French Industrial Exposition of 1844
The French Industrial Exposition of 1844, held in a temporary structure on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, was one in a series of eleven French national industrial expositions held to encourage improvements in progressive agriculture and in technology, that had their origins in 1798. The first Paris exposition immediately spawned imitators, including the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, which was open to international exhibitors from the entire world and outshone the highly successful French exhibition.
Other European expositions soon followed: Bern and Madrid in 1845; Brussels with an elaborate industrial exposition in 1847; Bordeaux in 1847; St Petersburg in 1848; and Lisbon in 1849. The exposition returned to Paris in 1849, called the Exposition of the Second Republic or Exposition Nationale des produits de l’industrie agricole et manufacturière.
source:
Wikipedia