8. Personified Continents in Public Places: Internationalism, Art, and Geography in Late Nineteenth Century Paris

This paper examines the yet unexplored relationships between internationalism, art, and geography by discussing the two cases of Paris, in the late nineteenth century. Using a landscape-as-text approach and the concepts of scale jumping and imaginative geographies, I focused here on the female statues representing the continents. Late nineteenth century Paris was characterized as the site where occurred a host of projects and events promoting internationalism by means of some kind of scale jumping. The world’s fairs and international congresses were typical events concerning internationalism, especially a hegemonic one. The erection of Les Quatre Parties du Monde was virtually linked to the debates and assertions surrounding the selection of the prime meridian, which was one of the themes at the two Paris international geographical congresses: the Congrès International des Sciences Géographiques in 1875, and the Congrès International de Géographie Commerciale in 1878. The physiognomies of Les Quatre Parties du Monde delivered an apparent message of the supremacy of Europe over others, and the fountain and statues were intended to symbolize the Paris meridian itself and to assert its status as the starting point for the calculation of the world’s longitude. The group of Les Six Continents was stemmed from the sort of hegemonic internationalism and imaginative geographies that found themselves at the 1878 Paris International Universal Exposition. While the appearances of Les Six Continents indicated a linear progress from primitive Oceania to civilized Europe, their arrangement at the inaugural ceremony at the Palais du Trocadéro, signified the historical and geographical centrality of the Mediterranean world. Both Les Quatre Parties du Monde and Les Six Continents could be taken as the descendants of the title page of Ortelius’ first world atlas. The practice to erect the statues of the continents could be regarded as a geographical practice, and these statues could also be understood as a different kind of geo-body.