The French History Podcast · Evergreen Podcasts

World Expos in France with Charles Pappas

·40 min·2 clips

Pappas says one pavilion at the 1964-65 World's Fair imprinted on him for life, especially IBM's nine-screen theater.

1. The French History Podcast episode focuses on World Expos in France and Charles Pappas's book, Nobody Sits Like the French, Exploring Paris Through Its World Expos. 2. Charles Pappas appears as author, senior writer at Exhibitor Magazine since about 2002, and Expo advisor, which matters because he has covered the expo industry for more than 20 years. 3. The episode asks what World Expos did to Paris, French commerce, and French public life. 4. Pappas links his own start in the field to the 1964-65 World's Fair in New York City, where the IBM pavilion and its nine-screen theater left a lasting mark on him. 5. He describes the IBM pavilion's steel trees, the Selectric typewriter's rotating ball, and the Eameses' synchronized projection system as an early example of expo spectacle. 6. He frames the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London as the first truly international World's Fair. 7. The Crystal Palace is described as 1,851 feet long and 408 feet wide, with a design inspired by a giant Amazonian water lily. 8. Pappas says 6 million people attended that fair and about 14,000 exhibitors showed roughly 100,000 exhibits. 9. He contrasts that scale with modern CES in Las Vegas, which he says has about 4,000 exhibitors in its most recent iteration. 10. He says the fair demonstrated soft power, using Joseph Nye's idea of attraction rather than coercion. 11. The Bistrot chair story shows how a German cabinetmaker, Michael Thonnet, won a gold medal at the 1867 Paris fair. 12. He says the chair spread worldwide, became the first mass-produced piece of furniture, and by the 1930s had sold an estimated 50 million units. 13. The Roquefort sequence shows the cheese at the 1855 Paris fair, rejected in London in 1862, then promoted with a one-page brochure at the 1867 Paris Expo. 14. Pappas says the 1900 Paris Expo turned Roquefort into an immersive cave experience and compares its combined expo audience to 120 million people. 15. Louis Vuitton's expo story includes his walk of about 250 miles to Paris at age 13, his work for the empress, and his first boutique in 1854. 16. Pappas says Vuitton won a bronze medal in 1886 and a gold medal in 1889, and that those medals functioned like Michelin stars. 17. Sarah Bernhardt's 1878 balloon ride over the expo site, with champagne and foie gras, becomes a detail about how expos amplified celebrity. 18. Rodin's 1900 pavilion, with 165 works including The Thinker and The Gates of Hell, is described as a one-man retrospective that charged 1 franc on weekdays and 5 francs on Fridays. 19. The tone is interview-based and detail-heavy, with Pappas speaking in long, anecdotal stretches that move from objects to politics to celebrity. 20. Listeners interested in Paris, design history, branding, and 19th-century world fairs will get the most from it; listeners wanting a short, abstract overview may skip it.

As heard by us

Paris's expositions become a sharp study of how brands, taste, and national prestige were made visible.

This episode uses Charles Pappas's book to frame Paris's World Expos as a clear case study in how prestige was turned into something people could see, buy into, and remember.

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Why you'd press play

You want Paris history about how World Expos helped luxury names stick.

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