Was the Belle Epoque in France Actually That ‘Belle’?

Everyone knows the Belle Epoque in France… we see it as we stroll round Paris, marveling on the beautiful curlicues of an Artwork Nouveau constructing or the sunshine brushstrokes of an Impressionist portray. 

We already love these energetic and exuberant and creative a long time that noticed out the nineteenth century and welcomed within the twentieth.

However how acquainted are we with Belle Epoque France, actually? 

What secrets and techniques does it maintain, and extra to the purpose, was it actually as nice as they are saying?

Eiffel Tower poster

It’s been known as a French Golden Age of kinds. Some, confused, have even known as it Victorian France (nicely, it does piggyback on the late Victorian and Edwardian eras). 

The that means of the Belle Époque period (normally written with an accent) is, by the best way, merely lovely age. How apt.

Or is it?

What IS the Belle Époque in France? 

It’s typically written up as “la belle epoch” however what actually counts is what it stands for.

When Napoleon III (nephew of Napoleon the First) was ousted after dropping the Franco-Prussian Battle in 1871, France was in a shambles, Paris much more so. The town was rising from a brutal blockade so extreme residents had been compelled to eat their pets to outlive. 

The Rue de Rivoli in Paris, broken by preventing in the course of the Paris Commune

A brief-lived revolutionary authorities – the Paris Commune – that took energy whereas France and Germany have been busy negotiating didn’t assist issues, and shortly France was confronted with the ignominy of getting to signal a peace treaty with Germany in that temple of French historical past and tradition: Versailles Palace. As if dropping the conflict wasn’t sufficient, France’s nostril could be rubbed into its defeat.

The conflict additionally price France Alsace and half of Lorraine, which grew to become a part of Germany, to not point out the hefty conflict reparations it needed to pay.

France was on its knees.

Usually, although, it’s darkest earlier than the daybreak and from this post-war devastation arose a Paris one might hardly have dreamed of. 

This crumbling, crushed society would quickly dive headlong right into a interval of political effervescence, unparalleled development, creative ebullience and social metamorphosis the likes of which hadn’t been seen since 

La Belle Epoque Paris: a radical overhaul

I say Paris, as a result of it was the hypercenter of the Belle Epoque. Whereas progress and innovation did unfold throughout France – you’ll discover loads of architectural and creative proof in locations like Nancy or Evian or Aix-les-Bains – Paris was its heartbeat.

It was Paris, in any case, which gave us such Belle Epoque beauties as the Eiffel Tower (which nobody thought lovely on the time), the Palais Garnier, the Petit and Grand Palais, these gorgeous metro station entrances, and the Fouquet jewelry store, which as soon as sat on the Rue Royale however has been reassembled proper contained in the Musée Carnavalet. 

To many, this was the Golden Age of Paris.

A bit of the unique furnishings of Fouquet Jewellers, now on the Musée Carnavalet

Only a few years earlier, Baron Haussmann had resculpted the face of Paris, reducing boulevards and clearing parks alongside which new buildings would elegantly be positioned. By the point the Belle Epoque rolled round, Paris regarded very similar to it does right this moment.

Belle Epoque Paris: shedding conservative artwork kinds

We’ll begin with artwork as a result of this was an period of unimaginable experimentation, giving delivery to the Impressionists, the Auguste Renoirs and Claude Monets whose masterpieces have made their house owners millionnaires.

An in depth-up of Monet’s Water Lilies on the Paris museum of the Orangerie – the ensemble has been known as the Sistine Chapel of Impressionism

Like many issues in trendy life, the brand new artists weren’t preferred at first. Traditionalist France rejected their work as ugly, unconventional, revolutionary even. However as is usually the case, they not solely got here round, however offered an setting through which many actions have been capable of develop: Artwork Nouveau, in fact, but in addition Cubism, and Fauvism, whose practitioners and artists painted and usual colors and shapes that went wild, cementing the fame of Paris because the world’s cultural capital.

Belle époque style (we ARE speaking about Paris, in any case) was an artwork type of significance. These vast open boulevards and newly planted parks have been good for exhibiting off the newest clothes and hats. That is the place you got here to see and be seen, on foot or in horse-drawn carriages, as a result of in these days, who you have been in society – and the way you regarded – decided a lot of your life. You needed to sustain, as a result of fashions modified rapidly.

In every single place they regarded, Parisians noticed one thing experimental, and the Belle Epoque was a extremely visible period.

In Paris, in 1895, the Lumière Brothers projected shifting photos to a paying viewers for the primary time. Images, which had come into its personal, was massively common among the many rich. Simply as a lot enjoyable have been the newfangled lithography and printing methods, which popularized these pleasant Belle Époque posters which right this moment break the bank to gather. These “affiches” promoted the cafés and dance halls of the Belle Époque period, the cabarets, and all these different morally questionable institutions which made Paris such a vibrant place.

