by Philipp Blom
Speed and exhilaration, anxiety and vertigo were recurrent themes of the years between 1900 and 1914, during which cities exploded in size and societies were transformed, mass production seized hold of everyday life, newspapers turned into media empires, cinema audiences were in the tens of millions, and globalization brought meat from New Zealand and grain from Canada to British dinner plates, decimating the incomes of the old landed classes and enabling the rise of new kinds of people: engineers, technocrats, city-dwellers. Modernity did not rise virgin-born from the trenches of the Somme. Well before 1914, it had already taken a firm hold on the minds and lives of Europe. The War acted not as a creator, but as a catalyst, forcing old structures to collapse more quickly and new identities to assert themselves more readily.
The Vertigo Years had much in common with our own day, not least their openness: in 1910 and even in 1914, nobody felt confident of the shape the future world would have, of who would wield power, what political constellation would be victorious, or what kind of society would emerge from the headlong transformation. By contrast, during the second half of the twentieth century the Cold War created a quite different situation: the outcome seemed uncertain, but it was perfectly clear what was at stake, and equally clear that one of two ideological systems would eventually be victorious. With the collapse of the Soviet empire, some of the openness and uncertainty of the Vertigo Years have reappeared, and today it is much more difficult to say what the future will bring for our societies.
In a large part, the uncertain future facing us early in the twenty-first century arose from the inventions, thoughts and transformations of those unusually rich fifteen yeats between 1900 and 1914, a period of extraordinary creativity in the arts and sciences, of enormous change in society and in the very image people had of themselves. Everything that was to become important during the twentieth century - from quantum physics to women’s emancipation, from abstract art to space travel, from communism and fascism to the consumer society, from industrialized slaughter to the power of the media - had already made deep impressions in the years before 1914, so that the rest of the century was little more than an exercise, wonderful and hideous by turn, in living out and exploring these new possibilities.
To understand this exhilarating and contradictory time, and to see the parallels and differences between it and our present, we must approach it without teleological preconceptions, without seeing these years exclusively in terms of what would or would not lead to the Great War. Instead, we need to look at it with the immediacy of the young Lartigue as he pointed his camera at the number six racing car. If the outcome appears distorted, a subjective image catching only part of the reality, nonetheless it remains the best way to capture the swiftness, the rush, the immediacy of the experience of life during this time.
In the spirit of trying to discover this time on its own terms, I would like to invite you to perform a thought experiment: imagine that a voracious but highly selective plague of bookworms had attacked the world’s libraries eating through books and photos, films and other records, and devouring all historical information dealing with the time between July 1914 and 2000; imagine you knew nothing about the Sarajevo assassination, the Somme, the Great Crash, the Reichskristallnacht, Stalingrad, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, the gulags, or the Berlin Wall, but that history had gently dawned into memory after the turn of the millennium. Imagine you would not see the biographies, thoughts and deeds of the people living in and around 1910 through the prism of a century of monstrous crimes and monumental achievements, but that you could remove these historical spectacles for a while. Imagine yourself looking at the years 1900 to 1914 without the long shadows of the future darkening their historical present, a living moment with all its complexity and its contradictions, its hopes and fears, and with an open future, just as it was lived by the people of that time.
1
1900: The Dynamo and the Virgin
So, you’re going to come, you are already coming, you have come, monsieur et madame, to our beautiful Exposition universelle of 1900. You are in Paris; from afar you have already seen, as in a dream, the structures of the Exposition standing out against the sky of the great city. What programme should you adopt? Where to begin? - from the official guide book to the 1900 World Fair
A simple agonising problem should occupy all of French thought: ‘How can we stop France from disappearing? How can we keep the French race on earth?’ Next to this vital question all others vanish … - Jacques Bertillon, La dépopulation de la France
She was monstrous, if oddly prophetic: there she stood, a buxom bourgeoise 20 feet high, right at the top of the huge Monumental Gate to the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900, the very entrance to a new century. Sailing ahead with the striking aplomb of a battleship on navy day and dressed in fashionable clothes, the plaster allegory of the city of Paris looked like an imperious matron chaperoning a spoilt daughter through the Galeries Lafayette: busty, bustling, arrogant. One could positively hear her barking orders at a timid sales assistant. The critics were not kind: ‘ridiculous’, ‘simply atrocious’ and ‘a triumph of prostitution’ were among the descriptions used by reviewers.
The sculptor Paul Moreau-Vauthier (1871-1936), a rising star of twenty-nine, had conceived of the daring idea of showing Paris as a modern Parisienne - not as a sylphlike girl or a Greek goddess in antique drapery, but contemporary and assured, a mature woman looking forward full of confidence to a new century. He had taken the actress Sarah Bernhardt, ‘the Divine Sarah’, as a model and commissioned the fashion house of Paquin to design a splendid, up-to-the-minute outfit for his work, which was to become a miraculous merging of legendary grace and metropolitan couture.
Monstrously prophetic: La Parisienne crowning the exhibiton gate,
designed to admit 60,000 people per hour.
