La Belle Époque (1871-1913)

SPREAD OF POWER WORLD WIDE

The hallmark of this era was the diffusion of power worldwide, away from France and Britain and towards other Western states (Germany, Russia, Italy, the United States, Brazil, Argentina) and even to non-Western Japan and Egypt. Although nationalists in France and Britain aroused hysteria by claiming that this power shift was evidence of national decadence, in actual fact this was merely the product of these countries catching up to France and Britain. In central Europe, the Americas, and points elsewhere, industrialization finally took hold. This increase in economic strength was accompanied by rapid population growth in each of these industrializing countries even as French and British population growth decelerated. To be sure, this shift away from France and Britain did not seriously challenge Franco-British prestige; indeed, the rising new powers generally emulated French or British models of law, literature, and philosophy. Still, the rise of these new powers forced tremendous change on the world, which quickly evolved into a decentralized complex of competing world powers. Eventually, the strains became too much and the system collapsed in bloody war; in the interim, these strains fostered an unparalleled fluorescence of culture and wealth known to posterity as la belle époque.

SPREAD OF POPULAR CULTURE

The worldwide spread of a common popular culture based on western European -- in particular, French -- models had begun long before the 1870’s. It was only in this period, though, that advanced communications and transportation technologies, the growth of mass literacy, and the emergence of a large middle class with substantial purchasing power allowed for a truly rapid spread of a common culture. Influenced equally by the Romantics’ idealization of emotion and by the Enlightenment’s identification of humans as beings possessing innate capacities and rights, many of the leading artists of the period pushed realism to its extreme limits. In literature, for instance, naturalist writers such as the French Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola and the English Thomas Hardy adopted a quasi-scientific attitude in their writing about formerly taboo subjects such as sex, crime, extreme poverty, and corruption in officialdom, while the Russian Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the Brazilian Paulo Carnheiro, and the Anglo-American Henry James explored the repressed psychological motivations of human beings. Some authors -- like the French symbolist poets Verlaine and Rimbaud, the Norwegian dramatist Ibsen, and the Anglo-Irish satirist Oscar Wilde -- even went out of their way to demonstrate their contempt for bourgeois life or to shock complacent audiences in the hopes of awakening people to their everyday realities. Similar breaks with tradition were present in music, whether in the form of Debussy’s atonal orchestral music, Stravinsky’s innovative classical music, or the new popular musics emerging in the major cities of the Americas and France, inspired by non-European musical styles and including once-taboo lyrics. In the graphic arts, impressionist and postimpressionist art -- the latter genre exemplified by Cézanne -- defied long-cherished conventions of representation and showed a willingness to learn from primitive and non-European art: Indeed, the French Gauguin was inspired by Tahitian life, while the Flemish Van Gogh was inspired by the hyperrealism of japonaiserie, or Japanese prints. Other major styles included fauvism, in which artists such as Matisse exploited bold color areas; cubism, as painted by the Spanish Picasso, which combined several views of an object on a single flat surface; and futurism, pioneered by Italians, who tried to depict the energy of speed and motion. Architecture was marked by the exploration of the uses of steel structures, using either neoclassical, curvilinear Art Nouveau, or functionally streamlined façades. It is safe to say that throughout the West and in the most modern non-Western countries, this radical new popular culture achieved near-universal penetration of urban populations and substantial influence elsewhere.

MASS MIGRATION OF PEOPLE

This rapid spread of a common global popular culture was remarkable in itself, but this period’s mass migrations -- mainly from Europe, but also including some Asian emigrants -- was even more spectacular, the 45 million international migrants over this period easily ranking as the single largest wave of migrants in world history. The vast majority of these migrants emigrated to the rich republics of non-Andean South America and to the self-governing British colonies in Australia and South Africa, but France (and France’s Algerian and South Pacific provinces) also absorbed millions of immigrants over this period. Even North America absorbed tens of thousands of people annually. Prohibited from entering these destinations by racist laws, most of the Asian emigrants -- overwhelmingly Indian and Chinese -- settled in Southeast Asia and some of the islands of the Caribbean Sea and Indian Ocean under the auspices of colonial powers, taking advantage of their relative wealth and education to create prosperous diasporas. These ceaseless migrations helped bind together many different countries by creating new hybrid identities (like Italo-French, Germano-Australian, and Judeo-Brazilian) and by introducing elements of one culture to another (for instance, the popularity of the Spanish Catalan sardana dance in southern France, brought by Catalan immigrants), though in places it gave rise to violence.

GLOBAL ECONOMY

The creation of a unified global culture was parallelled by the creation of a unified global economy, which was itself driven by this period’s rapid technological and organizational advances of this period, and the rapid dispersion of these advances worldwide. In communications, a transatlantic telegraph network -- based on an 1844 invention by the American Morse -- linking the Americas with Europe and selected points in the Southern Hemisphere had evolved by the end of the 1870’s, while British and American inventors independently happened upon the principles behind the telephone in the late 1870’s. These startling advances were replicated in the realm of transportation as railroads were rapidly expanded -- in the 1880’s, more than 150 thousand kilometres of railway were built in addition to the 300 thousand kilometres already built, much of this length being built in the vastness of America, eastern Europe, and Asia. Other advances came in the area of manufacturing, with the construction of more efficient machines and more efficient processes. The human element was not neglected, as the perfection of the principles of mass production through the budding science of sociology caused rapid increases in the per capita output of workers in industrializing countries. The economic cooperative movement pioneered in the United Kingdom also enjoyed great popularity in the industrial world among urbanites and peasants alike, as each group seized upon cooperatives as organizations that could allow them to enjoy some economic autonomy from impersonal government and corporate bureaucracies.

