This is the name given to the period in French history from the end of the nineteenth century until the beginning of World War I. It was a time of great optimism, in spite of enormous social upheavals and unrest which had begun around sixty years before. France enjoyed a sense of prosperity and peace with its European neighbors there were significant new inventions and brilliant innovations in the arts.

In this “golden age” there was also a sense of anarchy and a world-wide trend against the conventional, because of a series of social and aesthetic revolutions earlier in the 19th century. These changes were only the beginning, of course, but it was a heady time.

Brief chronology
1900 Paris universal exhibition (http://www.nga.gov/resources/expo1900.shtm)
 There were several other such exhibitions earlier; they were opportunities to take  stock of new inventions –  in Paris 1889 the Eiffel Tower was featured;  there  were some also in other places in the world
 This one was especially grand; it featured “Palace of Electricity,” and was the  most revolutionary in  terms of inventions
Guide Hachette (Paris newspaper) report: In the centennial museums, divided into many sections, the Fair shows the ascent of progress step by step-from the stagecoach to the express train, the messenger to the wireless and the telephone, lithography to the X-ray, from the first studies of carbon in the bowels of the earth to the airplane…It is the exhibition of the great century, which opens a new era in the history of humanity.

 Boxer Rebellion against growing foreign influences breaks out in China

 Large exhibition of the works of sculptor Auguste Rodin held in Paris

 William McKinley is elected President of the United States

1901  death of Queen Victoria, the woman who had represented moral values and  adherence to principles. Now that she was gone, it was permissible to enjoy  oneself – the English equivalent of La Belle Époque was the Edwardian Era

 Australia declares itself a republic and inaugurates its first parliament

 Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo, NY

 Astronomer Sir Richard Ball holds a conference in Milan on “possible  communication between earth and mars.” Sir Richard is skeptical, but Italian  Nicola Tesia says, “in a short while we shall be in communication with mars.”

 Russian writer Leo Tolstoy quoted in German newspaper Die Zeit: “God does  wrong! But if God does wrong, he is not good: hence, he does not exist at all.”

 Mrs. Anne E. Taylor, a 43-year-old widow, throws herself over Niagara Falls in a  barrel, risking her life to pay a mortgage. She succeeds.

 First distribution of Nobel Prizes takes place in Paris

 Guglielmo Marconi transmits a radio message from Cornwall, England to  Newfoundland

 McKinley is assassinated by anarchist Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American  Exhibition in Buffalo

1902 Second Boer War for the independence of two republics of South Africa (1899- 1902) was completed by the victorious British

 Barnum and Bailey circus comes to Paris

 Trans-Siberian Railway complete

1903 although a luxury, already 13,000 autos in France

 Wright Brothers completed their first successful flight, Kitty Hawk, SC

 New American Negro dance, the Cakewalk, is the craze of Paris

 Curie Nobel prize

1904 Lumière Brothers invented the autochrome process for photography

 Japan declares war on Russia over their rival imperialist ambitions for Korea and  Manchuria

 First performance of Puccini’s Madam Butterfly at Milan’s La Scala

 Universal Exhibition at St. Louis

1905 new group of artists, disrespectfully labeled Les Fauves (“wild beasts”) by an art  critic, had their successful debut in Paris at the “Salon d’Automne”
 
 Composer Richard Strauss’s opera Salomé, with text by Oscar Wilde, made its  scandalous debut at the New York Met

 Russian Revolution of 1905 consists of a series of strikes and anti-government  violence against Tsar Nicholas II. The tsar is finally obliged to sign the “October  Manifesto,” promising direct civil liberty and an elected legislative assembly.

 24th exhibition of the Association of Women Painters and Sculptors held in Paris

 Russia and Japan agree to negotiate peace, thanks to the mediation of F.D.  Roosevelt. In general, the Japanese people are not pleased with the conditions and  stage a revolt

1906 Pope Pius X protests to the French people against the separation of church and  state, after the breaking off of diplomatic relations between France and the  Vatican

 San Francisco earthquake

1907 Votes for women turned down in the British House of Commons

 After six years of research, six doctors in Massachusetts have arrived at the  conclusion that the human soul weighs about an ounce. Experiments have shown  that when dying patients are laid on a balance, their weight, after they have drawn  their last breath, is one ounce less than before. An observer reports, “At last  the soul is being studied by scientific principles and experimental methods.”

