Paris in the Belle Époque

Paris in the ''Belle Époque'' was a period in the history of the city between the years 1871 to 1914, from the beginning of the Third French Republic until the First World War. It saw the construction of the Eiffel Tower, the Paris Métro, the completion of the Paris Opera, and the beginning of the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur on Montmartre. Three lavish "universal expositions" in 1878, 1889, and 1900 brought millions of visitors to Paris to sample the latest innovations in commerce, art, and technology. Paris was the scene of the first public projection of a motion picture, and the birthplace of the Ballets Russes, Impressionism, and Modern Art.

The expression ''Belle Époque'' ("beautiful era") came into use after the First World War; it was a nostalgic term for what seemed a simpler time of optimism, elegance, and progress.

Rebuilding after the Commune

File:Marville, Charles - State of the Hôtel de Ville of Paris after the fire suffered during the revolts of the Comuna - Google Art Project.jpg, Hôtel de Ville after it was burned by the Paris Commune (May 1871)
File:Les Ruines de Paris et de ses Environs 1870-1871, Cent Photographies, Premier Volume. DP161584.jpg, The walls of the Tuileries Palace after arson by the Paris Commune
File:Les Ruines de Paris et de ses Environs 1870-1871, Cent Photographies, Premier Volume. DP161589.jpg, Ruins of the Ministry of Finance on the Rue de Rivoli
File:The Vendôme Column After Being Torn Down by the Communards.jpg, Remains of the column in the Place Vendome
File:Commune de Paris rue Royale.jpg, The Rue Royale and the church of the Madeleine
File:Paris Commune rue de Rivoli.jpg, Ruins along the Rue de Rivoli, scene of street battles between the Commune and Army

After the violent end of the Paris Commune in May 1871, the city was governed by martial law under the strict surveillance of the national government. At the time, Paris was not actually the capital of France. The government and parliament had moved to Versailles in March 1871 once the Paris Commune took power, and they did not return to Paris until 1879, although the Senate returned earlier to its home in the Luxembourg Palace.

The end of the Commune left the city's population deeply divided. Gustave Flaubert described the atmosphere in the city in early June 1871: "One half of the population of Paris wants to strangle the other half, and the other half has the same idea; you can read it in the eyes of people passing by." This sentiment soon became secondary to the need to reconstruct the buildings that had been destroyed in the last days of the Commune. The Communards had burned the Hôtel de Ville (including all the city archives), the Tuileries Palace, the Palais de Justice, the Prefecture of Police, the Ministry of Finances, the Cour des Comptes, the State Council building at the Palais-Royal, and many others. Several streets, particularly the Rue de Rivoli, had also been badly damaged by the fighting. 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. The city's bankers and businessmen quickly raised the money, and the reconstruction was soon underway.

The Conseil d'État and Palais de la Légion d'Honneur (Hôtel de Salm) were rebuilt in their original style. The new Hôtel de Ville was built on the lines of a more picturesque Neo-Renaissance style than the original that was based on the appearance of the Château de Chambord in the Loire Valley, with a façade decorated with statues of outstanding personages who contributed to the history and fame of Paris. The destroyed Ministry of Finance on the Rue de Rivoli was replaced by a grand hotel, while the Ministry moved into the Richelieu wing of the Louvre Palace, where it remained until 1989. The ruined Cour des Comptes on the Left Bank was replaced by the Gare d'Orléans, also known under the name Gare d'Orsay, now the Musée d'Orsay. The one difficult decision was the Tuileries Palace, originally built in the 16th century by Marie de' Medici as a royal residence. The interior had been entirely destroyed by fire, but the walls were still largely intact. The walls remained standing for ten years while the fate of the ruins was debated. Baron Haussmann, in retirement, appealed for a restoration of the building as a historic monument, and there was a proposal to turn it into a new museum of modern art. In 1881, however, a new Chamber of Deputies more sympathetic to the Commune than previous governments decided that it was too much a symbol of the monarchy and had the walls pulled down.

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 gesture was intended as a symbolic means to atone for the sufferings of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. The Basilica of Sacré-Cœur was subsequently built in a Neo-Byzantine style and paid for by public subscription. It quickly became one of the most recognizable landmarks in Paris during construction, but was not finished until 1919.

The Parisians

File:Auguste Renoir - Pont Neuf, Paris - Google Art Project.jpg, The ''Pont Neuf'' by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1872)
File:Caillebotte Rue de Paris.jpg, ''Paris Street; Rainy Day'' by Caillebotte (1877)
File:Victor Gabriel Gilbert (French, 1847-1933) The Lower Market, Paris, 1881.jpg, ''The Lower Market'' by Victor Gabriel Gilbert (1881)
File:Jean Béraud La Rue de la Paix.jpg, ''Rue de la Paix'' by Jean Béraud (1907)

The population of Paris was 1,851,792 in 1872, at the beginning the ''Belle Époque''. By 1911, it reached 2,888,107, higher than the population today.
Near the end of the Second Empire and the beginning of the ''Belle Époque'', between 1866 and 1872, the population of Paris grew only 1.5 percent. Then the population surged by 14.09 percent between 1876 and 1881, only to slow down again to a 3.3 percent growth between 1881 and 1886. After that, it grew very slowly until the end of the ''Belle Époque''. It reached a historic high of almost three million persons in 1921 before beginning a long decline until the early 21st century.