The result was as calamitous as the official opening itself. The French president, Emile Loubert, had been forced to conduct the solemn ceremony uniting all the grandest beards and tailcoats in the Republic amid the mud, puddles and scaffolding of a partial building site, and the first visitors who came streaming in to see what was the world’s most ambitious fair ever found many of the halls half empty. A contemporary cartoon shows a bewildered crowd caught amid scaffolding and ‘No entry’ signs. The caption reads ‘What’s on show at the World Fair’.
Over the following weeks all the remaining attractions were installed and even the last exhibitor had found his place among the multitudes. The ticket booths at the main gate, underneath the unloved allegory of the great city itself, had been constructed to process sixty thousand visitors an hour, and they were working at capacity. By the end of the exhibition period, some 50 million people had visited the 112-hectare grounds in the heart of Paris, an average of six hundred thousand every single day during weekends.
The exhibition was a grand, outrageous extravaganza, not only a trade fair and scientific convention, but first and foremost a gigantic fairground for local visitors and tourists from Europe, the United States and all around the world. Among them was Jean Sauvage, a schoolteacher from Berlin (German, despite his French name), who lovingly described every detail of his trip to Paris in an essay published in the yearbook of the Seventh Berlin District High School in 1900. Having arrived in the French capital (‘a single second class ticket cost me 69 marks and a few pennies’) in the early evening, the enterprising educator recounted the typical tourist experience, warning his readers of the vicissitudes of being a tourist in a foreign place: ‘it is better to buy a hat over there … A hat purchased in Germany means that one is recognized as a foreigner even more quickly…and becomes the target of constant assaults by tourist guides.’
Suitably disguised as a Frenchman, Sauvage made an extended tour through the city. Sauvage by name but civilized by nature, he was determined to let no detail of daily life escape him.
The sight of the broad, beautiful streets with their tall trees (many of them plane trees) and lively traffic makes one
feel elated. A multitude of shops with their different displays animate shoppers. Many shopkeepers set out their wares on boxes, crates and wooden trestles far into the street to lure customers. Here we can see masses of clothes, there the contents of a soap shop on the pavement, and there foodstuffs; an art dealer offers objets anciens; here we find fresh green asparagus which people love here, there oysters and rare snails (huîtres, escargots).... The street is littered with innumerable scraps of paper containing advertisements for restaurants and department stores. I take some of these advertisements with me.
Sauvage was amazed by the rhythm and speed of life in the metropolis. Even cycle paths were provided:
There are many automobiles in the streets. The velocipedists are fewer in number than in our streets; on the Avenue de la Grande Armée and elsewhere they have a beautiful asphalt lane to themselves. I noticed most of all that [the velocipedists] are less of a nuisance than in Berlin; the constant ringing of bells which makes one so nervous is hardly there at all …
Tramways and omnibuses are there in plenty. The difference between Berlin and Paris is not great: there are still a few horse-powered and heavy steam-powered vehicles, but there is a beautiful electric tram towards the Bois de Vincennes.
If traffic was similar at home, the teacher found other customs very different indeed: ‘I noticed the many urinoires, which are displayed with great lack of modesty. Even cabinets d’aisance [public toilets] are plentiful; close to the Palais Royal there is a whole long passage in a house with a great number of them, which are used assiduously. The urinoires on the Boulevards are usually situated around advertising columns, which in turn are used for advertisements: you read here: L’extrait de viande Liebig indispensable dans toute bonne cuisine, or Bec Auer, or Tendeur pour pantalons.’ Sauvage had to admit that this arrangement had its advantages, but when he saw one of these installations right at the foot of a public monument his sense of propriety was outraged. These French were quite unlike the Germans, after all.
Moving on through the cacophony of advertisements - ‘a roadside automation bears the slogan: Electrisez-vous! ’ - and still cunningly disguised in his French hat, Sauvage finally visited the object of his journey, the World Fair itself. He was stunned. ‘I feel incapable of describing even a small part of this gigantic work,’ he confessed.
Stretching along the Seine from the graceful newly built bridge dedicated to Tsar Alexander III at the beginning of the Champs-Elysées to the Champ de Mars and the area between the Trocadero and the Eiffel Tower (sole survivor of the previous World Fair in 1889), the huge display aimed to titillate, awe and overwhelm. France, it proclaimed, was still the world’s foremost nation. The centrepiece was a group of buildings resembling a gigantic wedding cake - all turreted white icing and allegorical drapery, containing the palaces (every building was a palace here) of decoration, furniture, design and other industries.
All major nations had been given space here to create an architectural representation of their culture. Actually, not quite all - the United States had initially been left out of the first, riverside, rank in this prestigious parade of countries (though Monaco had secured a spot), and only after kicking up a diplomatic storm were the others made to give up pieces of their land to make place for the new pretender. This was only fair, it was felt, even if the defiant Ferdinand Peck, Commissioner-General of the United States, was judged to have overstepped the mark, having not only the tactlessness to remind his hosts that American trade figures were greater than those of France and Germany put together, but also the presumption to state: ‘the United States have so developed as to entitle them not only to an exalted place among the nations of the earth, but to the foremost rank of all in advanced civilization.’ Eh, non! thought his French counterparts privately, with supreme self-assurance, but they gave him almost everything he wanted.