TECHNOLOGICAL AND ORGANIZATION CHANGES

These immense technological and organizational changes, along with material innovations like sewer systems, electric subways, parks, and bargain department stores, helped improve living standards for many in the industrial world. They also made it essential for the world’s countries to modernize their economies using these techniques else risk falling catastrophically behind. In fact, many of the events of this period were driven by technological advances and the accompanying intense economic competition. The rapid spread of colonialism worldwide, for instance, was driven by the demand for raw materials and new markets.

BRITISH EMPIRE

The United Kingdom, as the first industrial country of the world, remained at the centre of the global economy. Britain remained a prosperous country, despite slow economic growth compared to France or Germany; indeed, its slow population growth helped the rate of GNP per capita growth remain high even by European standards. Furthermore, Britain enjoyed a cultural golden age, as evidenced by its acclaimed playwrights, prose writers, and musical composers. The fact remained, though, that since the United Kingdom as a whole grew only slowly relative to its various competitors, it came to increasingly depend upon the resources provided by its wider empire to remain abreast. The most visible example of this was the large-scale recruitment of Indians as labourers and bureaucrats in the non-white areas of the Imperial; in areas as diverse as Fiji, Guyana, Malaya, and Natal, the British crown sponsored the formation of Indian colonies of settlement. At the same time, though, the British Empire began to show signs of falling apart. These included trends as various as the overwhelmingly non-British flood of European immigrants into the British colonies of Australia and South Africa, the growing independence of Britain's colonies of settlement, the growth of Indian nationalism, and the failure of Imperial trade protectionism in the last quarter of the 19th century and its replacement with limited free trade with British allies. Perhaps the most significant proof of this to Europeans, though, was Britain's dependence upon the entente cordiale signed in 1894 with France.

FRANCE

France, though humbled by the Franco-Prussian War, remained a dominant European state throughout this period. The quick replacement of the unstable Third Republic by the much stabler Second Orleanist Kingdom gave France the political stability that it so desperately needed. After a brief period of post-war economic recovery in the 1870's, France made a successful transition to stable liberal democracy and enjoyed a period of considerable prosperity and cultural innovations. The city of Paris became the largest city in Europe in this period, the cultural capital of Europe -- and indeed, the entire world -- and the centre of one of the largest industrial districts in Europe.

CHANGES OF VIEW OF WOMEN AND WORKERS

Another important political trend in the industrial world was the broadly-defined movement for the inclusion of the working classes and women in the nation. Uprooted from their rural homes, lacking job security, and suffering from dangerous overcrowded conditions at work and at home, workers and their families responded by organizing trade unions and economic cooperatives in order to try to acquire some measure of bargaining power. Women lacked this conspicuous organization, but some women from prosperous backgrounds had enough education and autonomy to organize the feminist movement. For both campaigns, the most important symbol of social inclusion was the ability to vote, and accordingly these campaigns centred upon the acquisition of the franchise. By the end of the 19th century, in most industrial countries and some non-industrial countries all adult males did gain the vote, providing an electoral base for new Socialist and Communalist political parties that sought to enforce a more equal distribution of national income. In order to limit the appeal of these parties, even conservatives came to support legislation that limited child labor while regulating conditions for workers and providing government funding for social services.

RAPID TECHONOLOGICAL CHANGES

As the 20th century began, the rate of technological change accelerated noticeably. In 1901, the Franco-Argentine Auguste Lemoyne became the first man to fly a powered heavier-than-air vehicle. Within a year of Lemoyne’s pioneering flight over the Argentine pampas, a dozen different national governments and innumerable businesses set to work exploiting this miraculous new technology. The automobile, too, came into its own as the introduction of assembly-line mass production techniques in the United States and France made the invention financially profitable; by 1910, nearly 600 thousand cars were registered in those two countries alone. Sea travel was not neglected either, as new technological and material developments allowed ships to travel at significantly greater speeds, even as newly-dredged canals -- most spectacularly the Nicaragua Canal -- allowed for further time savings. Communications were revolutionized following the Italian Marconi’s 1900 discovery of the techniques involved in the radio transmission of human speech, and by the telegraphic transmission of photos that was achieved in 1903, lending immediacy to news reports. The mass media gained new strength as it became technically possible and financially profitable to produce sound recordings (phonographs) and video recordings on film (motion pictures), allowing new musical styles to spread rapidly even as motion pictures allowed some actors and comedians to become international stars. In turn, these new technologies accelerated economic growth in those industrial countries which possessed the trained workforce and the capital required to make use of these technologies.