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The Belle Époque: everything you wanted to know
00:52:04
Mike Rapport discusses life in Paris at the turn of the 20th century – and reveals why it wasn't such a 'beautiful era' for everyone
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- [00:01]
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- [02:02]
John Baucam
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. For many, the Belle Epoque, or Beautiful Era conjures up images of cafes, can can dances and sunny walks along the River Seine. But was life in late 19th and early 20th century Paris really as exciting as the scenes painted by Toulouse Lautrec? In today's Everything youg Wanted to Know episode, John Baucram talks to Dr. Mike Rapport about the real history behind this lauded era, revealing why there was also a darkness to the City of Light.
- [02:46]
Dr. Mike Rapport
As ever, we've got a ton of questions to get through and not much time, but let's kick off with the most straightforward one. What do we actually mean by the term Belle Epoque it refers to the.
- [02:57]
Period just before the First World War. The Americans have a term for it, they call it the Gilded Age or the Gilded Era. So it's really around about 1900, with all the kind of connotations of glamour, of culture, of a little bit of decadence in a slightly kind of naughty way, if you know what I mean. And it's kind of very evocative of that period, with very stylish fashions, those slightly, what seem to be, to us now, rather eccentric looking automobiles and bicycles and things like that, the first airplanes, all those sorts of things. When it started is something which is really open to your own interpretation. The term itself, Belle Epoque, is normally associated with France itself, France before the First World War. And so that means that, by and large, most historians, when they talk about the Belle Epoque, can start in 1871, which is a significant date in French history, or maybe the late 1880s, rather more loosely. So it's the decades before the First World War.
- [03:54]
That's an excellent summary. Thank you, Mike. And how did France specifically arrive at this period of relative stability when so much of the 19th century and the late 18th century had been characterised by such upheaval?
- [04:08]
Absolutely. I mean, you've had 80 odd years of regime change, internal political conflict, a number of revolutions, two republics, two Napoleonic or Bonapartist empires, two monarchies. And so there's an awful lot going on in the late 18th, early 19th or first seven decades or so of the 19th century. What changed in the 1870s was regime stability and the regime which emerged in the wake of the Franco Prussian War. And I think we can talk about that in a moment. In 1871 was the Third Republic, which lasted roughly 1870 to 1940. But what was different about this one was that it managed to survive, it managed to cling on. In the end, it was destroyed by the Nazi invasion of 1940, not by an internal division and revolution. But one of the reasons it is kind of long lasting is because it was the first time that republicans in France took power through elections, not Through Revolution. The First Republic of the 1790s was created when the constitutional monarchy fell in a revolution in 1792. The Second Republic was created in the 1848 revolutions which swept across Europe. And then, of course, you've got this one, the Third Republic, which did come about because of the collapse of the Second Empire of Napoleon iii, which was defeated by the Prussians and their German allies in 1870, 1871, there was bloodshed, there was a revolutionary upheaval in Paris called the Commune. But the big difference this time is, is after a period of proto monarchist rule in the national assembly in the 1870s, the Republicans actually began to win elections. They took power in local town halls, and from there they used that as a springboard, and they finally won elections in the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, and the upper house, the Senate, in 1878. And so, for the first time, the Republicans took power through elections. And that kind of helped to solidify the Republic. And it lasted. There are moments where it has real challenges, where it looks like it's about to collapse under the blows of its opponents, but it survives.
- [06:16]
Thank you, Mike. And in this episode, we're mainly going to be talking about the Belle Epoque in Paris in the capital. What was the city like physically at the end of the Franco Prussian War? Was it something that we would recognise.
- [06:30]
Today a great deal? Yes. Well, of course, during the actual Franco Prussian War, the siege of Paris by the Prussians and the Paris Commune, that working class uprising in 1871, there was a lot of damage to the city, but by and large, the city itself had been changed a great deal under the Second Empire, under Napoleon III and his prefect of the Seine, who was in charge of the administration of Paris, Baron George Haussmann. And Haussmann had made some great renovations in the city. He created the boulevards that we associate with the Impressionists and with Paris today, with those great kind, very beautiful now tenements five or six stories high, with the zinc roofs and all that sort of thing, and the balconies and the windows and the shutters and the coach doors on the ground floor. That's the first thing. The second thing is he constructed markets. Haussmann constructed markets to make sure that Parisians could have access to irregular supplies of food. They knew where to go and so on and so forth, that he built the para sewers as well, and created green lungs, the Bois de Boulogne in the west, the Bois de Vincennes in the east, places where Parisians to go could get fresh air. Howson was determined that Parisians would have access to clean water, fresh air, food and rapid circulation around the city. And to some extent, he succeeded, although there was a price to pay. And that is with the renovations, of course, a lot of the poorer people couldn't pay the higher rents, and they were pushed outwards, eastwards and northwards, especially, and southwards to poorer suburbs, and some of which became shanty towns. But if you went to Paris in the 1870s, as the damage was being repaired after the war and the siege and the Commune, you would have noticed the emergence of the modern city.
