On 6 June 1913, King Albert I of Belgium visited the international exposition of Ghent.Footnote 2 During his visit, the king walked through various pavilions, including the Belgian one. While visiting them, he was assisted by several members of the Ligue Belge de Propagande pour Attirer les Visiteurs Étrangers. This private, non-government initiative existed between 1908 and 1914 and aimed to promote the country as a tourist destination.Footnote 3 Albert Gevers, the vice-president of the Ligue, showed the king around the pavilion. Gevers was also manager of the prestigious Hotel Saint-Antoine, located at Groenplaats 40 in Antwerp, and a member of the Antwerp tourism organization Antwerpen-Vooruit (otherwise known as Antwerp en Avant).Footnote 4 A newspaper article about the event documented the king’s acknowledgment of the importance of tourism promotion:
Mr Gevers explained to the king the structure of his organization and showed the opportunities that tourism presents for the local trade. He explained the advertising mechanisms and how he and his organization promote Belgium’s beauties and curiosities. ‘I congratulate you’, said the king to Mr Gevers, ‘for all that your organization has been able to do in such a short time to make Belgium known abroad and to promote tourism. We cannot go far enough down this path, and your successes are there to prove it.’Footnote 5
Although world expositions like these have already attracted scholarly attention, there is something peculiar about this case. In addition to the Belgian pavilion, the king also visited the section where the Belgian cities of Ghent, Antwerp, Liège and Brussels had their own pavilion (see Figures 1–4). What stands out about this visit is not the promotion of Belgium as a country or even the self-evident promotion of Ghent as the organizing city, but the tourism promotion conducted by other Belgian cities – a noteworthy yet underexplored phenomenon in the extensive literature on international expositions.
Figure 1. Pavilion of Ghent at the international exposition of 1913 (Ghent University Library, BHSL.HS.III.0003.000075).
Figure 2. Pavilion of Antwerp at the international exposition of 1913 (Ghent University Library, BHSL.HS.III.0003.000043).
Figure 3. Pavilion of Brussels at the international exposition of 1913 (Ghent University Library, BHSL.HS.III.0003.000031).
Figure 4. Pavilion of Liège at the international exposition of 1913 (Ghent University Library, BRKZ.TOPO.702.B.05).
For a long time, the prevailing idea in the literature was that the expos served as a platform for promotion undertaken by national governments.Footnote 6 As a result, research has concentrated on how participating countries have leveraged this platform, while some scholars have also examined the promotional efforts of the host city. Their historical image was determined by reports from the organizers, general overviews of all expos and monographic studies on a single exposition.Footnote 7 From the 1980s onwards, these expos have been examined from various academic disciplines, exploring their links to colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, industrial and economic development, geopolitical relations, art, culture and gender.Footnote 8 Only recently has attention been paid to the tourism component of these events. Most of this research focuses on international expositions as tourist attractions.Footnote 9 They generated a lot of tourism: the exposition was conceived as a tourist site, attracting millions of visitors from inside and outside the organizing country and having a major impact on the image of cities as tourist destinations.Footnote 10 Expos helped increase the number of tourists and popularized a modern consumerist, tourist sensibility.Footnote 11 Susan Barton has also linked the beginning of package tours to the Great Exhibition in London (1851).Footnote 12 These mega-events ushered in the age of tourism as an industry.Footnote 13
However, international expositions were not only a tourist attraction, but also a platform for tourism promotion conducted by tourism brokers, especially in support of urban tourism. They were offered a place from which railway and steamboat companies could send their agents to ensnare travellers.Footnote 14 The history of urban tourism and its promotion remains relatively underexplored, though some studies have examined this form of promotion at the expos.Footnote 15 For example, John R. Gold and Margaret M. Gold showed that city promotion undertaken by the organizing city at these types of large-scale events was always the sum of different stakeholders with various interests.Footnote 16 Steven Verhoeven built on this research by examining how Amsterdam stakeholders used the 1895 ‘World Exhibition of the Hotel and Travel Industry’, an unofficial world exposition in Amsterdam, as a tool for urban tourism promotion, and analysed the impact it had on the city’s image.Footnote 17 So while tourism promotion at the expos has been studied from the perspective of the organizing city, little research exists on the participation of other cities that saw the expo as an ideal place to highlight their own tourism potential. At the same time, the existing historiography pays little attention to the various actors that shaped promotion on the local, regional and national level. However, exploring these themes inevitably intersects with civic pride, identity and nationalism, because international expositions are often perceived as transnational platforms for the construction of national identities, as wars between nations, and battlegrounds of nationalism.Footnote 18 Yet these wars were not perceived by contemporaries as destructive, but as wars of ‘love, concord and affection’, in which the participants could advertise their progress (scientific, economic, etc.), but also share it with the world while strengthening social bonds.Footnote 19 In recent years, attention has been paid to the construction of national identities by diverse interest groups with particular local, national and international interests.Footnote 20 For example, in the Finnish pavilion at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, Finland was presented as racially homogeneous to distinguish itself from its Russian rulers, at the expense of Finnish minority communities, such as the indigenous Sámi peoples and the Russian-speaking communities within the Karelian region.Footnote 21 Sometimes, the construction of a nationalist image resulted in country pavilions in which differences within a nation were flattened or erased.
