As international visitors flooded into France, eager for the metropolitan experience, European travelers, particularly the French, looked with new interest towards those regions of Asia and Africa that remained relatively unexplored.
Influenced by the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who suggested that the “savages” of Africa and the Pacific were actually “natural men,” blessedly free of the burdens of civilization, fashionable Paris was swept with a vogue for artifacts from France’s Indochinese and North African colonies. Expat publisher/poet Nancy Cunard ringed her slim arms with tribal bracelets of carved wood and hammered metal while Man Ray juxtaposed the face of his model and mistress Alice Prin, aka Kiki of Montparnasse, with a Senegalese mask. Benin bronzes impressed Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire and Georges Braque with their purity of form. Reflecting this interest, and following the lead of Napoleon I who took artists and writers with him when he invaded Egypt, ethnographic expeditions of the 1920s recruited painters, photographers, writers, and, increasingly, filmmakers.
Central to this urge to explore was André Citroën, France’s leading automobile manufacturer. One of his engineers, Adolphe Kégresse, had perfected an auto-chenille or caterpillar car whose rear wheels ran on a tank-like half-track. To demonstrate its capabilities, Citroën organized a raid or expedition across Africa. Beginning in October 1924 in Colomb-Béchar, Algeria, the eight cars crossed the Sahara—the first automobiles to do so—and ploughed through equatorial jungles before separating. One team crossed to the island of Madagascar while the other headed for the Cape of Good Hope. Among the 17 team members were a film crew and a painter, ensuring the journey was meticulously documented.
For Citroën, this Croisière Noire or Black Expedition was a publicity triumph, particularly after the feature-length documentary film opened in Paris. The journey advertised Citroën automobiles but also opened up new overland routes, with resulting political and economic gains. Much credit for its success went to Georges-Marie Haardt, Citroën’s general manager, whom he placed in command. The backbone of the expedition, Haardt was a hard taskmaster. Even in the desert, each man was required to dress correctly and shave every day.
Not all expeditions were so well-ordered. In Southeast Asia, such adventurers as the young André Malraux, later a prominent novelist, filmmaker and politician who served as Charles DeGaulle’s minister of culture, were looting Cambodian temple sculptures for sale to eager museum curators and private collectors. Arrested in 1923, Malraux blamed his detention on corrupt French authorities who resented an amateur horning in on their lucrative business.
André Citroën
Author André Gide made two visits to the Congo and Chad in 1925 and 1926. Instead of Rousseau’s “natural man,” he found tribal people cruelly oppressed and exploited. His books about the trips bitterly criticized colonialism, particularly in the Congo, which was still cringing from the brutality of its former oppressors, the Belgians.
Following the Croisière Noire, Citroën and Haardt mounted an Asian journey, the Croisière Jaune or Yellow Expedition. One team would set out east from Beirut, crossing the Soviet Union, while another, starting from Beijing and heading west, would traverse the Gobi Desert, the two meeting somewhere in central Asia.
From the start in April 1931, nothing went well. The China team, joined by Jesuit priest and religious philosopher Teilhard de Chardin, was held for several months in Urumqi, capital of Sinkiang, by a warlord who envied their half-tracks. To ransom the team, Citroën had to send two new vehicles from Paris.
The eastward group, denied permission to enter the Soviet Union, headed into Kashmir and crossed the Himalayas—an extraordinary feat, during which the cars had to be disassembled and hand-carried over mountain passes. Crossing a frozen storm-swept Gobi desert sapped what remained of the expedition’s strength. Though the raid concluded triumphantly in Paris in February 1932, Georges-Marie Haardt wasn’t present. He had collapsed from exhaustion and died in Hong Kong, en route to Europe.
Tragedy continued to haunt the expedition when one of the team, Lieutenant Victor Point, learned on his return that his fiancée, actress Alice Cocéa, had taken another lover in his absence. On holiday with her on the Riviera, he took her out in a small boat and shot himself in front of her. Cocéa was starring in a Paris musical but furious audiences disrupted her performances, chanting “Point! Point! Point!” until she announced she was leaving show business to enter a convent.
