La Belle Epoque

 One of the problems when writing a history that spans across more than a hundred years is to find the right description for the periods involved. Sometimes centuries and decades do nicely, but sometimes they can be clumsy. Victoria died in 1901, bringing to an end the Victorian Age, and replacing it with the Edwardian period, yet there was so much cultural, social, economic and political continuity that the division is almost meaningless.

Then came 1914 and the world changed. Six empires went to war. Only two survived. The cultural, social, economic and political continuity was shattered right across Europe. 

When we look back on the time before 1914, we seem to be living in a different age. Things are happening today of which we hardly dreamed before the war. We were even beginning to regard war between civilised nations as a fable, for surely such an absurdity would become less and less possible in our rational, internationally organised world.  Carl Jung: Essays on Contemporary Events

Terms like 'the long century', referring to 1800 to 1914, try to do service, but they lack the focus I was looking for. My problem of writing about Irene Pickard's archive is that its roots lay in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and on until the massive fault line of 1914. I needed a term to spanned that period. There is no such convenient term in British history, however, there is in French history – la belle epoque – so I borrowed it. 

It fits so nicely a very special period when the fruits of the industrial revolution finally radically affected peoples' lives. Jules Verne's novel Around the World in Eighty Days summed it up in that what Phileas Fogg boasts that he can do – circumnavigate the globe in less than a quarter of a year. Steam ships, Steam trains, and the electric telegraph had welded the world together as one place. It seemed an age of the triumph of science, progress and reason. The shock of 1914 destroyed that illusion.

It is difficult for generations that have come to maturity since 1914 to realise fully the impact of horror and betrayal which the war made on people's minds. A few here and there, it is true, had seen it coming, had realized that, as Rufus Jones wrote "Beneath all overt acts and decisions the immense subconscious forces, charged with emotion, had been slowly pushing towards this event".     Elizabeth Grey Vining:  Friend for Life, a biography of Rufus M Jones

But that cataclysmic event set the scene for an age that would have to come to terms with those 'immense subconscious forces', and in Carl Jung, the cartographer par excellence of those forces, Irene Pickard found a guide, not just to understanding the dark potentials within that could be so destructively and collectively unleashed, but in understanding how all the forces within us might be brought into less destructive balance, or even constructively used.