- [08:18]
And we'll come to talk about social inequality later on in the episode. Were there many of the same recognizable landmarks they were being created?
- [08:26]
I mean, obviously Notre Dame had been there for hundreds of years. But what Haussmann did was he disengaged it from the clutter of old medieval buildings around it and created the Par Vie, the esplanade, in front of it, so that people could see it in all its Gothic glory. That was one of his other things he did. But some of the newer monuments, the monuments, the really iconic ones, like the Sacre Coeur, like the Eiffel Tower, were built in this period, in the period after 1871, for very different purposes. The Paris Metro, with the iconic Guimar Metro entrances, they belonged to Paris from 1900 and so on. So some of the great monuments, the great statues, like the statue of the Republic on Place La Republique now are a rallying point for political demonstrations. When Parisians come out the street that belongs to the Belle Epoque. So Paris does also change. The cityscape of Paris changes quite dramatically during the Belle Epoque.
- [09:21]
And you mentioned there, the Paris Metro. What are the other big technological advances of this period, then?
- [09:27]
Well, I think. I mean, I get very excited about the history of the Paris Metro. I find it fascinating. I enjoy. When I'm in Sydney, I do actually enjoy riding on it. I love the stations, most of them, but I think one of the most important ones actually is the bicycle, or rather the modern form of the bicycle with the pneumatic tyres, thanks to Dunlop and so on, which actually democratised the bicycle and it allowed Parisians to weave around their city much quicker than they had hitherto. So the metro combined with a bicycle is absolutely crucial. This is also the period, though, of the first flight. Bleriot crosses the channel, famously in his monoplane. You have the first automobiles chugging along the boulevards. Towards the end, you have motorised omnibuses, whereas before they've been drawn by horses. You also have electricity, the city lit up by electricity. So the City of Light, as it was sometimes referred to, is generally La Vie lumiere, with the lighting of electricity. I think the first boulevard to be lit up with electricity was the Avenue de l'opera, lighting the way to the Opera Garnier from the Louvre. So it does transform the city in a very visual way. And the way Parisians went around their.
- [10:39]
Business and talking about Parisians Themselves. How did they showcase their newfound wealth and their sense of style? Because I think when we imagine the Belle Epoque, we think of the fashion houses, we think of those, as you said, those slightly eccentric outfits.
- [10:54]
Yeah, definitely. I mean, that's part of the glamour of the period, part of its glamorous reputation. Women's dresses with the bustles, that kind of S shaped figure which kind of emphasizes the bust and the bottom and so on and so forth. The men's kind of tightly fitted suits with the top hat and tails. You. The kind of. This is the Paris of Proust. Right? You know. Recherche des Temps Perdu In Search of Lost Time is a multi volume epic on upper class Parisian life. A lot of this glamour was on display on the boulevards. The grand boulevard which link the Madeleine up to opera. You can still walk it today. It's incredibly busy, quite touristy. Crossing the opera itself, which is stunning, also very busy, and then along up towards the Boulevard Montmartre and the Boulevard St. Denis and so on. And that was the Boulevard des Italiens just after the Avenue de l'opera has lots of cafes, different cafes attracting the different clienteles. All very, very well to do. This is the place to see and to be seen. This is one of the eras of the flanel. The kind of people who are maybe fictional characters really, who just spend their time idling away on the boulevards and observing the life of the city around them and sometimes critiquing them quietly, not really engaging with it, but just watching, sitting in a cafe. What we would call today people watching. It's kind of a figure conjured up by baudelaire in the 1860s, who wrote about the flaneur. So yeah, there are places like that. The very wealthy went promenading on horseback or in their carriages in the Bois de Boulogne and up and down the Champs Elysees as well. So these are the places where the rich could show off their wealth and meet each other and chat and observe each other.
- [12:38]
Yeah. And what sort of luxury goods did the super rich have?
