ABSTRACT
Decades after the calamities that followed the outbreak of war in 1914, the French started to refer to the years from 1905 until that date as the belle epoque, the “good era,” a period of peace and prosperity sharply interrupted by the disaster of war. The avant-garde artists who were attracted to African art also welcomed as a colleague a French “primitive,” the self-taught painter Henri Rousseau and his dreamlike visions of strange beasts in exotic settings. In 1913, France was second only to the United States in the manufacture of automobiles, another product made possible by innovations associated with the second industrial revolution. By the first decade of the twentieth century, France was experiencing the impact of a series of new technological developments often labeled the “second industrial revolution.” One reaction against the Confederation Generale de Travail’s drift toward reformism after the strike wave of 1904 to 1906 was the development of a new doctrine of revolutionary syndicalism.
