Week 7 focused on cultural shifts in fin de siècle Europe. Established traditions and norms were increasingly challenged as urban growth led to new experiences and anxieties. Views of human nature as changeable and volatile ruled by urges rather than just reason grew. An interconnected world emerged through technology and inventions capturing this period of economic and technological optimism. Urban public spaces like boulevards and new structures like department stores brought both excitement and alienation as modern life accelerated.

1. Week 7: Fin de siècle Europe

2. Cultural shifts
• Growing challenges to established traditions
and norms (rationalism, classicism, middle
class values)
• Urban growth leads to new experiences and
anxieties.
• Human nature increasingly viewed as
changeable and volatile, ruled as much by
urges and instincts as thought and reason.

3. Economic and technological optimism
The Crystal Palace, 1851 Hall of Machine

4. An inter-connected world
Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days (1874)

5. “By dint of inventing machinery, men will end in
being eaten up by it! I have always fancied that
the end of the earth will be when some enormous
boiler, heated to three thousand millions of
atmospheric pressure, shall explode and blow up
our Globe!”
—J. Verne, Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863)

6. “Flaneurs” and urban exploration
“It is not given to every man to take a bath of
multitude; enjoying a crowd is an art; and only he
can relish a debauch of vitality at the expense of
the human species, on whom, in his cradle, a fairy
has bestowed the love of masks and
masquerading, the hate of home, and the passion
for roaming.”
—Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen (1869)

7. Edgar Degas, Place de la Concorde (1875)

8. Boulevards made for strolling (and seeing)

9. The department store: Temple of
consumerism or source of new anxieties?

10. Urban excitement and alienation
Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge (1895)

11. Edgar Degas, L’absinthe (1876)

12. From fixed to evolutionary theories of human
nature:
“[F]rom the war of nature, from famine and death,
the most exalted object which we are capable of
conceiving, namely, the production of the higher
animals, directly follows…[W]hilst this planet has
gone cycling on according to the fixed laws of
gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms
most beautiful and most wonderful have been,
and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859)

13. Rise of “biological” racism

14. Sigmund Freud, explorer of the irrational