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Brussels International Exposition, 1897

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Brussels International Exposition, 1897

The Brussels International Exposition (French: Exposition Internationale de Bruxelles, Dutch: Wereldtentoonstelling te Brussel) opened on 10 May 1897 and ran through 8 November 1897, drawing an estimated 7.8 million visitors. The Brussels event grew partly out of civic rivalry: a Brussels alderman’s earlier proposal for a fair was refused by the government in 1892, and after Antwerp went ahead with its own exposition in 1894, Brussels resolved to mount one as well. It was financed not by the state but by a private company, “Bruxelles-Exposition,” which struck agreements with the government and issued invitations to participating nations. Sources differ slightly on participation—varying from 22 to 27 in different accounts. The fair’s stated aims were to promote national products without excluding other nations and to shape public opinion in favor of colonization.

The exposition occupied two sites comprising 14 sections, linked by a purpose-built tramway line and the newly laid-out, roughly 11-km Avenue de Tervueren. The main grounds sat in the Parc du Cinquantenaire/Jubelpark in eastern Brussels, while a second site in the suburb of Tervuren held the colonial section devoted to the Congo Free State, King Leopold II’s personal property. The fair was a showcase of Belgian Art Nouveau at its height: its principal designers included Henry van de Velde, Paul Hankar, Gédéon Bordiau, and Gustave Serrurier-Bovy, and Henri Privat-Livemont produced the posters.

In Tervuren, Leopold II razed the existing Prince of Orange pavilion and erected a Palace of the Colonies in its place. In the main hall, the Hall of the Great Cultures, the decorator Georges Hobé built a distinctive wooden Art Nouveau structure evoking a Congolese forest out of African bilinga wood, and the exhibition displayed ethnographic objects, taxidermied animals, and Congolese export products such as coffee, cacao, and tobacco. The colonial museum functioned largely as a commercial and economic showcase, intended to acquaint Belgian industrialists and artisans with Congo’s raw materials—wood and ivory among the most prized—which Belgian artists worked into chryselephantine sculpture and Art Nouveau furnishings. The Tervueren site also included a replica African village in which 60 Congolese people were made to live for the duration of the exhibition, seven of whom died during their forced stay in Belgium.

Beyond the formal pavilions and colonial exhibits, the fair leaned heavily on spectacle and popular entertainment. The centerpiece amusement was Vieux-Bruxelles (Bruxelles-Kermesse), a 25,000 m² recreated old town offering nostalgic reduced-scale reproductions of historic buildings, dioramas, and the popular Chien-Vert restaurant. The grounds were dotted with novelty attractions of the kind common to Belle Époque fairs: a Cairo panorama pavilion, a “Zoographe” pavilion offering film projections, a giant barrel (the “Tonneau Gigantesque”), a “Giant’s House” (Het Reuzenhuis) built for the De Beukelaer biscuit firm and later reassembled at Bornem, and an infant incubator pavilion. Breweries and refreshment venues such as “Au Chien Vert” and the Borremans brewery catered to visitors alongside a Palais de l’Alimentation. The fair also hosted sporting spectacle: a world wrestling and athletics championship was staged during the exposition, won by the Frenchman Noël Rouveyrolis, known as “Noël le Gaulois.” A new electric tramway, inaugurated in 1897, carried visitors along the Avenue de Tervueren between the two sites, with horse drawn carriages (fiacres) as an alternative.

Physical remnants of the 1897 Exposition are few. After the Exposition closed, Leopold established the Museum of the Congo (today’s Royal Museum for Central Africa) at Tervuren in 1898. Victor Horta’s neoclassical Temple of Human Passions, built to house Jef Lambeaux’s relief, was finished in time but its opening was delayed by disputes until 1899. It is now known as the Horta-Lambeaux Pavilion and is managed by the Royal Museums of Art and History. A part of the surviving Palais Mondial from 1897 has housed the Autoworld automobile museum since 1986.

Aerial view of the Exposition.
Lion’s Incubators at the Brussels Exposition

At the Exposition internationale de Bruxelles of 1897, Alexandre Lion mounted two adjacent installations in the left avenue of the gardens, in the Parc du Cinquantenaire: a pavilion of infant incubators operated under the name of his Œuvre maternelle des Couveuses d’Enfants, and, a few metres away, an agricultural incubator — the “couveuse monstre” or Poussinière, capable of holding five thousand eggs with hatchings visible at any hour. Interestingly, some Belgium newspapers focused almost entirely on the infant incubators, while others focused primarily on the poultry incubators, probably reflecting differences in their audience.