Nevertheless, the construction of identity was not always based on the concept of a united, homogeneous whole. In Belgian historiography, the idea that Belgium is a country of cities with strong local identities has traditionally been central to the conceptualization of its national identity. According to Henri Pirenne (1862–1935), diversity was the essence of Belgian nationality.Footnote 22 From the Middle Ages onwards, the Netherlands had been an area of unprecedented city autonomy, which continued long after the creation of the nation-state. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, more and more authors portrayed their cities as independent communities with a rich history.Footnote 23 However, there is still insufficient research on the intersection of urban, regional and national identities, as classical studies often overlook the city’s role in nation-building.Footnote 24 An exception is the work of Tymen Peverelli. He charted the various – sometimes harmonious, sometimes conflictual – ways in which urban residents connected with urban and national identities. Peverelli concluded that for some townspeople, the mixed feelings they had towards the nation-state led to urban particularism, an emphasis on the unique cultural character and political autonomy of their own city. Others, however, cultivated a localized nationalism, the idea that the city was part of a larger national whole, but also that national identity could only be truly experienced at the local level.Footnote 25 This research builds on this division – and sometimes opposition – between urban particularism and localized nationalism by examining the presentation of urban tourism pavilions at international expositions in Belgium.
This article brings together research on the history of international expositions, tourism, media history and nationalism by examining the presence of Belgian urban tourism pavilions at the expos held in Belgium between 1885 and 1958. It seeks to contribute to the current argument that international expositions were not only a battleground for countries but also for cities. Instead of focusing on the micro-perspective of the city, it analyses the representation of different Belgian cities at the expos in Belgium to shed more light on this barely explored type of tourism promotion. Central to the research is the question of whether and how the Belgian cities at the international expositions between 1885 and 1958 collaborated to promote a unified image of Belgium as a tourist destination, or rather, emphasized their unique urban identities. The first part studies the promotion of different cities. Which cities, besides the host city, were represented by pavilions in which they promoted themselves as tourist destinations? Secondly, the actors behind these tourism pavilions will be brought to light. Which local, regional, national and international tourism brokers sought to promote these cities at the expos, and how did these actors position the city to the nation? And lastly, for whom was this message intended?
To answer these questions, a diverse corpus of sources was used. Research on tourism history at world expositions is challenging, as it requires a combination of various sources and methodologies.Footnote 26 This article draws from a wide range of sources, including various articles from Belgian newspapers,Footnote 27 maps of the Belgian international expositions which depict the pavilions of the participating countries and cities,Footnote 28 reports from the Commission for Tourism Promotion of Ghent and AntwerpFootnote 29 and reports from the Office Belgo-Luxembourgeois du Tourisme (OBLUT), the national tourism board of Belgium between 1931 and 1936, concerning the participation of different cities.Footnote 30
Setting the stage: city pavilions at the international expositions in Belgium
The first international expositions appeal to the imagination and have an almost mythical status, but for most participating countries, they were just a form of good marketing. Staging an expo presented an opportunity for a country to promote its latest technologies, economic enhancements, educational system, science, art, heritage and history, and to sell itself as a tourist destination. The first exposition to which the term ‘World Exhibition’ was applied was the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations in London in 1851. Besides Great Britain, the participating countries were allocated their own sections in London’s Crystal Palace to show off their achievements. Visitors could take a trip around the world and see various consumer goods, inventions and objects of art in one place. The exposition was a great success, and other countries decided to organize similar ones to match it.Footnote 31 A small section per country soon proved inadequate, so starting from the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867, each participating country was invited to build a pavilion in a characteristic national style to showcase its ‘authentic’ culture.Footnote 32 These pavilions were planned to be temporary, but extraordinary at the same time.Footnote 33 Belgium did not ‘just’ take part in global exposition fever; it was such an enthusiastic organizer of them that at one point a contemporary reporter questioned whether Belgium had transformed into Europe’s ‘permanent exposition ground’.Footnote 34
Between 1885 and 1958, over a dozen expositions were organized in Belgian cities: three in Antwerp (1885, 1894 and 1930), five in Brussels (1888, 1897, 1910, 1935 and 1958), three in Liège (1905, 1930 and 1939), one in Ghent (1913) and one in Charleroi (1911). Belgium was not the only country with so many expos. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there was no central organization responsible for the expos. Decisions to hold an expo were made at national or even local level and international recognition depended upon the ability to attract the participation of other countries. This led to an explosion in the number of expos at the end of the nineteenth century. There were expos every year, and sometimes even multiple ones per year. To better structure the organization of these events, the Bureau International des Expositions (BIE) was founded in 1928. After that, any country wishing to organize an expo had to submit an official candidacy to the BIE. For Expo 58, Belgium submitted an official candidacy, and the BIE selected Brussels as the host city. The BIE only recognized seven Belgian expositions as official: Expo 1897 Brussels, Expo 1905 Liège, Expo 1910 Brussels, Expo 1913 Ghent, Expo 1935 Brussels, Expo 1958 Brussels (categorized as World Expos) and Expo 1939 Liège (recognized as a Specialized Expo).
