The Belle Epoque is a retrospective chrononym for the period of social, economic, technological and political progress, mainly in France and Belgium, extending from the end of the 19 th century to the beginning of the First World War in 1914.
The term corresponds to the British at the end of the Victorian era and Edwardian times, for the Germans it is Wilhelminism, but the French expression is understood and used in most European countries.
Creation of the term
The expression would have been born at the end of the 1930s (according to Dominique Kalifa, the first unequivocal use comes from a radio program entitled “Ah la Belle Époque! Sketch musical of the 1900s” presented by André Allehaut on Radio- Paris in November 1940) to evoke the fifteen years that precede the Great War 1. In this retrospective appellation, there is a part of reality (expansion, carelessness, faith in progress, cheerfulness, etc.) and a part of nostalgia for a dreamed time.
However, for the historians Jean Garrigues, Philippe Lacombrade and Dominique Lejeune, the expression would rather be born in 1919.
In Europe
General: a period of peace
After the Franco – Prussian war, Europe saw a long period of peace lasting four decades, something rare and favorable to economic and technical progress. All of this progress affects France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Austria – Hungary in particular.
Throughout Europe, the labor force is organized into trade unions or political parties : it is during this period that the first European socialist parties appear, which are more and more influential.
The populations of this period are very optimistic and carefree about the future, thanks to extraordinary technical progress. Positivism and scientism have appeared. The Belle Epoque is felt primarily on the boulevards of European capitals, in cafes and cabarets, in workshops and art galleries, in concert halls and salons frequented by an average bourgeoisie who benefits from economic progress.
The Belle Epoque: France from 1879 to 1914
Provincial Integration and Socio-Demographic Issues
After the Great Depression from 1873 to 1896, France entered a period of sustained growth as part of the second industrial revolution, against the background of the galloping international expansion of the Paris financial center.
France was greatly enlarged during the Second Empire. It has acquired Nice and Savoy, but it loses Alsace-Lorraine (current department of the Moselle and Alsace in all except the territory of Belfort) with the treaty of Frankfurt of 1871 and it falls in a revanchist nationalism, much less generalized, however, it is not suggested today.
The national space unifies itself by integrating the new provinces and the countryside. Thus the tacot, whose railway network is denser, helps to open up the countryside ( Freycinet plan ). Indeed, the population, which is gradually urbanizing, remains largely rural (56 % in 1911). French demographics, on the other hand, remain weak.
The French population, always very hierarchical, becomes aware of belonging to one and the same nation and acquires the pride of being a great power. The middle classes exert an important weight in the conditions of the national political life, marked by the constitution of new liberal parties ( moderate and radical ), with a broad republican and patriotic consensus.
Paris is a city in full urbanization and modernization, like France. She alone embodies the prestige of France at the Belle Epoque. Strongly renovated by Haussmann, the capital is populating more and more.
This positive observation must, however, be qualified since there is an undeniable economic backwardness in France due to demographic problems (few births, Malthusianism ), structural problems (a majority of very small businesses, very few employees and a craft industry). very attached to the tradition which slow down the production), in spite of numerous investments abroad (the Russian loans ), and in the field of agriculture (too much agricultural labor force: 40 % of the assets work in the compared to only 32 % in secondary and 28 % in tertiary). This delay in agriculture is due to small properties inherited during the Revolution from the sale of clerical domains, on which polyculture and extensive farming are practiced; moreover, agricultural mechanization, although existent, remains a minority. France remains the fourth world power. From 1871 to 1913, the growth rate of GDP per capita (1.4 % per annum) is lower than that of Germany (1.7 % ) but higher than that of the United Kingdom (1.2 % ).
The Sovereign and Liberal Republic
The dominant political culture was the Republic 4, in the French form of liberal democracy with a broad patriotic consensus.
Republican culture was gradually imposed by rooting in festivals, rites and national symbols, such as La Marseillaise (national anthem in 1879) and the national holiday of July 14 (National Day in 1880). Republican culture was inherited from the Enlightenment liberalism and was based on positivism. The dominant culture has tried to meet the expectations of the middle class and middle class by protecting the rights of individuals and promoting freedom of enterprise. It had a decisive role on secularism, public education and citizen training.
The President of the Council and the former Minister of Education, Jules Ferry, establishes several major laws, the law of 21 December 1880 which opens the access to public secondary education for girls, the law of 16 June 1881 which establishes free primary education, and finally the law of March 29, 1882 which makes public education, secular and compulsory. The secularization operated by Jules Ferry has only reduced the place of religion in the definition of the norms of knowledge, manners and public space in general.
