Fête des Pères

Today is Father's Day in France, as it is in many other countries. Notice that Ally got two Mother's Days whereas I only got one Father's Day. This is one of the minor indignities a man suffers as "the Second Parent." As you can tell, it didn't really bother me. Also, I was happy to share Father's Day with my father-in-law, Sam.

We started the day's fun by meeting Jen at the Parc Zoologique de Paris in the Bois de Vincennes. The Bois de Vincennes is the Bois de Boulogne's companion park almost exactly opposite it immediately outside Paris. Getting over there took longer than we'd wanted, but we made it in time to be among the zoo's first guests. It's a pretty unexceptional zoo as it now stands. There's a huge hollow artificial rock formation in the zoo, which I guess is interesting. It's kind of falling apart, though. Major renovations are going on, so some of the most popular animals--big cats, elephants, and seals--can't currently be seen. Eli did get to visit giraffes, hippos, and zebras, which are probably his favorites outside elephants. He also seemed to enjoy the monkeys.

To me, the great interest of the Vincennes Zoo is its origin with the 1931 Paris Colonial Expositioin. This was a six-month display of France's colonial empire, which at that time was about as big and important as it ever got. For the exposition, large displays and pavilions were built showcasing many of the regions under French control. Groups of subject peoples were brought to Paris to be displayed in a sort of human zoo. Millions came from France and elsewhere--chiefly other European countries that lacked colonies of their own and sent settlers to the French empire--to see the exhibition. The zoo was built to house the strange animals that came from overseas and became a permanent edifice.

So, too, did a museum initially built to house art and craft objects created by France's subjects. It gradually evolved from a museum about the French colonial empire to one about the art of Africans and Pacific Islanders. In the last few years, these items were removed and the museum was reinvented as the Cité Nationale de l'Histoire et de l'Immigration (National Complex on History and Immigration). This seems to be shaping up as a museum on those who have come to France in recent times. France has received a lot of immigrants in the last century or so, chiefly from elsewhere in Europe and more recently from its former imperial possessions. France's issues with immigrants and "foreigners" are far too complicated to deal with here. This museum, though, is excellent. It's currently showing a temporary exhibition called " 1931: Les étrangers au temps de l'exposition coloniale" (1931: Foreigners at the time of the Colonial Exposition) dealing with some very interesting issues. In 1931, France controlled wide ranges of the earth's surface; in what sense were inhabitants of those places French or not French? Furthermore, while there was an exposition showcasing the strange people living under French control, there were also a lot of non-French people living in France. So what was Frenchness, to, say, an Armenian refugee making a new life in Paris; a Hmong brought to the Colonial Exposition as a living display; an Italian settler in the French protectorate of Tunisia; or a Polish miner of communist persuasion working and agitating in the Auvergne? It was just brilliant. Jen and Ally, both historians of the French colonies (albeit specializing in an earlier period) loved it.