There was much competition between city officials for the right to host an expo in their respective cities, as these events were seen as an opportunity to improve infrastructure, boost the cultural sector, attract tourists, create jobs, regenerate run-down areas and score points against rival cities.Footnote 35 According to newspaper articles, there were ‘big material advantages’ for the organizing city.Footnote 36 When a city was not selected to organize an international exposition, the stakeholders wanted compensation for their loss.Footnote 37 One of the ways to get that compensation was by obtaining their own pavilion.
At the first expos in Belgium at the end of the nineteenth century (from the World Fair in Antwerp in 1885 until the World Fair in Brussels in 1897), only the organizing cities had their own pavilion. Starting from the Liège exposition in 1905, other cities joined the fray. The first one to do so was not a major city, but a smaller one: Spa. Spa had been a tourist destination since the beginning of the seventeenth century because of its mineral springs, which were believed to have health-giving properties, and it was even perceived as one of the crown jewels of Belgian tourism.Footnote 38 The city was also relatively close to Liège and easily accessible by train. On some posters, the fair was depicted as co-organized by Liège and Spa. The initiative to promote Spa at this exposition may have been prompted by King Leopold II himself. He wanted to promote tourism among the Belgian elite, investing considerable amounts of his personal (and Congo-fuelled) resources into Spa and the coastal city of Ostend.Footnote 39
In 1910, the next international exposition in Brussels launched a new kind of pavilion that would return by default at the following Belgian expo: the ‘Pavilion of the four major cities’, consisting of temporary buildings representing Antwerp, Ghent, Liège and Brussels. The rise of these city pavilions may be linked to the foundation of the first tourist associations (VVVs or Vereenigingen voor Vreemdelingenverkeer) in these respective cities at the turn of the century. Three years later, it was Ghent’s turn to organize an expo. As in Brussels, there were pavilions representing the major cities (see Figures 5 and 6).
Figure 5. Plan général de l’Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Gand 1913 (Ghent University Library, BHSL.HS.III.0003.001182).
Figure 6. Cut-out of the map that focuses on the pavilions of the four major cities (Ghent University Library, BHSL.HS.III.0003.001182).
Although all Belgian international expositions in the following decades would display those city pavilions, each one did so in its own way. Some expos only showcased a small part of the cities, such as the Antwerp expo in 1930. The double expos in Antwerp and Liège in 1930 had two different aims. The Antwerp element of the expo focused on colonies, maritime power and Flemish art, while the Liègeois one focused on industry, science and applications and Walloon art.Footnote 40 In Antwerp, only the Flemish cities of Antwerp, Ghent and Ostend had a pavilion, while in Liège, various Flemish and Walloon cities staged them. There was a pavilion for each of the following cities: Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent, Liège and Ostend. As well as these individual pavilions, there was also a ‘Pavilion of Tourism’, which featured dioramas of ‘typical Belgian landscapes’.Footnote 41 These included the classic tourist products of Belgium: the cities of art, the coastal regions and the Ardennes.
