The Invention and Afterlife of Expo 67’s “Man and His World”

If you exit the Green Line at Montreal’s Berri-UQAM station and descend, the gate awaits: An entrance to the Yellow Line, a subterranean maw where a great slab of a sign remains reading ‘Expo 67: Terre des Hommes’ or ‘Man and His World’ in equally sized lettering below it (a relic from before Quebec’s modern language laws).

This ‘theme’, for lack of a better term, dates back to sometime in the early 1960s when Claude Robillard, a man running Montreal's planning department, delivered a verdict on what a world's fair should be: The era of exhibitions built around the newest screwdriver was finished, he said, and it was time to put the emphasis on people instead of their inventions.

That instinct became Expo 67's governing idea, but how it got there is a better story than the one we usually tell, because there are two of them.

The version everyone knows

In late May of 1963, the Seigniory Club at Montebello: a private resort on the Ottawa River about a hundred kilometres upstream from Montreal, built in the 1930s on land that once belonged to Louis-Joseph Papineau. Here, fifteen or so of the country's most prominent minds were summoned there for three days to decide what the fair was going to be about: Gabrielle Roy, neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, Alan Jarvis of the National Gallery, geophysicist J. Tuzo Wilson, poet F.R. Scott, journalist André Laurendeau, and Robillard himself along with architects Victor Prus and Raymond Affleck.

They emerged with Terre des hommes or ‘Man and His World’. La Presse dubbed the result the exhibition's Grande Charte, a charter written by twelve wise men (though accounts of who was actually in the room have never quite agreed on the number).

The phrase came from a 1939 memoir by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a pilot who flew mail routes for Aéropostale between France, Africa, and South America, and who once put a plane down in the Sahara and was pulled out alive by a Bedouin. The book appeared in English as Wind, Sand and Stars. Saint-Exupéry vanished over the Mediterranean in 1944 on a reconnaissance flight; The Little Prince, written the year before, is what most people know him for now.

Roy, who wrote the official unfolding of the theme for the fair's commemorative volume, pointed to a passage where Saint-Exupéry describes flying at night over Argentina and picking out a handful of lights scattered across the dark plain below, each household isolated, similarly to the stars. Recognizing your own solitude, she argued, makes you reach toward everyone else's. That was the thread the whole fair hung on.

The version in the archives

Inderbir Singh Riar's 2014 doctoral dissertation on Expo 67 makes a persuasive case that Montebello is a founding myth, and a manufactured one at that. Working from the van Ginkel papers at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Riar traces the phrase back to a memo from October 1962, drafted by a circle of Montreal architects including Affleck, Hazen Sise, Michel Chevalier, and the husband-and-wife planners Daniel and Blanche Lemco van Ginkel.

"Man and His World" is already sitting in it as an organizing principle for the event. Robillard, a close friend of the van Ginkels, is the one who converted the English into Terre des hommes and reached for Saint-Exupéry afterward to give it a pedigree. In late January 1963, the Province of Quebec Association of Architects spent a weekend at Lac Beauport, situated outside Quebec City, turning the idea into an actual program which means the Montebello meetup happened four months later.

According to Riar's explanation for the gap, from 1963 onward, the Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition deposited every memo, minute, and drawing it generated with the Public Archives of Canada. But an archive that begins with an Act of Parliament, has nowhere to file anything older than itself. So the story started where the paperwork did, and journalists have been repeating it ever since.

Despite the myth surrounding the Montebello meeting on record, it still had an impact. The conference gave the theme its philosophical backbone, drawn from the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley, the first director-general of UNESCO and the man who coined "transhumanism," though not in the sense the word carries today. Huxley wasn't talking about lifespans or biological enhancement, but about humanity collectively realizing its potential through science, education, and social planning.

The group's declaration argued that humanity, having already escaped gravity, ought to train the same capabilities on hunger, thirst, war, disease, and degrading labour. The final declaration was translated into five languages and shipped to 150 countries. The five sub-themes came out of it too: Man the Explorer, Man the Producer, Man the Provider, Man the Creator, Man in the Community.