A Beautiful Age
Sometimes, happiness in societies is only recognized in retrospect
The following piece is one in a series of letters to my newborn granddaughter.
Dear Leila,
For about a hundred years now—it’s hard to say exactly how long—the period between 1871 and 1914 in France has been known as “la Belle Époque”: “the beautiful era.”
The people who lived through that period, which sometimes refers to Europe generally, didn’t call it that—the label was applied retroactively, bounded by French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War on one side and the outbreak of the First World War on the other. These were two disasters in French history (one marked the end of French dominance on the continent, and the other, while nominally a victory over its German rival, marked the beginning of the end of French global power). But the 43 years in between are widely regarded as a kind of golden age of French civilization, when that nation’s power, influence, and seemingly indestructible sense of style reached its apogee. It was also a time of racism, sharp class conflict, and appalling sanitary conditions, but these are not things people typically remember, even if historians are likely to note this side of the coin—which is the kind of iconoclasm by which historians justify their existence these days, because that’s what universities pay for. There will probably come a time when the historiographic deck gets shuffled, and la Belle Époque gets replaced by a different term covering a different segment of time. On the other hand, the Middle Ages—which of course weren’t the middle for people living through them—have been with us, to the irritation of medievalists who prefer other terminology, for something on the order of 500 years.
I’m confident you will experience the culture and memory of la Belle Époque long before your childhood is over. You’ll see pictures of the Eiffel Tower (completed in 1889) in a picture book; you’ll see a Monet painting (as likely as on a coffee mug as a computer screen—I’ve got a few Monet neckties); you’ll savor a fruit tart (and maybe your rascally grandfather will slip you a sip of champagne). It won’t occur to you to ask where such artifacts came from, part of a cultural stew that includes Mickey Mouse, (that perpetually youthful rodent is now a century old) and “Ring around the Rosie” (a song about the bubonic plague epidemic in London in the seventeenth century). Such are the ways history circulates.
Other artifacts are more elusive: attitudes, beliefs, assumptions. I sometimes tell my students that History is the story of how common sense changes. Once upon a time it was too obvious for words that sun revolved around the earth, that the Pope was the voice of God, that black people were generally of inferior intelligence. If anything I write gets remembered at all, it’s as likely as not to be for remarkable falsehoods I took for granted. Though I’m hoping for a few shared recognitions and stumbling on a few durable truths that bear noting or repeating.
Next time I’m going to talk about some of these more elusive artifacts, the way they sometimes conflicted with each other, and what this means in the beautiful age in which you were born.