Exercises on Belle Époque

(FUVEST) "Lamps are going out all over Europe. We won't see them shine again in our lifetime." About this sentence, uttered by Edward Grey, Secretary of Foreign Affairs of Great Britain, in August 1914, it can be said that it expresses:

a) the realization that the war, which was starting at that moment and which would involve all of Europe, marked the end of a culture, of an era, known as the Belle Époque;

b) the disillusionment of those who know that the war, which was starting at that moment, between Great Britain and Germany, would bury a whole policy of diplomatic efforts aimed at avoiding the conflict;

c) the understanding of those who, being very old, are able to perceive that even that war, although long and bloody, would end one day, allowing Europe to shine again;

d) the illusion that, despite everything, the war that was starting would, because of its deadly and widespread character, be the last major armed conflict to involve all the countries of Europe;

e) the conviction that the war that had just begun and that would involve the entire European continent would be followed by another, the Second World War, before definitive peace was reached.

“[…] Modernity did not emerge virgin in the trenches of the Somme. Long before 1914, it was firmly established in the minds and lives of Europe. The First War did not function as a generating element, but a catalyst, forcing old structures to collapse more quickly and new identities to assert themselves more easily.” (BLOM, Philip. Turning years:cultural change in the West – 1900-1914. trans. Clovis Marques. Rio de Janeiro:Record, 2015. p. 16).

Based on the above statement, we can say that the decades leading up to the First World War:

a) were from generalized wars on the European continent, without any moment of peace.

b) were of complete technological stagnation.

c) were marked by technoscientific progress, which made possible the modernization of large urban centers.

d) did not have a major impact on major European capitals such as Paris and Vienna.

e) had no development in the arts.

(UNIFESP) “We are on the headland of the centuries! What is the point of looking back… We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchists… and contempt for women. We want to demolish museums, libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunistic and utilitarian cowardice.”

This quote, taken from the 1909 Futurist Manifesto, expresses an aesthetic that contributed ideologically to:

a) denial of the idea of ​​progress and later to the conservative reaction.

b) Spanish Civil War and later to the avant-garde movement.

c) Russian Revolution of 1917 and later to World War II.

d) First World War and later to fascism.

e) affirmation of surrealism and, later, for the polarization of the twenties.

Below is an excerpt from an interview with French psychoanalyst Elizabeth Rudinesco.

What was her motivation for writing a new biography of Freud?
Elisabeth Roudinesco: It was important that there was a biography in the French language. And I wanted to show Freud in a different light. I focused a lot on the Vienna issue, putting Freud back in the Viennese context at the end of the century. The idea was to show a Freud divided between the rational and the irrational. His wanderings, conflicts, even in his daily life, which was very important. […] I also wanted to make this synthesis:Freud and women, Freud and the politician in the face of Nazism, Freud in the Viennese context, in the Belle Époque, Freud at the end of the 19th century, with all his family genealogy, and his work in his historical development. (By Robson Viturino, in Frontiers of Thought , published September 26, 2016 )

Rudinesco highlights that, in the biography she intends to write about Freud, she wants to give evidence to the period in which the founder of Psychoanalysis was between the “rational and the irrational”, in the atmosphere of the Vienna of “Belle Epoque”. We can say that this period:

a) was irrelevant to Freud, as psychoanalysis only served to understand primitive societies.

b) represented the decline of the social and psychological sciences and, with them, of psychoanalysis.

c) had no decisive impact on psychoanalytic theory.

d) was important to Freud, as it represented his departure from Vienna to live in the United States.

e) represented the paradox of the relationship between material progress and preparation for total war.

Letter A

Grey's sentence, uttered just one month after the beginning of the First War, reveals the perception of the destructive potential of this one, which threatened the entire progress of Western civilization. Paradoxically, it was this progress, especially in the industrial field, that made possible the invention of the deadly weapons of the First World War.

Letter C

The period before the First World War, known as the “Belle Époque”, was marked by the great transformations of European industrial society, due to the evolution of techno-scientific devices. This built the atmosphere of modernity and progress that, by contrast, would be put to the test with the First World War.

Letter D

Futurism was one of the modernist artistic avant-gardes of pre-war Europe. Its members – especially its main ideologue, the Italian Marinetti – were fixated on the idea of ​​violence and war, as well as on the effusive atmosphere of technological modernization in nineteenth-century industrial society. After the end of World War I, Marinetti supported the idea of ​​the “strong state”, of Mussolini's fascism.

Letter E

Freud and the psychoanalysts who structured the so-called “deep psychology” managed, at the time of the “Belle Époque”, to perceive the paradox in which Western civilization was locked at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. On the one hand, there was all the rage over progress in the techno-scientific area, in the urbanization of urban centers, etc.; on the other hand, the massive investment in the modernization of military weapons, such as bombs, machine guns and toxic gases.