When 1899 turned over into 1900, did it feel akin to 1999 into 2000?
Obviously technology and culture were different back then, but was there an ominous and exciting vibe to coming into a new century?
Or were people going from 1899 into 1900 thinking it was just another week?
On 17 April 1888, two young authors, Micard and Jouvenot, presented at the Château-d'Eau theatre in Paris a new play titled Fin de Siècle (Century's End). This melodrama about a group of stockbrokers and their wives and mistresses wanted to be, according to the newspaper Le Siècle,
a faithful mirror reflecting the image of our rotten society, with its warts, its defects, its vices, its scandals, its suspicious financiers, its shady businessmen, its traffickers in ribbons and medals, its hypothetically honest women, its underworld princesses, its dubious barons, its high-branded pimps, this whole shady and crooked world.
The play is now forgotten, but its title, used in later books and plays, captured a certain zeitgeist of end-of-century France. Within the next two years, fin de siècle had become a common expression, used over and over in the French press, and it would spread to other European countries.
This chart shows the frequency of the expression "fin de siècle" compared to "siècle nouveau", "nouveau siècle" (new century) and "vingtième siècle" (twentieth century) in French newspapers between 1870 and 1910 (source: Bibliothèque Nationale de France). We can see how overwhelming was the use of fin de siècle from 1890 onward. Vingtième siècle only picks up in 1900.
This concept of the century's end was deeply pessimistic, and it became a catch-all for everything that (people felt) was going wrong. And there was plenty of that in France: the unfinished business with Germany (still an open wound since the War of 1870), endless scandals about corruption and finance (the Panama scandals, the stock market crash of 1882), the Dreyfus affair, political violence (anarchist bombings, troops firing on factory workers), the ongoing fight between the Republican governments and the Roman Catholic Church, concern about depopulation, fears about social changes, fears about Jews, feminists, Italian immigrants... The list went on.
Let it be clear: there was also optimism. France was relatively stable and prosperous, its colonial empire was growing, and there were numerous innovations in science, technology, arts and entertainment for the population to marvel about, as demonstrated by the World Fairs. Electricity! Buildings made of metal! Automobiles! Human zoos! But still: the expression "Belle Epoque" which describes the turn of the century period as a "Beautiful Epoch", was applied retrospectively, in the 1930s, when the horrors of WW1 made the 1890-1914 period look like a Golden Age.
But the fact is that end-of-the-century French press and literature was not exactly overflowing with optimism for the new century to come. And when was this new century supposed do start anyway? Even this was debated. Some said that it started on 1 January 1900, others (the majority in France?) on 1 January 1901.
So, if we look at newspapers dated 1/1/1900 or 1/1/1901, what's making the front page headlines? (I'm using the left-hand column). Here are some examples, summarized for convenience:
1/1/1900
1/1/1901
We could look at more papers and do an actual study, but this sampling of a few notable journals shows that, as far as the press was concerned, there was very little excitement about the new century. Only Le Figaro published an op-ed dealing with the 20th century. Le Matin and Le Gaulois talked about the new year, but not (or barely) about the century. Other newspapers did not care at all.
