A Nation of Many Frances

The France of 1914 was not one country but many. In Paris, electric streetlights illuminated grand boulevards where automobiles shared roads with horse-drawn carriages. The capital buzzed with artistic innovation—Picasso and Braque revolutionized painting, while Debussy and Ravel redefined music. Department stores like Bon Marché showcased the latest fashions to bourgeois shoppers, while workers crowded into cramped apartments in Belleville and Ménilmontant.

Beyond Paris lay a different France. In Brittany, farmers still spoke Breton rather than French, working small plots with methods unchanged for centuries. The industrial north—cities like Lille, Roubaix, and Tourcoing—throbbed with textile mills and coal mines, where workers, including thousands of Belgian immigrants, labored in harsh conditions. In the sun-drenched south, Provence's lavender farmers and Languedoc's vineyard workers lived by agricultural rhythms, their Republican politics often at odds with the conservative Catholic heartlands of the west.

Marie-Jeanne Bardot, a seamstress in Lyon, wrote to her cousin in June 1914: "The silk merchants grow richer while we work twelve hours for wages that barely feed our children. Yet they speak of France's greatness. Whose France, I wonder?"