Upon the release of a new book, we like to ask the author to share their thoughts on the how and why of their work. In Nobody Sits Like the French, writer Charles Pappas shines a light on the 19th and 20th-century World Expositions that transformed Paris.
Charles, what is the book about, and how did the idea for it come to you?
It's about how the Paris that we carry around in our heads – all those Emily-in-Paris-An-American-in Paris-Ratatouille scenes – are there for one reason: the world’s fairs that shaped Paris every bit as much as Dior shapes its gowns.
The idea came to me after one of the most disappointing moments of my life. I was an advisor to the US bid for Expo 2027, aka the World's Fair. The day after the US lost the bid (the vote was taken there in Paris) in June of 2024, I wandered around the city in a dejected daze. While the funeral in my brain was going on, and it felt like the universe had tossed in its cards and walked away, I meandered into the Petit Palais. While I was gazing at its marvelous works and architecture, it hit me in the face: So much of Paris – including the Petit Palais – was created by the World Expo. And nobody has ever really written a book that celebrates that reality.
Can you explain how the Paris World Expositions have shaped the city and why this intrigued you?
Paris is the physical memory of seven universal expositions that took place in the City of Light from 1855 to 1937. These Expos left behind an urban diary of the monumental—the Eiffel Tower, of course, but also the Musée d'Orsay, Grand Palais, and Petit Palais. Starting in 1855, Paris was literally remade by Baron Haussmann in anticipation of the city’s first world’s fair. That Paris of wide boulevards and the cream-colored limestone that dominates the city’s look – that mental postcard we carry in our heads of Paris is owed to the World Expos.
But the Expos also left a more subtle legacy, one that’s invisible to all but a handful of people on Earth who know that every time they sip a glass of burgundy, drink from Baccarat crystal, admire a Monet or a Gauguin, and even enjoy the benefits of a working sewer system in the City of Light, they owe that experience to a world expo there.
What draws you personally to the history of the Expositions and their legacy?
As a child my father drove us half way across the United States in our maroon Studebaker to see the New York World’s Fair. It was one of those before and after watershed moments life sometimes gifts us: the sheer brute force of wonders there formed a kind of rabbit hole I dropped down and never came out of.
You explore many facets of Paris in the book—was there a particular discovery or story that stood out to you?
If Monet had not wandered by an exhibit of experimentally crossbred water lilies near the Eiffel Tower at the 1889 Expo, he never would have encountered the botanical muse that inspired his greatest, most passionate works. Serendipity is often a World Expo's greatest gift to its visitors.
Who is this book for?
The book is for anyone who loves Paris and thinks they know it. Or wants to know it. But there are many more stories to tell, many more discoveries to be made about it, and, alone among the 50 million people who visit Paris each year, you’ll be the one coming back with the stories no one else has heard before.
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