La belle epoque

“It all started with a wake and funeral such as Paris had

never staged even for royalty. In May 1885, four months

after an immense state banquet to celebrate his eighty-third

birthday, Victor Hugo died.

His remains lay in state for twenty-four hours on top

of a mammoth urn which filled the Arc de Triomphe and

-was guarded in half-hour shifts by young children in Gre-

cian vestments.

Within a few yards of Hugo's apotheosis.

an endless procession across Paris the next day included

several brass bands, every political and literary figure of

the day, speeches, numerous deaths in the press of the delirious crowd,

and final entombment in the Pantheon.

The church had to be speciallv unconsecrated for the occasion. By this

orgiastic ceremony France unburdened itself of a man, a

literary movement, and a century.

Paris had just had her face lifted.

Baron Haussmann's ambitious plans for opening up the constricted city

had been executed by 1880.

Of all the stages that made up the city, the most for-

malized and demanding was the salon. [The aristocracy

still cultivated the conversation of what were assumed to

be great minds.

As the salon declined for lack of ladies trained to con-

duct one and through disappearance of the basic attitude

of hommage on which the institution rested, the need for

a verbal arena increased. One of the principal changes.of

la belle epoque was that the great performers moved from

the salon into the cafe.

Here anyone could enter, and each

man paid for his drink. As far back as the mid-eighteenth

century artists and writers in Paris had begun to rely in-

creasingly on the stimulus and exchange of the cafe. (They

were served by young boys, whence comes the word garcon

for waiter.) The term boulevardier was now invented

to describe men whose principal accomplishment consisted

in appearing at the proper moment in the proper cafe.

More than the salon, the cafe came to provide a free market-

place of ideas and helped France produce its steady sue-

cession of artistic schools.The Cafe

Guerbois and the Nouvelle Athenes in the sixties and sev-

enties had nurtured the first artistic movement entirely

organized in cafes: impressionism.

In the title of his famous

play, first produced in 1895, Dumas fils brilliantly named

this special world: Le demi-monde.

Fashion influenced every, domain of life, just after 1890

the velocipede had been introduced with little success.

A few years later, the Prince de Sagan, the most prominent

and dashing nobleman in France pedaled through the Bois

on a “little steel fairy" wearing a loud striped suit and

specially designed straw boater. The city was delighted.

And womens' fashions changed immediately to allow them

to ride astride. The bicycle, symbolizing everything demo-

cratic and modern (and supporting two weekly papers and one daily),

led the way to an upsurge of sport which cul—

minated in the revival of the Olympic games in 1894. After

the bicycle, but without public participation, came the air-

plane. The Eiffel Tower, raised at the cost of fifteen million uninflated francs in 1889.

This great anomaly of modern engineering

aroused protest from a committee of prominent citizens

and expressed all the aspirations of a period

which set out to surpass its heritage. And it remain-

ed: styleless, functionless, unhistoried- the Eiffel Tower in its truculent stance is the first

monument of modernism.