The Incubators in the Belgian Press
Le Petit Bleu de l’Exposition May 31 1897

The most complete treatment of the infant incubator exhibit came from Le Vingtième Siècle, the Brussels Catholic daily, which devoted a major illustrated feature to Lion’s Œuvre maternelle (May 2, 1897) carrying an engraving of the incubator hall, a portrait of Lion, and a technical drawing of the apparatus. The paper described the device with some precision: a glazed metal cage drawing filtered air from outside and venting through the roof, the temperature held constant by a regulator-thermometer and adjustable by any heat source — gas, oil, petroleum, or electricity. It located the founding of the work in Paris, on the boulevard Poissonnière, dating it to 1891 and reporting that some thousand children had since been received and saved in the proportion of 82 per cent, with fifty incubators in operation. La Réforme ran its own illustrated feature (20 May), signed with a drawing by Morel, which instead rooted the work at Nice and attributed to Dr Ciaudo, the city’s médecin-inspecteur for child protection, a more conservative and specific figure: of about 185 premature infants weighing between 800 grams and 2.9 kilograms over roughly three years, 133 discharged alive and well, 48 dead, 4 still in treatment — a survival rate of 72 per cent.

Several papers described the pavilion itself in similar terms: an elegant structure at the head of the left avenue of the Parc du Cinquantenaire, never empty, its façade hung with photographs of babies, synoptic tables and statistics; glazed cases each holding a swaddled premature infant; and, at the rear, a temperature-controlled enclosure where young wet-nurses tended the children. The audience was repeatedly noted as predominantly female. La Réforme‘s “Échos de l’Exposition” recorded a door placard announcing eight premature babies in residence, and the Petit Bleu de l’Exposition — a promotional daily published only for the run of the fair — gave a vivid account under the heading “À la Couveuse d’enfants,” complete with an engraving captioned “La foule devant le pavillon des couveuses Lion.”

The number of infants in the pavilion can be traced in news stories across the season as a rough index of the exhibit filling up: four babies in mid-May (Le Vingtième Siècle), seven by 11 August, eight including a pair of twins (La Réforme), and nine by early September (Petit Bleu). Two attendance markers also survive: Le Vingtième Siècle reported that Lion celebrated the 200,000th entry into the pavilion with his staff on 10 September, and the Journal de Bruxelles recorded fair-wide entries exceeding 25,000 on a single fine Wednesday in late June.

The poultry incubator exhibit (Poussinière) drew its own coverage, pitched at a different readership. Le Vingtième Siècle (27 June) and the Journal de Bruxelles (24 June) both ran descriptive pieces on the hatching spectacle — five thousand eggs on a sand bed at hen-temperature, chicks and ducklings breaking their shells continuously before the crowd — and both turned the spectacle into advocacy, reporting that agronomes, aviculturists and syndicates had asked Lion to place Poussinières around the country, and that M. Proost, director-general of agriculture and professor at Louvain, had announced a visit. Le Vingtième Siècle‘s earlier feature (14 June) captured the scene at the moment a clutch of ducklings hatched, prompting a child’s cry of “on dirait des serins!” The Petit Bleu itinerary tied the two exhibits together explicitly, presenting the Poussinière as the device that “admirably completes” Lion’s maternity of infant incubators.

Le Petit Bleu de l’Exposition September 5, 1897
The Exhibit in Popular Culture

A distinct category of coverage references the incubators not as a subject but incidentally, which is itself evidence of how thoroughly the “couveuse d’enfants” had entered the everyday vocabulary of the fair. It served as a geographic landmark in classified advertising — a pavilion for sale “facing the couveuse d’enfants” (Le Soir), a small building “facing the couveuse” destroyed by fire (Journal de Bruxelles) — and as a point of reference in news items, including a scaffolding-collapse accident in which an injured carpenter was carried to the infant pavilion and revived by the Croix-Rouge doctor on duty there (Le Peuple). It generated a human-interest item when an abandoned newborn found in the Square Marguerite was delivered by police to the incubators and there revived (Le Courrier de l’Escaut), and it furnished a parliamentary joke when a deputy mocked a government bill as “an infant born before term” fit to be sent “to the Exposition, to the couveuse d’enfants” (Le Peuple, reporting the Chamber). At least one classified advertisement shows the pavilion functioning as a labour exchange, a young woman advertising for a domestic position “on leaving the couveuse d’enfants at the Exposition” (Le Soir).

