The Belle Époque felt so golden at the time and feels so in retrospect because expectations surged far beyond the very real progress in prosperity and inclusion. It dazzled with science, finance, and culture—but literacy, longevity, and franchise were still thin. That is precisely why 1914 was so devastating: it showed how all the optimism had rested on a narrow, brittle foundation…
Bohumilo, on the Social Media Site That Must Not Be Named, writes:
Bohumilo: ‘I consider WWI to be the most detrimental event in European history, end of the old, better civilization of high culture and hard money, high hopes for future and hard international order. That’s when everything started going downhill — and nobody really understands why. If I could erase one event from history, it would be WWI. The entire 20th century would have been much better. I still think humanity (or, lets be frank, the West) has never, before or after, combined freedom, prosperity (that’s when economic growth per capita really took off, as @delong showed), and cultural vitality on the scale seen from roughly 1870 to 1914. I always think THE author of that era is H. G. Wells — and the author of the era that followed is Orwell…
Having been name-checked, I guess I should respond. And my response is: This is not right in many ways; but, still, right in one important way.
If we look at the civilizational delta and at civilizational expectations, 1870-1914 was special in a way that those of us who live with the memories of the 1914-1918 Great War and all the shit that landed on us afterwards have never been able to recover.
Bohumilo’s take on the Gilded Age-Belle Époque as a “better civilization of high culture and hard money, high hopes for future and hard international order” is, I think, broadly right in terms of material and what we hoped was civilizational progress, and I will give cultural vitality as well. The era felt golden because expectations surged and the international order seemed stable—until it wasn’t. That mix of real gains plus overconfident optimism is precisely what made tje 1914 break so shattering.
Nevertheless, first, in terms of levels of prosperity: Material prosperity in 1914 was narrow, fragile, and uneven. Vast numbers were short‑lived, hungry, poor, and illiterate—globally and in the “west.” Around 1900, average life expectancy sat in the low 30s due to high mortality at all ages and extreme infant and child deaths; the world did not pass 40 years until well after mid‑century. Literacy was scarce. Estimates suggest global adult literacy in 1900 barely exceeded one‑fifth; mass literacy arrived mostly after 1950.
“Hungry” and “poor” were empirical facts. Even in the most industrialized nations, urban surveys found large working‑class shares below subsistence. Rowntree’s 1899 York study put about 28 percent below a nutrition‑based poverty line. Booth’s London maps showed districts marked “poor” or “very poor.” Deprivation was not just peripheral or colonial.
Health was dire. In the early twentieth century, under‑five mortality in many countries exceeded 20–30 per 100 live births and had long been higher. This drove low life expectancy at birth. Rates fell only with broad improvements in public health, nutrition, sanitation, and medicine later in the century.
Second: I object to the term “west”. Strongly. “West” is a bad label. Use “Dover Circle‑Plus.” “West” pretends there’s a continuous relay from Uruk to Silicon Valley, collapsing discontinuous histories into one tradition. “Dover Circle‑Plus” instead names the concrete locus of early‑modern change: societies within roughly a 300–400‑mile radius of Dover and the polities that received large settler inflows or deliberately emulated those institutions after 1500. That framing fits the evidence and avoids torch‑passing mythology.
Two payoffs follow. It restores analytic clarity: the post‑1870 prosperity surge ties to specific institutional packages, not a timeless “West.” And it keeps priors honest about who’s in or out at different times—why Germany and Italy mattered in 1900; why Japan, Korea, Australia, and Singapore complicate “North Atlantic.” Better label, better history, better economics.
Third, the claim that the pre-1914 Belle Époque saw the height of freedom is also not right. Two things can be true at once. Material and technological capabilities exploded after 1870, yet broad, durable political voice lagged badly. Even within the Dover Circle‑Plus, franchise expansion was grudging, exclusionary, and late: property and gender bars persisted; racialized disenfranchisement gutted formal rights; colonial subjects were ruled without consent. The polity that built mass production and public health did not, for decades, build mass inclusion.
Globally, the gap was starker. Imperial governance meant “subject” status for hundreds of millions; authoritarian restorations and single‑party states throttled pluralism; newly independent polities often inherited coercive administrative shells. If we’re serious about what prosperity should mean, the absence of voice remains the central indictment: growth without representation is brittle, easily hijacked by elites, and morally thin. Unless, of course, you were a middle-class or better western European-descended white male.
But, fourth, even that is not quite true. Anglocentric gatekeeping shrank “West” even within Dover Circle‑Plus. Quite. The British imperial sneer—“the wogs begin at Calais”—makes the point: even inside the supposed core, status hinged on language, creed, and caste. English as milk‑tongue conferred belonging; being Catholic Irish could negate it. So the imagined “West” wasn’t just historically discontinuous—it was actively policed, narrowing voice and membership. That’s why even “Dover Circle‑Plus” is useful only if we pair it with a running audit of exclusion: who was counted, who was silenced, and by which institutions.
Still, there was something special that Bohumilo did put his finger on. In its confidence, 1870-1914 was special in a way that those of us who live with the memories of the 1914-1918 Great War and all the shit that landed on us afterwards have never been able to recover.
For belief in progress and the actual delta of progress was never so solid thereafter. Even in the Trente Glorieuses after World War II, there was an iron curtain down the middle of the European continent, and tyrannies of appalling degrees of antifreedom and death between the Fulda Gap in Germany and the Imjin River in Korea.