Paris wished to have enjoyable

After these troublesome years of conflict and crushing defeat, Paris was out for time.

I imply, what are you able to say about an period that gave us the can-can, the Moulin Rouge and the bordello?

Who can neglect Félix Faure, President of France from 1895-1899, extra well-known for his loss of life within the arms of his mistress than for his lifetime accomplishments?

However not all leisure in Paris was of this salacious kind. You may additionally benefit from the Paris Olympic Video games, the Tour de France, new museums and live performance halls, and the proliferation of grittier, extra practical writers like Victor Hugo and Emile Zola, whose portraits of up to date society inform us right this moment.

This was additionally when the well-known Paris bouillons, which at the moment are making a comeback, opened their doorways to feed town’s rising working class.  To take a peek at a kind of ‘trendy’ proletarian eating places, you step into the Bouillon Julien for an genuine Belle Epoque inside that hasn’t modified a lot in additional than a century.

This was additionally the heyday of the Parisian division retailer and despite the fact that one or two had been constructed earlier, the Belle Epoque was after they have been at their peak.

A fast stroll previous the storefront of La Samaritaine (just lately renovated and reopened) provides you with a touch of that grandeur. Higher but, go inside. Or into the Galeries Lafayette. Or the Printemps. Should you have been a well-to-do Parisian of the time, that’s what you’d have carried out.

The extraordinary cupola of the Galeries Lafayette in Paris

Lots of the new entertainments have been past the attain of the common Parisian wage-earner however right here, too, occasions have been altering, and staff have been discovering the that means of leisure, because the money and time to get pleasure from it slowly grew to become extra out there. Science and know-how helped put this inside attain. Loads of innovations saved individuals time, particularly in transportation. Not having to stroll lengthy distances to work and with the ability to journey the metro or tram or a bicycle as a substitute would revolutionize each day life.

However change wasn’t nearly leisure and sweetness – it was additionally about on a regular basis life. 

A rising variety of factories made it attainable for people to earn cash with out proudly owning land. These required extra bodily labour, and folks – typically poor farmers from France’s agricultural hinterland – moved to the cities, turning rural France into an city society. Inhabitants grew, and so did cities. Well being infrastructure improved, life expectancy elevated, working circumstances obtained higher, and labour unions have been born to ensure enhancements weren’t momentary and have been unfold round to all.

So what do you do when your setting adjustments, your life and prospects enhance, and the world round you boils over with radical new concepts? 

You present it off to the world, in fact.

The Expositions Universelles

The French Belle Epoque is well-known for its string of common exhibitions, however the inspiration for these occasions was not French in any respect. Actually, it got here from Britain.

The 1851 Nice Exhibition in London had been a long-held dream of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband, and its visitor of honour was the then Emperor of France, Napoleon III.

Having witnessed the unimaginable Crystal Palace and the million guests who got here, France needed to have one too. 

No sooner had Napoleon III returned to French soil that he instantly ordered a Common Exposition for Paris – larger and higher than London’s, he demanded. 

The primary in a sequence of world festivals opened in 1855, a bit earlier than the Belle Epoque, and the final could be a bit after, on the eve of World Battle II.

However between the primary and the final of those exhibitions, three Belle Epoque expositions stand out: 1878, 1889 and 1900.

1. The 1878 Common Exposition

This was extra an occasion of nationwide reconciliation after the Franco-Prussian catastrophe and the bloody Paris Commune, bringing everybody along with an eye fixed on a greater future. A preferred attraction was the top of the Statue of Liberty, proven right here earlier than the total statue was shipped to New York.

Entrance corridor of the Palais du Champ-de-Mars, on the 1878 World Truthful, and its monumental clock. The Palais confronted the Trocadéro, and was situated on the positioning the place the Eiffel Tower is now standing.

2. The 1889 Common Exposition

This marked the a centesimal anniversary of the French Revolution and the taking of the Bastille. Most of all, it celebrated business, at a time when France was getting again on its toes and wanted to be pushed out of recession (there’s nothing like a world’s honest to usher in cash, vacationers and delight!) 

The Galerie des Machines showcased the economic savvy of the time, and such seemingly inconceivable feats because the Eiffel Tower noticed the day right here, on the time the tallest construction on the planet. Unfold out at its toes have been 44 “villages” representing numerous overseas lands and colonies. 

