Belle Époque

• 1. Introduction

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  The Belle Époque did not announce itself. It crept into being after the guns of the Franco-Prussian War fell silent in 1871 and lasted, improbably, until another war swallowed it whole in 1914. For those four decades, a particular kind of European life became possible. Historian R. R. Palmer would later write that during this period, "European civilisation achieved its greatest power in global politics, and also exerted its maximum influence upon peoples outside Europe." That verdict was written in retrospect. Nobody living through it had a name for what they were in.

  The name came later, after two world wars made the preceding era look, by terrible contrast, like a golden age. Belle Époque means, simply, "beautiful era". The French gave it that name when they looked back and saw what they had lost. What remains are the questions worth spending time on. How much of it was genuinely beautiful? Who was allowed inside the beauty? And what was quietly building beneath the surface, all along, that would eventually end it?

• 2. Paris at the Centre

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  The 1889 World's Fair in Paris was a pivot point. The defeat of the nationalist agitator General Georges Ernest Boulanger and the celebrations surrounding that fair launched what the source calls "an era of optimism and affluence". The Eiffel Tower rose as the grand entrance to those fairgrounds and stayed, becoming the city's defining symbol for inhabitants and visitors alike. Paris hosted another World's Fair in 1900, the Exposition Universelle, and by then the city had been physically remade. Haussmann's renovation had reorganised its housing, street layouts, and green spaces into the walkable neighbourhoods that the Belle Époque would inhabit.

  French imperialism was at its height. The country's educational, scientific, and medical institutions sat at the leading edge of Europe. Restaurants such as Maxim's Paris achieved a new splendour as places for the wealthy to be seen. Bohemian life found its glamour in the cabarets of Montmartre. For the Parisian bourgeoisie and the nouveaux riches, the social set known as Tout-Paris set the pace, and what Tout-Paris did, others eventually copied.

  The Casino de Paris opened in 1890. The Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergère became landmark venues where burlesque performance styles flourished in ways considered too bold for comparable cities in Britain or America. Dancers and singers including Polaire, Mistinguett, Paulus, Eugénie Fougère, La Goulue, and Jane Avril became genuine celebrities, and several of them sat for Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's poster art, which made the period's nightlife visible to the wider world. Liane de Pougy, described as dancer, socialite, and courtesan, headlined the top cabarets.

  Not everyone lived this way. France carried a large economic underclass that never reached the Belle Époque's entertainments. Poverty persisted in Paris's urban slums and among the rural peasantry for decades after the era ended.

• 3. Cracks in the Surface

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  Captain Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly convicted of treason using fabricated evidence supplied by French government officials. The antisemitism directed at Dreyfus, tolerated broadly in French society, sat at the heart of the controversy and the trials that followed. The affair consumed France for years. It drew heavy newspaper coverage and eventually an open letter from the prominent novelist Émile Zola, published as J'Accuse...!, which condemned both government corruption and French antisemitism directly.

  Political violence punctured the era at intervals. A bomb was detonated inside the Chamber of Deputies of France in 1893, causing injuries but no deaths. President Marie François Sadi Carnot was killed in 1894. That same year, Émile Henry carried out a terrorist attack against civilians, killing a cafe patron and wounding several others. France experienced fewer political assassinations than Russia, but the Belle Époque was not peaceful in any absolute sense.

  Conflicts between the government and the Roman Catholic Church were a recurring feature of domestic politics. Some in the artistic elite viewed the fin de siècle, the turn of the century, through a fundamentally pessimistic lens. The international workers' movement reorganised itself during this period, reinforcing pan-European class identities among those whose labour underpinned the era's prosperity. The most prominent transnational socialist body was the Second International. Anarchists of multiple affiliations were active in the years leading up to World War I.

  Militarism and international tensions grew considerably between 1897 and 1914. The immediate prewar years were marked by a general armaments competition across Europe. Diplomatic crises tested the peace repeatedly: the Congress of Berlin in 1878, the Berlin Conference in 1884, and the Algeciras Conference in 1906 each managed disputes that threatened the general stability. The First Balkan War of 1912-1913 and the Second Balkan War of 1913 are now considered direct prologues to the First World War.

• 4. Science and Invention

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  Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity in 1896 while working with phosphorescent materials, confirming and extending earlier observations about uranium salts made by Abel Niépce de Saint-Victor in 1857. Marie Skłodowska-Curie worked in France during this period, winning the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903 and the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1911. Louis Pasteur, perhaps the most famous scientist in France during the era, developed both pasteurisation and a vaccine for rabies. Mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré made contributions to pure and applied mathematics and also wrote books for general readers.

