In late nineteenth-century Paris, reflections on race permeated scholarly discourse, government policies, and the public imagination. Human displays, when groups of non-Europeans lived under the popular and scientific gaze for weeks or even months, were the intersection of these three realms. Installed at various sites of public education such as the Esplanade des Invalides, the Jardin d’Acclimatation, and the base of the Eiffel Tower, human exhibits were accompanied by a dwelling that framed and anchored the display. With France’s humiliating defeat in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War and the destruction of the Paris Commune, human displays were meant to reassure the French public of its racial superiority and of the benefits of modernity. Little studied, however, is how these exhibits were staged and, more specifically, the pivotal role that architecture and the exhibits’ siting in the built environment played in materializing notions of racial difference. My dissertation demonstrates that scientists, government officials, and architects used reproductions of houses to forward a curated vision of racial difference that was comprehensible to the French public. At a moment when French racial identity was in crisis, architecture was a tool for stabilizing notions of race and concretizing ideas about white supremacy on a global scale.

My research reveals that Parisians were uniquely aware of how architecture and the built environment shaped personal and national identity. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, questions surrounding France’s racial status and potential decline abounded. The newly renovated Paris was not only meant to embody France’s cultural superiority but was also intended to prevent societal upheaval. However, after months under Prussian siege and the self-inflicted pain of the Commune, the city was devastated. Charles Darwin’s concept of racial degeneracy fueled the scientific and popular imaginations: could the French race be in decline? Within this anxious milieu, French scientists created human displays to educate and entertain the public. Scientists argued that a group’s domestic and natural environment were expressions of innate racial characteristics; the apartment, the French dwelling par excellence, was inextricably linked with its urban setting and had once visualized France’s place at the forefront of racial progress. Equipped with ideas about how urban architecture related to modernity and social progress, Parisians were primed to decipher racial ideologies in buildings.

My method puts the traditionally separate fields of anthropology and architecture into conversation, showing how the two disciplines exchanged and reinforced notions of European cultural superiority. I pair materials such as the papers of the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, documents from the Ministry of Education, and scholarly publications with architectural history sources like illustrated books and journals, preparatory watercolors, and photographs. Each chapter interrogates a different venue for displays of human housing, beginning with the precursor to human displays: architectural journals and museum displays. Next, I examine the anxiety about mixed-race groups on display at the Jardin d’Acclimatation in the context of Franco-German scholarly competition. In chapter 3, I reveal the anxieties that French men felt, specifically about national degeneracy, military weakness and masculinity, in the presence of the Senegalese Village at the 1889 Universal Exposition. Last, I consider Charles Garnier’s use of Aryanism in the 1889 History of Human Housing display and illustrated book.