La Belle

1
La Belle Époque

• The fairy-tale state of mind of the privileged
  classes occurring between 1890 - 1914

2
Origins

• took place during a period of world peace
• was the product of a new class that had acquired
  wealth through the industrial revolution and
  technological advances
• based on a new kind of order imposed by an
  insecure privileged class

3
Characteristics

• Denial of the grim realities of life
• Embrace of manners and etiquette
• Rejection of showing any kind of emotions
• Deification of technology

4
Dormitory at a Russian factory
5
Salvation Army coffins were used as beds for
the destitute.






























































6
Poor children were dependent on collective soup
kitchens.



7
Children at work under terrible
conditions








8
Welsh mine workers
9
Ascot
10
Fashions seen at Ascot, 1905
11







Sandown
12
A prim and proper British Edwardian family
13
The Gibson Girl image of the beautiful,
well-bred woman with upswept hair and tiny waist
was created by the American cartoonist Charles
Dana Gibson and inspired by his wife.
14
The grim reality of a poor family
15
The children of the wealthy were brought up by
servants and had little contact with their
parents.
16
Diana of Dobsons, a play based on the grind and
squalor of the London shop girl. Shop assistants
worked long hours for low pay. Their work
was physically exhausting and demanded
considerable concentration as well as the effort
of maintaining an air of politeness.
17
Chicagos 1893 Worlds Columbian Exposition
18
Exposition Universelle
The 1900 Paris Worlds Fair
19
The Machine Gallery
20
National Idiosyncrasies

• Characteristics

21
France
22
Pursuit of pleasure, culture, and beauty
23
Paris was the fashion capital of the world
24

• His novel Remembrance
• of Things Past revealed
• that beneath the surface
• of French refinement,
• there existed all kinds
• of vulgar and perverse
• behaviors.

Marcel Proust
25
England
26
Pursuit of power through the colonization of one
quarter of the world
African banana plantation
27
Queen Victoria
King Edward VII
(1819 1901)
(1841-1910)
28

• Oscar Wilde refused to
• play by Victorian rules.
• When he publicly came
• out of the closet, he
• was condemned to jail.

Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas
29
United States
30
Pursuit of wealth

The Biltmore Estate, Asheville, North Carolina
31
Consuelo Vanderbilt (18761964) was sold to the
highest title in England.
32
Forces that Destroyed La Belle Époque

• Anarchism
• Artists and intellectuals
• The suffragette movement
• Technology
• World War I

33
Anarchism

• Anarchists did not believe in the rule of law.
• As many as five heads of states were assassinated
  by anarchists.

President McKinleys assassination (1901).
34
A police file card of a Russian woman
suspected to be an anarchist
35
Artists and Intellectuals

• began to question the accepted rules and ideas
• explored the interior world of the psyche as well
  as the hypocrisy of society
• created their own conventions

Sigmund Freud
36
Freuds couch
37
The Suffragette Movement

• Women wanted equal rights and the right to vote.
• Women protested their dehumanization into mens
  playthings.

Protestor being led away by bobbies
38
A suffragette on a hunger strike in prison being
force-fed
39
Emeline Pankhurst, founder of the
British suffragette movement
40
Emily Davison threw herself under the Kings
Derby horse Anmer on June 4, 1913.
41
Technology

• was deified by La Belle Époque
• was the means of living a more leisurely life
  style
• leveled class barriers when it became more
  accessible to many
• turned treachorous when used to create the new WW
  I weaponry

42
Entrance to the 1900 Paris World Fair
43
Interior, 1900 Paris World Fair
44
German three-phase motors and transformer factory
45
Ford Motors auto workers assembly line
46
The front page of the New York Times, April 16,
1912
47
World War I

• The reality of the war could not be kept at bay
  by the privileged classes.
• Many aristocrats and rich people volunteered and
  were killed.

48
Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand
The Archduke had just visited the victims of a
bomb intended for him when Gavrilo Princip
stepped out of the crowd and killed him.
Gavrilo Princip being apprehended by Serbian
police.
49
The European Powers, many of whom were related by
blood, attended Archduke Ferdinands funeral in
Vienna.
50
The reality of World War I
51
The end of La Belle Époque