Beautiful, although not for everyone. That could be a realistic motto of the Belle Époque, a period in which social inequalities were still very evident, and even the difference between some countries in Europe. However, after the horror of the Great War, nostalgia for the years before the conflict allowed us to coin a retrospective illusion, that of the good old days. A belle époque that symbolized, as the French historian Michel Winock states, “the prewar: the years of life, as opposed to the years of death.”
It was a period of progress, technical advances, great inventions, artistic avant-garde, color and frivolity, in which Paris wanted to become the capital of the world. At the height of the Third Republic, the French capital was the greatest scene of luxury and ostentation, of wealth and waste, of national pride and exhibitionism, of talent and creativity. This was evident with the inauguration of the Universal Exhibition of 1900, the first great spectacle of the 20th century.
Beneath the golden surface of that time, the aristocracy limited its space in select circles, of which it was a part by right, and not by the simple desire to gain access. It was the gratin, that exclusive social nucleus immortalized by Marcel Proust in his monumental work In Search of Lost Time. “The refined,” Proust stated, “calculate the social value of a room by the number of people excluded.”
An example of this dandyism was Boni de Castellane, an aristocrat considered the most elegant man of the Belle Époque. Among the female representatives of the gratin, the Countess of Greffulhe stood out, who inspired Proust with the features of the “Duchess de Guermantes”, the most relevant female character in In Search... Anna de Noailles, an intelligent and committed aristocrat, competed with Marthe Bibesco the feminine primacy of literary culture in Paris.
For its part, the bourgeoisie lived happy times in the “golden age of security”, as Stefan Zweig defined that kind of artificial paradise that was the Belle Époque, in which such a small number of people had never enjoyed so much.
And the French capital was the great setting for that pleasure. The presence of monarchs, heads of state and magnates attracted by the fascination of the city meant the deployment of an unprecedented service infrastructure.
While the Ritz became a symbol of luxury hotels, the great world fair of 1900 catapulted Maxim's as the fashionable establishment. The atmosphere of maroon velvets, mirrors, chandeliers and bars with sinuous lines, in the purest Art Nouveau style, made it one of the temples of Parisian frivolity, with its own goddesses wrapped in feathers, jewels and voluptuous silks.
These were the demi-mondaines, the queens of beauty and entertainment in that Paris, who sold their favors very expensively. La Bella Otero, Liane de Pougy, Émilienne d'Alençon... used to come to the restaurant accompanied by great fortunes or aristocrats who could not resist their power of seduction. Some of them became stars of the show, defying convention and making a name for themselves.
The entire world had its eyes turned towards that feverish capital full of attractions. High life, an expression invented by English visitors to Paris in 1900, reflected the slide towards moral permissiveness of high society that enjoyed life without hesitation.
A year earlier, President Félix Faure himself was the victim of his passionate outburst. He used to receive his lover, the beautiful Meg Steinheil, in a room in the Elysée. Apparently, the president needed the help of a powerful aphrodisiac to consummate his love affairs. He took it, but just at that moment Cardinal Richard showed up to discuss an urgent matter, and then the Prince of Monaco was waiting for him, who had come to talk to him about the Dreyfus case.
At the end of the visits, Faure found that the effects of the stimulant were disappearing. He took another pill, and after a while he collapsed into Meg Steinheil's arms. The “happy death” of President Faure was one of the most identifying episodes of that period in which pleasures were pushed to the limit.
Meanwhile, the Italian Giovanni Boldini became the great portraitist of the women of the Belle Époque, who were already “aware of their beauty and femininity,” as stated by the Italian historian Tiziano Panconi. “Boldini portrayed like no one else the Parisian joie de vivre, the joy of living of the first years of the century, glorifying the daily life of bourgeois life, without suspecting that, very soon, it would be annihilated by the serious events that were lurking.”
They were years in which the feminine condition began to emerge in its fight for the right to equality. “For the first time in European history,” notes German historian Philipp Blom, “women were studying, beginning to earn their own money, demanding the right to vote, and, most importantly, suggesting that, in an industrial age, physical strength and martial virtues became useless.”
In 1900, female athletes debuted in the Olympic Games, those in Paris, although there were fewer than twenty participants, out of a total of one thousand competitors.
Some boundaries were being crossed, although the truth is that those who broke the rules, such as the actress Sarah Bernhardt or the writer Colette, still scandalized right-thinking minds. Thus, while the “divine Sarah” was considered by some to be the greatest genius of her time, others denounced her tumultuous love life and her extravagances.
For her part, Colette led the sexual ambiguity in that Paris that was immersed in what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called “a morbid lust for the exotic, abnormal and different.”
The city's nightlife reached unsuspected heights. First was the emergence of the magazine as a genre of entertainment; Later the music hall arrived imported from London. The success achieved led to the appearance of up to six stores in the French capital. Thus, names such as Folies Bergère, Moulin Rouge, Casino de Paris, Olympia, Alcazar d'Été and Ambassadeurs became the great stages of the Parisian night.
Its impact was such that it even generated a street advertising system unknown until then: the poster. This new graphic language, which revolutionized the art of design, had great representatives, such as Théophile Steinlen and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who left their creativity printed on posters.
Around 1900, Montmartre championed a new aesthetic. Absinthe ran like morphine and opium on the most rogue nights. Also creativity and artistic freedom. Bohemianism was concentrated in Le Chat Noir, the most famous of the literary cabarets, the inverted image of a traditional salon.
As Roger Shattuck notes, “in a prosperous and self-satisfied France, artists who were striving to advance found almost no one following their example. Their reaction was the most natural: they grouped together to support each other. They constituted what has been called the avant-garde, which would change the conception of art forever.”
At the foot of that dynamic, modern and revolutionary hill, duels were still in force, which appealed to honor to settle differences. Something typical of a Corneille tragedy in the middle of the Belle Époque. Passionate duels, but also fights for political reasons, such as those caused by the aforementioned Dreyfus case, a real combat between supporters and detractors of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, accused of espionage, against a background of anti-Semitism.
Paris lived in permanent effervescence. While a part of the bourgeoisie was swimming in opulence, thanks to its financial and real estate operations, another more popular sector achieved a certain prosperity due to the economic growth of those years and monetary stability.
However, in that dazzling city there were horrifying pockets of misery. It was the other side of the Belle Époque. A bitter face that fueled prostitution, overcrowding and the emergence of anarchist currents that resulted in police repression.
Despite everything, as the French historian Dominique Kalifa states, “that society trusted in the future. The notion of progress was always present.” She laughed, she had fun, she felt free, euphoric. Nothing seemed to prove otherwise. It was the joy of the apocalypse.
This text is part of an article published in number 618 of the magazine Historia y Vida. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