In 1886, about one-third of the population of Paris (35.7 percent) had been born in Paris. More than half 56.3 percent) had been born in other departments of France and about eight-percent outside France. In 1891, Paris was the most cosmopolitan of European capital cities, with seventy-five foreign-born residents for every thousand inhabitants. In comparison, there were only twenty-four per thousand in Saint Petersburg, twenty-two in London and Vienna, and eleven in Berlin. The largest communities of immigrants were Belgians, Germans, Italians and Swiss, with between twenty and twenty-eight thousand persons from each country. Followed by these were about ten thousand from Great Britain and an equal number from Russia; eight thousand from Luxembourg; six thousand South Americans; and five thousand Austrians. There were also 445 Africans, 439 Danes, 328 Portuguese and 298 Norwegians. Certain nationalities were concentrated in specific professions: Italians were concentrated in the businesses of making ceramics, shoes, sugar and conserves, whereas Germans were concentrated in leather-working, brewing, baking and charcuterie. Swiss and Germans were predominant in businesses making watches and clocks and also accounted for a large proportion of the domestic servants.

The remnants of old Paris aristocracy and the new aristocracy of bankers, financiers and entrepreneurs mostly had their residences in the 8th arrondissement, from the Champs-Élysées to the Madeleine church; in the "Quartier de l'Europe" and "Butte Chaillot" (now the area of the Place Charles de Gaulle; the Faubourg Saint-Honoré; the "Quartier Saint-Georges", from the Rue Vivienne and the Palais-Royal to Roule; and the Plain of Monceau. On the Right Bank, they lived in Le Marais. On the Left Bank, they lived on the south of the Latin Quarter, at Notre-Dame-des-Champs and Odéon; near Les Invalides; and at the École Militaire. The less affluent shop owners lived from the Porte Saint-Denis to Les Halles to the west of the Boulevard de Sébastopol. The middle class employees of enterprises, small businesses and government lived closer to the center of the city along the "Grands Boulevards"; in the 10th arrondissement; in the 1st and 2nd arrondissements near the Paris Bourse (Stock Exchange); in the Sentier quarter near Les Halles; and in Le Marais.

Under Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann demolished the poorest, most crowded and historical neighborhoods in the center of the city to make room for the new boulevards and squares. 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. Small quarters of working-class Parisians still remained in the center of the city, mainly on the sides of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève in the Latin Quarter near the Sorbonne and the Jardin des Plantes, and along the covered Bièvre River, where the tanneries had been located for centuries.

Paris was both the richest and poorest city in France. Twenty-four percent of the wealth in France was found in the Seine department, but fifty-five percent of burials of Parisians were made in the section for those unable to pay. In 1878, two-thirds of Parisians paid less than 300 francs a year for their lodging, a very small amount at the time. An 1882 study of Parisians, based on funeral costs, concluded that twenty-seven percent of Parisians were upper or middle class, while seventy-three percent were poor or indigent. Incomes varied greatly according to the neighborhood: in the 8th arrondissement, there were eight poor persons for ten upper or middle class residents; in the 13th, 19th and 20th arrondissements, there were seven or eight poor for every well-off resident.

The ''Apaches'' of Paris

''Apaches'' was a term that was introduced by Paris newspapers in 1902 for young Parisians who engaged in petty crime and sometimes fought each other or the police. They usually lived in Belleville and Charonne. Their activities were described in lurid terms by the popular press, and they were blamed for all varieties of crime in the city. 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."

Government and politics

After the Commune took over the municipal government of Paris in March 1871, the French national government concluded that Paris was too important to be run by the Parisians alone. On 14 April 1871, just before the end of the Commune, the National Assembly, meeting in Versailles, passed a new law giving Paris a special status different from other French cities and subordinate to the national government. All male Parisians could vote. The city was given a municipal council of eighty members, four from each arrondissement, for a term of three years. The council could meet for four sessions a year, none longer than ten days, except when considering the budget, when six weeks were allowed. There was no elected mayor. The real powers in the city remained the Prefect of the Seine and the Prefect of Police, both appointed by the national government.

The first legislative elections after the Commune, on 7 January 1872, were won by the conservative candidates. Victor Hugo, running as an independent candidate on the side of the radical republicans, was soundly defeated. In the Paris municipal elections of 1878, however, the radical Republicans were overwhelmingly victorious, winning 75 of the 80 municipal council seats. In 1879, they changed the name of many of the Paris streets and squares. The "Place du Château-d’Eau" became the Place de la République, and a statue of the Republic was placed in the center in 1883. The avenues "de la Reine-Hortense" (named for the mother of Napoleon III, Hortense de Beauharnais), "Joséphine" (name for the wife of Napoleon I, Joséphine de Beauharnais), and "Roi-de-Rome" (named for Napoleon II), were renamed Avenue Hoche, Avenue Marceau, and Avenue Kléber, after generals who served during the period of the French Revolution: Lazare Hoche, François Séverin Marceau-Desgraviers, and Jean-Baptiste Kléber.

