Paris in the Belle Époque

Besides the cost of reconstruction, the new government was obliged to pay an indemnity of 210 million francs in gold to the victorious German Empire as reparations for the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

On 4 August 1871, at the first meeting of the city council after the Commune, the new Prefect of the Seine, Léon Say, put forward a plan to borrow 350 million francs for reconstruction and indemnity payments.

[3] On 23 July 1873, the National Assembly (the legislature of the early French Third Republic that was replaced by the Chamber of Deputies and a Senate in 1875) endorsed the project of building a basilica at the site where the uprising of the Paris Commune had begun.

The working-class Parisians moved out of the center toward the edges of the city, particularly to Belleville and Ménilmontant in the east; to Clignancourt and the Quartier des Grandes-Carrières to the north; and on the Left Bank to the area around the Gare d'Austerlitz, Javel and Grenelle, usually to neighborhoods that were close to their places of work.

In September 1907, the newspaper Le Gaulois described an Apache as "the man who lives on the margin of society, ready to do anything, except to take a regular job, the miserable who breaks in a doorway, or stabs a passer-by for nothing, just for pleasure.

[16] Another political crisis shook Paris beginning on 2 December 1887, when the president of the republic, Jules Grévy, was forced to resign when it was discovered that he had been selling the nation's highest award, the Legion of Honour.

Monarchist politicians began to promote Boulanger as a potential new leader who could dissolve the parliament, become president, recover the lost provinces and restore the French monarchy.

Nuns and other religious figures were forbidden to have official positions in hospitals, statues were put up to honor Voltaire and Diderot, and the Panthéon was secularized in 1885 to receive the remains of Victor Hugo.

On December 17, the police evicted the Archbishop of Paris from his official residence at 127 Rue de Grenelle; the Church responded by banning midnight masses in the city.

[25] The economy of Paris suffered an economic crisis in the early 1870s, followed by a long, slow recovery that led to a period of rapid growth beginning in 1895 until the First World War.

Between 1872 and 1895, 139 large enterprises closed their doors in Paris, particularly textile and furniture factories, metallurgy concerns, and printing houses, four industries had been the major employers in the city for sixty years.

Another French cinema pioneer and producer Charles Pathé, also built a studio in Montreuil, then moved to the Rue des Vignerons in Vincennes, east of Paris.

His chief rival in the early French film industry, Léon Gaumont, opened his first studio at about the same time at the Rue des Alouettes in the 19th arrondissement, near the Buttes-Chaumont.

The industry of mass tourism and large luxury hotels had arrived in Paris under Napoleon III, driven by new railroads and the huge crowds that had come for the first international expositions.

More luxury hotels appeared near the train stations and in the city center during the Belle Époque; the Hôtel Continental opened in 1878 on the Rue de Rivoli on the site of the old Ministry of Finance, which had been burned by the Paris Commune.

[33] In the first part of the Belle Époque, the fiacre was the most common form of public transport for individuals; it was a box-line small horse-drawn coach with driver carrying two passengers that could be hired by the hour or by the distance of the trip.

The reason for the delay was a fierce battle between the French railway companies and national government, which wanted a metropolitan system based on the existing railroad stations that would bring passengers in from the suburbs (like the modern RER).

It was taken down in 1954 after destructions during World War II, but some remaining sculptures including that of Gambetta himself were placed in 1982 in the Square Édouard-Vaillant (20th arrondissement) by the socialist president François Mitterrand.

Designed by Auguste Perret, it was also built of reinforced concrete and decorated by some of the leading artists of the era: bas-reliefs on the façade by Antoine Bourdelle, a dome by Maurice Denis, and paintings in the interior by Édouard Vuillard.

The projects were managed at first by Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand, who had been the head of department of parks and promenades under Haussmann and was elevated to the post of Director of Public Works of Paris, a position he held until his death in 1891.

[43] Between 1895 and 1898, Formigé created another Belle Époque landmark, the Serres d'Auteuil, a complex of large greenhouses designed to grow trees and plants for all the gardens and parks of Paris.

[45] The three "universal expositions" that took place in Paris during the Belle Époque attracted millions of visitors from around the world and displayed the newest innovations in science and technology, from the telephone and phonograph to electric street lighting.

Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) moved to Paris in 1881 and worked as a clerk for the French Navy, then for the Ministry of Public Education, as he wrote short stories and novels at a furious pace.

Other writers who made a mark in the Paris literary world of the Third Republic's Belle Époque included Anatole France (1844-1924); Paul Claudel (1868-1955); Alphonse Allais (1854-1905); Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918); Maurice Barrès (1862-1923); René Bazin (1853-1932); Colette (1873-1954); François Coppée (1842-1908); Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897); Alain Fournier (1886-1914); André Gide (1869-1951); Pierre Louÿs (1870-1925); Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949); Stéphane Mallarmé (1840-1898); Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917); Anna de Noailles (1876-1933); Charles Péguy (1873-1914); Marcel Proust (1871-1922); Jules Renard (1864-1910); Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891); Romain Rolland (1866-1944); Edmond Rostand (1868-1918); and Paul Verlaine (1844-1890).

Other influential composers in Paris during the period included Jules Massenet (1842-1912), author of the operas Manon and Werther, and Eric Satie (1866-1925), who made his living as a pianist at Le Chat Noir, a cabaret on Montmartre, after leaving the Conservatory.

In 1876, Auguste Renoir rented space at 12 Rue Cartot to paint his Bal du moulin de la Galette, which depicts a popular ball at Montmartre on a Sunday afternoon.

Drawn by the reputation of Paris as the world capital of art, Pablo Picasso came from Barcelona in 1900 to share an apartment with the poet Max Jacob and began by painting the cabarets and prostitutes of the neighborhood.

[62] Matisse and artists such as André Derain, Raoul Dufy, Jean Metzinger, Maurice de Vlaminck and Charles Camoin revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism.

[63] The Paris Salon, which had established the reputations and measured the success of painters throughout the Second Empire, continued to take place under the Third Republic until 1881, when a more radical French government denied it official sponsorship.

[66] Other more traditional sculptors whose work won acclaim in Paris during the Belle Époque included Jules Dalou, Antoine Bourdelle (also a former assistant of Rodin), and Aristide Maillol.