ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Decline and Emulation: Parisian Zoos and the Shifting Geography of Zoological Modernity

• In Event: Animal Networks. Zoos in the Peripheries 2

English Abstract

By the early twentieth century, the Jardin des Plantes menagerie—once a European model—was widely described as outdated, poorly administered, and scientifically underperforming. This critique did not come only from journalists: senior officials of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle acknowledged that the menagerie’s cramped enclosures, high mortality rates, and limited funds hindered both scientific work and public display. Reformers such as zoologist Gustave Loisel, tasked by the state with studying foreign zoological gardens, returned with detailed comparative surveys that underscored the contrast between Paris’s aging facilities and the expansive, hygienic, and financially robust zoos he observed on his tour of Europe and America. Loisel’s reports—along with internal correspondence, committee deliberations, and administrators’ own assessments—circulated new architectural models, administrative structures, and scientific programs as potential templates for renewal. This paper situates these debates within a broader transnational field in which zoological institutions actively borrowed, compared, and recalibrated their practices. It traces how Parisian officials increasingly positioned foreign zoos as benchmarks for reform, revealing a shifting geography of zoological modernity. In doing so, the paper illuminates how questions of animal welfare, scientific ambition, and administrative autonomy became central to redefining the purpose and future of the first metropolitan zoo at the turn of the twentieth century.

Author

• Claire Cage, University of South Alabama