Exhibiting exotic animal skins: geographies of fur and feather artefacts in nineteenth-century Paris

Résumé En

Fur and feather artifacts proliferated during the second half of the nineteenth century, as bourgeois commodity goods, specially in European and North-American urban contexts. Great Exhibitions, mostly known for being “machine  temples,” were full of exotic animals, mostly silent, as they were (skillfully made from) their skins. Those impressive marketplaces encapsulated the industrial, commercial and imperial purposes, pushed out by the expansion of capitalistic economy and newer and faster means of transportation, in which animal skins circulated as ever around the globe to be transformed into pleasing manufactured products.In the Expositions Universelles of Paris, animals were exhibited as being the matter to be worked out by industry ; as manufactured products (hats, coats, fans, carpets) ; and as stuffed animals, with an ambiguous status that went from scientific objects to national wildlife representatives, to natural resources or ornamental accessories. Further, some countries/colonies exhibited products made by indigineous people, referred to as “savages”. All these forms of display reinforced the discourse of the conquest over nature by progress and civilization. Animals appear lacking any form of agency and de-contextualised from their original environmental realities and social “cosmovisions”. However, alternative human relations to animals could be grasped out, for example, the 1867 Exposition organised an international congress of animal protection societies.The Parisian Expositions (five from 1855 to 1900) are a good place where to look for the commodities of empire. The spatial distribution and content of animal exhibits, the data on feathers and furs trade, the exhibitors catalog and the reports of colonies/countries (Africa, America and Asia), as well as the printed and illustrated press could help to build up a narrative “behind the showcase”, taking into account the role of actors (naturalists, furriers, milliners, advocates for animals, traders, etc.) and the geographies skin objects over time.