Once again, the documentary film of the expedition aroused public imagination. Despite financial difficulties, Citroën began planning the Croisière Blanche, a White Expedition to promote his cars in the Americas. This time the half-tracks would cross northern Canada from Edmonton to the Pacific, traversing the Rocky Mountains.
Meanwhile, expeditions for Africa and Asia left Paris almost monthly, often with as many artists on the staff as scientists. Surrealist poet Michel Leiris signed on as archivist with a Dakar-Djibouti Expedition, which sailed from Bordeaux in May 1931. Also on board were an ethnomusicologist, a naturalist, and a painter. Finding Rousseau’s “natural man” wasn’t high on its agenda. In his book about the journey, L’Afrique fantôme (Phantom Africa), Leiris, nostalgic for Paris, marveled at how little affinity he felt for Africans. “Do you know,” he wrote a friend, “I haven’t had sex with even one African woman. That’s how little I’ve changed.”
No less eager than the explorers to realize on the value of its colonial possessions, the French government mounted the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale to encourage investment and exports. It occupied most of the Bois de Vincennes, a park on the edge of Paris. More than 20 French colonies in Africa, Indochina and the Pacific, as well as possessions of other European powers, were represented by often lavish pavilions or whole settlements, including a reconstruction of part of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, ironically one of the sites most despoiled by treasure hunters. Restaurants served ethnic food, and tribal people demonstrated their ceremonies and ways of life. At the same time, the government constructed on the site a striking new museum in Art Déco style, the Musée Nationale des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie.
Citroën’s decision with his Croisière Blanche to leave Africa and Asia for North America brought disaster. Under the command of Charles Bedaux, a flamboyant character who had already crossed Africa from east to west and driven across Tibet, the party, which included both Bedaux’s wife and mistress, left Edmonton in five vehicles in July 1934. But half-tracks that had defeated the Himalayas were no match for the Rockies, particularly without the steadying hand of Georges-Marie Haardt. Overwhelmed by rainstorms, the expedition lost three cars in mudslides, and abandoned the remaining two.
André Citroën, bankrupt, died in 1935. His dream of a network of international highways crowded with Citroën automobiles would not be realized in his lifetime. The 33 million visitors to the Colonial Exposition took away with them the news that Africa was ripe for exploitation. At the same time, enthusiasm waned for the image of Africa and Asia as repositories of native wisdom. As this high-minded impulse faded, exploration by default was left to the looters.
The Dakar-Djibouti expedition, of which Michael Leiris was a part, would become the most highly publicized of all raids. Dazzled by the richness of Africa’s art objects, it plundered indiscriminately. On its return, leader Marcel Griaule presented Paris’s Musée d’Ethnographie with his “sumptuous booty,” 3600 items of sculpture or craftwork, 6000 photographs, 1600 meters of film and 1500 pages of documentation. There was more than enough to stock a new Musée de l’Homme or Museum of Man, filling a wing of the Palais de Chaillot, on the hill of the Trocadero overlooking the Tour Eiffel. Its first exhibition opened on June 2, 1933. Significantly, the guest of honor was not a distinguished ethnographer but African-American music-hall and movie star Joséphine Baker. She flirted and jived among the exhibits, to the delight of the press and the newsreel cameras.
Paradoxically, the presence of so much tribal art in Paris revived an appreciation of the folkways of France itself. The expansion of railroads and autoroutes made every corner of the nation accessible. The 1930s saw a new interest in local history, customs, costume and language. Like Wales, Scotland and Ireland in Great Britain, the French regions of Brittany, Corsica and Alsace asserted political ambitions. Breton French revived as a living language, and Corsican separatists would soon be campaigning vigorously, even violently, for self-government.