Plus nuclear weapons.
Bu contrast, back before World War I the expectation was that even the Russian Empire would join civilized society with general civil and political rights and economic prosperity, and with faster than deliberate speed as well. Hell, its aristocracy thought of itself as at least partly French.
So the Gilded Age-Belle Époque truly was, in this narrow sense of hopes for progress and a belief that the world was going the right way, a better civilization.
A great deal of thought is required to try to figure out why this was so: Why was the era of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the reactionary Holy Alliance, and then the Revolutions of 1848 followed by something better? How did what I like to call the pseudo-classical semi-liberal order emerge? And how did it manage to become something which was, in historical and perhaps now in contemporary perspective, such a smashing success as far as the progress of civilization was concerned.
But, even so, do not overstate things. Let me call H.G. Wells as a witness:
H.G. Wells (1908): Becoming a Socialist: from “New Worlds for Old” (London: Macmillan), pp. 16-19: “A walk I had a little while ago with a friend along the Thames Embankment… from Blackfriars Bridge to Westminster. We had dined together and we went there because we thought that with a fitful moon and clouds adrift, on a night when the air was a crystal air that gladdened and brightened, that crescent of great buildings and steely, soft-hurrying water must needs be altogether beautiful.
And indeed it was beautiful: the mysteries and mounting masses of the buildings to the right of us, the blurs of this coloured light or that, blue-white, green-white, amber or warmer orange, the rich black archings of Waterloo Bridge, the rippled lights upon the silent flowing river, the lattice of girders, and the shifting trains of Charing Cross Bridge–their funnels pouring a sort of hot-edged moonlight by way of smoke–and then the sweeping line of lamps, the accelerated run and diminuendo of the Embankment lamps as one came into sight of Westminster.
The big hotels were very fine, huge swelling shapes of dun dark-gray and brown, huge shapes seamed and bursting and fenestrated with illumination, tattered at a thousand windows with light and the indistinct glowing suggestions of feasting and pleasure. And dim and faint above it all and very remote was the moon’s dead wan face veiled and then displayed.
But we were dashed by an unanticipated refrain to this succession of magnificent things, and we did not cry, as we had meant to cry: “How good it was to be alive!”
Along the embankment, you see, there are iron seats at regular intervals, seats you cannot lie upon because iron arm-rests prevent that, and each seat, one saw by the lamplight, was filled with crouching and drooping figures. Not a vacant place remained, not one vacant place.
These were the homeless, and they had come to sleep here. Now one noted a poor old woman with a shameful battered straw hat awry over her drowsing face, now a young clerk staring before him at despair; now a filthy tramp, and now a bearded, frock-coated, collarless respectability; I remember particularly one ghastly long white neck and white face that lopped backward, choked in some nightmare, awakened, clutched with a bony hand at the bony throat, and sat up and stared angrily as we passed. The wind had a keen edge that night, even for us who had dined and were well-clad. One crumpled figure coughed and went on coughing–damnably.
‘It’s fine,’ said I, trying to keep hold of the effects to which this line of poor wretches was but the selvage; ‘it’s fine! But I can’t stand this.’
‘It changes all that we expected,’ admitted my friend, after a silence.
‘Must we go on—past them all?’
‘Yes. I think we ought to do that. It’s a lesson perhaps—for trying to get too much beauty out of life as it is, and forgetting. Don’t shirk it!’
‘Great God!’ cried I. ‘But must life always be like this? I could die, indeed, I would willingly jump into this cold and muddy river now, if by so doing I could stick a stiff dead hand through all these things in the future,–a dead commanding hand insisting with a silent irresistible gesture that this waste and failure of life should cease, and cease forever.’
‘But it does cease! Each year in its proportions it is a little less.’
I walked in silence, and my companion talked by my side.
‘We go on. Here is a good thing done, and there is a good thing done. The Good Will in man—’
‘Not fast enough. It goes so slowly—and in a little while we too must die.’
‘It can be done,’ said my companion.
‘It could be avoided,’ say I.
‘It shall be in the days to come. There is food enough for all, shelter for all, wealth enough for all. Men need only know it and will it. And yet we have this!’
‘And so much like this!’ said I.
So we talked and were tormented.
And I remember how later we found ourselves on Westminster Bridge, looking back upon the long sweep of wrinkled black water that reflected lights and palaces and the flitting glow of steamboats, and by that time we had talked ourselves past our despair. We perceived that what was splendid remained splendid, that what was mysterious remained insoluble for all our pain and impatience. But it was clear to us: the thing for us two to go upon was not the good of the present nor the evil, but the effort and the dream of the finer order, the fuller life, the banishment of suffering, to come…
And, of course, it all went smash: At the start of 1914:
John Maynard Keynes (1919): The Economic Consequences of the Peace <https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/15776/pg15776-images.html>: ‘The inhabitant of London… regarded this [peaceful and prosperous Belle Époque] state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable. The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life…
On the eve of the Great War, believers in prosperity had mistaken a precarious order for permanent progress. The shock of 1914-1918 lay not only in the carnage but in the revelation that the Belle Époque’s optimism rested on a brittle base—thin literacy and longevity, constrained political voice, extractive colonial structures, and overconfident elites. Grant the era its cultural vitality and genuine material improvements. But I insist we weight the baseline. Expectations had outrun reality—and that gap explains both the dazzling glow and the devastation when the lamps went out.
