ABSTRACT
Visitors in search of diversion and instruction at the Paris Exposition of 1889 might have been intrigued by an unusual display at the Palais des Artes Libéraux, where a Polish librarian named Michael Zmigrodski had arranged drawings of over 300 objects, each bearing a swastika or, as he put it ‘an ornament which I believe to have a swastikal origin’.1 This tableau, in which the swastikas were arranged in groups labelled ‘Prehistoric’, ‘Pagan’ and, unusually, ‘Christian’ was afterwards deposited in the St Germain Museum of Prehistory. Over and above Zmigrodski’s sub-classifications stands the embracing taxonomy of ‘objects bearing swastikas’, and it was not simply vulgar showmanship which led him to direct his audience to a sudden recognition of the swastika as it magically appeared amongst a group of inscriptions or in an ornamental band. A contemporary commented that ‘[Zmigrodski] has made it his special study to show that this cross had everywhere a symbolical, and not merely ornamental value’.2 The expedient of using drawings, rather than providing the objects themselves for inspection, turned the swastika into an exhibit whose twodimensionality in fact negated the principle of an exhibition ‘in the round’, since the spectator was not asked to consider and interpret the object from all angles, but simply to recognise a distinctive and repeated sign. However, the donation of these drawings to the Musée des Antiquités Nationales reified this pseudoexhibition as material evidence in its own right. That this was possible indicates the overwhelming popularity of ‘Aryan’ theories of ancestry and race in Europe at that time; Zmigrodski the librarian and swastika-hunter was also an anti-
Semite, whose self-appointed task was to promote the swastika as the heraldic device of the Aryo-Germanic family. He compared the swastika to a fly trapped in amber, its unchanging form representing the preservation of a racial essence over time, and his declared aim was to prove that ‘in a very ancient epoch, our Indo-European ancestors professed social and religious ideas more noble and elevated than those of other races’.3
