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.

Paris in 1897 — Boulevard Montmartre by Camille

Pissarro
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

Hôtel de Ville after it was burned by the Paris The walls of the Tuileries Palace after
Commune (May 1871) arson by the Paris Commune

Ruins of the Ministry of Finance on the Remains of the column in the Place
Rue de Rivoli Vendome

The Rue Royale and the church of Ruins along the Rue de Rivoli, scene of
the Madeleine 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.[1]

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." [2] 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.[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 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.[4]

The Parisians

The Pont Neuf by Pierre-Auguste Paris Street; Rainy Day by Caillebotte

Renoir (1872) (1877)

The Lower Market by Victor Gabriel Gilbert Rue de la Paix by Jean Béraud (1907)
(1881)

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%. Then the population
surged by 14.09% between 1876 and 1881, only to slow again to a 3.3% 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.[5]

In 1886, about one-third of the population of Paris (35.7%) had been born in Paris. More than half (56.3%)
had been born in other departments of France and about 8% outside France.[6] In 1891, Paris was the most
cosmopolitan of European capital cities, with 75 foreign-born residents for every thousand inhabitants. In
comparison, there were only 24 per thousand in Saint Petersburg, 22 in London and Vienna, and 11 in
Berlin. The largest communities of immigrants were Belgians, Germans, Italians and Swiss, with between
20 and 28,000 persons from each country. Followed by these were about 10,000 from Great Britain and an
equal number from Russia; 8,000 from Luxembourg; 6,000 South Americans and 5,000 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. Germans were concentrated in leather-working, brewing, baking and charcuterie.
Swiss and Germans were predominant in businesses making watches and clocks, and accounted for a large
proportion of the domestic servants.[7]

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.[8]

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 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.[9]

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 55% 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 27% of Parisians were upper
or middle class, while 73% 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. [10]

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."[11]

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.[12]

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.[13] In the Paris municipal elections
of 1878, however, the radical Republicans were A meeting of the Paris Municipal Council (1889)
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.[14]

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,[15] 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.[16]

May Day battles between socialist

workers and police on the Place de la
Concorde (1890)

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
A transit strike in 1891 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.[17]

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.[18]

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
Policemen helping a lost little girl in the
troops quartered in several barracks around the city. The painting La petite fille perdue dans Paris
Republican Guard was given the duty of providing security for by Charles-Gustave Housez (1877)
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. [19]

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.[20]

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."[21] 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.[22]

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.[23]

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.[24]

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.[25]

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 The Moisant workshop on the Boulevard de
better access to transportation on the river and Vaugirard (1889) made the metal structure for the
railroads. Several moved to less-expensive areas at the Bon Marché department store
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.[26]

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 Louis Renault and his first car (1903)
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.
Louis Blériot and his aircraft (1909)
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.[27]

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
Le Bon Marché in 1887
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.[28]

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, Jeanne Paquin's fashion house (1906)
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.[29][30]

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.[31]: 24

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.

A costume for Bicycling costumes Designs by Paul Poiret An evening theater

roller skating at the (1898) (1908) dress by Jeanne Paquin
Bal Bullier (1876) (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 Claude Monet: Gare Saint-Lazare, l'arrivée d'un
Ministry of Finance, which had been burned by the train, 1877, Fogg Art Museum, USA
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.[32]
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. [33]

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.[34]

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 A horse-drawn Paris omnibus in 1910
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.[35]

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
Motorized omnibuses on the Avenue de Clichy
tramway begin to gain importance, when the CGO lost
(1914)
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.[36]

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.

The Paris Métro under construction (between 1902 Hector Guimard's original Art Nouveau entrance to
and 1910) the Paris Métro station Abbesses

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.[37]

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 Triumph of the Republic by Jules Dalou on
The Republic, a statue in the slogans of the republic the Place de la Nation (1899)
Place de la République (1883) 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.[38]

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 The Hotel Lutetia (1910), with its Art Nouveau
left bank: the Rue de la Convention, Rue de Vouillé, façade, reflected the abandonment of the strict
Rue d'Alésia, and Rue de Tolbiac. On the Right Bank, façade uniformity of Haussmann's Paris
the Rue Étienne-Marcel was the last of the Haussmann
projects to be completed before the First World
War.[37]

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.[39]

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. .[39]

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.[40] 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.[41]

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 The interior of the Bon Marché department
buildings in the Art deco style. Designed by Auguste Perret, it store (1875)
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.
 The Romano- The Gallery of The Castel The Grand Palais (1900)
Byzantine style Machines from Béranger by
of the Basilica the Universal Hector Guimard
of Sacré-Cœur Exposition of (1899)
(1873-1919) 1889

The Church of The Théâtre des Champs-

Saint-Jean-de- Élysées (1913) in Art Deco
Montmartre style
(1894-1904), the
first church built
of reinforced
concrete

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 The Pont Alexandre III and the Grand Palais,
linked two sections of the Exposition; and a railroad bridge legacies of the Paris Universal Exposition of
between Grenelle and Passy. Two more bridges were 1900
dedicated in 1905: the Pont de Passy (now the Pont de Bir-Hakeim), and the Viaduc d'Austerlitz, crossed
by the metro.[42]

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.[43] 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 At the Exposition Universelle of
de Trocadéro, which served as the main building for the exposition. He 1878, the Gardens of the
filled the park with a grotto, fountains, gardens and statues (the statues Trocadéro displayed the full-size
can now be seen on the parvis of the Musée d'Orsay). The park also head of the Statue of Liberty
displayed the full-sized head of the Statue of Liberty (Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World)
Enlightening the World) before the statue was completed and shipped before the statue was completed
and shipped to New York City.
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.[43]

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, the chief architect of
Paris. The two palaces and the Gallery of Machines were demolished after the exposition, but in 1909,
Formigé was given the task of transforming the exposition site around the Eiffel Tower into a park with
broad lawns, promenades and groves of trees in the form it is today.[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. The largest structure, one hundred
meters long, was designed to grow tropical plants. The
greenhouses still exist today and are open to the public.

