By Alejandro Martínez, Universidad Nacional de La Plata
While exploring the collections of Central American plants housed in the Herbarium of the Museum of Natural History in Paris, our attention was drawn to a sample belonging to the tree known as caucho or hule, from Guatemala. According to the enclosed information, this handful of leaves had been collected and sent to Paris by a Mr. Guerin. A subsequent visit to the Archives Nationales de Pierrefite-sur-Seine allowed us to learn more about this unknown personage and the history behind these rubber leaves and other Central American natural objects that arrived in Europe sent by Guerin.
During the Universal Exposition of Paris in 1900, visitors passing through the Pavilion of the Republic of Guatemala, located in the Champs de Mars, could see the main products produced in that nation. Particularly attractive were the exhibits on coffee, wood, medicinal plants and minerals.
One of the curiosities of this pavilion was a large, almost square mass at the entrance. It was not a huge igneous rock extracted from the volcanic highlands of the north, nor was it a blurred sculpture, one of those familiarly known as “barrigones”, whose manufacture is attributed to the Olmec people. It was instead a giant block of rubber extracted from the rubber tree or Castilla elástica, by its scientific name, a plant of the Moraceae family, native to Mexico and Central America.

At the end of the exhibition, the block was divided and distributed among various scientific institutions in Paris by René Guérin, general curator of the Guatemalan pavilion, who also donated leaves, flowers, seeds and fruits of Castilla elástica to the Natural History Museum of Paris. This French chemist, who until then had gone unnoticed by European scientific circles, began to send different specimens to the Paris Museum and at the same time began to publish in magazines dedicated to plants and animals of economic interest to tropical regions.
Guérin first arrived in Guatemala in 1890, as part of a financial mission led by Inspector Edmond Sénéchal, whose objective was to reorganize and put into operation the Mint in that country. He remained there until the end of 1893 when his task was completed and he had to return to France. Although at the beginning of 1894 he returned to Guatemala hired to run a school of mines. At the same time he presented a request to the Ministry of Public Instruction of France to carry out a free mission in that country.
This mission project had the recommendation of Sénéchal, his former boss, who, in addition to emphasizing its disinterested nature, pointed out that Guérin’s objective was to send to the Paris Museum, at the expense of the French State, “the interesting collections of mineralogy that he had already assembled and those of ethnology and prehistoric archaeology that he hoped to form in the course of his next explorations” (Letter from Edmond Sénéchal to the Minister of Public Instruction, Paris, March 10, 1894. Archives Nationales F/17/2973/1)
Indeed, the “service of travels and scientific and literary missions” of the French Ministry of Public Instruction financed more than 2300 individual missions in the period from 1840 to 1914, as Jean-Christophe Bourquin has shown. From 1871 onwards, however, and within the framework of a policy of colonial expansion, literary and intra-European travel gradually gave way to more distant movements with an exploratory, naturalistic or archaeological purpose (Bonneuil 1999; Bourquin 1993).
After being analyzed by the Commission of Travel and Scientific Missions, Guérin’s application was rejected. In the opinion of Ferdinand Fouqué (1828-1904), a geologist at the College de France, “this young man has not had the necessary education to successfully carry out a mission of the type he is applying for. He does not seem to know natural history necessary for the success of a scientific mission.”. (Letter from Ferdinand Fouqué to the Minister of Public Instruction, Paris, May 12, 1894. Archives Nationales F/17/2973/1) For his part, Julien Haton de La Goupilliere (1833-1927), director of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines in Paris, said “It has not been possible to find any trace of the person to whom your letter refers. I may add that I have not had the slightest acquaintance with any person of that name.” (Letter from Haton de la Goupilliere to the Minister of Public Instruction, Paris, April 2, 1894. Archives Nationales F/17/2973/1)
Unknown and with no sign of having had any training in science, Guérin, a young chemical essayist, became part of the large group of unfortunate applicants for individual missions, whose study, as Stephanie Soubrier points out, allows us to identify the mechanisms of exclusion of a certain category of individuals and projects while showing us the constant redefinition of the boundaries of scientific legitimacy (Soubrier 2018)
Guérin continued to insist on his fondness for the natural sciences despite the rejection. Shortly after having been notified, he wrote again to the Ministry, requesting a copy of the “Advice to naturalist travelers” by Henri Filhol (1843-1902), wishing to have “practical information on the collection, preparation, and conservation of plants and animals”. The book was sent to him at the end of 1894 (Letter from René Guérin to Raoul de Saint-Arroman, Guatemala, October 3 and December 4, 1894. Archives Nationales F/17/2973/1). And although we have no news after this request of his activity as an amateur naturalist, it seems that in addition to his work at the Mint and the Central Chemical Laboratory of Guatemala, he continued with his plan to form collections to send to Paris.

His performance at the head of the Guatemalan delegation was marked by the uncertainty inherent in the comings and goings of politics since the participation of that country in the Universal Exposition was not decided until the last minute. The Guatemalan pavilion was inaugurated in July 1900, three months before the beginning of the exposition. Journalist Émile Berr (1855-1923) wrote: “The Republic of Guatemala, which had initially decided not to participate in the 1900 Exposition, changed its mind at the last moment and, at the beginning of April, hurriedly commissioned a Commission, presided by Mr. Salvador Herrera, to organize “something” in Paris that could be done. A delegate, Mr. Guérin, head of the national chemical laboratory of Guatemala, was charged with improvising a general exhibition of the country’s products” (“Le Guatémala”, Le Figaro, Paris, July 3, 1900, p.3).
With a little more than two months to organize the exhibition and thanks to this somewhat fortuitous event, Guérin had the opportunity to exhibit in Paris the collections he had managed to assemble after almost a decade (Gers 1901). His linguistic chart of Guatemala, for example, caught the attention of Fernand Deslile (1848-1911) who invited him to present it at the Congress of Americanists that was taking place there. During the exhibition, he also managed to establish a relationship with several Parisian naturalists and began to send different collections to the metropolis, among them human skulls, mosses, plants, ants, beetles, locusts, and even a bat. The last entry recorded in the catalog of articulated arthropods of the Paris Museum dates from 1908 and Guérin’s presence in the publications began to decrease around 1910. By 1913, back in France, although still using his title of director of the central laboratory in Guatemala, we find him acting as a member of the jury at the universal and international exhibition in Ghent. After that, he sank back into oblivion.
References
Bonneuil, Christophe 1999 “Le Muséum national d’histoire naturelle et l’expansion coloniale de la Troisième République (1870-1914)” en Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer, tome 86, n°322-323, pp. 143-169.
Bourquin, Jean-Christophe 1993 L’État et les voyageurs savants. Légitimités individuelles et volontés politiques. Les missions du ministère de l’Instruction Publique (1840-1914), Tesis, Université Paris I.
Gers, Paul 1901 En 1900, Corbeil: Ed. Crété. Soubrier, Stephanie 2018 “Les éconduits de la Science : les demandes de missions lointaines rejetées par le ministère de l’Instruction publique (1842-1900)”, en Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle [online], 57 | 2018, puesto en línea el 26 de diciembre de 2020, consultado el 21 de enero de
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Nathalie Richard (October 10, 2022). “A huge block of rubber”. A short story about the Guatemala Pavilion at the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition. SciCoMove — Scientific Collections on the Move. Retrieved April 28, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/twt8