The 1935 exposition in Brussels was an exception to the established practice of city pavilions, with only one for the host city. For other cities, the financial crisis of the 1930s hit hard, and budgets were so depleted that large-scale participation was impossible.Footnote 42 The global crisis, which was kept at bay in the early 1930s due to the euphoria and economic activity associated with the expos in Antwerp and Liège in 1930, eventually took a toll on these cities, leading to depletion of their financial resources.Footnote 43
In 1939, however, the cities participated again, on a major scale. The Exposition Internationale de la Technique de l’Eau in Liège in 1939 hosted the most Belgian city pavilions in the history of Belgian expos. It was categorized by BIE as a specialized exhibition focused on water. The event attracted not only the four major cities but also Ostend, Spa, Namur, Chaudfontaine and even the small village of Han in the south of Belgium. All of them were connected by the theme of water and used this as a selling point to attract tourists, but – more importantly – they were also forerunners within the tourism landscape of Belgium. The main tourist attraction of the small village of Han-sur-Lesse is a system of underground caves. Since their first scientific explorations during the nineteenth century, they have formed one of the main tourist attractions in Belgium. The caves were bought by Baron de Spandl in 1856, and in 1895 his heirs founded the Société Anonyme de la Grotte de Han.Footnote 44 Han is one of the first examples of a tourism operation by a private organization that moved heaven and earth to ensure its success.Footnote 45 During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a campaign was launched to promote the cave system through posters, brochures and guides.Footnote 46 The organization of a tourist pavilion for the city in 1939 (and in 1905) was probably part of this promotion plan. Chaudfontaine, a small city close to Liège, was, like Spa, known for its thermal waters. Namur’s position at the confluence of two rivers, the Meuse and the Sambre, made it an important communications hub and, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, a well-known stop on the voyages pittoresques along the river Meuse.Footnote 47
After World War II, Belgium organized one last exposition (until now). Expo 58 centred around ‘Taking stock of the world for a more humane world’. Belgium’s goal was to showcase the start of a new era of unity and prosperity. The organizing city had the opportunity to build its own city pavilion, but Brussels’ finances were so depleted that it was impossible.Footnote 48 The other cities fared no better and were only able to contribute to a shared tourism pavilion.
These tourism pavilions did not appear at expos outside Belgium, but that did not mean that they were not used as platforms for tourism promotion. Belgian cities seized the opportunity of these foreign expositions to attract tourists to their cities by placing promotional material inside the national pavilion. For example, the Antwerp tourism organization printed city guides and guides about the port of Antwerp in French, Flemish, English and Spanish for an unofficial world exposition in Strasbourg in 1920.Footnote 49 To the expo in Philadelphia (1911), Antwerp City Council sent 27 books about its must-see attractions. Brochures and books were often used at foreign fairs to promote cities.Footnote 50
Although the city pavilion seems to have been a good alternative for cities that were not selected to host an expo, it appears to have been relatively rare. Apart from Belgian city pavilions, only Parisian pavilions appeared on the floor plans of the Belgian expositions. The city pavilion of Paris was sometimes located inside the French pavilion but was more often separated from its country pavilion.Footnote 51 The presence of the Parisian pavilion may have been due to the city’s emerging status as the ‘capital of the world’.Footnote 52 Between 1852 and 1914, Paris became a cultural and intellectual centre but was also increasingly regarded as the most modern city in the world.Footnote 53 Paris, as a city of culture and progress, could not be absent from the international expositions. Due to this article’s limited scope, an examination of city pavilions at expos outside Belgium was not feasible. Nevertheless, an in-depth analysis of the Belgian city pavilions reveals the organizations that created them.
A peek behind the curtain: organizations behind the construction of tourism pavilions
Since the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, expos have served as events to showcase goods, industry and technological enhancements, and as a platform for national and imperial identities.Footnote 54 As Anne-Marie Thiesse stated: ‘There is nothing more international than the formation of national identities.’Footnote 55 Most historians studying the formation of national identities use a top-down approach that focuses on the role of national elites in the nation-building and branding process.Footnote 56 Branding at the international expositions seems to have been completely in the hands of the national governments, who constructed their national pavilions. Since the 1990s, however, studies have proved that the reality was much more complex and that regional and local levels should also be accounted for.Footnote 57 As noted by Eric Storm, however, in these studies, the role of tourism is still largely ignored.Footnote 58 This part of the article focuses on local, regional and national organizations that promoted tourism at the expos, and questions the balance between local and national identity. It analyses the intentions of these organizations without ignoring the fact that the visiting tourists may have experienced these pavilions differently and, in turn, may have contributed to tourism branding by writing and talking about their experiences.Footnote 59
Contrary to the literature, the Belgian case shows that the organization was rarely tightly controlled by a national government, but rather by the work of a multitude of local actors. At the end of the nineteenth century, the first tourist associations appeared on the scene and started their promotional activities.Footnote 60 Such interest groups had resounding names like Bruxelles-Attractions, Malines Attractions (Mechelen Aantrekkelijkheden) or Gand en Avant (Gent Vooruit). These local organizations counted among their members hotel and restaurant owners, shopkeepers and local politicians.Footnote 61 The history of these tourism associations and their marketing practices (referred to as propaganda at the turn of the century) is still underexplored by historians, except for a handful of local studies.Footnote 62 Nevertheless, research conducted in the French and German contexts suggests that these organizations were pivotal in disseminating and consolidating both local and national consciousness.Footnote 63 Often, these syndicats d’Initiative also had a distinctly political profile but were not, or only lightly, subsidized by the city council.