The Central African village, one of many 44 represented on the exhibition and laid out on the foot of the Eiffel Tower

The Argentina Pavillion, which received the prize of finest pavillion

Contained in the Galerie des Machines, reminder of the economic revolution, courtesy Library of Congress

3. The 1900 Common Exposition

The 1900 Paris Exposition was designed to herald the arrival of the twentieth century and have a good time the previous century’s achievements – of which, as we have now seen, there have been loads.

Greater than 50 million individuals got here, and main venues have been constructed all through Paris only for the event. We will thank the exposition for the Pont Alexandre III, the Petit and Grand Palais and the Gare (now Musée) d’Orsay, to call just a few. After all all of the technical improvements must be proven off as nicely, resembling the good Paris ferris wheel, escalators and shifting sidewalks, or the brand new “talkies”. Napoleon III would have been proud.

Shifting walkway at 1900 Paris World’s Truthful. The 2 left platforms moved at totally different speeds, whereas the correct one stayed stationary. Courtesy Brown College

The Pont Alexandre III, constructed 1896-1900 in time for the 1900 Paris World’s Truthful. The Grand Palais is on the left and the Petit Palais on the correct. Courtesy Brown College

The principle entrance of the 1900 Exposition in Paris with the triumph gate by René Biné. Courtesy Library of Congress

The darkish underside of La Belle Epoque period

Nevertheless superb the innovations and the fashionable buzz and the growth, all was not good in the course of the Belle Epoque. The advances in well being and dealing circumstances have been all of the extra phenomenal for his or her distant start line: enormous inequalities and devastating poverty.

Social inequality was the rule

Many French individuals have been poor, particularly within the countryside, the place agricultural crises would push them to the cities. Right here, they’d crowd in insalubrious shantytowns, residing a lifetime of insecurity and precariousness, with no heating, inadequate meals and little clear consuming water (aqueducts had been destroyed by the Franco Prussian conflict).

The shortage of consuming water in Paris would, by the best way, be partly remedied by an English philanthropist, Sir Richard Wallace, who constructed fountains throughout Paris to supply clear water to those that couldn’t afford to pay for it. You may nonetheless see them dotted round Paris.

As staff thronged to the factories, a lot of their co-workers could be youngsters – as much as 20% of the workforce. Courageous souls tried to reform this and succeeded considerably; legal guidelines have been handed, however not carried out, as few households might afford to reside with out the additional earnings from their youngsters’s work.

Ladies’s rights have been few and much between in what was a extremely patriarchal society, one through which males, largely white males, had energy of life and loss of life over girls (it could take till 1944 for ladies to get the authorized proper vote in France).

Do you have to occur to return throughout it, Paris Police 1900 is a recent tv sequence that can make you gnash your tooth with its discriminatory and antisemitic dialogue, all completely attuned to the mores of the time.

Discrimination and racism have been widespread and acceptable. 

In a single notorious incident within the southern French city of Aigues-Mortes, in 1893, a bunch of Italian seasonal salt staff was murdered throughout social tensions after rumours that that they had assaulted French staff. This led to a pogrom-like bloodbath through which Italian staff have been hunted by way of the streets, cornered, and dozens have been killed. Initially, the native Prefect pardoned the killers however needed to resign after a world outcry. 

Newspaper cowl of the Aigues-Mortes bloodbath

However maybe probably the most consultant occasion of the time stands out so starkly it’s nonetheless spoken of right this moment is the Dreyfus Affair, a hysterical mass-media lynching of a person accused of disrespecting France. 

L’affaire Dreyfus

Like a civil conflict, it pitted brother towards brother and prompted rifts amongst buddies that by no means healed.

In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a French military officer, was wrongly accused of passing secret paperwork to the Germans. It turned out to not be true – a sure Esterhazy had been responsible however that didn’t cease authorities from discovering Dreyfus responsible, sentencing him, and jailing him not as soon as, however twice. Dreyfus was Jewish.

It will take 12 years to exonerate him however his rehabilitation divided France. Passions have been fuelled by anti-Jewish media. The Catholic La Croix prided itself for being the “most anti-Jewish newspaper of France”, a phrase  printed proper throughout its banner. It’s one thing for which the paper (which nonetheless exists) has extensively apologized and tried to set proper.

Captain Dreyfus being court-martialed, from Le Petit Journal of 23 December 1894

Dreyfus imprisoned on Satan’s Island

This was a time of political experimentation. Keep in mind that the Second Empire had simply ended with Napoleon III, and the monarchy had been extinguished not that lengthy earlier than, in 1830. Then we had the revolutionary Paris Commune, so when it got here to the republic, it was something however stable.