The national pavilions bore eloquent witness to a certain image of Europe and the United States, for with the notable exception of Finland (represented by a flowing art nouveau building), all nations had chosen to represent themselves through pastiches of historic architecture: Gothic for Germany, the nation that simply had to have the highest spire of all; Renaissance for Italy; medieval Moorish for Spain. Britain was represented by a mock Jacobean building by Edwin Lutyens, modelled on the town hall of Bradford-upon-Avon. The United States plumped for Capitol classicism, a building with a dome 156 feet high, crowned by a golden eagle. Identity, these structures suggested, was made up of the distant past, be it in the old countries or in the New World.
Dressed up in old robes: national pavilions at the 1900 World Fair.
If the past held sway on the right bank area, on the left bank it ran wild. Here was one of the exhibition’s principal tourist attractions: ‘vieux Paris’, a fantastical and fantastically kitschy recreation of what Victor Hugo had imagined medieval Paris to have been like, complete with turrets (a hanged man swung from one of them) and wooden-framed houses, a living Quasimodo, dozens of damsels, and knights attacking each other with wooden swords. Street pedlars in historical dress sold refreshments and miniature Eiffel Towers. The theme park, it turns out, is no invention of our time.
Beneath the turrets, putti and rococo scroll work of the official Fair architecture lay a different world: a thrusting, confident modernism. Machines glistened everywhere and new engines and inventions crowded the exhibition halls. The intrepid Berlin teacher Sauvage was determined to see as much as humanly possible. He visited the great exhibition of fruits in the banqueting hall built for 25,000 people; he tried the electric moving walkway with its three different speeds; he was nearly knocked out by the mirages appearing before his eyes in the Hall of Illusions; he visited the metallurgical exhibits, saw the world’s largest diamond; he inspected X-ray machines in action and marvelled at African termite mounds, was wide-eyed at the sight of the Palace of Electricity illuminated by 5,000 light bulbs, dazzled by searchlights with the power of 300 million candles, awed by a huge crane built by C. Flohr in Berlin (‘another area in which German engineering still has claimed victory!’) and humbled by the purring dynamos supplying all these wonders with energy: ‘you look at these huge machines with great respect and also with a distinct chill running down your spine ... if this power is unchained, it will smash a tiny human being to individual atoms.’
Sauvage was not the only one to be overwhelmed by the uncanny sight of machines running almost silently and creating an unseen force that could move mountains. The most intense, most lyrical and most exalted admirer of these dynamos was the historian and novelist Henry Adams (1838-1918), in Paris on a study visit from the United States. In his autobiography The Education of Henry Adams he recounts his (third-person) confrontation with the machine as a religious revelation:
To Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm’s-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring, - scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair’s-breadth further for respect of power, - while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive.
The colonial exhibition across the river, by the Trocadero Palace, was not dedicated exclusively to French colonies (France had the second-largest colonial empire of the day), but it made sure that the British possessions did not outshine those of the host nation. Here visitors could watch the inhabitants of various remote territories carrying on their lives as if there were not thousands of pairs of eyes trained on them, and a thousand French hearts beating a little more proudly at the thought that these were their subjec
ts, too.
This was a graceful and harmlessly exciting world. You could shop at a Cairo souk, admire Algerian craftsmen and eat in Chinese restaurants, you could visit the Cambodian pagoda and watch happy and contented natives in colourful costumes. The African inhabitants of the pavilion of French Congo were particularly well nourished and beautifully dressed. Women with large jars on their heads walked past curious onlookers amid the lush rainforest vegetation, the men looked proud yet joyful, liable to break out in song and dance any minute. There was not even the remotest indication of what was taking place in their Congolese homelands, of the largest genocide the earth had witnessed, perpetrated under the personal supervision of his Majesty King Leopold of Belgium, one of the celebrated guests of the 1900 Exhibition.
A Nation Vanishes
Most of the grand façades of this ‘essence of an age’, as the official commemorative twenty-volume publication called it, have long been broken up or melted down, and still the Paris Exhibition remains fascinating for its sheer gaudy wealth, for its innumerable anecdotes and curious details, for what it stated so obviously, and for what it refused to say. Away from the official speeches and reassurances of universal brotherhood and national greatness, the glitter of the exhibition was welcome and the entire display had served as a highly ornamented carpet spread over the unprecedented loss of confidence and the gaping social fissures running through France itself.
The World Fair presented a new, technological world dressed in the comforting ruffles of olden times. On the centenary of the French Revolution the 1889 Paris World Fair had boldly shone into the future, its emblem the unornamented structure of the Eiffel Tower and its legendary beam of light. In 1900 there was little appetite for daring statements. The French wanted to be distracted and entertained, not astonished or even shocked.
