At a time when all this stuff is just being erased as evil, I thought it might be fun to travel back to a time when things could at least be debated. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
I am fond of many French colonial stamps with their exotic views of far off colonies. So a total Empire set should really be exciting. Alas this stamp has too much going on and the rest of the issue is a small bulk mail stamp of a Fachie woman that is very familiar to stamp collectors.
Todays stamp is issue A42, a 1.5 Franc stamp issued by France itself in 1930. It was a five stamp issue in various denominations. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 65 cents used. The exposition was a few years too early for the stamp souvenir sheets that would have been part of later expositions. It should be remembered though that French colonies themselves issued stamps as part of the exposition, and often were available to collectors at the colony’s pavilion at the expo.
World War I had a big negative effect on the prospects for European power’s colonial experiment. Most of the fighting was in Europe but there was a widespread sense that the natives of the colonies did not do their part in service to the mother country. There was further contreversy coming from the left in the Soviet Union and Weimar Germany that the whole endeavor of colonies leads to decadence, and race mixing. Our friends on the left don’t phrase things that way any more but it was an earlier time.
The six month long Exposition Coloniale Internationale was set at the Bois de Vincennes, the largest park in Paris. The park was laid out by Napoleon III who remember had lost a European war while much of his Army was tied down in the colonies. A reaction to the criticism was that France would be portrayed as not assimilating the colonies but their partners. Pavilions were in the local style and natives were brought in to demonstrate the native culture of the colonies and create art and crafts. One of the most popular pavilions was a recreation of the Angkor Wat Cambodian Temple. Smaller colonial powers like Portugal, Belgium, Holland and even the USA participated. The expo was well attended and there was a spike afterward of French applying to serve in the colonies.
There was however some pushback. A Dutch recreation of Balinese Mero temple burned down under mysterious circumstances. The pavilion contained a great deal of the collection of the Batavia Museum. The was also a counter expo put on by French Marxists that had displays of the horrors of forced labor and compared in a positive light the Stalin era Soviet nationalities policy to the European colonial experiment. The Marxist expo attracted few visitors.
The legacy of the Expo was not great. A Permanent Colonial Museum was opened at the edge of the park. It proved not permanent, the building now houses a museum to immigrants in France and the former collection is mainly in storage at a museum honoring former French President Chirac. The biggest legacy seems to be a spike in the consumption of North African and Vietnamese food in Paris that has yet to dissipate. Maybe the 1920s lefties had a point? The Batavia Museum in the Dutch East Indies used the fire insurance payout to fund a major expansion back home. This is now the Indonesia National Museum. So in a way the colonial power is still there teaching the natives of their own culture. Funny how that works.
Well my drink is empty and here’s hoping that our hobby is not itself erased as part of our current leftie friends’ desire for a new year 1. Come again soon for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting. First published in 2020.