In Bruges, Brugge-Voorwaarts, one of those local tourism organizations, lobbied the city council for a place at the Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Bruxelles in 1910.Footnote 64 The city council recognized the utility of this kind of promotional pavilion, but they had doubts about the return on the investment requested.Footnote 65 And besides, according to council member M. Van Hoestenberghe, Bruges was already sufficiently promoted through other kinds of expos, and he believed that ‘all those who know Belgium also know that Bruges exists’.Footnote 66 He recommended other ways of promoting the city, for example by spreading posters and images of Bruges on trains and steamships, or in other major cities. His opinion was decisive in granting the organization a smaller subsidy than requested, with the result that no pavilion was built. Van Hoestenberghe’s opinion may have been influenced by his membership of the Catholic Party and the Catholic tourist association Die Roya, given that Brugge-Voorwaarts was a liberal organization opposed to the Catholic one. This example illustrates some reasons why cities did not organize pavilions: their financial means were insufficient, internal (ideological) contradictions undermined the construction or the pavilions were perceived as a useless form of promotion. This example also showed that city councils were heavily involved in the planning and construction of those temporary buildings. As previously stated, a pavilion was perceived as a sign of pride for the city, and being unable to organize one resulted in a loss of prestige.
City councils wanted to showcase the uniqueness of their city within the nation. For example, in his speech at the opening of Ghent’s tourist pavilion at the fair in Antwerp in 1930, the mayor of Ghent, Vander Stegen, made a classic statement of localized nationalism: ‘There are certainly few countries where municipal independence is as clearly defined as in Belgium, where for centuries the local character has lived on so clearly and so independently, and where, as in our country, the cities play their own role, giving them, as it were, a personality in the state.’Footnote 67
Besides initiatives by local tourism organizations and city councils, there were also national campaigns: some privately funded, others operated by the state. The Ligue Belge de Propagande pour Attirer les Visiteurs Étrangers, a privately funded national organization to promote tourism in Belgium, also set up a tourism pavilion where members of the Ligue could promote their cities. The Ligue organized a pavilion in 1910 and 1913. They invited all members to participate, but not every member city accepted their offer. Ghent City Council, for example, argued that they already had their own pavilion and that their place in the tourism pavilion should therefore go to another city.Footnote 68 Another national organization that has taken on the role of tourism promoter was the Chemins de fer de l’État Belge, the state-run Belgian railway company, between 1834 and 1926. At the exposition in Brussels, a Belgian railway carriage was on display, with panels depicting Belgian cities and regions. Six of them were delivered by the Ghent Commission for Tourism Promotion, who ‘hoped that the test, which will be done with the coach, will yield sufficient results to extend that kind of propaganda [in train coaches]’.Footnote 69
Besides local and national organizations, the organizing committees of the fairs also played a role in the construction of these city pavilions. Before any organizations were involved, a call for participation or invitation was sent out by the organizing committee of the expo to cities all over Belgium.Footnote 70 It is unclear when these organizing committees started inviting cities and which cities they invited or excluded. In the correspondence of the Commission for Tourism Promotion (Vereeniging voor Vreemdelingenverkeer) of the city of Ghent, the first correspondence with an organizing committee of the fairs started in 1929, ahead of the international exposition in Antwerp.Footnote 71 When the call went out, much depended on the city’s finances and whether or not it wanted to organize its own pavilion. This dynamic underscored the intricate interplay between financial means and participation in the fair’s activities. The committees wanted to show a harmonious and coherent representation of Belgium, a unified Belgium. And that unified Belgium included the presence of individual city pavilions. For example, Alfred Martougin, the head of the organizing committee of the fair in Antwerp in 1930, sent a letter to the mayors of the four major cities ordering them to co-operate ‘to be able to create in our place du centenaire the representation of our four great cities, which have always been found at our previous international expositions and which, especially in 1930, would be such a beautiful testimony of our union and our national solidarity’.Footnote 72 At this point, the city pavilions were closely linked to the country’s identity.