The workers’ riots of June 1848 and the Commune of 1871 long cultivated a black legend and a horrifying memory for the principal actors of the Third Republic. In this context, Minister Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau abolishes the Le Chapelier law (1791) on March 21, 1884 and authorizes the labor unions.
Democrats are embodied among others by Édouard Herriot and Anatole France. Other political cultures nourish political life: anarchism, socialism, radicalism, pacifism, patriotism and nationalism ( Maurice Barrès, Jacques Bainville, Action française ); major political events, such as the Dreyfus affair or the Boulanger affair, are fueling an antiparliamentary movement of the left and the far left, born of the scandal of Panama.
The Dreyfus affair has lastingly marked the minds, both by its hostility and its intensity, and despite the presidential pardon granted to the military on 19 September and his release on 21 September 1899, this affair resulted in the formation of two antagonistic blocs in France. on a religious background.
After the Boulanger affair, the right becomes dominant notably by recovering the nationalist torch, and because the republican thinkers come out of the Dreyfus affair. Many intellectuals swing to the right ( Charles Péguy, Daniel Halévy ).
France knows a certain religious divide 10 in the early 1900s, sometimes called the “war of the two France”. The year 1902 saw the victory in the elections of the Bloc des Gauches and the appointment to the position of president of the Council of Émile Combes, figure of radicalism and anti-clerical convinced. The place of the Catholic Church in political affairs causes violent quarrels (“clericalism, that’s the enemy!”) Between clerical parties and anti-clerical political groups, often on the left and represented in the House. deputies. Anti-clericalism is therefore the reaction against this tendency to subordinate politics to religion. For example, Quinet wanted to destroy all churches and institute atheism and secularism applied to society as a whole. These frontal attacks lead to the law of separation of the Church and the State of 1905, of which the law of 1882 on the public education, laic, free and obligatory of Jules Ferry constitutes however the real origin of the concrete secularization. Secularism, as it was built in France from this law, ensured the freedom of conscience and expression of each.
France of the Belle Epoque is also one of the great colonial empires of the time. This empire is exhibited during World Expositions. Colonization was at the time often perceived as positive among a certain republican elite, often of left, and the critics took time to set up, but they existed. Georges Clemenceau (radical party) vehemently opposed it during oratorical contests against Jules Ferry, the monarchist right ( Maurras, Barres) and a marginal fringe of the Marxist left or the mass of peasants and workers have always been against colonization during the Belle Epoque.
A slow change in society
A large and inhomogeneous rural population
Agricultural assets still accounted for 44% of the total population in 1906, a little later ( 1911 ) 5.3 million men and 3.2 million women.
The personal situations are quite variable, but of this total, about half are agricultural workers. They are for the most part domestic servants, ” valets de ferme” who commit themselves for a year to the Saint Michel, at the time of the “valet fair”.
The living conditions are difficult, different from one region to another, a little more favorable in the provinces of vineyards or cereal crops. On the whole, it is the impression of great rural poverty, even among the owners, given the small size of the farms that dominates.
The agricultural crisis, which manifests itself in the 1890s, favors a rural exodus that has already begun, fueling the growing industrial centers or the large number of women (especially women) in the urban bourgeoisie. The desire to educate the French has led the various governments to generalize school obligations in the countryside with the hope of homogenizing mentalities, even to fight against regional differences and to blur the imprint of provincial cultures (eg forbidden to speak Breton even during breaks). These projects coincide with the desire to attach a stable electorate to the Republic.
A triumphant city bourgeoisie
High society mixes the old aristocracy, well established by its rural properties in the provinces, and the big business bourgeoisie, captains of industry ( Schneider for example) and high officials, politicians or famous doctors constitute elites who share fortune, power and influence, at the moment when Paris becomes the place of all the international speculations allowing a rapid enrichment.
Family traditions vary somewhat for each of these groups, but they share the same kind of life and frequent the same places. In Paris, they live in mansions served by many servants and animate the “season”, that is to say the period of receptions and shows that shaped the myth of the Belle Epoque. In summer, they settle in their castles in the countryside or in the villas of the Normandy coast. The favorite spas and seaside resorts are Biarritz, Deauville, Vichy, Arcachon and the French Riviera.
The average and the petty bourgeoisie, on the other hand, have the peculiarity of not working with their hands, seeking social ascension and aspiring to lead a “bourgeois life”. Regarding the income available to them, the scale is quite extensive: there are small rentiers, executives and engineers, industrial contractors but also officials and rural owners living in the city.
The mentalities, or more precisely the “bourgeois morality” which are part of the French tradition, belong to this group: it is a life founded on respectability, the concern for saving which ensures a certain ease and the obsession with “good manners” inculcated in the family.
