Luxembourg - Expo Paris 1900
This pavilion, built by the French architect Vaudoyer, was a great honour for its author and for this small country of 200,000 souls, which has insisted on taking its place among the great countries of Europe. It was a reproduction of part of the Grand Duke's Palace in Luxembourg. Its main facade, in Renaissance style, but very simple and without any sculpture other than the grand-ducal coat of arms placed above the entrance, was nevertheless very elegant, with its high belfry with large windows, flanked on the left by a thin corbelled turret and which recalled that the building was once, like its Belgian neighbour, a people's house before becoming the residence of the sovereign.
On the Rue des Nations side, the side façade had only a series of bays surmounted by an attic and rose at the western end to form a small pavilion with an attic, the pediment of which bore the motto in the Luxembourg dialect: "Mir wellen bleiwen wat mir sin", i.e. "We want to remain what we are". May the wish of this valiant little people, surrounded by so much greed, be granted!
This pavilion contained the entire exhibition of Luxembourg, except for the important section of metallurgy which was installed in the Champ-de-Mars, and, although it contained nothing exceptionally curious, it gives a good idea of the industrial activity of this small country. On the ground floor, whose vestibule was adorned with a beautiful bronze statue representing a worker in a metallurgical factory, were exhibited the products of various industries, hardware, perfumery, weaving, etc. One stopped with interest in front of the exhibition of a curious new process of electrolysis by which copper objects were covered in a few moments, before the eyes of the visitors, with a layer of any metal, gold, silver, copper, zinc, cobalt, etc. A beautiful staircase led to the upper galleries where the work of the Luxembourg professional schools was gathered and which ended in an elegant reading room decorated with a full-length portrait of the reigning Grand Duke.
©Louis Rousselet - L'Exposition Universelle de 1900