Paris during the Second Empire

During the Second French Empire, the reign of Emperor Napoleon III (1852–1870), Paris was the largest city in continental Europe and a leading center of finance, commerce, fashion, and the arts.

During the Second Empire, with the growth of the number of wealthy and upper middle class clients, lower-paid specialist craftsmen began to make products in greater quantity and more quickly, but of poorer quality than before.

The placier provided certain services, such as beating carpets or cleaning doorways, and in exchange was able to get more valuable items, from silk and satin to old clothing and shoes to leftovers from banquets.

The city established bureaux de bienfaisance—or charity bureaus, with an office in each arrondissement—to provide temporary assistance, usually in the form of food, to the unemployed, the sick, the injured, and women who were pregnant.

The public aid was supplemented by private charities, mostly operated by the church, which established a system of crèches for poor children and weekly visits by nuns to the homes of the sick and new mothers.

A doctor working at the morgue wrote, "A multitude of the curious, of all ages, sexes, and social rank, presses in every day, sometimes moved and silent, often stirred by horror and disgust, sometimes cynical and turbulent.

[citation needed] From 1828 to 1855, Parisian public transport was provided by private companies that operated large horse-drawn wagons with seats, a vehicle called an omnibus.

In 1855, Napoleon III's prefect of police, Pierre-Marie Piétri, required the individual companies to merge under the name Compagnie général de omnibus.

It was pulled by two horses and was equipped with a driver and conductor dressed in royal blue uniforms with silver-plated buttons, decorated with the gothic letter O, and with a black necktie.

The fiacres carried lanterns that indicated the area in which their depot was located: blue for Belleville, Buttes-Chaumont, and Popincourt; yellow for Rochechouart and the Pigalle; green for the Left Bank; red for Batignolles, Les Ternes, and Passy.

Fruits and vegetables also arrived at night, brought by carts from farms and gardens around Paris; the farmers rented small spaces of one by two meters on the sidewalk outside the pavilions to sell their produce.

[32] Thanks to the growing number of wealthy Parisians and tourists coming to the city and the new network of railroads that delivered fresh seafood, meat, vegetables, and fruit to Les Halles every morning, Paris during the Second Empire had some of the best restaurants in the world.

[36] Just below the constellation of top restaurants, there were a dozen others that offered excellent food at less extravagant prices, including the historic Ledoyen, next to the Champs-Elysées, where the famous painters had a table during the Salon; others listed in a guidebook for foreign tourists were the cafés Brébant, Magny, Veron, Procope and Durand.

[39] The latter were inexpensive eating places, often with a common table, where a meal could be had for 1.6 francs, with a bowl of soup, a choice of one of three main dishes, a dessert, bread, and a half-bottle of wine.

The one at Gros-Caillou was located on the banks of the Seine near the Palais d'Orsay; it was the place in which ordinary cigars were made, usually with tobacco from Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, Mexico, Brazil, or Hungary.

The Reuilly factory employed a thousand workers, of whom 939 were women, a type of work culture in the tobacco industry depicted in the opera Carmen (1875) by Georges Bizet.

The revolution was fuelled in large part by Paris fashions, especially the crinoline, which demanded enormous quantities of silk, satin, velour, cashmere, percale, mohair, ribbons, lace, and other fabrics and decorations.

The store Au Coin de la Rue was built with several floors of retail space around a central courtyard that had a glass skylight for illumination, a model soon followed by other shops.

Painters devoted great effort and intrigue to win approval from the jury to present their paintings at the Salon and arrange for good placement in the exhibition halls.

In an earlier period, this group included the painters Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Alfred Sisley; then, later, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille, and Henri Fantin-Latour.

[51] Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) left Paris in 1851, just before the Second Empire was proclaimed, partly because of political differences with Napoleon III, but largely because he was deeply in debt and wanted to avoid creditors.

Another important writer of the time was Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897), who became private secretary to the half-brother and senior advisor of Napoleon III, Charles de Morny.

The new age of railways, and the enormous increase in travel that it caused, required new train stations, large hotels, exposition halls, and department stores in Paris.

Jacques-Ignace Hittorff also made extensive use of iron and glass in the interior of the new Gare du Nord train station (1842-1865), although the facade was perfectly neoclassical, decorated with classical statues representing the cities served by the railway.

[57] In men's fashion, the long redingote of the era of Louis-Philippe (the name came from the English term "riding-coat") was gradually replaced by the jacquette, and then the even shorter veston.

"[58] By the end of the Second Empire, Paris had 41 theaters that offered entertainment for every possible taste: from grand opera and ballet to dramas, melodramas, operettas, vaudeville, farces, parodies, and more.

During the Second Empire, it was based in the Salle Ventadour and hosted the French premieres of many of Verdi's operas, including Il Trovatore (1854), La Traviata (1856), Rigoletto (1857), and Un ballo in maschera (1861).

Coming from the Place Château d'Eau, the first theater was the Théatre Lyrique, which had originally been built in 1847 by Alexander Dumas to stage plays based on his stories, but became an opera house.

It had been made famous in 1828 from portrayals of the sad clown Pierrot by the mime Jean-Gaspard Deburau, whose story is told in the 1945 film The Children of Paradise (Les Infants de Paradis).

Next to the Funambules was the Théâtre des Délassements-Comiques, famous for vaudeville, pantomime, and dancing by beautiful women in costumes as scant as the censors would allow, including performing the Rigolboche, later known as the French can-can.

Music in the Tuileries Gardens by Édouard Manet (1862).
Napoleon III by Alexandre Cabanel (about 1865)
The new boulevards and parks built by Haussmann during the Second Empire
An editorial cartoon of 1858 illustrates the opposition of many residents of the Paris suburbs to Napoleon III's plan to make them part of the city.
The interior of a Paris chocolate factory in 1855
A chiffonier (1852), who each night searched through refuse for anything that could be salvaged.
The Paris morgue in 1855, where bodies found floating in the Seine were put on display so they could be identified.
The new Gare du Nord station (1866) was the ceremonial gateway to Paris, crowned by statues representing the cities of northern France.
An early Paris omnibus in the 1850s.
In 1852, an enlarged omnibus on rails was inaugurated on the Cours-la-Reine .
Gas lamp on the Place de l'Étoile (now the Place Charles de Gaulle )
Les Halles , the central market of Paris, rebuilt by architect Victor Baltard between 1853 and 1870 with vast pavilions of cast iron and glass.
Food arrived at Les Halles by wagon from a train station and was carried by porters called "les forts" (the strong) to pavilions where it was sold.
The novelty store of Carrefour-Drouot on the Rue Drouot in 1861, an ancestor of the modern department store.
Bon Marché , the first modern department store, in 1867.
The grande salle of the Theater of the Académie Royale de Musique on the Rue Le Peletier during a performance of ballet. It was the main opera house in Paris before the completion of the Palais Garnier in 1875.