2 PARIS, 1937: COLONIAL QUESTIONS AND PEACE 101Radio where the vast networks of communication that transmitted
sounds and images across the globe was illustrated and explained.^59 The
Radio Pavilion was situated in the vicinity of the Pont Alexandre III,
which had been converted for the duration of the exposition into the
Triumphal Way of Light and Radio (Voie triomphale de la lumière et de
la radio).^60 Consisting in a series of tall kiosks placed on each side of the
bridge, the Triumphal Way of Light and Radio was brilliantly illuminated
at night.^61 Indeed, electric light was used in abundance throughout the
exposition, the gift to humanity that electricity represented being cele-
brated in Raoul Dufy’s immense painting entitled La fée électricité (The
Electricity Fairy) which was especially commissioned for the exposition
and which was housed in the Pavilon de l’électricité et de la lumière,
‘where gigantic circuit-breakers and generators stood before it like mon-
strous robot sentries’.^62
The principal locus of the exposition was the Palais de Chaillot.
Erected on the top of the colline de Chaillot on the foundation of the
old Palais du Trocadéro, it was built especially for the exposition but
with the ultimate intention that it would house three permanent muse-
ums: the Musée de la Marine, the Musée de l’Homme and the Musée
des Monuments français. The Musée de l’Homme, which was founded
in 1937 by Rivet (who was also, according to Georges Henri-Rivière, a
founder of the Popular Front), was the old Musée d’Ethnographie du
Trocadéro transformed and modernised, its change of title heralding the
advent of a ‘science of synthesis’: a meeting of anthropology, prehistory,
ethnography, sociology, and linguistics.^63 Although criticised later for,
among other things, manifesting ‘cultural arrogance’ (such as through
(^59) Patrice A. Carré, ‘“Exactement modernes”?: Les techniques de communication,’
Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’Histoire 16, no. 16 (1987): 84–90, 87.
(^60) Ibid., 86–87.
(^61) Bertrand Lemoine, ‘Paris 1937: Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques
dans la vie moderne,’ in Challet-Bailhache, ed., Paris et ses expositions universelles: architec-
tures, 1855– 1937 , 78.
(^62) Nigel Simeone, ‘Music at the 1937 Paris Exposition: The Science of Enchantment,’
Musical Times 143, no. 1878 (2002): 9–17, 10. Pavilon de l’électricité et de la lumière was
designed by Robert Mallet-Stevens and Henri Pingusson. La Fée Électricité is now housed
in a gallery of the Palais de Tokyo.
(^63) J. Millot, ‘Le Musée de l’Homme,’ Revue de Paris 45, no. 15 (1938): 687–94, 687–
- See also Katherine Conley, Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marbelous in Everyday
Life (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2003) 117.