Not only did the organizing committees send out invitations to participate in tourism promotion at the expos, but the OBLUT also invited them to contribute to its tourism pavilion.Footnote 73 The OBLUT was a national tourism agency set up by the government in 1931 to replace the Conseil Supérieur du Tourisme en Belgique (the successor to the Ligue Belge de Propagande pour Attirer les Visiteurs Étrangers) and to promote the country as a tourist destination.Footnote 74 Although the national government was the founder of the organization, it was kept afloat by subsidies from member cities, and its governance was in the hands of city representatives. For the 1935 expo in Brussels, the OBLUT invited the mayors of Belgian cities to reflect on the pavilions, stressing that they wanted to promote a unified but diverse Belgium and that the couleur locale of the regions and cities should be preserved by highlighting their differences and similarities.Footnote 75 A recurring theme in these debates was the exterior appearance of the pavilions. Even before entering the pavilion, visitors could already get a feel of what they might find inside, as the architecture reflected the identity of the nation or the city.Footnote 76 Both national and city pavilions aimed to showcase uniqueness, but often adopted a common style. The pavilions of Ghent, Brussels, Antwerp and Liège at the international exposition of 1913, for example, were inspired by buildings in the respective cities but were all built in the same style: Flemish Neo-Renaissance. This style was favoured by architects and urban planners involved in urban renewal, preservation and beautification around 1900 and was adopted as a national style.Footnote 77 After World War I, modern pavilions replaced traditional representations, reflecting a shift towards showcasing a city’s modernity. These tourism organizations tried to link the much older Belgian brand of Kunststeden (cities of art) with the modernity of an expanding leisure and consumption infrastructure.Footnote 78 Although the OBLUT agreed with using the same architectural style, they wanted differences to indicate that all cities were a part of the Belgian nation but had their own spirit.
The differences could be small, such as the fences around the tourism booth representing the city or region, but also in the clothes worn inside the pavilions. People representing a city or region at the fair in 1935 had to wear ‘regional clothes’ to set them apart from other cities or regions, as seen in the photo of the interior of the pavilion of Han at the fair in Liège in 1939 (see Figure 7).Footnote 79 The OBLUT symbolized how the national government was trying to get a better grip on promoting Belgium as a tourist destination, but in practice, much was still determined by local tourism organizations set up by city councils.
Figure 7. Interior of the pavilion of Han and Rochefort. On the right side of the painting, in the middle, sits a lady wearing traditional regional clothing of the region, Exposition Internationale de la Technique de l’Eau in Liège in 1939 (this photo was sent to www.worldfairs.info and is part of the collection of S.A. des Grottes de Han et de Rochefort – Expo Liège 1939).
Much like the OBLUT, privately owned commercial organizations also engaged city councils to contribute to their pavilions. One noteworthy example was the Royal Automobile Club de Belgique, which was ‘keen to increase the appreciation of the tourist riches of our country [Belgium]’ and saw the fairs as the ideal platform to achieve this goal.Footnote 80 The city of Ghent answered the call and placed a diorama of the Kuip of Gent in their pavilion. Dioramas, introduced in 1822, toured Europe and showcased natural marvels.Footnote 81 These dioramas and the ones later used at the fairs could be used for several years. The diorama of the Kuip of Gent, for example, was used during three different expositions (1930, 1935 and 1939) and repurposed as an attraction in Ghent city hall after the fairs.Footnote 82 According to reports of the fairs, these dioramas were some of the most popular attractions in the pavilions.Footnote 83 Besides a diorama, the Commission for Tourism Promotion of Ghent also sent the Automobile Club pictures of monuments like the Gravensteen and the beguinage to project in the pavilion.Footnote 84 This illustrates that besides their own pavilions, city councils also used other pavilions to promote their cities.
During the expo in Liège (1939), urban tourism promotion came more firmly under the umbrella of the national government. In contrast to the previous fair, the OBLUT did not set up a pavilion to promote Belgium as a tourist destination. The Department of Tourism and Hotels of the Ministry of Transport took on this task to represent all tourist centres (the coast, the Ardennes and the art cities) at no cost to them.Footnote 85 Ghent, for example, seized this opportunity to showcase its most renowned landmarks on a large map within the national pavilion. In addition, Ghent had its own dedicated pavilion, which allocated around 30 square metres for tourism promotion. This reflects the increasing institutionalization and nationalization of tourism promotion after World War I, and although the initiative came from the national government, local tourism organizations still played their part.
