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Step back in time to La Belle Montmartre - 2007 (by J. Boyer-Switala) Introduction Marion Cotillard's character in Midnight in Paris wants to live in La Belle Époque France as she believes it to be Paris' Golden Age. She won't get much of an argument from me - although I'd be more inclined to say I'd like to visit (not permanently reside in) La Belle Époque. In English, La Belle Époque translates to The Beautiful Age and  arose out of the burgeoning Industrial Revolution. It spans post-Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) through the onset of WWI (1914). And beautiful it was...well, if you were not poor urban workers, anyway.  Children of the Working Class - 1900 ( source: www.parisiennedephotographie.fr ) The People The ever-expanding bourgeoisie adopted many of the values and ideals from their Victorian neighbors in the north and their own aristocracy (they were aristocratic wannabes). They valued morality, propriety, and modesty, and spent their l

While my husband teases me that I have brainwashed my children to be proper liberals, what he has yet to recognize is that it is a ruse for my real brainwashing activity: that they WANT to move to Paris. Immédiatement. Maintenant. Aujourd'hui .  It is no great secret that it is my deepest heart's desire to live in Paris. I spend hours online, browsing apartments for sale, finding the perfect one, then subsequently daydreaming about my life in said apartment.  That, by the way, I can't afford. I have even been known to use real estate as the proverbial dangling carrot to convince the rest of my family that they, too, want Paris as badly as I do. After all, who wouldn't want to give up their bedroom for their very own spot on a sleeper sofa in Paris? My eldest is on board; in fact, she thinks we should leave yesterday. And while I'd like to take credit for this, I believe it has more to do with  a seventeen-year-old's wanderlust and the deep-seated desi