The burning of the Tuileries Palace by the Commune meant that there was no longer a residence for the French head of state. The Élysée Palace was chosen as the new residence in 1873. It was built between 1718 and 1722 by the architect Armand-Claude Mollet for Louis Henri de La Tour d'Auvergne, Count of Évreux, then purchased in 1753 by King Lous XV for his mistress, the Marquise de Pompadour. During the period of the French Consulate, it was owned by Joachim Murat, one of Napoleon's marshals. In 1805, Napoleon made it one of his imperial residences, and it became the official presidential residence when his nephew, Louis-Napoléon, the future Emperor Napoleon III, became President of the Second Republic. During the Bourbon Restoration of 1815–30, the Élysée gardens were a popular amusement park. The Élysée Palace had no large room for ceremonial events, so a large ballroom was added during the Third Republic.

The most memorable Parisian civic event during the period was the funeral of Victor Hugo in 1885. Hundreds of thousands of Parisians lined the Champs-Élysées to see the passage of his coffin. The Arc de Triomphe was draped in black. The remains of the writer were placed in the Panthéon, formerly the Church of Saint-Geneviève, which had been turned into a mausoleum for great Frenchmen during the French Revolution, then turned back into a church in April 1816, during the Bourbon Restoration. After several changes during the 19th century, it was secularized again in 1885 for the occasion of Victor Hugo's funeral.

Social unrest, anarchists and the Boulanger crisis

The ''Belle Époque'' was spared the violent uprisings that brought down two French regimes in the 19th century, but it had its share of political and social conflicts and occasional violence. Labor unions and strikes had been legalized during the regime of Napoleon III. The first labor union congress in Paris took place in October 1876, and the socialist party recruited many members among the Paris workers. On May 1, 1890, the socialists organized the first celebration of May Day, the international day of labor. Since it was an unauthorized celebration, it led to confrontations between police and demonstrators.

The majority of political violence came from the anarchist movement of the 1890s. The first attack was organized by an anarchist named Ravachol, who set off bombs at three residences of wealthy Parisians. On April 25, he set off a bomb at the Restaurant Véry at the Palais-Royal and was arrested. On 8 November, anarchists planted a bomb in the office of the Compagnie Minière et Métallurgique, a mining company, on the Avenue de l'Opéra. The police found the bomb, but when it was taken to the police headquarters, it exploded, killing six persons. On 6 December, an anarchist named Auguste Vaillant set off a bomb in the building of the National Assembly that wounded forty-six persons. On 12 February 1894, an anarchist named Émile Henry set off a bomb at the café of the Hôtel Terminus next to the Gare Saint-Lazare that killed one person and wounded seventy-nine.

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. A popular general, Georges Ernest Boulanger, had his name put forward as a potential new leader. He became known as "the man on horseback" because of images of him on his black horse. He was supported by ardent nationalists who wanted a war with Germany to take back Alsace and Lorraine, which were lost in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. 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. Boulanger was elected to parliament in 1888, and his followers urged him to go to the Élysée Palace and declare himself president; but he refused, saying that he could win the office legally in a few months. However, the wave of enthusiasm for Boulanger quickly faded away, and he went into voluntary exile. The government of the Third Republic remained firmly in place.

The Police

The Paris police force was completely re-organized after the fall of Napoleon III and the Commune; the ''sergents de ville'' were replaced by the ''gardiens de la paix publique'' (Guardians of the Public Peace), which by June 1871 had 7,756 men under the authority of the Prefect of Police named by the national government. Following a series of anarchist bombings in 1892, the number was increased to 7,000 guardians, 80 ''brigadiers'' and 950 ''sous-brigadiers''. In 1901, under the prefect Louis Lépine, in order to keep up with the technology of the time, a unit of policemen on bicycles (called the ''hirondelles'' after the brand of the bicycles) was formed. They numbered 18 per arrondissement and reached 600 by 1906 for the whole city. A unit of river police, the ''brigade fluviale'', was organized in 1900 for the Universal Exposition, as well as a unit of traffic police who wore a symbol of a Roman chariot embroidered on the sleeve of their uniform. The first six motorcycle policemen appeared on the streets in 1906.

In addition to the ''gardiens de la paix publique'', Paris was guarded by the '' Garde républicaine'' under the military command of the Gendarmerie Nationale. Gendarmes had been a particular target of the Commune; 33 had been taken hostages and were executed by a (Communard) firing squad on Rue Haxo on 23 May 1871 in the last days of the Commune. In June 1871, they provided security in the damaged city. They numbered 6,500 men in two regiments, plus a unit of cavalry and a dozen cannon. The number was reduced in 1873 to 4,000 men in a single regiment, called the ''Légion de la Garde républicaine'' (Legion of the Republican Guard), with its headquarters on the Quai de Bourbon and troops quartered in several barracks around the city. The Republican Guard was given the duty of providing security for the president of the republic at the Élysée Palace, the National Assembly and the Senate, at the prefecture of police, and also at the Opéra, theaters, public balls, racetracks, and other public places. A unit of bicyclists was formed on 6 June 1907. When World War I began, the entire unit of Paris gendarmes was mobilized and fought at the front during war; 222 of them lost their lives.

