In Europe

the Boer War, a speech by the kaiser, the launching of a battle cruiser.
    The map in the catalogue provides a bird's-eye view of the impressive fair grounds: from the Grand Palais, along the lanes of pavilions on both banks of the Seine, to the Eiffel Tower and the great exhibition halls on the Champ de Mars. The World's Fair was a part of the city as a whole. Or, put differently, Paris with its boulevards laid out from 1853 under the prefecture of Georges Haussmann blended seamlessly with the fair, because Paris had become a permanent exhibition in itself, the grand display window of France, the city state of the new century. And both – as the photographs in the catalogue also show – were created for the new urbanite par excellence, the boulevardier, the actor/viewer of the theatre of the street, the young people on an allowance, the noble property owner, the wealthy officer, the youthful bourgeois relieved of all financial concerns.
    ‘The weather is so warm, so lovely, that I go outside again after dinner, even though I feel fatigue coming on,’ noted the young writer André Gide in the summer of 1905. ‘First along the Champs-Élysées, strutting past the
cafés-concerts
, I bustle through to the rotunda, then turn back along the Élysées again; the crowd is partying, in greater numbers and with greater cheer, all the way to the rue Royale.’
    On other days he rides the roof rack of an omnibus, walks in the Bois de Boulogne, visits the opera, then heads back to a new exhibition featuring Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cézanne, ‘impossible not to visit the Louvre these days’.
    The boulevardier's haven was the café, the marble table with kirsch and hot chocolate and friends all around, the democratic successor to the aristocratic salon. His prime trait was an infallible sense of timing: to be found in the best establishment at the best moment. The urban stroller moved between the old age and the new, plunging into the anonymity of the crowd, then falling back into the old security of one's own class. It was a way of life that showed up everywhere in the literature of the day, a modern courtliness that conquered every major European city.
    André Gide, 1 September, 1905: ‘I am swept off my feet, I let myself be carried along by this monotone flow, dragged along by the course of the days. A great lethargy overtakes me, from the moment I arise to the evening hour; the game saves me at times, but gradually I lose my normal life.’
    I stroll from the Champ de Mars along the Seine and the roaring traffic on both banks to the boarded-up entrance of the Grand Palais, which is now being restored. Big neon letters on the Eiffel Tower read ‘347 days till the year 2000’. Of the old World's Fair, the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais are still standing, and of course the Pont Alexandre III, with its four pillars at the corners, gigantic golden horses atop those, and along the edges a lacework of bronze lanterns with glass like cut diamonds.
    In that same April in which the Pont Alexandre III and the 1900 World's Fair were opened, the anti-Semitic daily
La Libre Parole
took up a collection to present a pair of rapiers to the Jew-hater Raphaàl Viau, to commemorate his twelfth duel ‘for the good cause’. Viau expressed his hope that the blades ‘would not long remain unsullied’.
    Around the turn of the century, three major scandals rocked Europe's capitals. They were cracks in the façade, the first fissures in that steadfast world of rank and class. In London, in 1895, there was the conviction of the brilliant writer Oscar Wilde for perversity. In Berlin, a similar scandal took place in the period 1907–9 concerning Prince Philipp zu Eulenburg, former ambassador to Vienna and one of the German emperor's intimate friends. But the scandal with the greatest impact was the Dreyfus affair.
    No other issue occupied the French more intensely between 1897–9 than the possible rehabilitation of the unjustly accused Alfred Dreyfus. This Jewish army captain had been banished to Devil's Island for allegedly having spied for the Germans. Gradually, however, it became increasingly clear that officers of the war council had tampered with his dossier and then, to refute the rising groundswell of suspicion, had continued to pile forgery upon forgery. The nation's military command knew about it, but refused to budge. To admit to such fraud would be tantamount to blasphemy, and would cast a taint on the
gloire