Electric Dreams

Electricity transformed Belle Époque Paris more profoundly than any other technology. Gas lighting had made nights navigable; electricity made them brilliant. The transition, begun in the 1880s, accelerated through the 1890s, reaching crescendo at the 1900 Exposition's electrical displays.

The change started with public spaces. The Opéra's electric chandeliers, installed in 1887, turned performances into light shows. Department stores competed in window displays, their electric bulbs drawing moths of customers. The Grands Boulevards became "ribbons of light," their illumination visible from the Eiffel Tower. Poets struggled for metaphors—was electricity domesticated lightning, captured starlight, or materialized energy?

Domestic electrification proceeded slowly, expensively, unequally. Wealthy hotels particuliers installed generators, their owners hosting "electrical soirées" where guests marveled at instant, flameless light. Middle-class apartments waited for municipal power, arriving neighborhood by neighborhood. Working-class quarters remained gas-lit well into the twentieth century, their residents watching wealthy districts glow while they lived in familiar shadows.

Marie Curie, working in her unheated, unelectrified laboratory shed, represented science advancing despite primitive conditions. "We work by day with sunlight, by night with candles," she wrote to her sister. "Yet we study radiation, the universe's fundamental energy. The irony is not lost on us." Her radium glowed in the dark, providing its own illumination, suggesting mysteries electricity hadn't yet revealed.

The telephone accompanied electricity's advance, copper wires carrying voices alongside power. The Paris telephone exchange, established in 1879, grew from 50 subscribers to 30,000 by 1900. The "demoiselles du téléphone"—young women operating switchboards—became new urban types. Their voices, disembodied yet intimate, connected strangers across the city.

Jeanne Marais, chief operator at the central exchange, managed 200 women routing thousands of daily calls. "We are the city's nervous system," she explained. "A doctor needs to reach a dying patient? We connect them. A businessman must close a deal? We make it possible. Lovers separated by angry parents? We unite their voices." The operators knew everything—affairs, business secrets, political plots—yet professional ethics demanded silence.