrid. When we lived in Rosemere during my high school years she often threatened to take me up to St. Lin to visit his childhood home.
Later on, in school, I studied the Pre-Raphaelites and Art Nouveau and became intrigued with the era, but only in Europe. La Belle Epoque. The Edwardian Era. And that was the time that famous mini series, Upstairs Downstairs played on TV. And since I studied early film, I probably saw that Jean Renoir film, you know, the one Gosford Park is based on. (Why does the title escape me? I saw it a while back and it is far better than Gosford Park, which is very good in its own right.)Oh, I looked it up, Les Regles de Jeu.
Up until a few years ago, I am ashamed to say, I couldn’t have told you when women in Canada got the vote (Maybe I should have asked one of those old ladies. Had I met Edith Nicholson in, say, 1966, on, say, the 62 Clanranald bus, and chatted her up, I’m sure she would have told me. Maybe she would have been with Blair, her great-nephew and my future husband.)
All to say, I’ve long been entranced with the glamour of 1900 France. And, lately, I was thrilled to find a hazy film of the 1900 Paris Exposition on YouTube as well as some beeeeooootiful pictures by a Robert Bonnin on Flickr.
And, yesterday, reading a 1900 copy of the Canadian Magazine off archive.org, (for yet more background to my story Flo in the City, about a girl coming of age in 1910, based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ )I read all about the Canadian Pavilion at the 1900 exposition.
And, frankly, it was disturbing. It was disturbing to read how little has changed with respect to Canada’s image abroad.
The pavilion itself, it is written, was ugly and hidden by too many trees. (What WERE they thinking: this was Paris 1900, the home of all things beautiful.)Well, the pavilion was near the Eiffel Tower.
It contained a natural history exhibit, with a lot of mooseheads, and an agricultural exhibit, with a lot of pre-wheat boom (Ontario) wheat and apples and berries (but no Blackberry) and a mineral exhibit, gold from the Yukon and asbestos from Quebec, yawn. It contained an exhibit on our forests, double yawn, and lots of fish and wood for sale. Oh, and maple syrup, maple syrup, maple syrup. Oh, and some petroleum products, although who in the heck needs that?
The article begins by saying Canada’s image (snow, ice, snow and more ice) has improved on the world stage lately because of our involvement in the Boer War… and so it’s time to sell stuff to the world.
One item being pitched got my attention. Pelee island wine. Imagine! I just discovered the stuff myself last year. Not bad. I’m sure the French were as impressed with that product as they are today. (Except that the idea of a country outside of Europe pitching wine to Europeans seems, well, so before its time. I bet there was no California wine back then. Today, everyone is making wine and pitching it to the planet. Russia, Argentina…
Pelee Island Wine Exhibit.
If you are Canadian, do you find this depressing? Anyway, they also had a railroad exhibit with pictures of our countryside designed to attract tourists. Hunting tourism was the big sell.
Oh and there was another exhibit:an education exhibit. There was a reproduction of an Ontario Classroom with notebooks and textbooks. All designed to show the French we weren’t yokels. (They still don’t believe us.)
I can imagine this pavilion didn’t excite visitors, who were too busy hopping on and off Edison’s moving sidewalk. (There’s also a film of that on YouTube.)
Still, I imagine Edith, Marion and Flo (who was 8 in 1900) read all about the Exposition. In 1912, Marion was invited to visit Paris with family friends, but she didn’t have the money. Her friends brought her back a gift, so she writes in a letter. “Imagine me wearing a fancy Parisienne blouse.”
Both Edith and Marion made it to Paris in their lifetimes, Marion for a 1946 UNESCO Conference, as a Representative of the Canadian Teachers Association. She died the very next year because of a heart attack. Two decades later, in old age, Edith and Flo would visit Expo67, Montreal’s Universal Exhibition.
Expo67 wasn’t so much a ‘marketing’ Expo as an educational and cultural one. The Canadian Pavilion was a sprawling space and it featured no mooseheads or wine. Just a Katimavik, an inverted pyramid, and a fake maple tree with orange-tinted pictures of Canadians for leaves. And it had a rusty dragon out back. And it served whalemeat and maple syrup in the high end restaurant. Well, some things never change.
And although there were 50,000,000 visits made to the Expo islands between April and October 1967 (you can read about it in my play Looking for Mrs. Peel at www.tighsolas.ca/page745.html)
very few Europeans came, a mere 2 percent of visitors to Expo were from outside North America.
I’ve never been to France, but I spent four hours in De Gaulle last week. I intend to go next Spring, and see Montmartre and Le Moulin Rouge. Until then there’s always Google Earth Street View.
Canada’s Food exhibit at Paris Exposition
For the article, page 387 http://www.archive.org/ (Canadian magazine.. canadian libraries)