- [12:42]
Fashion, definitely a lot comes from the provinces. The luxury industries of France itself, of which France is still. One of its great economic strengths is the production of high quality luxury items. Good food as well. Some of the travel guides actually talk about it. You know, these are the things you can have in restaurants and cafes. They spend a lot of time in entertainment and also products from the colonies, the empire. This is a time when France becomes the second biggest imperial power in the world after Britain. In terms of its territorial holdings, if you exclude Russia's Eurasian empire, it has a massive colonial empire. It's kind of a contradiction, a Republican empire. But from that, with the advent of steam power and so on, you get rapid communications, transporting goods from across the world to the department stores. And this, I think, is actually just as important as what people were consuming and buying as to where they did it. And you have the advent of the department store, which is only really made possible by the speed of communication, by the integration of the economy both nationally and internationally, which also, in a sense, democratizes this luxury, because the department store makes these things more accessible, particularly to the middle classes.
- [13:55]
And you alluded to it a bit earlier on, Mike. But in addition to this, you also have a bohemian counterculture that flourishes in places like Montmartre. What sort of people would you have bumped into on the streets there?
- [14:09]
Well, I guess there are kind of two parts to Montmartre, really. There's the Montmartre, which people think of today, and I think rightly, which is on the hill, the Butte Montmartre, around Sacre Coeur. And there you would have encountered a mixture of bohemians kind of artists, really struggling artists. The bateau la voire is where Picasso and his friends lived, teetering at the top of their pillow above the boulevards, really desperately poor there. You would have also rubbed shoulders with anarchists. Beaumartre was a big refuge for anarchists, people involved in radical politics because the rents were cheap there. The kind of process of haussmanization, that construction of boulevards, those luxurious apartment blocks, really pass this area by. Partly because of the topography, right? It's hilly, the streets are winding. Its streets are very, very steep and often are staircases, not boulevards. So it doesn't lend itself to hasmonization very easily. So it becomes a pocket of old Paris. You also had a lot of very, very desperately poor people. There was an area in the center of Montmartre which was called the Maquis de Montmartre. So if you like the scrubland, the wildlands, the wilderness of Montmartre, which was basically a shanty town, but people had their own little plots of land. They grazed animals, and they lived in their shacks and shanty houses there. And it slowly got swallowed up, disappearing in the interwar period. So there, that first part of Montmartre on the hill, you would have rubbed shoulders with political radicals, anarchists in particular, artists, and much of the city's poor population. But down below, lower Montmartre, if you like, along the boulevards that most Parisians kind of went to, gravitated to, which was the Montmartre of the cabarets and the cafes, places like the Chat Noir, the Mirliton and so on, with singers. People like Toulouse Lautrec did a lot of the artwork for these places. Eric Sati, the great pianist and composer, performed in these places. So there, that was where Parisians would often go to slummet, if you like, and enjoy life slightly on the edge. And slumming actually was a term I think the Victorians invented in this period in London, when they did much the same thing. Going to have a look at the poor districts and so on. But in Paris, it also meant. It primarily meant going to these places, these cafes, being entertained by artists from Bohemia.
- [16:24]
And now, this is a very broad question, Mike, but what were the great cultural highlights of this period, do you think?
- [16:30]
Wow. Take your pick. I would say that it's first of all, the International Exposition of 1889, which produced the Eiffel Tower, which, of course is still a much loved landmark in Paris. It wasn't so loved at the time by everybody, was highly controversial. I would also say that this is the period of Impressionism. If you go Back to the 1870s, the last stages of Impressionism, post Impressionism, the onset of kind of more modernist forms of artwork such as Cubism. Picasso invented Cubism in Paris in the early 1900s. You've also got, for example, Art Nouveau. And Art Nouveau is those kind of beautiful vegetal lines, gorgeous colors and so on. Often this is a decorative type of artwork associated with things like jewelry, furniture, internal embellishments of houses and public buildings. The metro entrances, for example, those serpentine green metro entrances which are washed with that green enamel that is Art Nouveau. And that is associated particularly with the International Exposition of 1900. So I think you've got a lot to kind of look at for this period, which is what also gives the era its aura. It's also an era of great kind of philosophical thinking. Henri Bergson, for example, really a philosopher at the College de France, began to think quite deeply about the way we perceive time and experience time. It's a period of scientific breakthrough. This is where Marie Curie is doing her greatest work. And it's just so rich in all this. So I think you're right. It is a very broad question, but it's great fun to kind of go, what went on in this period. It really is very, very, very, very vibrant indeed.
- [18:15]
And just briefly, how would ordinary Parisians have entertained themselves? What were the go to Things they would do on an evening, if you.
