Belle Époque It was used to call the time in the history of Europe between the last two decades of the 19th century and the outbreak of the Great War of 1914. Between April and November 1900.
Paris hosted a spectacular Universal Exhibition , was visited by nearly forty million people. Above all, it showed a reality:the extraordinary confidence that Europe had in its values and in the future. The ascendancy of European thought, art, literature and music (Wagner, Verdi, Puccini) was indisputable in 1900. London was in that year "the heart of the world" (in the words of H. G. Wells). Paris was the center of art and elegant life, which had its extension in Monte Carlo, the Côte d'Azur, Brighton, the Venetian Lido, the Italian Riviera, Baden-Baden, Biarritz (and near it, and for Spain, in San Sebastian). Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Munich, Barcelona, Rome, Florence were the epicenters of modernity. The world seemed fascinated by the historical and artistic legacy of European civilization:the greatest American novelist, Henry James (1843-1916), made it the subject of several of his best works (Daisy Miller, Portrait of a Lady, The Cup golden). American tycoons like Frick, Mellon or Isabella S. Gardner bought fabulous collections of European painting.
To be sure, much of Europe, perhaps 50% of Western Europe and 90% of Eastern Europe, remained rural Europe. But this was partly misleading. London, with 6.5 inhabitants in 1900, was the financial center of the world, a fast-paced and intense river port, and the main industrial center of its country. It centralized the national network of roads and railways, which tilted over its large stations (Victoria, Paddington, Euston, Waterloo). From 1900-1910 it had a complete electrified metro network. It had city buses from 1904, and taxis from 1907. It was the center of government and the British Empire, administered from Whitehall. It was well endowed with large hotels, restaurants and luxury cafes (such as the Royal, Oscar Wilde's favorite venue); of great museums and art center (the British Museum, the National Gallery, the Tate Gallery opened in 1897, the Victoria and Albert Museum of 1909). London was the capital of consumption with department stores such as Harrod's (1905), Marks and Spencer (1907) and Selfridges (1909), as well as luxury commerce for the aristocracy and high society in streets such as Bond and Jermyn.
Society in the Belle Époque
The last two decades of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th, the Belle Époque, as it was nostalgically called in France after the First World War (equivalent to the golden age of the United States and Edwardian England), were for Europe a period of profound economic and social transformations. The second industrial revolution (steel, electricity, chemical industry...), industrial and urban development, multiplied the opportunities for employment and social mobility. The middle classes, doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, civil servants, teachers, merchants, owners, employees, administrators, technicians, intermediaries, salespeople, warehousemen, etc. were the main beneficiaries of this. The services sector occupied in Great Britain in 1911, for example, 45.3% of the working population; 30% of the population defined themselves as middle class. The industrial working class, linked to mining, the iron and steel and chemical industries and the railways, acquired stability and awareness of its identity as a class:two milestones in the literature of the European working class, Zola's Germinal and Gerhart Hauptmann's The Weavers they appeared in 1885 and 1892, respectively. Around 1900, the industrial working class consisted in Britain of about 13.8 million workers (of which 5 million miners) out of a total population of 41 million, in Germany about 11 million (1 million miners). ), for about six million in France and around three million in Russia and 2.5 in Italy.
Collective life had changed. In the big cities, it acquired an impersonal and anonymous character, where the ancestry of notable families and personalities was increasingly confined to their own circles and spheres:clubs, salons, racecourses, opera houses, casinos, parks or distinguished avenues of the city, summer resorts and where the influence of religious life and churches faded. The press would increasingly shape the consciousness of the urban masses. The presence of these in the streets and public places, and the appearance of new forms of collective culture (the music hall, the popular and sensationalist press, the cinema, sports events), testified to the change.
The aristocracy and the upper bourgeoisie
The elegant residential areas of London's West End (Belgravia, Mayfair) were home to the magnificent classical-style buildings of the wealthy classes and the grand mansions of the aristocracy, and the large administrative and service buildings.
The gentleman, social prototype of Victorian and Edwardian England, whose manners were condensed in the expression fair play ("Fair play"), was an ideal of courtesy, restraint, and restraint. In Paris, the wealthy classes were leaving the center from 1880, moving towards the proximities of the Place de la Estrela, a new and very luxurious neighborhood for high society:Proust, for example, settled in 1919 at number 44 of the street Hamelin.
The elegant portraits of the aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie of the European (and North American) Belle Époque made by painters of conventional taste and extraordinary technical quality like John Singer Sargent, Giovanni Goldini, Philip de László and Ander Thorn (also Sorolla, Zuloaga and others), they expressed the security that the ruling classes still had –before 1914– in their values, lifestyle and social prestige. Sargent, specifically, painted more than eight hundred portraits, all of them beautiful.