Literally "Beautiful Age". Name given in France to the period from roughly the end of the Franco-Prussian War (1871) to the start of World War 1 (1914), in which standards of living and security for the upper and middle classes increased, leading to it retrospectively being labelled as a golden age by them. In the United Kingdom, the Belle Époque overlapped with the late Victorian era and the Edwardian era. In Germany, the Belle Époque coincided with the reigns of Kaiser Wilhelm I & II and in Russia with the reigns of Alexander III and Nicholas II.