‘Dear diary…’: a day in the city pavilion at the international exposition
Very little is known about the interior of these pavilions, about who staffed and visited them, and what impressions visitors got when they were guided through the pavilion. In tourism studies, the emphasis is mostly on the institutional aspect, so that the experiences of tourists themselves at these events are often understudied. During my archival research, I uncovered an extraordinary source that provides a unique insight into the inner workings of the pavilion: a journal kept by the guides who ran the pavilion. In 1930, the city pavilion of Ghent at the World Fair in Liège was managed by city-appointed guides who kept a meticulous diary documenting the pavilion’s daily operations in detail.Footnote 86 Their entries covered a range of topics, including the stock of tourist brochures, damage to the pavilion, their impressions, the nationalities of visitors and remarks made by those who passed through. These diary entries are a unique source which allow us to uncover what was shown in these city pavilions, who was responsible for their maintenance and the media used, as well as to understand the target audience and the experiences of guides and visitors. Unfortunately, so far, no similar diaries for other pavilions have been traced. The following observations, therefore, are based on one case-study of a unique source of one pavilion during one specific international exposition: the city pavilion of Ghent at the expo in Liège in 1930.
The Ghent city pavilion was open from 31 May until 27 October. During this time, 18 different guides – 17 men and one woman – were responsible for its maintenance. It is unclear whether this predominance of male guides was typical because the history of tour guides is still largely unwritten.Footnote 87 Figure 8 shows that most daily entries lack information on the nationality of the visitors. When they are mentioned, Belgians seem to be the largest group of visitors to the pavilion (29.1 per cent). Other groups mostly originated from neighbouring countries: France, the Netherlands, Germany and Luxembourg. Of the Belgian visitors, most originated from large cities like Ghent, Liège, Antwerp and Brussels (see Figure 9). It is clear that most visitors originated from the organizing country and even from the city that organized the pavilion. This means that most of the promotion at these fairs was also targeted at local Belgian day-trippers or even local townspeople. The pavilions were intended to attract foreign tourists but also to emphasize national identity and evoke ‘city patriotism’.Footnote 88 They informed visitors about the city’s tourist attractions and urban planning. The pavilion could be perceived as a way to promote these plans, but also to persuade citizens to agree with them.
Figure 8. Country of origin of groups visiting the pavilion of Ghent during the international exposition in Liège in 1930 based on the diary of the superintendents in the pavilion (City Archive of Ghent, Archive of Theatres and Festivities (XXI), 114 (13–20)).
Figure 9. Belgian cities of origin of groups visiting the pavilion of Ghent during the exposition in Liège in 1930, based on the diary kept by the superintendents (City Archive of Ghent, Archive of Theatres and Festivities (XXI), 114 (13–20)).
The diary provides information concerning the country and/or city of origin of the visitors and even offers incidental indications about their gender, social standing and occupations. One in five entries mentions a school visit. On 8 of the 31 days, there were visits from all girls’ schools, and twice there were groups of teachers. This attendance by pupils and teachers is closely linked to one of the main goals of the expos: educating the population.Footnote 89 As early as 1876, the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition attracted numerous school groups.Footnote 90 Country pavilions often had a section dedicated to the development of the education system, and it has even been established that these expos laid the foundations for the first school museums.Footnote 91 Another prominent group of visitors were two groups from the Vlaamse Toeristenbond (VTB, Flemish Tourist Association): one from Antwerp and one from Sint-Niklaas. VTB was founded in 1922 to teach Flemish citizens how to travel and to ‘spread knowledge of Flanders as much among fellow countrymen as strangers and thereby [encourage] travel in our region’.Footnote 92 In this context, the local branches, such as those in Antwerp and Sint-Niklaas, organized excursions. The international expositions were one of their day trips, and a visit to the Flemish pavilions was a must-see. Several journalists (4) and photographers (3) also visited the pavilion. In addition, several Belgian engineers from Wallonia and engineers from Seraing (France) also visited to gather information about the port of Ghent. They were part of a bigger group of workers who visited the expos. Organizers of the world expositions saw workers as an important target group, as the expos were about spreading new knowledge, skills and techniques.Footnote 93 The pavilion guides recorded that most conversations with tourists were in French, sometimes in Dutch and occasionally in English and German.
The interior of the pavilions contained all kinds of media with which the organizers hoped to attract would-be city-trippers. The walls of the pavilions were decorated with posters that depicted must-see attractions: the beguinage, the Gravensteen, Gentse Floraliën and the famous Van Eyck Altarpiece. There were also brochures, often in short supply, available in French, English, German and Dutch. The French ones in particular were frequently depleted (mentioned three times in the diary). Furthermore, the pavilion also hosted dioramas and panoramas, media which were used in all Belgian expositions from the late nineteenth century up to Expo 58.
