week 7: politics and culture in the fin de siècle
DESCRIPTION
Week 7 in HIST1233, Modern EuropeTRANSCRIPT
![Page 1: Week 7: Politics and culture in the fin de siècle](https://reader036.vdocuments.mx/reader036/viewer/2022062514/5588e511d8b42a16148b4605/html5/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Week 7: Fin de siècle Europe
![Page 2: Week 7: Politics and culture in the fin de siècle](https://reader036.vdocuments.mx/reader036/viewer/2022062514/5588e511d8b42a16148b4605/html5/thumbnails/2.jpg)
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.
![Page 3: Week 7: Politics and culture in the fin de siècle](https://reader036.vdocuments.mx/reader036/viewer/2022062514/5588e511d8b42a16148b4605/html5/thumbnails/3.jpg)
Economic and technological optimism
The Crystal Palace, 1851 Hall of Machine
![Page 4: Week 7: Politics and culture in the fin de siècle](https://reader036.vdocuments.mx/reader036/viewer/2022062514/5588e511d8b42a16148b4605/html5/thumbnails/4.jpg)
An inter-connected world
Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days (1874)
![Page 5: Week 7: Politics and culture in the fin de siècle](https://reader036.vdocuments.mx/reader036/viewer/2022062514/5588e511d8b42a16148b4605/html5/thumbnails/5.jpg)
“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)
![Page 6: Week 7: Politics and culture in the fin de siècle](https://reader036.vdocuments.mx/reader036/viewer/2022062514/5588e511d8b42a16148b4605/html5/thumbnails/6.jpg)
“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)
![Page 7: Week 7: Politics and culture in the fin de siècle](https://reader036.vdocuments.mx/reader036/viewer/2022062514/5588e511d8b42a16148b4605/html5/thumbnails/7.jpg)
Edgar Degas, Place de la Concorde (1875)
![Page 8: Week 7: Politics and culture in the fin de siècle](https://reader036.vdocuments.mx/reader036/viewer/2022062514/5588e511d8b42a16148b4605/html5/thumbnails/8.jpg)
Boulevards made for strolling (and seeing)
![Page 9: Week 7: Politics and culture in the fin de siècle](https://reader036.vdocuments.mx/reader036/viewer/2022062514/5588e511d8b42a16148b4605/html5/thumbnails/9.jpg)
The department store: Temple of consumerism or source of new anxieties?
![Page 10: Week 7: Politics and culture in the fin de siècle](https://reader036.vdocuments.mx/reader036/viewer/2022062514/5588e511d8b42a16148b4605/html5/thumbnails/10.jpg)
Urban excitement and alienation
Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge (1895)
![Page 11: Week 7: Politics and culture in the fin de siècle](https://reader036.vdocuments.mx/reader036/viewer/2022062514/5588e511d8b42a16148b4605/html5/thumbnails/11.jpg)
Edgar Degas, L’absinthe (1876)
![Page 12: Week 7: Politics and culture in the fin de siècle](https://reader036.vdocuments.mx/reader036/viewer/2022062514/5588e511d8b42a16148b4605/html5/thumbnails/12.jpg)
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)
![Page 13: Week 7: Politics and culture in the fin de siècle](https://reader036.vdocuments.mx/reader036/viewer/2022062514/5588e511d8b42a16148b4605/html5/thumbnails/13.jpg)
Rise of “biological” racism
![Page 14: Week 7: Politics and culture in the fin de siècle](https://reader036.vdocuments.mx/reader036/viewer/2022062514/5588e511d8b42a16148b4605/html5/thumbnails/14.jpg)
Sigmund Freud, explorer of the irrational