By a decree of 29 June 1912, to assure the security of Paris by fighting organized criminals such as the ''Apaches'' and the ''bande à Bonnot'', a criminal section called the ''Brigade criminelle'' was created.

Religion

Paris in the ''Belle Époque'' witnessed a long and sometimes bitter dispute between the Catholic Church and governments of the Third Republic. During the Commune, the Church was particularly targeted for attack; 24 priests and the Archbishop of Paris were taken hostages and shot by firing squads in the final days of the Commune. The new government after 1871 was conservative and Catholic, and provided substantial funding for the Church establishment through the Ministère des Cultes, which approved the building of the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur on Montmartre without government funds as an act of expiation for the events of 1870–1871. The anti-clerical Republicans took power in 1879, and one of their leaders, Jules Ferry, declared: "My objective is to organize humanity without God and without kings." In March 1880, the Assembly outlawed religious congregations not authorized by the State, and on 30 June had the police expel the Jesuits from their building at 33 Rue de Sèvres. 260 monasteries and convents were closed in Paris and the rest of France. A new law was passed declaring that all public education should be non-religious (''laïque'') and obligatory. In 1883, new laws were passed to forbid public prayers and forbid soldiers to attend religious services in uniform. In 1881, twenty-seven cadets from the École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr (Military Academy of Saint-Cyr) were expelled for attending a mass at the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The law against working on Sunday was repealed in 1880 (it was reinstated in 1906 to assure workers a day of rest), and in 1885, divorce was authorized.

The new Municipal Council of Paris, also dominated by radical republicans, had little formal power, but it took many symbolic measures against the Church. 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. Several of the streets of Paris were renamed for republican and socialist heroes, including Auguste Comte (1885), François-Vincent Raspail (1887), Armand Barbès (1882), and Louis Blanc (1885). Specifically forbidden by the Catholic Church, cremation was authorized at Père Lachaise Cemetery. In 1899, the Dreyfus affair divided Parisians (and the whole of France) even more; the Catholic newspaper ''La Croix'' published virulent anti-Semitic articles against the army officer.

The new National Assembly of 1901 had a strongly anti-clerical majority. At the urging of the socialist members, the Assembly officially voted the separation of Church and State on 9 December 1905. The budget of 35 million francs a year given to the Church was cut off, and disputes took place over the official residences of the clergy. 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. A law of 1907 finally resolved the issue of property; churches built before that date, including the cathedral of Notre Dame, became the property of the French state, while the Catholic Church was given the right to use them for religious purposes. Despite the cutoff of government assistance, the Catholic Church was able to build 24 new churches, including 15 in the suburbs of Paris, between 1906 and 1914. Official relations between Church and State were almost non-existent to the end of the ''Belle Époque''.

The Jewish community in Paris had grown from 500 in 1789, or one percent of the Jewish community in France, to 30,000 in 1869, or 40 percent. Beginning in 1881, there were new waves of immigration from Eastern Europe that brought 7 to 9,000 new arrivals each year, and French-born Jews in the 3rd and 4th arrondissements were soon outnumbered by new arrivals, whose numbers increased from 16 percent of the population in those arrondissements to 61 percent. The pogroms in the Russian Empire between 1905 and 1914 provoked a new wave of immigrants arriving in Paris. The community faced a strong current of antisemitism, exemplified by the Dreyfus Affair. With the arrival of the great number of Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia, the Paris community became more and more secular and less religious.

There was no mosque in Paris until after the First World War. In 1920, the National Assembly voted to honor the memory of the estimated one hundred thousand Muslims from the French colonies in the Maghreb and black Africa who died for France during the war, and gave a credit of 500,000 francs to build the Grand Mosque of Paris.

The Economy

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. Most of these enterprises had employed between 100 and 200 workers each. Half of the large enterprises on the center of the city's Right Bank moved out, in part because of the high cost of real estate, and also to get better access to transportation on the river and railroads. Several moved to less-expensive areas at the edges of the city, around Montparnasse and La Salpêtriére, while others went to the 18th arrondissement, La Villette and the Canal Saint-Denis to be closer to the river ports and the new railroad freight yards. Still others relocated to Picpus and Charonne in the southeast, or near Grenelle and Javel in the southwest. The total number of enterprises in Paris dropped from 76,000 in 1872 to 60,000 in 1896, while in the suburbs their number grew from 11,000 to 13,000. In the heart of Paris, many workers were still employed in traditional industries such as textiles (18,000 workers), garment production (45,000 workers), and in new industries which required highly skilled workers, such as mechanical and electrical engineering and automobile manufacturing.

