We have seen Paris through the eyes of Hemingway and Balzac, the palettes of Chagall and Delaunay, the excesses of Henry Miller, the menus of Julia Child, the stars of Michelin, and the listicles of Fodors, Frommer’s, and Lonely Planet.
But no one has ever seen it through the singular lens of the “Exposition Universelle” (“Universal Exposition”), aka the World’s Fair, aka The World Expo.
Paris is the physical memory of seven universal expositions that took place in the City of Light from 1855 to 1937. These expos left behind an urban diary of the monumental—the Eiffel Tower, of course, but also the Musée d'Orsay, Grand Palais, and Petit Palais.
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“Nobody Sits Like the French” tells those stories and many more. A cocktail of travel guide and history, the book paints a Paris invisible to all but a handful of people on Earth who know that every time they sip a glass of burgundy, drink from Baccarat crystal, admire a Monet or a Gauguin, and even enjoy the benefits of a working sewer system in the City of Light, they owe that experience to a world expo there.
Every time you chew a stick of Juicy Fruit, eat a hamburger, slip on a nylon, plug your phone into a wall socket, flick on a TV, lick an ice-cream cone, press a touchscreen, ride an escalator, watch a movie about dinosaurs, pay at the pup for gas, or get fingerprinted, you’re doing something that originated at a world’s fair or hit a tipping point of popularity there.
More than just promoting material things, however, expos popularized and evangelized every social movement and cultural concept, too, including Manifest Destiny, the closing of the frontier, Nudism, female suffrage, temperance, and technocracy.
"Flying Cars, Zombie Dogs, & Robot Overlords" covers, for example, the World’s Fairs that featured a nudist colony (1935); Salvador Dali’s half-naked lobster women, their virtue barely secured by well-placed crustaceans (1939); the X-ray machine and the thousands who happily blasted themselves with it(1898): and even the vibrators displayed by health advocates (1900).