- [18:22]
Could afford it, you go to the cinema, which does become cheaper over this period. The cinema basically gets invented in Paris more or less in the 1890s. People like Nelius, for example, that's a possibility. The theater was still very, very popular too, especially along the boulevards. You know, working Parisians promenaded as well. We talked about how earlier, you know, the wealthy went off on horseback along the Champs Elysees and all that and showed off to each other. Working Parisians did the same. You know, they. On Sundays, on their days off, they went walking, they went picnicking. And so this is also a period of growth in sport, both as participants and as spectators. Cycling in particular. This is the period of the Tour de France, for example, where it gets created the Olympic Games. Don't think it hosts the first one, but it hosts a number of them. One of the earlier Olympic Games when they get revived in this period. So sport is very important too. Also, reading print becomes cheaper, Printing processes become cheaper. So people read newspapers, people read magazines, which start to serve such a wide diversity of tastes. Suddenly magazines are not just highbrow things. Magazines are printing pictures. They begin to print in color in this period, or try to. They do all sorts of things and they have a wide variety. Because this is the rise of the mass media too. Rise of popular literature. This is also why it's remembered, really. I think it's quite a vibrant period.
- [19:48]
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- [21:27]
Dr. Mike Rapport
As you explain in your new book, this wasn't such a beautiful era for everyone. You alluded to the pockets of poverty in Montmartre. Were there any other areas of desperate poverty around the city?
- [21:39]
Yes, absolutely. I think it's worth bearing in mind that we talk about the Belle Epoque. And so far we've been focusing on the more glamorous side and cultural side. And that does exist, right? That is a reality. But it's a reality for a relatively small amount of people. One statistic I've read is that around about 80% of all Parisians, if you measured by how much wealth they pass on at the time of their death to their children, 80% in this period are classified as poor because they have a relatively small amount of money and of goods that they pass on. 72% of those are classified as indigent, which means they have nothing to pass on to their children and a lot of the working poor. These are the Parisians who service this lustrous city. But this is the other side of it. The wealth distribution in this period is shocking. In 1910, something like 90% of France's national wealth is owned by the top, wealthiest 10% in society. And the Parisian poor tended to live in the bits that the tourists didn't see. So you're looking at Belleville, Mellemonton, and beyond that you had areas, an area called the Zone, which was an area between the limits of the city and the ill fortifications that were meant to protect the city. And that is desperately poor. You have shantytowns. You also have the industrializing suburbs outside the 20 arrondissement proper. And these areas are desperately poor. They are often made up of people who've migrated to the city from the countryside in search of work. You often then find that the second generation of people find themselves very much dissociated from the city itself as well. The Belle Epoch is a period which is really also associated quite heavily with prostitution. It's been glamorized, but with the high class brothels visited by Prince of Wales, the future Edward vii, and so on. But it was A really squalid, horrible existence. I think the prefect of police estimated that something like 7,000 women are officially registered as sex workers. But the figure of people who are working off the formal police registration are likely to be much, much more. Some estimates like 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 women trying desperately to scrape a living together through that. Alcoholism was rife. One historian called it the great collective binge. But absinthe becomes a real problem in this period, and there's crime as well. I mean, it's not terribly dangerous city, but there are areas which were these dispossessed youth of these kind of impoverished suburbs. Many of them formed gangs, mostly fighting turf wars amongst each other for possession of territory, ownership of territory, above all, control of prostitution gangs called Apaches, who created something of a sensation in the press, who become representative of the dark underbelly of the city.
- [24:38]
And how did social inequality influence radical.