Cars, airplanes and movies

Three major new French industries were born in and around Paris at about the turn of the 20th century, taking advantage of the abundance of skilled engineers and technicians and financing from Paris banks. They produced the first French automobiles, aircraft, and motion pictures. In 1898, Louis Renault and his brother Marcel built their first automobile and founded a new company to produce them. They established their first factory at Boulogne-Billancourt, just outside the city, and made the first French truck in 1906. In 1908, they built 3,595 cars, making them the largest car manufacturer in France. They also received an important contract to make taxicabs for the largest Paris taxi company. When the first World War began in 1914, the Renault taxis of Paris were mobilized to carry French soldiers to the front at the First Battle of the Marne.

The French aviation pioneer Louis Blériot also established a company, Blériot Aéronautique, on the Boulevard Victor-Hugo in Neuilly, where he manufactured the first French airplanes. On 25 July 1909, he became the first man to fly across the English Channel. Blériot moved his company to Buc, near Versailles, where he established a private airport and a flying school. In 1910, he built the Aérobus, one of the first passenger aircraft, which could carry seven persons, the most of any aircraft of the time.

The Lumière brothers had given the first projected showing of a motion picture, ''La Sortie de l'usine Lumière'', at the Salon Indien du Grand Café of the Hôtel Scribe on the Boulevard des Capucines, on 28 December 1895. A young French entrepreneur, Georges Méliés, attended the first showing and asked the Lumière brothers for a license to make films. The Lumière Brothers politely declined, telling him that the cinema was for scientific purposes and had no commercial value. Méliés persisted and established his own small studio in 1897 in Montreuil, just east of Paris. He became a producer, director, scenarist, set designer and actor, and made hundreds of short films, including the first science-fiction film, ''A Trip to the Moon'' (''Le Voyage dans la Lune''), in 1902. 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.

Commerce and the department stores

The ''Belle Époque'' in Paris was the golden age of the ''Grand magasin'', or department store. The first modern department store in the city, Le Bon Marché, was originally a small variety store with a staff of twelve when it was taken over by Aristide Boucicaut in 1852. Boucicaut expanded it, and by deft discount pricing, advertising, and innovative marketing (a mail order catalog, seasonal sales, fashion shows, gifts to customers, entertainment for children) turned it into a hugely successful enterprise with a staff of eleven hundred employees and income that increased from 5 million francs in 1860 to 20 million in 1870, then reached 72 million at the time of his death in 1877. He built an enormous new building near the site of the original shop on the Left Bank, with an iron structure designed with the help of the engineering firm of Gustave Eiffel.

The success of Bon Marché inspired many competitors. The Grands Magasins du Louvre opened in 1855 with an income of 5 million francs that rose to 41 million by 1875 and 2400 employees in 1882. The Bazar de l'Hôtel de Ville (BHV) opened in 1857 and moved into a larger store in 1866. Printemps was founded in 1865 by a former department head of Bon Marché; La Samaritaine was opened in 1870; and La Ville de Saint-Denis, the first building in France to have an elevator, in 1869. Alphonse Kahn opened his Galeries Lafayette in 1895.

High Fashion and luxury goods

At the beginning of the ''Belle Époque'', the industry of '' haute couture'' (high fashion) was dominated by the House of Worth. Charles Worth had designed the clothes of the Empress Eugénie during the Second Empire and turned high fashion into an industry. His shop at 7 Rue de la Paix helped make that street the center of fashion in Paris. By 1900, there were more than twenty houses of ''haute couture'' in Paris, led by designers including Jeanne Paquin, Paul Poiret, Georges Doeuillet, Margaine-Lacroix, Redfern, Raudnitz, Rouff, Callot Sœurs, Blanche Lebouvier, and others, including sons of Charles Worth. Most of these houses had fewer than fifty employees, but the top six or seven firms each had between four hundred and nine hundred employees. They were concentrated on Rue de la Paix and around the Place Vendôme, with a few on the nearby Grands Boulevards. At the Universal Exposition of 1900, an entire building was devoted to fashion designers. The first fashion show with models had taken place in London in 1908; the idea was quickly copied in Paris. Jeanne Lanvin became a member of the ''Chambre syndicale de la haute couture'' (Syndicate of fashion designers) in 1909. Coco Chanel opened her first shop in Paris in 1910, but her fame as a designer came after the First World War.

The growth of the department stores and tourism created a much larger market for luxury goods, such as perfumes, watches and jewelry. The perfumer François Coty began making scents in 1904, and achieved his first success selling through department stores. He discovered the importance of elegant bottles in marketing perfume and commissioned Baccarat and René Lalique to design bottles in the Art Nouveau style. He realized the desire of middle class consumers to have luxury goods and sold a range of less-expensive perfumes. He also invented the fragrance set, a box of perfume, powder soap, cream and cosmetics with the same scent. He was so successful that in 1908 he built a new laboratory and factory, La Cité des Parfums ("The City of Perfume"), at Suresnes in the Paris suburbs. It had 9,000 employees and made one hundred thousand bottles of perfume a day.

The watchmaker Louis-François Cartier opened a shop in Paris in 1847. In 1899, his grandchildren moved the shop to the Rue de la Paix and made the shop international, opening branches in London (1902), Moscow (1908) and New York (1909). His grandson Louis Cartier designed one of the first purpose-built wristwatches for the Brazilian aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont, who made the first aircraft flight in Paris in 1906. The "Santos watch" went on sale in 1911 and was a huge success for the company.

