FRENCH HISTORY

Twentieth century France

The debut of the twentieth century is often referred to as La Belle Époche (the beautiful age) and is associated with the Art Nouveau movement. Artists, writers, designers and architects were breaking new ground stylistically. Toulouse Lautrec and Alphonse Mucha painted many of the posters that have since become iconicly French such as Le Chat Noir.

Culturally, the twentieth century started on a ground-breaking, revolutionary note that it guarded for much of the century. Coco Chanel totally revolutionised women’s fashion with her elegant but comfortable designs. Philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus gave the world Existentialism and innovative new American writers such as William S. Burroughs and Henry Miller would find France the only country prepared to publish their works.

Politically, the twentieth century was a tumultuous time in the history of France.

When Germany declared war on France in 1914, the battle quickly developed into a bloody trench war between the combined French and Allied forces and the German army. By the end of the War, nearly 1.5 million French soldiers were dead, which at the time amounted to almost one quarter of all young French males. This loss had a profound effect on both France’s economic recovery and its population growth for many decades.

In 1939, Germany again declared war on France. Hitler struck when France was at its weakest, struggling under the double losses of World War I – the men killed and the boys unborn which had reduced the numbers of France’s soldiers to an all-time low. By 1940, Germany had occupied the north of France and the Atlantic coastline and the country had been divided into two – occupied and un-occupied France. The French government of the time, the Third Republic, ended when President Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain signed an armistice with Germany thus beginning a period of collaboration between Pétain’s government and the Nazis. The French government moved from its base in German occupied Paris, to the spa village of Vichy in central France (le Massif Central). Meanwhile, war hero Charles de Gaulle was generating the Free France movement. Charles de Gaulle was one of the first public figures to speak out against collaborating with the Germans. In fear of assignation, de Gaulle escaped to London where he broadcast his first and most famous speech to the French, pleading them to not support the Vichy government and to fight the Germans. ‘France has lost a battle, not the war,’ he said.

When the Allied forces finally defeated Germany and ousted them from France, collaborator Marshal Pétain was imprisoned for life and a provisional government, led by Charles de Gaulle, was installed. In 1946, de Gaulle resigned and the Fourth Republic came into being.

The Second World War left France impoverished but despite this, the country retained its international renown as the centre of culture and the avant garde. In the years following the War, the country prospered both economically and culturally. Paris continued to be the fashion capital of the world, artists, writers and philosophers filled the cafés and jazz musicians broke new ground in underground clubs and bars.

By the mid 1950s, much of the traditional foundations of French life had changed and modernised. There were fewer numbers of farmers or people working in agriculture and an enormous rise in people working in high-technology and service sector industries. Maybe it’s for this reason that France has led the way with many technological advances of the time such as developing their very high-speed train known as the TGV, or the Concord aeroplane, or the first publicly interactive computer network, the Minitel.

France’s entry into the twentieth century may have been called ‘La Belle Époque’, but to everyone at Finding France she is known in the twenty-first century as simply ‘La Belle France’.