- [24:42]
Politics very, very strongly. This is a period where you get the emergence of different types of anarchist activism in particular, but also the emergence of a more organized democratic form of socialism and the forerunner of the French Communist Party as well. So the most dramatic was anarchism, and that took three forms. The first form was perhaps the most well known, at least to an English language readership. And that's the various anarchist assassination attempts and plots against individuals and groups of people. So you had assassination attempts against heads of state, you had bombings in Paris, restaurants getting bombed by anarchists, often loan shark anarchists, who are seeing that as a way of destabilizing what they regard as the bourgeois capitalist order. Propaganda by deed, in the hope that this would inspire others to action. This was particularly bad in the 1890s, where you had really, what would be called the first modern terrorist style attacks on people who really were bystanders. Terrorism up to this point had targeted individuals, people involved directly with the gate heights of state, for example, judges and so on and so forth. But ultimately, in the end, the first bombing attack on a cafe, because these people were thought to be bourgeois, may not have had much to do with politics or the state. But hey, they were the victims. This is terrifying for a lot of people, as it would be today. So there's that that began to run its course. The most dramatic one in many ways is syndicalism, which is the idea from the late 1890s that if you were a worker, if you organized into a massive nationwide trade union, you could have a general strike. And if you had a general strike, if every single worker in France went on strike on the same day and held to that strike, the entire capitalist system would collapse, the bourgeois state would collapse, and you would usher in a free, egalitarian society. And there are attempts at doing that, although they're crushed by a combination of bringing in the military, bringing in the police, heavily policing demonstrations, sometimes quite violently, and also by the fact that syndicalism, in a sense, becomes a victim of its own success. Many French workers joined French trade unions not because they really believed in the revolutionary struggle of the syndicalists, but because they were quite successful at winning strikes, gaining concessions from employers, who realized that if we don't concede, worse could happen. So in a sense, that could be one why syndicalism doesn't succeed in ushering a new revolution. The third form of anarchism was just on the eve of the First World War, motorized. The Bonneau gang, led by a chap called Bonneau, goes around robbing banks, killing a lot of people in the process, stealing the money, because theft was considered by some anarchists to be a revolutionary act. And eventually they die in a hail of bullets. But what alarmed the authorities was that they came and went in motor cars, early motor cars. So they were motorized criminals or motorized anarchists. And in the end, the police respond with the same. They chase them down in motorcars. Clemenceau's Gardes des Tigre Brigade of Tigers. Socialism organizes in two ways. First of all, you have the communists, people who become the communists after the First World War, who believe in class struggle and revolution and so on and so forth, but eventually, in the end, become a constitutional party. They end up kind of contesting elections. But the more successful socialists are the ones who we would call social democratic, right? So they're the ones who do contest elections, who believe in republicanism, who believe in democracy, who want reform and want to achieve it through parliamentary means. And they are really the ancestors of the modern day French Socialist Party. So there are different ways in which workers, the poor and so on could mobilize, because this is a country which has universal male suffrage. So they can reach out, activists can reach out to a wide electorate.
- [28:49]
And on the subject of suffrage, is there a women's suffrage movement in France at this time?
- [28:54]
There is. It is relatively small compared, say, with the suffrage movement that existed in Germany before the First World War, that existed in Britain, North America, definitely much smaller. There is a suffrage movement which campaigns. There are points where it looks like it actually might even be successful. Marguerite Durand is one of them, who campaigns as a massive march on Bastille Day in 1914. So weeks before the First World War breaks out. And they have the sympathy of the French Socialist prime minister at the time, Rene Viviani, who's quite keen on the idea that gets stymied by the First World War, of course, and it gets shelved. And women didn't get the right to vote till 1944. There was suffragist movement, a suffragette movement, most notably Hubertine Auclair, who's the most active. But it's nowhere near as kind of militant as those you see in, say, the United States or in Great Britain, partly because almost by definition, not exclusively almost by definition, if you are in favor of women's suffrage, not always, but generally speaking, you are probably in favor of the Republic as well. And the French Republic had a number of threats to it. Both outside people were very worried about Germany, but also interior people were always worried that the monarchists might come back, the anti republican, anti democratic authoritarian forces might try to overthrow it. And there are points where it looked like that might happen in the 1880s and 1890s. So a lot of women feminists who were quite keen on the idea of the suffrage were reluctant to push too hard and the fear that they might destabilize the state, destabilize the republican order, the democratic order. Also French feminists were much more interested tackling the problems that denied women control over their everyday lives. And above all, they were worried particularly about the limitations placed on women's rights by the Napoleonic Code of 1804, which is still very much in force. And so much of the feminist campaign targeted that the reform of the Napoleonic Code as opposed to the suffrage.
- [31:03]
And we can't really talk about this period without discussing the Dreyfus affair, which really dominates the 1890s onwards. For the benefit of listeners who aren't familiar with that controversy, can you just give us a brief explanation of the main events?