Most energy was nonetheless concentrated within the fingers of the army, and the clergy held main sway over social life, together with schooling. What the Dreyfus affair succeeded in doing was to decrease these powers: the army was seen as a reactionary power-grabbing establishment, whereas the clergy was discredited for its discriminatory stances. In the end this led to a separation of church and state that continues to at the present time.

The consolidation of France

For many of its historical past, France was a set of states, with regional loyalties stronger than nationwide ones. We have been Burgundians or Bretons, not French. That took time.

Because the French Revolution rolled round, solely 1 / 4 of France spoke French. The remainder spoke regional tongues, typically higher than French, which was used for official issues however not day-to-day life. It took the Revolution to make it the language of schooling, and the Belle Epoque to make major faculty free and obligatory, catapulting French into each family, with dad and mom typically studying from their youngsters.

This gave France a stronger sense of identification, and naturally made it simpler to provoke voters when the time got here to move for the polls. It additionally meant that for the primary time, staff might go away the depth of their provinces and go discover work elsewhere, which they did, in droves.

The Scramble for Africa and a nation’s identification

Past the “fairly pavilions” put up by overseas international locations and abroad colonies in the course of the Common Exhibitions, this was the period of the dreadful scramble for Africa, when Europeans marched in, conquered, divided and in the end gave themselves a pat on the again for ruling “their” bits of Africa. By the top of the period, 90% of Africa could be beneath European rule, a big swathe of it “belonging” to France.

France’s colonies on the time of the Belle Epoque by Shid0x02 CC BY-SA 3.0

From the French standpoint, these overseas ventures have been a hit, increasing as they did France’s halo abroad. Just like the innovations and advances of the time, colonial empires could be proven off throughout France’s exhibitions.

After which it got here to a crashing halt

Some individuals contend the Belle Epoque was solely “belle” in hindsight, that it was the calm earlier than the storm. 

They’re most likely proper. Should you have been residing throughout this time, you wouldn’t have known as it La Belle Epoque. That solely occurred as soon as it ended.

The Belle Epoque offered France with a 40+12 months uninterrupted stint of peace, however human nature being what it’s, that couldn’t final. 

By 1914, Paris was frenetic, awash with the vitality of progress and residing life as if it’d quickly come to an finish – little did they know.

When World Battle I erupted, its destruction made it straightforward to look again with nostalgia on the previous and name it the Belle Epoque. 

Many arts had flourished, turning drab on a regular basis residing into bursts of unimaginable color. The working lessons and decrease bourgeoisie started having fun with life, nonetheless modestly, a lot improved by the numerous technological and scientific discoveries of the age: vaccines and hygiene for well being, telephones for communication, cinema for leisure, electrical avenue lights for safety, the brand new strategies of transportation – there’s no query many features of life grew to become simpler. The previous spiritual and army orders misplaced energy and the face of politics grew to become solidly republican. Even overseas coverage was upended.

Stroll round Paris right this moment and also you’ll see its legacy in every single place: the metro entrances and Wallace fountains, the Pont Alexandre III and the Palais Garnier, the foremost malls, all of which metamorphosed Paris.

Stand by one in all these and use your creativeness. Should you get rid of the vehicles and alter the garments, are you able to see the Belle Epoque? It is best to, as a result of definitely in some components of central Paris, little or no can have modified.

So was the Belle Epoque actually “belle”?

This was a time of innovations, of latest sorts of transportation and advances in well being and revolutionary leisure, a time of huge creative and mental creativity and innovation, and a time of social upheaval and alter.

Elegant balls of the nineteenth century portrayed right here in Une Soirée Élégante by Victor-Gabriel Gilbert

So bodily, visually, sure, the Belle Epoque was sublimely belle!

From the standpoint of know-how, in fact it was.

Even politically and socially, it was an unimaginable time – many lives improved, though after we discuss concerning the Belle Epoque, we should always keep in mind that some loved it and benefited from it excess of others.

However sure, the title does appear apt.

Belle Epoque FAQ

How you can pronounce Belle Epoque

Belle-ay-POCK

When was Belle Epoque?

There isn’t any agency date, however it’s extensively accepted to have began someday after the top of the Franco-Prussian Battle in 1871, ending in 1914 simply earlier than World Battle I.

What’s the belle epoque that means? 

The that means of belle epoque is, fairly merely, lovely period.

Who have been the highest Belle Epoque painters?

Belle Epoque artwork – which covers a large number of types – is represented by such well-known artists as Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Matisse, Auguste Rodin and lots of extra. This was additionally the heyday of the French Artwork Nouveau motion generally known as the Ecole de Nancy.

What’s Belle Epoque model?

Flamboyant, curvy, pure… and a lot extra. On the one hand, it exemplified progress and social change, and on the opposite, it harked again to the previous in nostalgia.

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