Dreyfus Affair
Special mention should be made of the Dreyfus Affair, as it was a political scandal which dominated France during the 1890s and early 1900s, dividing the country between nationalists and the upholders of the truth (the left). It involved the wrongful conviction for treason of Alfred Dreyfus, for treason. Dreyfus was the highest ranking Jewish artillery officer in the French army. Based on some documents found in a waste-paper basket, he was charged with passing military secrets to the Germany Embassy in Paris. In 1894 he was convicted and sent to Devil’s Island in French Guiana. By the time it was realized that they had little evidence, it was politically impossible to withdraw the charges. Dreyfus’s cause was taken up by many, including the writer Emile Zola. Dreyfus was finally exonerated in 1906, readmitted into the army and even made a knight in the Legion of Honor. Unfortunately, the factions created by the affair remained in place for decades afterwards and had a number of political repercussions, including the 1905 legislation separating church and state which Pope Pius X vilified (see above).

Art Nouveau (http://www.nga.gov/feature/nouveau/exhibit_intro.shtm)
For political and social reasons, Paris was the scene of great turmoil during the several years before 1900. In many ways, the century had ended badly and there was a desire to change the atmosphere and create a new beginning as a response to the industrial urban environment. One innovation was a new decorative style which grew out natural forms, but in a stylized manner and the remaining interest in Japanese. Picasso and others in his circle were certainly aware of this phenomenon and, to a certain extent, their work was a reaction against it.

cafés
The café, in some ways, the café is a distinctly French phenomenon. Their rapid growth during the middle of the 19th century can be attributed to rapid urban transformation which resulted in the need for people, accustomed to village life, to seek alternate means of finding connections in an accessible public forum for social life. As early as 1830, Paris was regarded as the center of revolution and the birthplace of modern leisure. The number of cafés in Paris between the 1840s and 1900 grew from 4,500 to 30-33,000 – more than in any other European city. These places had many names – bistros, cabarets, brasseries, bouchons, bibines – but all served a similar function: to provide a place for people, primarily the working class to congregate, drink, socialize, and, even, stir up unrest. Their growth also coincided with the rise of the working class and the organizing of socialist movements. In addition, by the end of the century, in this climate of anarchy, they also became the leading centers for artistic and intellectual discourse, replacing the role of the salons, which primarily catered to the upper classes.
Regulations governing the cafés varied throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries depending on who was in charge. The big concerns seemed to be about rowdiness and closing times – sometimes midnight, sometimes 2:00 A.M., at one time 4:00 A.M. There are reports of workers arranging their working days around breaks at the café, it seems clear that most, if not all, opened at a very early hour of the morning (no matter when they closed).
Patrons of the café had their meals and drank wine, beer and absinthe, for the most part.

Montmartre
It was on this location that St. Denis, 3rd century Bishop of Paris, and the patron saint of France, was beheaded around 250 C.E. The area was called the “mountain of the martyr.”

Montmartre was not incorporated into the city of Paris until 1860. Before then it had been an outlying suburb, where sheep were still put out to pasture and wind mills were still in operation. Its rural character was part of its appeal as more and more people moved in and the area grew into a symbol of gaiety and the Bohemian life.

Even after incorporation, it was still on the fringes of Paris (and thus not subject to the strict enforcement of its laws). As the local nuns had been making wine there for some decades, it had become a natural drinking place. Thus, from the beginning, Montmartre became an arena where traditional boundaries were blurred – between the fine and popular arts, between the artist and the audience, between the “high” and the “low” life, between the anarchist and the conservative. It was a place where religious traditions fell under the pressure of prostitution, alcohol and other forbidden pleasures. Prostitutes, masquerading as bar maids, served all equally.

More importantly for the play and for western culture, Montmartre was the capital of the arts and a key intellectual center of Paris. The cafés, unlike the Salons of the 17th and 18th centuries, were open to all.

The Basilica
The Catholic Church has been experiencing a fall in membership for some time around 1900 and it is believed that the construction of the Basilica of Sacré Coeur at the highest point in Montmartre was a strategy to confront the growing secularity there and in the city of Paris as a whole. Built in 1899, ten years after the Eiffel Tower, its grandeur and placement suggested that Montmartre was actually a site for religious pilgrimage, and thus it set up a sharp dichotomy between the sacred and profane nature of the area. Ironically, the basilica’s original plans called for a gift shop, and in some ways, it became part of the commercialism the church sought to offset.