- [31:18]
It is complicated, but fundamentally, a Jewish artillery officer, officer who had been seconded. A young man, a Captain Alfred Dreyfus, had been convicted by the French military of espionage, of leaking secrets to the Germans. The fact that he was Jewish becomes very important in the affair. Fundamentally. Initially, most French people thought the army must have got their man. There's a leak. It's horrible. Somebody selling secrets to the German. He a traitor. He should face the severest punishment possible. Some people thought he should face the death penalty. In the end, he was exiled to what was sometimes referred to as the dry guillotine, an island off French Guiana, Devil's island, where he was kept in solitary confinement in really, truly ghastly conditions. And the idea was that he would be left there to die. Fundamentally, the problem with all this is that it very soon, over a couple of years, became quite, quite clear that Dreyfus was not guilty. And this came to light from a number of sources. First of all, Dreyfus brother, Mathieu Dreyfus, worked pretty doggedly to try to uncover the true evidence. And so he got in touch with various French politicians, some of whom became quite sympathetic to the cause of Dreyfus. Also, you had French military intelligence itself. There was a new guy in charge of French military intelligence, Colonel Picquart, who himself actually originally believed that Dreyfus was guilty, just like most other people did. The problem was that the French authorities, the military in particular, were getting very worried by the activities of Machad Dreyfus and others who began to think, wait a minute, some things aren't quite right about, about the conviction of Alfred Dreyfus. Picard's brief was actually, you're in charge now. Find the evidence, bury it, Prove his guilt beyond reasonable. Absolutely, just prove it, bury it, close the case once and for all. So Picard delves into the evidence and he found that actually the critics were right, the army was wrong. Dreyfus was indeed innocent. Of course, this could be potentially career ending for him because there are a lot of people in the high command and in French politics who just wanted the affair to just go away. Picard himself was dogged in many ways, very, very courageous in actually really kind of risking his career and possibly his freedom in doing this, because you could be sent to jail for libel. And in the end, what happened was that he identified the culprit, who was a dissipated, aristocratic army officer named Walsan Esterhazy, who had been selling secrets to the Germans for the oldest reason possible, not ideology, but money. He was desperate for cash. Picquart, in the end, managed to get him to be court martialed. The problem being is that the judges, the military, the army officers who were the judges were pretty biased and acquitted him after half an hour of deliberation. And it was this in early 1898 that prompted what we would now regard as the affair proper, where the whole thing blows up and becomes this massive public controversy. When great novelist Emile Zola appears at the offices of Lehrar, the newspaper partially edited by Georges Clemenceau hen Rue Montmartre presents him with an open letter to the President of the Republic entitled, eventually, when it gets published, j'accuse, I accuse him. He accused the French army of a cover up. He accused a lot of the army officer corps, rightly of antisemitism. Because more and more people are becoming convinced that if Dreyfus had not been Jewish, he probably wouldn't have been convicted. And he denounced anti Semitism in France. And this is what blew up the affair. The affair proper for the remaining period becomes one of a cultural war really, between those who believed that Dreyfus was innocent and they positioned themselves in support of what they saw as the core values of the Republic. Justice, liberty, equality, the values of the French Revolution. Whereas the anti Dreyfusad really position themselves on more authoritarian values. The military, the honor of the army, hardline nationalism, antisemitism. Often many of these people were hostile to the values of the Republic. Many of them were monarchists or crypto monarchists. Many of them were also nationalists of a new type of more authoritarian, racist, hardline nationalist, ultra nationalist type re emerging. It's in this period that the term National Socialism was coined incidentally by one of the anti Dreyfusarts, the writer Maurice Barres. So this blew up. There was really very little common ground between these two sides who get entrenched in their position. So the affair becomes much less about the guilt or innocence of poor Dreyfus languishing on Devil's island in these pestilential conditions, and much more about these bigger ideological issues, this bigger ideological conflict. In the end, the President of the Republic dies in what the British press, I think would call a compromising position. He is in an amorous clinch with his mistress. Although there are all sorts of rumors as to what exactly they were doing, some of them are quite hilarious in their own way. Anyway, so Felix Ford dies, A new president comes in. He's much more in favor of revising the Dreyfus case. And Dreyfus is brought back from Devil's island, retried in 1899 by a court martial. They still find him guilty, incredibly, but they find him guilty with extenuating circumstances, which means that they can let him go eventually. And eventually he's fully exonerated and restored to his rank in the French army, actually promoted in 1906. So yeah, it blows apart some very deep divisions within French society.
- [37:13]
So it almost sees a recalibration of French politics.
