André Gide, who founded the Nouvelle Revue Française literary review in 1908, influenced Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.

American writers of the Lost Generation, like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, met and mingled in Paris with exiles from dictatorships in Spain and Yugoslavia.

The painters of the School of Paris for example included among others Chaïm Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani, and Marc Chagall, who were Jews from Lithuania, Italy, and Russia, respectively.

[6] Surrealism came to the forefront in the 1920s cultural scene, bringing new forms of expression to poetry with authors like André Breton, whose Surrealist Manifesto appeared in 1924, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, and Robert Desnos.

Surrealists also included artists like Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, and Francis Picabia, sculptors like Jean Arp, Germaine Richier and even early film-makers, like Luis Buñuel and René Clair.

In a new revue, La Folie du Jour, in which she danced the number "Fatou" wearing a costume revealing all but a skirt made of a string of artificial bananas.

Wearing only her loincloth of bananas, Baker suggestively performed "danse sauvage" to a Charleston tempo – a genre still new to Europe.

[9] This dance inspired a 1929 tempera painting titled Josephine Baker, first shown by the painter Ivanhoe Gambini in an exhibition of the Radiofuturista Lombardo group he founded.

[10] The scandal which erupted over Baker's dancing gave way to enthusiasm and quickly generated excitement among Parisians for jazz and black music.

American culture of the Roaring Twenties had a substantial influence on France, which imported jazz, the Charleston, and the shimmy, as well as cabaret and nightclub dancing.

Interest in American culture increased in the Paris of the 1920s, and shows and stars of Broadway theatre introduced as innovations for the élite and were imitated thereafter.

The 1930 song J'ai Deux Amours enshrined Baker as a full-featured star of Parisian nightlife, who not only danced, but also commented on the music and did comedy.

In 1923 another ballet was born, La création du monde; Darius Milhaud wrote the music, and Blaise Cendrars the scenario.

In the Olympia at the Bobino, the Théâtre de la Gaîté-Montparnasse showcased Marie Dubas and Georgius, who inaugurated the Singing Theatre by staging popular songs.

The major sporting event during this decade was Olympic Games in Paris in 1924, in which 3,092 athletes from 44 countries participated, and no fewer than 625,000 spectators attended.

[clarification needed] Max Linder, after being discovered by Charles Pathé, became integral in making the film a cultural phenomenon.

In the Paris of the 1920s, the theater was essentially dominated by four directors -- Louis Jouvet, Georges Pitoëff, Charles Dullin and Gaston Baty.

But parallel to this, the educated public is interested elites increasingly to authors and works that combine classical in the form and the opposition reality/dream at the theatrical atmosphere.

[clarification needed] In 1920, post-impressionist painter Nils Dardel and de Maré together created Ballets suédois at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.

The boyish look was characterized by a loose, streamlined, androgynous silhouette where neither the bust nor the waist are evident, accompanied by a short hairdo.

It became the symbol of the emancipated woman: free and autonomous, and expressing a new social freedom for a woman—she goes out on the town, smokes, dances, engages in sports or outdoor activities, drives a car, goes on trips—and, flying in the face of moral conventions of the day, she flaunts an extra-marital liaison, perhaps even her homo- or bisexuality, or cohabits openly with a partner.

A straight sheath with 3/4 sleeves and no collar, the crêpe de Chine tube all in black (a color previously reserved for bereavement) was the perfect evocation of garçonne style, erasing the forms of the female body.

Copied many times over, this "Ford signed 'Chanel'" as Vogue magazine dubbed it, referring to the mass-produced American car, would become a classic item of womenswear of the 1920s and beyond.

It took 6 years to clear the shortage of energy caused by the reconstruction of the northern mines that the Germans had drowned during World War I.

The Wall Street crash of 1929 brought an end to the exuberant zeitgeist in the United States, although the crisis didn't actually reach Europe until 1931.

Their world of song was primarily that of the street, the javas and tangos of dances, weddings, and banquets and not of the Parisian high society.