The stakes could not have been higher for the 1931 Exposition coloniale internationale, held in Vincennes when popular support for France's imperial project had reached an all-time low. The last and most impressive of a long line of ethnographic expositions, or ‘human zoos’, this monumental world's fair attracted 8 million visitors in its six-month run. Guided by the goal of reigniting the French public's interest in the colonies, the Exposition's organizers took great care to orchestrate what visitors saw and, equally importantly, did not see. As Paul Reynaud, Minister of Colonies, put it in his inaugural address, ‘le but essentiel de l'Exposition est de donner aux Français conscience de leur empire […]. Il faut que chacun de nous se sente citoyen de la plus grande France’ (the primary goal of the Exposition is to give the French people a greater awareness of their empire […]. Each of us must feel like a citizen of ‘Greater France’). The act of observing the colonies in France became a way to rehearse the colonial mission.

To this end, officials promoted the Exposition as ‘authentic’ and expunged traces of its highly constructed nature, but hybridity and assimilation still proved particularly thorny issues. Competing narratives vied for space both on the colonized subject's body and within their larger displays. On the one hand, colonized subjects had to embody savagery in order to warrant further colonization; yet they could not be too ‘savage’, which would suggest the failure of the ongoing colonial project. As Pascal Blanchard points out, colonized subjects ‘could not remain for too long in the category of the “savage” or the “barbarous”, given that this would have been a denial of the core principles of the colonial mission’. Similarly, as Patricia Morton highlights, the organizers used colonized pavilions’ architecture—whose exteriors supposedly reflected ‘authentic’ cultural practices—to classify ‘colonized races into hierarchies based on stages of evolution’. For instance, the pavilions for Martinique, Guadeloupe, and La Réunion, which the French considered examples of successful assimilation to French culture, ‘employed “metropolitan” styles’ while others did not.

Of equal importance was what Exposition officials expunged from the fair—most notably the violence on which the colonial project depended.