The Belle Epoque and the Coming of War, 1890-1914

The Belle Epoque: Peace, Prosperity, and Popular Entertainment

• Industrialization and Global Economic Change
• Rising Real Wages for Workers (data from England)
• Manchester & Blackpool
• Music Hall Songs

The Great War: Causes and Character

• Imperialism
• Maps of World Connections: Imperialism, European Alliances, etc.
• National Rivalries & Entangling Alliances
• Aggressive Nationalism
  • Serbian nationalism & the assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand in Sarajevo: June 1914
  • Popular press: rivalry over the conquest of China (cartoon)
• Arms Race: The Expansion of the German Navy and the British Response
• Power Politics and the Interests of [nation] States.
  • General Friedrich von Bernhardi, Germany and the Next War, 1914
  • Sir Norman Angell, The Great Illusion, 1910
• Internal pressures for war in European States (important role of the popular press)
  
  
  • war to arrest moral decline and reaffirm masculin virtues [Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel (1921) was an example of a positive memoir on fighting on the Western Front, in sharp contrast to Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1928)]
    
    
  • war to "escape from" internal conflicts between workers and owners [labor parties vs. liberal & conservative parties], between women demanding suffrage and governments (especially keen in Britain)
    
    
  • influence of social Darwinism transposed to mean the struggle for existence between competitive races and competitive nations.

  An expression of the social and moral benefits of imperialism (and war) for Europeans reflects a kind of social Darwinism in the sense that the strong will grow weak if not engaged in a struggle. Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India put it this way in 1907:

. . . without a world to conquer or a duty to perform [the British character] would rot to atrophy . . . . In Empire we have found not merely the key to glory and wealth but the call to duty and the means of service to mankind. Let us no more foreswear Empire than we would abjure our own souls.

von Treitschke on the greatness of war, ca. 1890

Hymn of Hate 1914 by Ernst Lissauer

• war to deflect internal strife--socialism, feminism, female suffrage, etc.