For Belgian visitors, the city pavilions were an opportunity to learn more about their own country, but they also offered a time for reflection on their own identity. The guides of the Ghent pavilion declared that Belgian visitors were mainly given information to refute incorrect perceptions. Some visitors did not realize that the pavilion was not just an extension of the pavilion of Brussels or Antwerp but belonged to another city altogether. To counter this, the title ‘Ghent’ was added at the entrance of the pavilion. The guides mentioned that foreigners claimed to be interested in visiting the city after seeing the pavilion and that this promotion worked. But not only were foreigners impressed by the pavilion; Roger Bombeke, one of the guides of the city pavilion of Ghent, exclaimed, ‘It sounds odd to hear from inhabitants of the city of Ghent visiting the pavilion that they are surprised to “discover in Liège that their city contains so much beauty.”’Footnote 94 This made Bombeke’s day, and he wrote enthusiastically in the diary that ‘he was so proud to be a Gentenaar’. Several visitors shared this sentiment. Bombeke’s entry shows that the guides increasingly believed in the utility of city pavilions as a platform for tourism promotion and inspiring city pride.
The end of the visit
The visit of the king of Belgium to the Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Gand in 1913 illustrated the importance of expositions as platforms for identity formation and the promotion of urban and national tourism.Footnote 95 Traditionally, the city has been treated as a negligible factor in the nation-building process or discussed only as a stage for mega-events.Footnote 96 However, several historians, both in Belgium and beyond, have noted that too little is known about how urban, regional and national levels of identification may or may not have overlapped at these kinds of events. By examining the promotion of urban tourism, this article demonstrates that the city was not merely the space where mega-events took place, but that cities actively used these expos to shape and sell their own identities.
Although four main cities – Antwerp, Brussels, Liège and Ghent – may have set the stage for tourism promotion, it was not a tale of four cities. A wide array of Belgian cities – both large and small – used the expos in Belgium to showcase their tourist assets. These cities included Ostend, Spa, Namur, Chaudfontaine and Han-sur-Lesse. In the course of the twentieth century, an increasing number of actors recognized these international expositions as the perfect platform for promoting urban tourism. However, this did not mean that every city in the country participated. Participation was sometimes impossible due to financial constraints, internal (ideological) divisions or a lack of confidence in the effectiveness of the pavilions as a form of promotion.
Belgian city pavilions became so well established at the Belgian expositions that they became deeply intertwined with Belgian identity. Unlike most other countries, where national pavilions dominated, Belgian expos consistently highlighted the uniqueness of its cities, inside and outside the country. Correspondences between city governments and organizing committees of foreign expos indicate that Belgian cities participated in them, but that, rather than setting up individual pavilions, they occupied space in the Belgian pavilion instead. This demonstrates that even in the absence of standalone city pavilions, cities played an important role in the narrative presented in the pavilions and the tourist promotion of Belgium in general.
A peek behind the curtain reveals that the organization of these pavilions was in the hands of myriad tourism organizations at multiple levels, ranging from local, privately funded ones to national, governmental bodies with their own motivations and strategies. This confirms Gold and Gold’s observation that the expos always came about through various actors with their own goals in mind.Footnote 97 Throughout the twentieth century, the national government tried to take more control over tourism promotion at the expos, but even after World War II, local governments and organizations remained the driving force. These different actors used the various pavilions to attract foreign visitors, reinforce national identity and evoke a sense of civic pride among Belgians.
Different identities overlapped in these pavilions. Both national organizations, like the Office Belgo-Luxembourgeois du Tourisme (OBLUT), and city governments sought to position Belgian cities as complementary parts of a diverse yet unified national identity. To accomplish this, co-operation between different city governments and other organizations was tremendously important. On the other hand, each city wanted to highlight its unique characteristics so that visitors could distinguish one city from another. This tension is evident in reports from the 1930 Expo in Liège, where the guides at the Ghent pavilion expressed frustration that some visitors could not tell the difference between city pavilions.
This research may have begun with the Belgian king’s visit to the pavilions of the country’s four largest cities – as a tale of four cities – but the story turns out to be much more complex. The expos were not just platforms for a handful of major cities; they were arenas where urban centres of all sizes negotiated their identities and sold themselves as tourist destinations, individually and as part of a national whole. Although this research is still only a case-study, it does challenge the common assumption that expos were primarily about national representation and confirms that cities played a far more important role in the narratives than was previously assumed. I hope it functions as a stepping stone for further comparative research into the representation of cities in other countries’ pavilions and that it might provide a clearer answer to the question of different overlapping identities during mega-events.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my supervisors for reading and commenting on the different versions of this article and for helping to refine the final details.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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