- [37:16]
Yeah, up to a point. I mean, in some ways it played on older divisions, divisions between those who kind of supported the heritage of the Revolution of 1789 and the Republic and those who are generally hostile to it, who saw the Revolution of 1789 as a disastrous rupture with France's true monarchist and above all, religious Catholic past. I should emphasize, though, that there are Catholics on both sides of this divide. There are some Catholics who are quite willing to make their peace with the Republic and believed in justice. And so therefore were Dreyfusa, not just anti Dreyfusa. Yeah. So in a sense it plays on these older divisions, but it's overlaid by some new political forces, one of which is a new form of nationalism, one that no longer sits on tradition, hierarchy, harking back for the monarchy, but one that regards nationalism in terms of ethnicity, race, to which certain groups, such as Jews, such as immigrants, can never belong. And one of the reasons Zola himself gets castigated is because his father was an Italian immigrant, so how could he possibly be French? One of the reasons the anti Dreyfus I thought that Dreyfus was guilty was it didn't matter actually whether he was guilty or is at the point he is, he was Jewish, so he could never be fully French. It's a new, much darker form of conservative authoritarian ideology. It also, though, blew apart any attempt to heal the older divisions. There had been a possibility that in French politics that the old kind of Catholic right in France had made its peace with the Republic. It was called the rallying to the Republic, partly as a means of defending fairly conservative property owning people from socialism and anarchism. So there's a rallying of moderate mainstream Catholics to the Republic. The Dreyfus affair blew that apart and made that kind of compromise very, very hard on both sides. It made republican anti clericalism, which is the other side of all this, of course, much more militant. And there's a push against the Catholic Church and you get a separation, a total separation of the Church and State in 1905. That's perhaps one of the most significant political effects of the Dreyfus affair.
- [39:30]
Now, Mike, let's talk about France's relationship with other nations. Firstly, is it true to say that King Edward VII was a Francophile?
- [39:39]
Edward was absolutely a Francophile. He perhaps most notoriously was a favourite at some of the high class Parisian brothels. But the most important thing I think about Edward was that he was part of a soft power mission that the British government launched in an effort to come to an agreement with the French, particularly over their imperial, their colonial differences. They had long been, of course, colonial rivalries overseas in the struggle for empire. But there were other threats, other things that people worried about, not least the rise of Germany. So what actually happened was Edward visits Paris. I think it's in 1903. And initially he is treated with a great deal of hostility by the prison crowds. He's the son of the monarchy, so a monarchist, therefore not terribly popular with some of the more republican left leaning Parisians. And also he's British, one of the old rivals of the old enemy. However, by the end of it, he so charms Parisians with his character. He was a bon vivard that he becomes very popular. And by the end of it, he was cheered by Parisian crowds whenever he appeared. And this becomes part of a kind of a softening of French public opinion. It's not the main reason the entente cordiale, that political understanding, kind of quasi alliance, if you like, between the French and the British gets signed in 1904. Far from it. That's geopolitics, that's national self interest on both sides. Size, that's security, mutual security. But it definitely was an act of soft power that helped to smooth over public opinion and made it more receptive to the idea of an agreement with the British.
- [41:19]
And Mike, you mentioned it just there, and we've obviously talked about it in the context of the Dreyfus affair. But how has France's relationship with Germany evolved during this period? Has there always been tension simmering beneath the surface since the Franco Prussian War?
- [41:34]
By and large, yes. But those tensions ebbed and flowed. The idea that Germany, after all, annexed Alsace and the northern part of Lorraine in 1871 at the end of the Franco Prussian War. There is a kind of a movement, a sense of what at the time was called revanchiisme, the desire for revenge against Germany and the retail taking of the lost provinces. If you go to the Place de la Concorde today, you'll see the various statues representing France's great cities. They're all geographically arranged according to the same points of the compass at which they're roughly found on the map of France. Strasbourg. Strasbourg on the northeastern corner is there in this period. It was covered in a black shroud as a symbol of mourning the lost province of Alsace. So yeah, there was a great depth of animosity about that. But formally, relations between France and Germany were entirely hostile in this period. There are periods of cooperation, there are periods where governments on both sides try to ease tensions and so on and so forth. It does blow up in the Dreyfus affair, obviously, because that's a case of espionage, of a national security leak, where somebody within the French army and eventually the true culprit was found, is handing secrets to one of the Other great enemies of France. That's going to blow up Germanophobia to a great degree. Right. The French, however, were a little bit more secure, ironically, in this period, geopolitically, because right about the time just before the Dreyfus affair, in 1893, they had signed an alliance, a military alliance, with Russia. It's the first time since the Franco Prussian War that France had broken its diplomatic isolation and had an ally on the other side of the German empire. So one of the reasons the Dreyfus affair becomes so urgent to the French high command when that blows up in 1894 is they want to be able to show to the Russian allies that they can get a handle, that they can be trusted, they can get a handle on whoever is leaking information to their common enemy, if you like, the Germans, and that they're not weak, they're not incompetent, they're not blundering, they've got control of this. So that's why the denial also kicks in. It's not the only reason. Anti Semitism plays a part and so on, and anti Republican values play a part. But there is a pragmatic element here as well. They want to show their Russians that they are a reliable, dependable military ally.