Status of Women
The condition of women in the Belle Epoque is marked by political and social changes affecting Western women in a disparate way. The majority of women (from Africa, Asia, Latin America and rural societies in Eastern and Southern Europe) see the enduring of a centuries-old system where the issue of emancipation does not arise and whose missions are to ensure family tasks and maternity. Poor Western women who work as workers face, with the advent of the second industrial revolution to burdensome charges, in often grueling and underpaid conditions, with the appearance of the sexual division of labor. In Europe, the demographic transition affects all social classes, which are seeing a decrease in the birth rate. On the other hand, in the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy of the big western cities (Paris, London, New York or Berlin) other structural changes take place: the role of housewife becomes the norm, and even a strategic objective because of the near impossibility for women to get a living wage.
At the same time, for the petty bourgeoisie, it appears the possibility of studying and taking up new jobs such as teaching or journalism and, for the better-off, a relative liberation of morals that allows them to more easily mix with men, or even to engage in public sport. Still others engage in politics, such as suffragettes advocating for the right to vote for women, or in a more radical way with socialists like Rosa Luxemburg for a transformation of society. Finally, others, like Marie Curie in the sciences, become pioneers in being the first women to gain recognition in circles that, despite these changes, remain on the eve of 1914 still mostly male.
A working world with multiple faces and the search for structures
Very different conditions
The workers formed 30% of the population during the Belle Epoque and are distributed as follows: about 5 million for men and 2.5 million for women. In these figures are confounded the workers of the highly qualified workshops ( craftsmen ), the workers of the big industry and the miners of bottom. Everything differentiates them: wages first, which are also higher in Paris than in the provinces (almost double for an adult).
Women earn 30 to 50 percent less than men.
The working conditions are also very diverse: in the workshops the workers are very close to their boss who works with them since the end of their apprenticeship, but in large companies, profitability is sought by all means and it requires speed and efficiency on faster and more dangerous machines.
Despite the harshness of their condition, the workers have since the Second Empire improved their wages (about 60%) and their daily lives.
Workers’ demands
Despite the low proportion of unionized workers before 1914, some expectations are partly met: working days are reduced to hours per day for three-quarters of establishments and eight hours per day for underground miners, rest weekly is acquired from 1906. But pensions and unemployment insurance or medical reimbursements are still in the realm of utopia.
The trade unions are nevertheless quite combative within the CGT. In 1906, the Charter of Amiens, which is the founding document, reminds everyone that trade unionism is independent of political parties, that the workers intend to think and act on their own in the social field but also on the political plane by asserting themselves more “revolutionary” than the SFIO at least during the first years.
The originality of the CGT also lies in the fact that it targets all trades while most of the unions only address a professional category. It is also in this sense that it animates the Bourses du Travail in the big industrial cities.
A rich cultural, entertainment and inventions
In the French imagination, the Belle Epoque remains the time of the advent of the ideal of Enlightenment (liberalism and revolution of 1789) and a proliferation of artistic achievements and inventions.
The belief in a progress of humanity animates a good part of the French elites, especially in science ( positivism ). Built for the World’s Fair in 1889, the Eiffel Tower, symbol of Paris, makes the French capital the showcase of the world and progress. Some thinkers, before or after the carnage of the Great War, had, however, shown reservations or irony against the idea of an inescapable progress ( Bernanos ).
Important scientific discoveries
French scientists still have a place of choice in European scientific research but, unlike in previous periods, they no longer work in isolation; the systematic publication of their work puts them in rapid contact with their foreign colleagues, which makes faster progress in the programs started by each.
The scientific congresses allow them to exchange their ideas and the universal exhibitions make them known by the general public and industry. Henceforth, their prestige is very great and their social status is changing; they become the new figures who benefit from the recognition and respect of the authorities. They are honored by their compatriots and respected internationally.
The engineers who take them over to the companies acquire a new stature; they are no longer mere “officials” but innovators who introduce revolutionary techniques for profitability or security.
The most important discoveries were first applied to everyday life. This is the case of the control of electricity when Marcel Deprez and Aristide Bergès develop a system to carry the current. Domestic lighting benefits and this new form of energy revolutionizes industrial techniques. Electrometallurgy is developing and electrolysis is transforming the work of aluminum by lowering the cost price of this metal.
In the process, engineers invent the radio ; the TSF ( wireless telegraphy) according to the work of Édouard Branly and the cinema whose base of operation is the control of the current (techniques of the Lumière brothers in 1895 ).