File:Bal Bullier, Paris, 1876.jpg, A costume for roller skating at the Bal Bullier (1876)
File:Bicycling; The Ladies of the Wheel, 1896.jpg, Bicycling costumes (1898)
File:Iribe Les Robes de Paul Poiret p.17.jpg, Designs by Paul Poiret (1908)
File:Paquin3.jpg, An evening theater dress by Jeanne Paquin (1914)

Tourism, hotels and railroad stations

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. The expositions and the crowds grew even larger during the ''Belle Époque''; twenty-three million visitors came to Paris for the 1889 exposition, and the 1900 exposition welcomed forty-eight million visitors. The Grand Hôtel du Louvre, built for the universal exposition of 1855, opened that same year. The Grand Hôtel on the Boulevard des Capucines opened in 1862. 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. The Hôtel Ritz on the Place Vendôme opened in 1898, and the Hôtel de Crillon on the Place de la Concorde opened in 1909.

The growing number of visitors to Paris required the enlargement of the main train stations to handle all the passengers. The Gare Saint-Lazare had been covered with a forty-meter high shed between 1851 and 1853; it was further enlarged for the 1889 exposition, and a new hotel, the Terminus, was built next to it. The station and its huge shed became a popular subject for painters, among them Claude Monet, during the period. A brand-new station, the Gare d'Orsay, designed by Victor Laloux, opened on 4 July 1900; it was the first station designed for electrified trains. The line was not profitable, and the station was almost demolished in 1971, but between 1980 and 1986 it was turned into the Musée d'Orsay. The Gare Montparnasse, serving western France, had been built between 1848 and 1852. It was also enlarged between 1898 and 1900 to serve the growing number of passengers. The Gare de l'Est and Gare du Nord were both expanded, and the Gare de Lyon was completely rebuilt between 1895 and 1902 and given a new restaurant in the ornate style of the period, Le buffet de la Gare de Lyon, renamed the Train Bleu in 1963.

From the fiacre to the taxicab

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. In 1900, there were about ten thousand fiacres in service in Paris; half belonged to a single company, the ''Compagnie générale des voitures de Paris''; the other five thousand belonged to about five hundred small companies. The first two automobile taxis entered service in 1898, at a time when there were just 1,309 automobiles in Paris. The number remained very small at first; there were just eighteen in service during the Exposition of 1900, only eight in 1904, and 39 in 1905. However, by the end of 1905, the automobile taxi began to take off; there were 417 on the streets of Paris in 1906, and 1,465 at the end of 1907. Most were made by the Renault company in their factory on the Île Seguin, an island on the Seine between Boulogne-Billancourt and Sèvres. There were four large taxi companies; the largest, the ''Compagnie française des automobiles de place'' owned more than a thousand taxis. Beginning 1898, the automobile taxis were equipped with a meter to measure the distance and calculate the fare. First called a ''taxamètre'', it was renamed ''taximètre'' on 17 October 1904, which gave birth to the name "taxi". In 1907, Renault began building three thousand specially-built taxis; some were exported to London and others to New York City. The ones that went into service in New York were named "taxi cabriolets", which was shortened in America to "taxicab". By 1913, there were seven thousand taxis on the streets of Paris.

The omnibus, the tramway and the metro

At the beginning of the ''Belle Époque'', the horse-drawn omnibus was the primary means of public transport. In 1855, Haussmann consolidated ten private omnibus companies into a single company, the C.G.O. (''Compagnie générale des Omnibus'') and gave it the monopoly on public transport. The coaches of the CGO carried twenty-four to twenty-six passengers and ran on thirty-one different lines. The omnibus system was overwhelmed by the number of visitors at the 1867 Exposition, thus the city began to develop a new system of tramways in 1873. The omnibus continued to run, with larger cars that could carry forty passengers in 1880, and then, in 1888–89, a lighter vehicle that could carry thirty passengers, called an ''omnibus à impériale''. The horse-drawn tramway gradually replaced the horse-drawn omnibus. In 1906, the first motorized omnibuses began to run on Paris streets. The last horse-drawn omnibus run took place on January 11, 1913 between Saint-Sulpice and La Villette.

The horse-drawn tramway, running on a track flush with the street, had been introduced in New York in 1832. A French engineer living in New York, Loubat, brought the idea to Paris and opened the first tramway line in Paris, between the Place de la Concorde and the Barrière de Passy in November 1853. He extended the line, known as the ''Chemin de fer américain'' ("American rail line"), all the way across Paris from Boulogne to Vincennes in 1856. But then it was purchased by the CGO, the main omnibus line, and remained simply a curiosity. Only in 1873 did the tramway begin to gain importance, when the CGO lost its monopoly on city transport and two new companies, Tramways Nord and Tramways Sud, one financed by Belgian banks and the other by British banks, began operating from the center of Paris to the suburbs. The CGO responded by opening two new lines, one from the Louvre to Vincennes, the other following the line of fortifications around the city. By 1878, forty different lines were operating, half by the CGO. The companies tried a brief experiment with steam-powered tramways in 1876, but abandoned them in 1878. The electric-powered tramway, in service in Berlin since 1881, did not arrive in Paris until 1898, with a line from Saint-Denis to the Madeleine.

