Liane de Pougy, dancer, socialite and courtesan, was well known in Paris as a headline performer at top cabarets. Burlesque performance styles were more mainstream in Belle Époque Paris than in more staid cities of Europe and America. The Folies Bergère was another landmark venue. The Moulin Rouge cabaret is a Paris landmark still open for business today. For Paris's less affluent public, entertainment was provided by cabarets, bistros and music halls. Those who were able to benefit from the prosperity of the era were drawn towards new forms of light entertainment during the Belle Époque, and the Parisian bourgeoisie, or the successful industrialists called the nouveaux riches, became increasingly influenced by the habits and fads of the city's elite social class, known popularly as Tout-Paris ("all of Paris", or "everyone in Paris"). Some of the artistic elite saw the Fin de siècle in a pessimistic light.Īrt Nouveau style coffee service in Meissen Porcelain, by Theodor Grust, 1902. Conflicts between the government and the Roman Catholic Church were regular during the period.
Poverty remained endemic in Paris's urban slums and rural peasantry for decades after the Belle Époque ended. France had a large economic underclass who never experienced much of the Belle Époque's wonders and entertainments. It was not entirely the reality of life in Paris or in France, however. It was a cultural center of global influence, its educational, scientific and medical institutions were at the leading edge of Europe.
The defeat of Boulanger, and the celebrations tied to the 1889 World's Fair in Paris, launched an era of optimism and affluence. It was also a period of stability that France enjoyed after the tumult of the early years of the Third Republic, featuring defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the uprising of the Paris Commune, and the fall of General Georges Ernest Boulanger. Two devastating world wars and their aftermath made the Belle Époque appear to be a time of joie de vivre (joy of living) in contrast to 20th century hardships. Grand foyer of the Folies Bergère cabaret Palmer: " European civilisation achieved its greatest power in global politics, and also exerted its maximum influence upon peoples outside Europe." The Belle Époque was a period in which, according to historian R. R.
The Belle Époque was so named in retrospect, when it began to be considered a continental European " Golden Age" in contrast to the horrors of the Napoleonic Wars and World War I. In this era of France's cultural and artistic climate (particularly within Paris), the arts markedly flourished, with numerous masterpieces of literature, music, theatre, and visual art gaining extensive recognition. Occurring during the era of the Third French Republic, it was a period characterised by optimism, regional peace, economic prosperity, colonial expansion, and technological, scientific, and cultural innovations. The Belle Époque or La Belle Époque ( French: French for "Beautiful Epoch") is a period of French and European history, usually dated to between 1871–1880 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914.