Alongside these ran the recurring daily squibs that several papers carried with little variation — La Réforme‘s “Le vrai succès de l’Exposition reste toujours la Couveuse d’Enfants,” the Journal de Bruxelles‘s “Le succès de la couveuse d’enfants… s’accentue,” and the standing “Voir à l’Exposition” and listing notices in Le Peuple, Le Soir and Le Vingtième Siècle. These are best understood as a single repeated promotional register rather than as discrete reports, and their volume is itself a measure of how steadily the exhibit was kept before the public eye.

The Incubators in the French Press

The contrast between the Belgian and the French press coverage is striking. In Belgium the infant incubator generated sustained, standalone reporting — descriptive features, an engraved portrait of Lion, running tallies of the babies in residence, the publication of official correspondence, and a parallel advocacy literature around the poultry machine. In the French papers examined, the same exhibit appears only as a single noun in a list of fairground attractions, never as a subject in its own right. La Lanterne (9 October), Le Petit Marseillais and La Gironde (both 10 September) place the “couveuse d’enfants” among the Panorama des Alpes, the zoographe, the optique and the Palais de la ville de Bruxelles, and dispose of the poultry and aviculture concours “pour mémoire” as a matter for specialists. That the Marseille and Bordeaux notices are the same dispatch word for word suggests the limited French interest was largely syndicated wire copy rather than independent reporting — consistent with a French press already turning its attention toward the great Paris exposition of 1900

The Donation to the City of Brussels

La Réform reproduced a pair of official letters under the heading “Les Couveuses d’enfants.” The first, dated 18 June 1897 and signed by the burgomaster Buls for the Collège des bourgmestre et échevins, acknowledges Lion’s letter of 13 June offering incubators to the city’s hospital establishments. The second, dated 23 June, from the Conseil général des Hospices et Secours, signed by Van den Broeck and Alfred Evrard, proposes to place one incubator at the hospice de la Maternité and the five remaining at the hospice des Enfants Assistés, and asks Lion’s consent to inscribe him as donor on each.

Awards and Honors

The Rapport Général sur l’Exposition Universelle de Bruxelles 1897 documents that the “Diplome d’Honneur” in Classes 35-41 (various Hygiene) was awarded to “Oeuvre maternelle des couveuses d’enfants, a Paris;” a Collaborateur Silver Medal was awarded to F. Narçon (Lion’s site manager, who also managed the Amsterdam 1895 exhibit); and a Bronze Medal was awarded to Alexandre Lion in Classes 162-163 (Mateéerial agricole) for his poultry incubator.

Plan général. Source: Gallica.bnf.fr
Primary Sources
  • Rapport Général de l’Exposition internationale de Bruxelles 1897, Chapitre Premier, “Les Jardins — I. Le Parc,” p. 300 — locates “la couveuse artificielle… appliquée à l’espèce humaine” in the left avenue, between the Panorama des Alpes and the restaurant automatique.
  • Rapport Général de l’Exposition internationale de Bruxelles 1897: p. 197, Diplômes d’honneur, Oeuvre maternelle des couveuses d’enfants, à Paris; p. 236, Diplômes de médaille de bronze, Lion, Alexandre, à Paris; p. 215, Diplômes de médaille d’argent, Naarçon, F., Oeuvre maternelle des couveuses d’enfants.
  • Guide-Album Illustré de l’Exposition Universelle Bruxelles-Tervueren 1897.
  • La Vie Moderne à l’Exposition Internationale de Bruxelles 1897
Other Sources
  • “Brussels International Exposition (1897),” English Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_International_Exposition_(1897)
  • “Exposition internationale de Bruxelles de 1897,” French Wikipedia. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposition_internationale_de_Bruxelles_de_1897
  • “Bruxelles – 1897 – Exposition Internationale,” La Belgique des Quatre Vents (blog), Oct. 2016. https://belgique-insolite-et-occulte.blogspot.com/2016/10/bruxelles-1897-exposition-internationale.html
Belgian Press Sources

Le Courrier de l’Escaut

  • 9 July 1897 — “Enfant trouvé”: abandoned newborn taken to the couveuse.

Le Peuple

  • 1 June 1897 — “Un accident à l’Exposition”: injured carpenter carried to the infant pavilion.
  • 11 July 1897 — Exposition listing (“Maternité Lion” / couveuse monstre).
  • 23 July 1897 — “À la Chambre,” séance of 22 July: couveuse d’enfants invoked as a joke.
  • 6 September 1897 — Exposition listing.