When the 1900 Universal Exposition was announced in 1898 in anticipation of millions of visitors coming to Paris, most of the public transport in Paris was still horse-drawn; forty-eight lines of omnibuses and thirty-four tramway lines still used horses, while there were just thirty-six lines of electric tramways. The last horse-drawn tramways were replaced with electric trams in 1914.

Other cities were well ahead of Paris in introducing underground or elevated metropolitan railways: London (1863), New York (1868), Berlin (1878), Chicago (1892), Budapest (1896) and Vienna (1898) all had them before Paris. 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). The Municipal Council of Paris, in contrast, wanted an independent underground metro only in the twenty arrondissements of the city that would support the tramways and omnibuses on the streets. The plan of the municipality won and was approved on 30 March 1898; it called for six lines totaling sixty-five kilometers of track. They chose the Belgian method of construction, with the lines just under the surface of the street, rather than the deep tunnels of the London system.

The first line, which connected the Porte de Vincennes with the Grand Palais and the other exposition sites, was built the most rapidly (just twenty months) and opened on 19 July 1900, three months after the opening the exposition. It carried more than sixteen million passengers between July and December. Line 2, between Porte Dauphine and Nation, opened in April 1903, and the modern Line 6 was finished at the end of 1905. The earliest lines used viaducts to cross over the Seine, at Bercy, Passy and Austerlitz. The first line under the Seine, Line 4 between Châtelet and the Left Bank, was built between 1905 and 1909. By 1914, the metro was carrying five hundred million passengers a year.

Constructing Paris

Monuments

Most of the notable monuments of the ''Belle Époque'' were constructed for use at the Universal Expositions, for example the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Palais, the Petit Palais, and the Pont Alexandre III. The chief architectural legacy of the Third Republic was a large number of new schools and local city halls, all inscribed with the slogans of the republic and statues of allegorical symbols of the republic; representations of scientists, writers and political figures were placed in parks and squares. The largest monument was an allegorical statue of the republic erected in the center of the Place du Château-d'Eau, renamed the Place de la République in 1879. It was an enormous bronze figure 9.5 meters high of the republic holding an olive branch and standing on a pedestal 15 meters high. On 14 July 1880, the Place du Trône was renamed the Place de la Nation, and a group of statues by Jules Dalou, called ''Triumph of the Republic'', was placed in the center. In the middle was Marianne in a chariot drawn by two lions surrounded by allegorical figures of Liberty, Work, Justice and Abundance. A plaster version was put in place in 1889, the bronze version in 1899. A 29-meter tall monument with a statue of another republican hero, Leon Gambetta, surmounted by a pylon crowned by a winged lion, was placed in the Cour Napoléon of the Louvre in 1888. 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.

Streets and boulevards

The construction of the new boulevards and streets begun by Napoleon III and Haussmann had been much criticized by Napoleon's opponents near the end of the Second Empire, but the government of the Third Republic continued his projects. The Avenue de l'Opéra, Boulevard Saint-Germain, Avenue de la République, Boulevard Henry-IV and Avenue Ledru-Rollin were all completed by 1889 essentially as Haussmann had planned them before his death. After 1889, the pace of construction slowed down. The Boulevard Raspail was finished, the Rue Réaumur was extended, and several new streets were created on the left bank: the Rue de la Convention, Rue de Vouillé, Rue d'Alésia, and Rue de Tolbiac. On the Right Bank, the Rue Étienne-Marcel was the last of the Haussmann projects to be completed before the First World War.

While the streets planned by Haussmann were completed, the strict uniformity of façades and building heights imposed by him was gradually modified. Buildings became much larger and deeper, with two apartments on each floor facing the street and others facing only onto the courtyard. The new buildings often had ornamental rotundas or pavilions on the corners and highly ornamental roof designs and gables. In 1902, maximum building heights were increased to 52 meters. With the advent of elevators, the most desirable apartments were no longer on the lowest floors, but on the highest floors, where there was more light, nicer views and less noise. With the arrival of automobiles and the beginning of traffic noise on the streets, the bedrooms moved to the back of the apartment, overlooking the courtyard.

The façades also changed from the strict symmetry of Haussmann: undulating façades appeared, as did bay and bow windows. Eclectic façades became popular; they often mixed the styles of Louis XIV, Louis XV and Louis XVI, and then, with the advent of Art nouveau style, floral patterns could be incorporated. The most striking examples of the new architecture were the Castel Béranger on the Rue La Fontaine and the Hôtel Lutetia. Between 1898 and 1905, the city organized eight competitions for the most imaginative building façades; variety was given precedence over uniformity. .