For the automobile, the engineers deploy an effective energy and inventiveness that makes them the inventors of the dismountable tire ( Michelin in 1895 ) or the actors of notable improvements for the internal combustion engine such as Panhard and Levassor. The Renault brothers are in France the pioneers of the industrial manufacture of the automobile. They contribute to make the country one of the best equipped, namely 100,000 cars in 1914.
Some discoveries were decisive for the future years: the experiments of Clément Ader in 1903 – 1906 allow the airmen Louis Blériot in 1909 to make the first crossing of the Channel and Roland Garros the crossing of the Mediterranean in 1913.
For medicine, the work of physicists and chemists were essential steps: Pierre and Marie Curie isolate radium in 1898 by working from the work of Becquerel which showed the radioactivity of uranium in 1896. They also share with him the 1903 Nobel Prize in physics, for the discovery of radioactivity. Marie Curie will obtain a second Nobel Prize in 1911 and remains as the greatest French scientist of her time with Louis Pasteur.
They are thus increasing the possibilities of using X-rays discovered in 1895 by the German Wilhelm Röntgen applied to radiography, the use of which is becoming widespread for the detection of tuberculosis.
The prestige of the intellectual world
The term “intellectual” little used before 1898 appears in the context of the Dreyfus affair. It becomes a substantive that designates men of science as well as writers and some artists, “men of pure intellectual work.” The novels follow various tendencies, the naturalism of Zola neighbor with the exoticism of Pierre Loti and more personal novels like those of André Gide or Marcel Proust.
The French culture is distinguished in any case by its innovative character and unique radiation on a global scale. Several avant-garde movements are developing. In the arts, we can cite Impressionism, paving the way for Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism and Art Nouveau ( Alfons Mucha, Hector Guimard, Eugene Grasset, Louis Majorelle ). Great merchants and gallerists such as Ambroise Vollard or collectors such as Gustave Fayet are then the fervent revelators of these avant-gardes. Fayet gathers nearly seventy works by Gauguin and will lend them for the first retrospectives in Weimar first, then in Paris at the Salon d’Automne in 1906.
There is an intense and eccentric literary activity: Baudelaire, the champion of Parisian modernity, Léon Bloy, Pierre Louÿs and Octave Mirbeau, who made it a time of excess and fantasy. Victor Hugo and Émile Zola, both intellectuals and writers, who believed in social progress and advocated for a more harmonious society, and who will never stop denouncing the deplorable living conditions of the working class, mark the century of same as Voltaire marked the eighteenth century.
Theater and poetry are also exploring new avenues of denunciation; this is what Alfred Jarry wants to achieve with Ubu King, where he ridicules dictatorships.
France is also experiencing a rich period of entertainment and recreation. The French have fun or rejoice in activities mainly playful, outside the constraints of social life and work, with the De Dion-Bouton, the “fairy electricity”, the first round of France… The Lumière brothers, considered as inventors of the cinematograph, which would make it a French invention, present their films on giant screens. The cabarets of the Pigalle district such as the Black Cat (frequented by Verlaine and Satie among others), The Japanese Divan or the New Athens “encanaillent” their audiences. At the Moulin Rouge, open since 1889, Mistinguett launched the “waltz skewer” in 1907. In most of these places, there is no scene until 1918.
The Olympics, II e of the modern era after those of Athens, take place in the Bois de Vincennes. Paris is the world capital of entertainment, fashion and luxury. In 1900, with the Universal Exhibition, the City of Light is at the peak of its influence.
A rich artistic creation
The Impressionists led the way in 1874 by studying the variation of colors according to the light. Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet continue to work this way during the Belle Epoque.
But other painters are opening new avenues of research. This is the case of Gauguin, who juxtaposes solid colors and simplifies the layout to emphasize the authenticity of the scenes. Cézanne and Van Gogh accentuate these tendencies by resorting to very striking colors and a design that makes Cézanne the precursor of cubists.
The forms are treated by cubists in a revolutionary way; the vision of the real is exploded, decomposed, to be restructured according to intellectual conceptions where the necessary forms are the cube, the sphere and the cylinder. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque or Juan Gris are the masters of the trend.
The Demoiselles d’Avignon completed by Picasso in 1907 are considered the first cubist manifesto. The construction of the painting is rigorous, the geometric lines articulate the composition, the borrowing of the painter to African civilizations give the work a strange character that was very controversial at the time of the exhibition.
It is the Russians who have explored all possibilities of rejecting reality. Malevich uses color as the sole medium of his thought and bases supremacy. Kandinsky in 1910 removed all figurative representation, giving shape and color the meaning of “a graphic representation of a state of mind” ; he thus founded abstract art.
