The phrase, “La Belle Époque” (French: “The Beautiful Era”) refers to the atmosphere in Europe and especially France, the high point of which lasted from 1900 to 1914, with the outbreak of World War I. The whole era was characterized by the phrase, “la douceur de la vie” (French: “the sweetness of life”). People of the time would say that if you weren’t alive then, they could not communicate how charming life was at the time.
The sinking of the Titanic in April, 1912 is the symbolic catastrophe that heralded the end of the era. Anyone who watched Downton Abbey would perhaps remember the opening scene, which depicts the newspaper announcing it with a screaming headline.
The great masterpiece, Journey to the End of the Night (French: Voyage au bout de la nuit, 1932), describes the whole world around World War I as a nightmarish battlefield of previously unseen scope. Céline’s protagonist, Ferdinand, travels the world, from battles in Europe to Africa, then to New York and Detroit’s Ford assembly line before returning to France, finding that the nightmare is global and inescapable.
Céline died within 24 hours of Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway is famous for the quote from The Sun Also Rises (set in the 1920s), “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.”
The question is how could we ever explain complete evaporation of the sweetness of life and transformation into such a nightmare, culminating into the world of today.
Lastly, think of the point made in Sebastian Haffner’s The Meaning of Hitler, how Hitler fit into this nightmarization of the world. Haffner writes:
It is impossible for a serious historian to maintain that without Hitler world history in the twentieth century would have taken the course it has taken. It is by no means certain that without Hitler a second world war would even have taken place; it is quite certain that if it had taken place it would have taken a different course — possibly even with different alliances, fronts and outcomes. Today’s world, whether we like it or not, is the work of Hitler. Without Hitler there would have been no partition of Germany and Europe; without Hitler there would be no Americans and no Russians in Berlin; without Hitler there would be no Israel; without Hitler there would be no de-colonization, at least not such a rapid one; there would be no Asian, Arab or Black African emancipation, and no diminution of European preeminence. Or, more accurately, there would be none of this without Hitler’s mistakes. He certainly did not want any of it.
(The Meaning of Hitler, Harvard University Press, 1979, page 100)
No-one has yet captured how the nightmarish feeling of 2025 is itself downstream from the preceding era.