Paris under Louis-Philippe

[1] The heart of the city, around the Île de la Cité, was a maze of narrow, winding streets and crumbling buildings from earlier centuries; it was picturesque, but dark, crowded, unhealthy and dangerous.

The 1832 uprising, which followed the funeral of a fierce critic of Louis-Philippe, General Jean Maximilien Lamarque, was immortalized by Victor Hugo in his novel Les Misérables.

[8] The nobility, composed of several hundred families, continued to occupy their palatial town houses in the Faubourg Saint-Germain and held a prominent place in society, but exercised a much smaller role in the government and business of the city.

The Rothschild family and the bankers Jacques Laffitte and Casimir Perier lived on the Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, north of the Place Vendôme, just outside the boulevards.

The name was taken from the Romani people who originally immigrated to France from eastern Europe in the 15th century and were mistakenly believed to come specifically from Bohemia; they were numerous in Paris at the time.

Between March and September, it killed 18,402 Parisians, including Casimir Périer, the president of Louis-Philippe's Council of Ministers, who caught the disease after visiting cholera patients in hospital.

[20] At each angle of the square's extended octagon Hittorff placed a statue representing a French city: Bordeaux, Brest, Lille, Lyon, Marseille, Nantes, Rouen and Strasbourg.

The ashes of Napoleon were returned to Paris from Saint Helena in 1840, and were placed with great ceremony in a tomb designed by Louis Visconti beneath the church of Les Invalides.

In addition to saving architectural landmarks, he participated with his friend the novelist George Sand in the discovery of The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries at the Château de Boussac in the Limousin in central France; they are now the best-known possessions of the Cluny Museum in Paris.

Much of the work was directed by the architect and historian Eugène Viollet-le-Duc who sometimes admitted that he was guided by his own scholarship of the "spirit" of medieval architecture, rather strict historical accuracy.

The old buildings that pressed up against the back of the Hôtel de Ville were cleared away, two new wings were added, the interiors were lavishly redecorated, and the ceilings and walls of the grands salons were painted with murals by Eugène Delacroix.

[20] Rambuteau, during this fifteen years as Prefect of the Seine, made attempts to solve the blockage of traffic and the unhealthiness of the streets in the center, particularly after the cholera epidemic in the heart of the city.

In July 1839, Rambuteau authorized the construction of a new circular type of urinal, ten to twelve feet high, made of masonry with a pointed roof and posters displayed on the outside.

In 1840, as the result of tensions between France, Britain and the German states, the discussion was renewed, and a plan was put forward by Adolphe Thiers, the President of the Council and the Minister of Foreign Affairs.

The financiers, the Péreire brothers, built the first line from Paris to Saint-Germain-en-Laye between 1835 and 1837, largely in order to persuade the banking community and the Parisians that such a means of transport was feasible and profitable.

[29] The first train stations in Paris were called embarcadéres (a term borrowed from river navigation)), and their location was a source of great contention, since each railroad line was owned by a different company, and each went in a different direction.

[33] He patronized many of the leading artists of the time, including Gioacchino Rossini, Frédéric Chopin, Honoré de Balzac, Eugène Delacroix, and Heinrich Heine.

The porcelain factory at Sèvres, which had long made table settings for the royal courts of Europe, began to make them for the bankers and industrialists of Paris.

Some of the floating baths were designed for wealthier patrons, some were used as schools to teach swimming, and some were reserved for women only; one was located in front of the Hôtel Lambert on the Quai d'Anjou.

After Du Sommerard's death in 1843, the French state bought the building and his collection, and the Hôtel de Cluny and the Roman baths adjacent to it became the Museum of the Middle Ages.

The Paris Salon, held every year at the Louvre, continued to be the most important event in the French art world, establishing both prices and reputations of artists.

His most famous painting of the period, Liberty Leading the People (La Liberté guidant le peuple), an allegory of the 1830 revolution, was purchased by the French state, but was considered to be too inflammatory to be shown in public until 1848.

The most famous was Frédéric Chopin, who arrived in Paris from Poland in September 1831 at the age of twenty-one and never returned to his homeland after the Polish uprising against Russian rule in October 1831 was crushed.

He earned his living mainly from commissions given by wealthy patrons, including the wife of James Mayer de Rothschild, the publication of his compositions, and from private piano lessons.

A new theater for panoramas was built in 1839 by the architect Jacques Ignace Hittorff at the Carré Marigny on the Champs-Élysées to display Jean-Charles Langlois's monumental historical painting, The Burning of Moscow in 1812.

More riots took place in 1831 to protest a memorial service held at the church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois for the Duke of Berry, a prominent monarchist who had been assassinated on 14 February 1820 during the reign of King Louis XVIII.

[42] On 4 June 1832, the funeral procession of General Lamarque, an anti-monarchist army officer- popular with the students- who had died of cholera, was turned into a massive demonstration against the government; the protesters chanted "Long live the Republic!"

At one o'clock in the afternoon, as Louis-Philippe and his entourage were passing the Café Turc on the Boulevard du Temple, an "infernal machine" of multiple gun barrels was fired from a window.

In the elections for the Chamber of Deputies in July 1842, conservatives and monarchists retained their majority, but in Paris, ten of the twelve new members belonged to the opposition, two of them republicans.

Another crowd invaded the Tuileries Palace, seized the royal throne, carried it to Place de la Bastille, and burned it at the foot of July Column.