Week 7: Fin de siècle Europe

Cultural shifts

• Growing challenges to established traditions and norms (rationalism, classicism, middle class values)

• Urban growth leads to new experiences and anxieties.

• Human nature increasingly viewed as changeable and volatile, ruled as much by urges and instincts as thought and reason.

Economic and technological optimism

The Crystal Palace, 1851 Hall of Machine

An inter-connected world

Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days (1874)

“By dint of inventing machinery, men will end in being eaten up by it! I have always fancied that the end of the earth will be when some enormous boiler, heated to three thousand millions of atmospheric pressure, shall explode and blow up our Globe!”

—J. Verne, Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863)

“Flaneurs” and urban exploration

“It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude; enjoying a crowd is an art; and only he can relish a debauch of vitality at the expense of the human species, on whom, in his cradle, a fairy has bestowed the love of masks and masquerading, the hate of home, and the passion for roaming.”

—Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen (1869)

Edgar Degas, Place de la Concorde (1875)

Boulevards made for strolling (and seeing)

The department store: Temple of consumerism or source of new anxieties?

Urban excitement and alienation

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge (1895)

Edgar Degas, L’absinthe (1876)

From fixed to evolutionary theories of human nature:

“[F]rom the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows…[W]hilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

—Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859)

Rise of “biological” racism

Sigmund Freud, explorer of the irrational