  France was a leader in early cinema. The cinématographe was invented by Léon Bouly and then put to use by Auguste and Louis Lumière, who held the first film screenings in the world. The automobile began as a luxurious experiment for the well-off; French manufacturers such as Peugeot were already pioneers in carriage manufacturing when the car emerged. Edouard Michelin invented removable pneumatic tires for bicycles and automobiles during the 1890s.

  France established the world's first national air force in 1910. Two French inventors, Louis Breguet and Paul Cornu, each made independent experiments with flying helicopters in 1907. French inventor Édouard Belin developed the Belinograph, also called the Wirephoto, to transmit photographs by telephone. Neon lights were invented in France. Physicist Gabriel Lippmann invented integral imaging, a technique still in use today.

  Biologists and physicians finally established the germ theory of disease during this era, and the field of bacteriology was founded. The electric light began displacing gas lighting. The Paris Métro underground railway joined the omnibus and streetcar in moving the working population across an increasingly suburbanised city.

• 5. Art and the Avant-Garde

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  Vincent van Gogh died in 1890. It was during that same decade that his paintings began attracting the admiration that had been withheld from him in life. First other artists recognised them; then the public followed gradually. His trajectory traced a pattern common to the period: art that shocked in one decade became canonical in the next.

  Reactions against Impressionism drove visual arts in Paris through the Belle Époque. Post-Impressionist movements multiplied: the Nabis, the Salon de la Rose + Croix, Fauvism, Symbolism, and early Modernism. Between 1900 and 1914, Expressionism reached both Paris and Vienna. Early Cubism and Abstraction were exhibited. The official art school, the École des Beaux-Arts, mounted an exhibition of Japanese printmaking that changed approaches to graphic design, particularly posters and book illustration. Aubrey Beardsley was influenced by a similar exhibition when he visited Paris during the 1890s. African tribal art also captured the imagination of Parisian artists at the turn of the century.

  Art Nouveau, called Jugendstil in central Europe, became the era's most broadly recognised movement. Characterised by curvilinear forms and nature-inspired motifs, it became prominent from the mid-1890s and spread through much of Europe. Hector Guimard applied it to the Paris Métro stations, making it inseparable from the city's identity. Auguste Rodin brought the same modernising impulse to sculpture. Among the painters working in Paris were Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Henri Rousseau, and a young Pablo Picasso.

  In literature, Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola stood at the peak of realism and naturalism. Marcel Proust began In Search of Lost Time in 1909, though it would not appear until after World War I. Thomas Mann's Death in Venice was published in 1912. Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations appeared in 1886; his free verse was the first of its kind seen by the French reading public, and his works continued influencing Surrealists and Modernists for years afterward. Stéphane Mallarmé's Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard anticipated both Dada and concrete poetry. Colette shocked France with the Claudine novel series.

• 6. Music and Movement

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  Salon music defined the Belle Époque's musical character. Short, accessible pieces for piano solo or violin and piano circulated widely, alongside a large repertoire of songs known as mélodies. The Italians led this form, with Francesco Paolo Tosti as its greatest champion. The style later fell into obscurity; even at serious recitals, singers became reluctant to perform salon pieces as encores.

  Operettas were at the height of their popularity during the era, with composers including Johann Strauss III, Emmerich Kálmán, and Franz Lehár. Many composers working in Paris during this period remain widely performed today: Igor Stravinsky, Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, Lili Boulanger, Jules Massenet, César Franck, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Gabriel Fauré along with his pupil Maurice Ravel. According to Fauré and Ravel themselves, the most favoured composer of the Belle Époque was the Norwegian Edvard Grieg, who reached the height of his popularity in both Parisian concert halls and salon life. Ravel and Frederick Delius were reported to agree that French music of the period was, in essence, "Edvard Grieg plus the third act of Tristan".

  Modern dance found its footing in the theatre of this era. Dancer Loie Fuller performed at venues including the Folies Bergère and took her style abroad. Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes brought international fame to Vaslav Nijinsky and shaped modern ballet technique. The Ballets Russes produced several foundational works of the form, including The Firebird and The Rite of Spring, the latter sometimes provoking audience riots at its performances. Those riots were, in their way, a sign of how much was at stake in Belle Époque culture: audiences cared enough to be outraged, and the works that outraged them are the ones that lasted.