Beautiful, Color Images of Paris Taken a Century In the past—on the Starting of World War I & the End of La Belle Époque

It could be that the key piv­ot factors of his­to­ry are solely vis­i­ble to these across the bend. For these of us immersed within the current—for all of its deaf­en­ing sirens of vio­lent upheaval—the precise years future gen­er­a­tions will use to mark our epoch stay unclear. But after we look again, cer­tain years stand out above all oth­ers, people who his­to­ri­ans use as arrest­ing­ly sin­gu­lar e book titles: 1066: The Year of Con­quest, 1492: The Year the World Began, 1776. The first such yr within the twentieth cen­tu­ry will get a par­tic­u­lar­ly grim sub­ti­tle in his­to­ri­an Paul Ham’s 1914: The Year the World End­ed.

It seems like hyper­bol­ic mar­ket­ing, however that apoc­a­lyp­tic descrip­tion of the consequences of World War I comes from a few of the most elo­quent voic­es of the age, whether or not these of Amer­i­can expa­tri­ates like Gertrude Stein or T.S. Eliot, or of Euro­pean sol­dier-poets like Wil­fred Owen or Siegfried Sas­soon.

In France, the hor­rors of the conflict immediate­ed its sur­vivors to remem­ber the years earlier than it as La Belle Epoque, a phrase—wrote the BBC’s Hugh Schofield within the cen­te­nary essay “La Belle Eqoque: Paris 1914,”—that appeared “much lat­er in the cen­tu­ry, when peo­ple who’d lived their gild­ed youths in the pre-war years start­ed look­ing back and rem­i­nisc­ing.”

We’re used to see­ing the peri­od of 1914 in grainy, drea­ry black-and-white, and to see­ing nos­tal­gic cel­e­bra­tions of La Belle Epoque rep­re­despatched­ed graph­i­cal­ly by the live­ly full-col­or posters and adver­tise­ments one finds in décor shops. But due to the total col­or pho­tos you see right here, we will see pho­tographs of World War I‑period Paris in full and vibrant colour—photos of town 110 years in the past nearly simply as Parisians noticed it on the time. Icons just like the Moulin Rouge come to life in vivid day­mild, above, and light-weight­ing up the evening, under.

Ear­ly cin­e­ma Aubert Palace, under, within the Grands Boule­vards, shim­mers beau­ti­ful­ly, as does the art-deco mild­ing of the Eif­fel Tow­er, fur­ther down.

Below, scorching air bal­loons hov­er within the enor­mous Grand Palais, and fur­ther down, a pho­to­graph of Notre Dame on a hazy day nearly seems like a water­col­or.

The pho­tographs have been made, writes Messy N Chic, “using Autochrome Lumière tech­nol­o­gy between 1914 and 1918 [a tech­nique devel­oped in 1903 by the Lumière broth­ers, cred­it­ed as the first film­mak­ers]…. [T]here are around 72,000 Autochromes from the time peri­od of places all over the world, includ­ing Paris in its true col­ors.”

Not all the pho­tographs are of well-known archi­tec­tur­al mon­u­ments or nightlife des­ti­na­tions. Very many present ordi­nary avenue scenes, like these above, one depict­ing a num­ber of bored French sol­diers, pre­sum­ably await­ing deploy­ment.

The Paris of 1914 was a Euro­pean cap­i­tal in main tran­si­tion, in additional methods than one. “Moder­ni­ty was the mov­ing spir­it,” writes Schofield; “It was the time of the machine. The city’s last horse-drawn omnibus made its way from Saint-Sulpice to La Vil­lette in Jan­u­ary 1913.”

Schofield additionally factors out that, like Gild­ed Age New York, “the pub­lic image of Paris was the cre­ation of roman­tic cap­i­tal­ists. The real­i­ty for many was much more wretched… there were entire fam­i­lies liv­ing on the street, and decrepit, over­crowd­ed hous­ing with nonex­is­tent san­i­ta­tion.”

Moder­ni­ty was leav­ing many behind, class con­flict loomed in France because it erupt­ed in Rus­sia, even because the glob­al cat­a­stro­phe of World War I risk­ened French elites and professional­le­tari­at alike, who each served and who each died at very excessive charges.

You can see many extra of those aston­ish­ing­ly beau­ti­ful full-col­or pho­tographs of 1914 Paris—on the finish of La Belle Epoque—at Vin­tage Every­day and Messy N Chic.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this publish appeared on our web site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Paris Had a Mov­ing Side­stroll in 1900, and a Thomas Edi­son Film Cap­tured It in Action

Pris­tine Footage Lets You Revis­it Life in Paris within the Eighteen Nineties: Watch Footage Shot by the Lumière Broth­ers

Paris in Beau­ti­ful Col­or Images from 1890: The Eif­fel Tow­er, Notre Dame, The Pan­théon, and More (1890)

Josh Jones is a author and musi­cian primarily based in Durham, NC.