Architecture

The architectural style of the ''Belle Époque'' was eclectic and sometimes combined elements of several different styles. While the structures of the new buildings were resolutely modern, using iron frames and reinforced concrete, the façades ranged from the Romano-Byzantine style of the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur on Montmartre, to the strange neo-Moorish Palais du Trocadéro, to the neo-Renaissance style of the new Hôtel de Ville, to the exuberant reinvention of French classicism of the 17th and 18th centuries in the Grand Palais, Petit Palais and Gare d'Orsay, decorated as they are with domes, colonnades, mosaics and statuary. The most innovative buildings of the period were the Gallery of Machines at the 1889 exposition and the new railroad stations and department stores: their classical exteriors concealed very modern interiors with large open spaces and large glass skylights made possible by the new engineering techniques of the period. The Eiffel Tower shocked many traditional Parisians, both because of its appearance and because it was the first building in Paris taller than the cathedral of Notre-Dame.

Art Nouveau became the most striking stylistic innovation of the period in architecture. It is associated particularly with the metro station entrances designed by Hector Guimard and a handful of buildings, including Guimard's Castel Béranger (1889) at 14 Rue La Fontaine and the Hôtel Mezzara (1910) in the 16th arrondissement. The enthusiasm for Art Nouveau metro station entrances did not last long; in 1904 it was replaced at the Opéra metro station by a less exuberant "modern" style. Beginning in 1912, all the Guimard metro entrances were replaced with functional entrances without decoration.

A revolutionary new building material, reinforced concrete, appeared at the beginning of the 20th century and quietly began to change the face of Paris. The first church built in the new material was Saint-Jean de Montmartre, at 19 Rue des Abbesses at the foot of Montmartre. The architect was Anatole de Baudot, a student of Viollet-le-Duc. The nature of the revolution was not evident, because Baudot faced the concrete with brick and ceramic tiles in a colorful Art Nouveau style with stained glass windows in the same style.

The Théâtre des Champs-Élysées (1913) is another architectural landmark of the period, one of the few Paris buildings in the Art deco style. 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. It was the setting in 1913 for one of the major musical events of the ''Belle Époque'': the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's ''The Rite of Spring''.

File:Le sacre coeur (paris - france).jpg, The Romano-Byzantine style of the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur (1873-1919)
File:Béroud - Le dôme central de la galerie des machines à l'exposition universelle de 1889 - P2314 - Musée Carnavalet (cropped).jpg, The Gallery of Machines from the Universal Exposition of 1889
File:Paris 16 - Castel Béranger -1.JPG, The Castel Béranger by Hector Guimard (1899)
File:Main entrance of Grand Palais, Paris July 2014.jpg, The Grand Palais (1900)
File:St Jean de Montmartre.jpg, The Church of Saint-Jean-de-Montmartre (1894-1904), the first church built of reinforced concrete
File:Theatre-des-champs-elysees-.jpg, The Théâtre des Champs-Élysées (1913) in Art Deco style

Bridges

Eight new bridges were put across the Seine during the ''Belle Époque''. The Pont Sully, built in 1876, replaced two foot bridges that had connected the Île Saint-Louis to the Right and Left Bank. The Pont de Tolbiac was built in 1882 to connect the Left Bank with Bercy. The Pont Mirabeau, made famous in a poem by Apollinaire, was dedicated in 1895. Three bridges were built for the 1900 Exposition: the Pont Alexandre-III, dedicated by Czar Nicholas II of Russia in 1896, which connected the Left Bank with the grand exposition halls of the Grand Palais and Petit Palais; the Passerelle Debilly, a foot bridge that linked two sections of the Exposition; and a railroad bridge between Grenelle and Passy. Two more bridges were dedicated in 1905: the Pont de Passy (now the Pont de Bir-Hakeim), and the Viaduc d'Austerlitz, crossed by the metro.

Parks, gardens and squares

The work of creating parks, squares and promenades during the ''Belle Époque'' continued in the Second Empire style. 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. He was also the director of works of the 1889 Universal Exposition, responsible for building the exposition's gardens and pavilions. Alphand finished several of the projects begun under Haussmann: the Parc Montsouris (1869–1878), the Square Boucicaut (1873), and the Square Popincourt (later renamed Parmentier, and still later Maurice-Gardette), which replaced a demolished slaughterhouse and opened in 1872. Alphand's first major project of the ''Belle Époque'' was the Jardins du Trocadéro, the site of the Universal Exposition of 1878 that surrounded the enormous Palais de Trocadéro, which served as the main building for the exposition. He filled the park with a grotto, fountains, gardens and statues (the statues can now be seen on the parvis of the Musée d'Orsay). The park also displayed the full-sized head of the Statue of Liberty (''Liberty Enlightening the World'') before the statue was completed and shipped to New York City. The grotto and much of the park are still preserved as they were. It was used again for the Universal Exposition of 1889 Exposition, and with new fountains and a new palace added, it was also used for the Universal Exposition of 1937.

During the exposition of 1878, Alphand used the Champ de Mars as the site of a huge iron-framed exhibit hall, 725 meters long, surrounded by gardens. For the 1889 exposition, the same site was occupied by the Eiffel Tower and the huge Gallery of Machines, plus two large exhibit halls: the Palace of Liberal Arts and the Palace of Fine Arts. The two palaces were designed by Jean-Camille Formigé

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