All text reproduced from World's Fair magazine, Volume VIII, Number 3, Copyright 1988, World's Fair, Inc.
Expanded and revised version January 2000, by Arthur Chandler.

The visitor might make the transition between the foreign pavilions and the French exhibits on the right bank by stopping in at the Pavilion of Tourism. Here the tourist to the exposition could go to change currency or make boat and train reservations for travel away from Paris. This pavilion, which would be repeated and expanded in the 1937 exposition, was the first explicit acknowledgement by the French government that tourism was a proper concern of the nation. After all, was not an international exposition a kind of condensed tourism, an opportunity for the visitor to Paris to see the highlights of world culture?

The Pavillon du Tourisme by architect Robert Mallet-Stevens (exterior, detail, and interior)

The city of Paris herself chose to present two sides of her million-faced nature: education and taste. All the major exhibits in the Pavilion de la Ville de Paris were mounted by students from the schools of Paris. Boys and girls, from ages four through nineteen, made furniture, bound books, wove tapestries, and placed all their handiwork around an elaborate scale model of a city. The exhibit was universally praised as a splendid fulfillment of the long-stated ideals of French trade education: to provide all young people with both the skills to make useful objects and the aesthetic sense to make those objects pleasing to look upon.

Highlight of the Right Bank, the Pavilion de la Ville de Paris (exterior, detail, and interior)

Stretching westward along the Right bank of the Seine were the exhibits devoted to French colonies – including the special prize and pride of France: Alsace. Of all the regions of France which exhibited it was the Alsace section that captured the special joy of the French. This half-French, half Germanic region had been appropriated by Germany as one of the most coveted spoils of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. France had bitterly resented the loss; and it was common knowledge that she would have traded all her African and Asian colonies for the return of the Alsace. After the defeat of the Germans in 1918, France received her beloved Alsace back into the fold – and acquired some new colonies abroad as well. Northern Africa, Western Africa, Indochina, Morocco, Tunisia – all received a pavilion, and all were given a chance to display their contributions to the decorative arts theme of the exposition. But Alsace was granted three buildings, each one showing a different aspect of life in the regained French province.