La Belle Epoche

1
La Belle Epoche

• HST 332 Age of Dictators, Europe 1850-1914

2
Definitions (value-free)

• Liberal
• Person who valued modernization and change
  frequently anti-clerical or a member of a
  minority faith.
• Conservative
• Person who valued traditional government and
  morality and wished to retain as much of these as
  possible.
• Social Democrat
• Person committed to social justice and equality.
  Could be Marxist of non-Marxist, revolutionary or
  Revisionist.
• Nationalist
• Person convinced that each people must have their
  own government. Some nationalists were
  Chauvinists.

3
Definitions

• Anarchist
• Person committed to social justice and equality.
  Anti-Statist and wary of all organization. Both
  violent (terrorist) and non-violent.
• Radical
• Advocate of quick, thorough-going change. Most
  extreme exponent of a viewpoint.
• Reactionary
• Conservative who wanted to return to the
  conditions of an earlier era.
• Anti-clerical
• Person opposed to the special privileges of the
  clergy.

4
Mistaken approaches

• Anachronism
• Projecting our knowledge back on past historical
  actors.
• Assuming past historical actors knew the outcome
  of events.
• Moral subjectivity
• Placing contemporary value systems on past
  historical actors

5
Examples

• Empire
• Migration of the term imperialist
• Race
• racial science or eugenics
• Racism/racialism
• Europes Jews, Anti-Semitism and Zionism

6
Forms of government

• Type.
• Relative power of executive and parliament.
• Franchise.

7
The peasantry

• The bed-rock of traditional society and
  government, the peasantry was in profound crisis.
  From the mid-1870s, prices for agricultural
  goods were falling and mechanization ensured that
  fewer people were needed on the land.
  Urbanization, modernization, industrial
  capitalism all seemed to conspire to keep the
  peasantry down.

8
The economy

• Triumph of the capitalist way.
• Statist exceptions.
• The Gold Standard.
• The long depression
• Yukon and South African gold strikes
• Rising living standards.
• Improvement in real wages.

9
The working class(es)

• Social Democrats had an optimist view of the
  future. Socialist intellectuals carried on a
  vibrate, highly-educated public discourse. While
  traditional artisans faced de-skilling,
  industrial workers had seen their real wages and
  standard of living increase, their industrial
  actions achieve ever-greater success.

10
The middle class

• The Belle Epoche was the great day of the middle
  class, as they exercised increasing political
  power and enjoyed gaining social acceptance. The
  family and moral values frequently derided as
  bourgeois had achieved ascendancy among all
  save intellectuals and the nobility.

11
The nobility

• Threatened by the growing wealth and power of the
  middle classes and the growing numbers of the
  working classes, most within the nobility saw
  their world as doomed. This was accompanied by
  an end-of-the-century lethargy and fascination
  with decline.