The success of the decorative arts
Because Art Nouveau uses materials from the industry, such as iron or glass, which are easy to work with and offer many possibilities, it is very significant of the Belle Epoque. The decorative arts adopt plant motifs to create utilitarian objects (furniture, tableware) treated as works of art. Metro mouths devised by Hector Guimard use a form of abstract veganism and the vases of Émile Gallé ( School of Nancy ) evoke silhouettes of flowers. The buildings of architect Jules Lavirotte, in collaboration with ceramist Alexandre Bigot, advocate an antiacademic style to erotic symbolism sometimes exuberant. As for René Lalique’s jewels, they mix precious metals and floral corollas.
Music that breaks with the past
The French musical life is of great wealth but remains concentrated on Paris, reflecting as much the international influence of the City of Light as the political, administrative and cultural centralization of France. Thus, during the 200 days of the Universal Exhibition of 1900, will be given (in addition to thirty official concerts) 360 symphonic sessions and 1,200 opera performances.
If the most outstanding French composers are Gabriel Fauré, Camille Saint-Saens, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, we must not forget Igor Stravinsky who settled in Paris in 1908 and the Spanish Isaac Albéniz, Enrique Granados and Manuel de Falla. The Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes is also the creator of both major piano works of Debussy and Ravel as Albeniz and Falla, he made known throughout Europe and Latin America.
The big Parisian salons set the tone of this intense artistic life; those of the Countess Greffuhle, the Princesses of Polignac and Cystria, Misia or even Madame de Saint-Marceaux.
If Debussy faces the harshest critics for Pelleas and Melisande (1902), his Martyrdom of St. Sebastian (1911) is not better received. But it is Igor Stravinsky who rout the most with The Bird of Fire, Petrouchka and especially The Rite of Spring (1913), breaks with tradition.
The first music festivals are developing in the south of France, the ancient theater of Orange for Chorégies and the modern arena of Béziers, where Fernand Castelbon de Beauxhostes mounts grandiose shows, such as the Déjanire de Saint-Saëns (1897), Parysatis (1902) or the Heliogabal of Déodat de Séverac (1910).
From 1909 to the forefront of the creation, the Ballets Russes of Sergei Diaghilev dazzle the Parisian scene as they are also sometimes cause reactions as horrified at the first of the afternoon of a fauna, on the music of Debussy, where the art of the choreographer is energized by the talent of Nijinsky.
There was also a great popular musical palette: love songs, comic troopers, gritty rengaines, comic heckling, repetitive refrains from ear worms and ragtime.
Sculptural innovations
The sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) epitomizes the prestige of French art of the late xix th century and beginning of the xx th century. His first works are quite classic in their bill, but, from the Bourgeois de Calais to the Thinker, they become more and more expressive. The feelings are more and more visible to become what Rodin wanted to achieve with his Balzac. “The resemblance… is that of the soul,” he writes shortly after completing this work, which is rejected by the sponsors of the Society of Men of Letters.
A “fruitful community of artists, all arts combined, who live in Paris or around, in synergy and also in competition, has made permanent innovation the only driving principle capable of bringing distinction and added value to artistic work. The concentration of artists and creators, industrialists of culture (cinema, record, press, book), merchants and gallerists as entrepreneurs, patrons, collectors and fashion designers puts them all in a fruitful proximity and facilitates the relationship between supply and demand”. It is therefore a centralization of the artistic, literary and cultural life that characterizes this extraordinary proliferation of the Belle Epoque in France.
New Technologies
A succession of inventions will profoundly change the way of life. The photography will generate the cinema, the velocipede is transformed into a bicycle, the realization of smaller and light engines allows the development of motorcycles, automobiles, planes. Huge progress has also been made in chemistry (Pierre and Marie Curie), electronics and iron and steel. The development of medicine and hygiene can reduce infant mortality and increase life expectancy. France is becoming more and more equipped with electricity. In 1895, the projection offirst film of history in Paris marks the success that awaits cinematography.
Men of the time see hope on development in technology; for them she is capable of everything, even of what was thought impossible a century before.
The phenomenon of universal exhibitions
The xix th century was the great century of progress. To celebrate the prodigies of the arts, sciences, industry and agriculture, France invited all nations to participate in the World Exhibition which it organized in Paris. All responded to this invitation; they wished to compare the progress of their industry with that of other nations. The 1900 Exhibition was a marvel. The Champ-de-Mars had its water tower and its luminous fountains which, in the evening, transformed this part of the Exposition into a real fairyland, the quays of the left bank of the Seine were occupied by the palaces of the nations, each in its national architecture. ”
– Jeanne Bouvier (1865-1964)
The universal exhibitions of 1889 (presentation of the Eiffel Tower ) and 1900 (electricity) are the symbols of the Belle Epoque.
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