- [44:02]
And so the outbreak of War in 1914, then, is that treated as something of a shock, or is it coming?
- [44:10]
People did, I think, see it as a shock. I mean, you've got the kind of traditional image of people going joyfully off to War in 1914. I don't think that's true. If you read some of the more private memoirs and diaries of people, Marguerite Durand is one of them. The French feminist is saying, there are people crying on the street, especially at the railway stations, when people are saying goodbye to relatives. There was almost more like a resignation. One of my students at Glasgow Uni, where I teach, is French, and he told me that his grandfather, when they heard about the war breaking out and the efforts of the great French Socialist politician Jean Jaures to stop it by reaching out to his German colleagues, by reaching out to the Belgians, by speaking to the British. His assassination as the Germans were invading Belgium seemed to remove the last possibility of peace in France. And my student told me that his grandfather remembers people coming in from the fields being told that Georres had been assassinated, and people saying, matanon, honora la guerre. Now we'll have war. And not saying that joyfully, but saying that, oh, my gosh, it's happening again. So it does come, I think, as a shock, a Great deal of sadness, a great deal of anxiety. There is an overlay of kind of national unity. Even that deep division caused by the Dreyfus affair gets temporarily healed in what is called the Union Sacre, the sacred Union, the national unity. In face of the common enemy, external enemy, diplomatically, is it a shock? Well, what is interesting is the French people within the French Foreign Ministry had worked very hard, I think, to kind of find new ways of conducting foreign affairs. My friend and colleague Peter Jackson wrote a very good book on this called beyond the Balance of Power, where he points out that actually, some of the ideas about international cooperation over lots of different things, over forms of, if you like, European integration, ways of conducting foreign affairs in ways that are much more about cooperation, about working together, about speaking to each other, about understanding each other's differences that arises within the French Foreign Ministry on the eve of the First World War. And it gets ruptured really quite tragically in many ways by 1914. So, yeah, I think the First World War is more a shock, actually, than anything else, and, of course, ultimately becomes a massive tragedy for everybody concerned.
- [46:34]
As we wrap up this episode, Mike, and we think about the term Belle Epoch, beautiful era. Does that come retrospectively when people are looking at the horrors of the Great War? Does it stem from that nostalgia, would you say?
- [46:48]
Absolutely. It's not a term people used at the time. People didn't say, we're in a belle epoque. People were more likely to say at the time before 1900, fin de siecle, end of the century, which was often a bit more a term more laden with anxiety. Where are we going? What's technology doing to us? People were worried about the impact of technology, just as we are today. And so the term belle epoque was coined retrospectively. It become particular, particularly popular in the 1930s when the dark clouds in Europe were forming again, and people said, what have we lost? What has gone wrong? And people looked back and began to romanticize this period and began to call it the Belle Epoch, the Beautiful Period, or the Gilded Age, if you like. And so, yes, the term is still used to define that particular period those decades before the First World War.
- [47:36]
Finally. How do you think we should remember the Belle Epoch today, then?
- [47:41]
I think one way of remembering it is that it tells us a lot of the issues people back then faced were confronting similar issues that we are facing today. For example, I've mentioned already concerns about technology and the impact technology has on the human psyche, on human sociability, on communication immunities, fears of atomization. We're worried about iPhones and us plugged in all the time. People are worried about the way modern society, with its speed, with its technology, with its remoteness, can atomize communities and break them down into just isolated individuals. People worried about that over 100 years ago. We are worried now especially about misinformation and fake news. Well, if you want a great example, an earlier example of misinformation, fake news, falsified evidence, have a look at the Dreyfus affair, especially the way the media responded, particularly the anti Dreyfusad media, which basically recycles lies, recycles misinformation, because its cause, its position was more important than the truth, than justice. So in a sense, what the Belle Epoque tells us is in many of the things we're worried about today, we've been there before, and many of the solutions that people talked about and proffered may have been ignored. And a lot of very good people from all kinds of political perspectives try to navigate their way through it and try to understand it and try to find solutions to it. I think if we want to end on an optimistic note, I think if the Belle Pot tells us anything, is that it's possible to find our way through the dark times. I know the Belle epoch doesn't end well. It ends with the First World War, as we've discussed. But that doesn't mean that ours need to do the same thing.
- [49:33]
John Baucam
That was Dr. Mike Rapport, reader in Modern European History at the University of Glasgow. His latest book is City of Light, City of Paris in the Belle Epoque. He was speaking to John Baucam. Thanks for listening. Listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.