The Coming Storm

By 1910, social movements sensed approaching crisis. Strike waves intensified. The 1910 railway strike paralyzed France, bringing military intervention. Women's suffrage demonstrations grew larger and more militant. The old order creaked under pressure for change.

Young activists like Hélène Brion synthesized feminism, socialism, and pacifism into comprehensive liberation vision. "We fight not just for votes or wages," she declared, "but for human dignity, for a world where cooperation replaces competition, where difference doesn't mean inequality."

The tragic irony was that war would accelerate some changes while destroying the movements that fought for them. Women would enter factories and offices, proving capabilities feminists had long proclaimed. Workers would gain recognition through wartime necessity. But the internationalist, pacifist, humanitarian vision animating Belle Époque social movements would die in trenches.

In 1914, Jean Jaurès desperately tried preventing war through international socialist solidarity. His assassination on July 31 symbolically ended the Belle Époque's progressive dreams. The movements he embodied—democratic, reformist, optimistic about human nature—would survive but never recapture prewar innocence.