Le Soir

  • 11 June 1897 — classified: pavilion for sale “en face de la couveuse d’enfants.”
  • 31 August 1897 — “À l’Exposition”: couveuse monstre notice.
  • 7 September 1897 — “À l’Exposition”: closing extended to 7 November; couveuse monstre notice.
  • 15 October 1897 — classified: young woman seeking a position on leaving the couveuse.
  • 19 October 1897 — “À l’Exposition”: couveuse monstre closing notice.

Le Vingtième Siècle

  • 2 May 1897 (2 parts) — illustrated feature on the Œuvre maternelle; apparatus described; Paris/1891, ~82%; home-rearing service; six-incubator donation noted.
  • 13 May 1897 (2 parts) — feature on the Couveuses Lion pavilion at inauguration; four babies.
  • 14 June 1897 — “À l’Exposition”: ducklings hatching in the couveuse monstre.
  • 20 June 1897 — press-fêtes chronicle; visitor tips recommending both exhibits.
  • 27 June 1897 — feature on the Poussinière Lion; Proost visit announced.
  • 5 July 1897 — “À l’Exposition”: recommends aviculturists see the Poussinière.
  • 11 August 1897 — crowds in the rain; seven babies in residence.
  • 20 August 1897 — “Voir à l’Exposition” listing.
  • 10 September 1897 — “À l’Exposition”: 200,000th entry into the pavilion.
  • 1 October 1897 — couveuse monstre listing.
  • 7 October 1897 — “Voir à l’Exposition” listing.

La Réforme

  • 20 May 1897 (2 parts) — illustrated feature “Œuvre maternelle des Couveuses d’enfants” (dessin de Morel); portrait of Lion; Nice origin; Dr Ciaudo statistics (185 infants, 72%).
  • 5 June 1897 — “Les fêtes de la Pentecôte”: couveuses listed among attractions.
  • 8 June 1897 — “Échos de l’Exposition”: descriptive feature on the pavilion (eight babies; door placard; wet-nurses).
  • 24 June 1897 — short note: hundreds daily at the couveuse.
  • 30 June 1897 — “Rixe entre deux soldats,” with couveuse note: eight babies (incl. twins) born at 6, 7, 8 months.
  • 1 July 1897 (donation correspondence, multiple images) — “Les Couveuses d’enfants”: letters of 18 June (Buls, Collège des bourgmestre et échevins) and 23 June (Van den Broeck and Alfred Evrard, Conseil général des Hospices et Secours) on the gift of six incubators.
  • 15 September 1897 — “Le vrai succès de l’Exposition reste toujours la Couveuse d’Enfants.” (recurred with identical wording on many dates throughout the season)

Petit Bleu de l’Exposition (special edition)

  • 31 May 1897 (3 parts) — “Un itinéraire pratique à l’Exposition”: one-day route; Couveuses and Poussinière adjacency; Dutch railway pavilion opposite.
  • 19 July 1897 — “Choses qu’il ne faut pas manquer… À l’Exposition”: must-see list including the couveuses and Poussinière Lion.
  • 5 September 1897 (multiple images, incl. engraving and site plan) — “À la Couveuse d’enfants”: nine children in residence; exterior photographs/statistics; “La foule devant le pavillon des couveuses Lion”; Exposition site map marking “Couveuse LION” and “Poussinière LION.”
  • 3 October 1897 — recurring must-see list (recurred with identical wording on many dates throughout the season)

Journal de Bruxelles

  • 24 June 1897 — “À l’Exposition”: feature on the Poussinière; entries over 25,000; Proost visit announced.
  • 7 August 1897 (2 images) — “À l’Exposition” section-walk feature on the couveuse; fragment stating the Lion couveuse saves 80%.
  • 18 August 1897 — “Le succès de la couveuse d’enfants… s’accentue” (recurred with identical wording on many dates throughout the season)
  • August 18, 1897 — “Un incendie à l’Exposition,” a small building “en face de la couveuse d’enfants” destroyed by fire
French Press Sources
  • Le Petit Marseillais, 10 September 1897 — “Exposition internationale de Bruxelles”: couveuse named in an attraction list (syndicated dispatch).
  • La Gironde, 10 September 1897 — same syndicated dispatch.
  • La Lanterne, 9 October 1897 — “À l’Exposition internationale de Bruxelles”: couveuse d’enfants named in an attraction list.
Internet Links
More Information about Alexandre Lion

Last Updated on 06/23/26