Reviewed by Brian Odom

When Francophiles everywhere contemplate the Belle Époque, what immediately comes to mind are the striking images of Monet’s “Water Lilies,” the incredible originality of a Rodin sculpture and the rich tonality of a Debussy musical score. We long to be transported to the cultural capital of the world, Paris, checking into César Ritz’s new hotel, taking in a Bernhardt performance, shopping at the Bon Marché and attending an Impressionist Exhibition at Nadar’s studio. However, upon arriving we would quickly find our illusions shattered by appalling social inequalities, a startling level of anti-Semitism (of which the Dreyfus Affair was only the most prominent example) and a fierce political struggle for the very soul of the Third Republic. In Dawn of the Belle Époque, Mary McAuliffe takes readers behind the illusory façade and into a beleaguered city as seen through the eyes of its cultural and political icons.

Having previously explored French culture in Paris Discovered, McAuliffe begins her year-by-year account in 1870 when, after a self-imposed 20-year exile, Victor Hugo returned to a city “pummeled in turn by the Prussians, by French government forces and by the Commune.” As McAuliffe makes abundantly clear, “Paris in late spring of 1871 was a shambles.” In the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, a violent mêlée between the Communards and government troops raged all along Haussmann’s broad boulevards. Although the government proved victorious, Communard deaths exceeded 20,000 (a number that McAuliffe notes surpassed that of the revolutionary Reign of Terror) and explosive social tensions were exposed that would lie directly beneath the surface of the Belle Époque. From time to time, these tensions would emerge pitting the faction of order and tradition against the party of reform and social justice.

Conservative leaders such as Thiers and MacMahon led a counter-revolutionary crusade to establish a “Moral Order,” a struggle that “involved monarchy versus republic, Catholic Church versus secular state, and the role of the army” in the new French Republic. Symbolic of this traditionalist movement was the construction of the Sacré Coeur, the Catholic Church’s “monument to white-robed purity” and “visual manifestation of the new Moral Order.” Over the course of McAuliffe’s innovative and subtly woven narrative, the rising basilica stands in moral judgment over the actions of the artists and the citizens of Paris. In diametric opposition to the pristine purity of the Sacré Coeur were many representations of the new secular age that included Charles Garnier’s new opera house, the Eiffel Tower and Bartholdi’s 1886 gift to America, “Liberty Enlightening the World.”

While the many travails of the Third Republic — including the Commune rising, the Boulanger Crisis, the Panama Canal Scandal and the Dreyfus Affair — provide a framework for McAuliffe’s account, the bulk of her narrative consists of the shifting fortunes of the members of Paris’ avant-garde art community as well as its political and social reformers. Impressionist artists such as Monet, Renoir and Degas overcame fierce initial criticism from both the Académie and the public, and eventually gained acceptance of their revolutionary style. While Debussy rejected the label of Impressionist musician, much of his career was spent breaking the traditional boundaries of music and distancing himself from the style of Wagner. There were also the literary giants such as Émile Zola, whose celebrated Naturalist works such as Germinal were influenced by the “revolutionary ideas” that were “percolating throughout French society.”

Of all the tribulations of the age, none divided the art community more than the Dreyfus Affair. McAuliffe argues that the conviction of the Jewish artillery officer on the charge of treason called forth “the full range of fear, hate and misguided national pride that was France’s burden as the century drew to a close.” Desperately grasping for any solutions to an appalling economy and social troubles, the French government tapped into a strain of anti-Semitism that foreshadowed the horrors of the 20th century. The Manifesto of the Intellectuals and Zola’s own J’accuse! were only one side of a debate between pro- and anti-Dreyfusards. As McAuliffe points out, the popularity of the anti-Dreyfusard camp “revealed a resurgence of Boulangist-style nationalism” with a “base in ardently conservative and Catholic right.” While Dreyfus’ supporters viewed themselves as the champions of “a free and just Republic unhampered by the political power of either the army or the Church,” his opponents saw themselves as the defenders of traditional French values.

As the turn of the century approached, many of McAuliffe’s subjects looked upon the upcoming Universal Exposition of 1900, with its Palace of Electricity and the completion of the elaborate Pont Alexandre III that spans the Seine, as a transformative, healing event. Isadora Duncan and the more than 50 million who flocked to the exhibition marveled at what they considered the dawning of a new age.

It is within this psychologically damaged milieu that McAuliffe deftly explores the inner lives of the artists and those who surrounded them, and in the process humanizes these larger-than-life characters. For McAuliffe, these demigods of the art world were ordinary people who fell in love, mourned the loss of loved ones and worried increasingly about their financial security and their legacy. In examining the impact of the death of Hugo, the revolutionary career of Louise Michel and the passionate love affair between Rodin and Camille Claudel, McAuliffe has added a truly remarkable degree of insight into both the lives of the participants and the turbulent world they inhabited. McAuliffe paints with broad, majestic strokes a world that has been lost to us or perhaps never was.

Brian Odom is a graduate of the University of Alabama with master’s degrees in history and library science. He teaches history at Jefferson State Community College, outside of Birmingham, Alabama, and is a reference librarian at Pelham Public Library.