Epilogue: The History of Modern European Sport as a History of Modern European Ideas

The paradox of the most bourgeois of centuries was that its life-styles became 'bourgeois' only late, that this transformation was pioneered on its fringes rather than at its centre, and that, as a specifically bourgeois way and style of living, it triumphed only momentarily. That is perhaps why the survivors looked back to the era before 1914 so often and so nostalgically as the belle epoque. ¹