Dawn of the Belle Epoque: The Paris of Monet, Zola, Bernhardt, Eiffel, Debussy, Clemenceau, and their Friends

Abstract

This book explores the private and public lives of well-known artists, composers, architects, poets, novelists, sculptors, playwrights, actresses, dancers, entrepreneurs, and politicians in the last third of the nineteenth century. McAuliffe’s deep research in both primary and secondary sources, combined with her skilled reconstruction of social and professional networks, results in a wealth of fascinating, roughly interwoven biographies and historical events. The reader is treated, for example, to such diverse morsels as the vision of Claude Debussy climbing a rope ladder to the bedroom of his close friend’s wife while he was a guest in the couple’s summer home, and the phenomenal contributions Gustave Eiffel made to the success of French aircraft and radio communications during World War I. Professional historians of France and of French culture, arts, and literature will wonder what contribution this book—intended for a general audience and devoid of any explicit argument—makes to our scholarly understanding of the belle époque. Its examples demonstrate how individuals negotiated their way through this period of crumbling tradition and extraordinary innovation in the midst of major economic and political upheavals. McAuliffe unearths both the mundane and sublime encounters with change, from Emile Zola’s and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s bicycle-induced broken arms and their proclaimed distaste for mechanised speed, and the prolonged controversies over the building of the Sacré Coeur basilica and its symbolic counterpoint, the Statue of Liberty, to the electrical and mechanised wonders of the 1889 and 1900 Paris Expositions. Much of the narrative focuses on her subjects’ initial failures and subsequent successes, and on their uses and abuses of extra-marital affairs and social-professional networks as they climbed upwards or, in several cases, fell into states of degeneration.