Other than the parks of the expositions, no other large Paris

parks were created in the Belle Époque, but several squares of
about one hectare each were created. They all had the same
The Serres d'Auteuil (1898), next to the
Bois de Boulogne, provided trees, shrubs
basic design: a bandstand in the center, a fence, groves of trees
and flowers for all the parks of Paris and flower beds, and often also statues. These included the
Square Édouard-Vaillant in the 20th arrondissement (1879), the
Square Samuel-de-Champlain in the 20th arrondissement
(1889), the Square des Épinettes in the 17th arrondissement (1893), the Square Scipion in the 5th
arrondissement (1899), the Square Paul-Painlevé in the 5th arrondissement (1899) and the Square Carpeaux
in the 18th arrondissement (1907).[43]

The best-known and most picturesque park of the period is that composed of the Squares Willette and
Nadar on the slope directly below the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur on Montmartre. It was begun by Formigé in
1880, but not completed until 1927 by another architect, Léopold Béviére, after the death of Formigé in
1926. The park features terraces and slopes dropping eighty meters from the Basilica to the street below,
and has one of the best-known views in Paris.

Street lighting

At the beginning of the Belle Époque, Paris was lit by

a constellation of thousands of gaslights that were often
admired by foreign visitors and helped give the city its
nickname La Ville-Lumière: the "City of Light". In
1870, there were 56,573 gaslights used exclusively to
illuminate the streets of the city.[44] The gas was
produced by ten enormous factories around the edge of
the city that were located near the circle of
fortifications. It was distributed in pipes installed under
the new boulevards and streets. The street lights were The first electric street lights in Paris, on the
placed every twenty meters on the Grands Boulevards. Avenue de l'Opéra (1878)
At a predetermined minute after nightfall, a small army
of 750 uniformed allumeurs ("lighters") carrying long
poles with small lamps at the end went out into the streets to turn on a pipe of gas inside each lamppost and
light the lamp. The entire city was illuminated within forty minutes. The Arc de Triomphe was crowned
with a ring of gaslights, and the Champs-Élysées was lined with ribbons of white light.[44]

One of the major urban innovations in Paris was the introduction of electric street lights to coincide with the
opening of the Universal Exposition of 1878. The first streets lit were the Avenue de l'Opéra and the Place
de l'Étoile around the Arc de Triomphe. In 1881, electric street lights were added along the Grands
Boulevards. Electric lighting came much more slowly for residences and businesses in some Paris
neighborhoods. While electric lights lined the Champs-Élysées in 1905, there was no electric lines for any
households in the 20th arrondissement.[45]

The Paris Universal Expositions

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.

The 1878 Universal Exposition

The Universal Exposition of 1878, which lasted from 1 May to 10 November 1878, was designed to
advertise the recovery of France from the 1870 Franco-German War and the destruction of the period of the
Paris Commune. It took place on both sides of the Seine, in the Champ de Mars and the heights of
Trocadéro, where the first Palais du Trocadéro was built. Many of the buildings were made of new
inexpensive material called staff, which was composed of jute fiber, plaster of Paris, and cement. The main
exposition hall was an enormous rectangular structure, the Palace of Machines, where the Eiffel Tower is
 located today. Inside, Alexander
Graham Bell displayed his new
telephone and Thomas Edison
presented his phonograph. The head of
the newly finished Statue of Liberty
(Liberty Enlightening the World) was
displayed before it was sent to New
York City to be attached to the body.
Important congresses and conferences
Aerial view of the Universal Exposition of 1878 took place on the margins of the
exposition, including the first congress
on intellectual property, led by Victor
Hugo, whose proposals led eventually to the first copyright laws, and a conference on education for the
blind, which led to the adoption of the Braille system of reading for the blind. The exposition attracted
thirteen million visitors, and was a financial success.

The 1889 Universal Exposition

The Universal Exposition of 1889 took place from 6 May until 31

October 1889 and celebrated the centenary of the beginning of the
French Revolution; one of the structures on the grounds was a replica
of the Bastille. It took place on the Champ de Mars, the hill of Chaillot,
and along the Seine at the Quai d'Orsay. The most memorable feature
was the Eiffel Tower, 300 meters tall when it opened (now 324 with
the addition of broadcast antennas), which served as the gateway to the
exposition.[46] The Eiffel Tower remained the world's tallest structure The Eiffel Tower was the gateway
until 1930.[47] It was not popular with everyone; its modern style was of the Universal Exposition of
denounced in a public letter by many of France's most prominent 1889
cultural figures, including Guy de Maupassant, Charles Gounod and
Charles Garnier.[48] The largest building was the iron-framed Gallery
of Machines, at the time the largest covered interior space in the world. Other popular exhibits included the
first musical fountain, lit with colored electric lights that changed in time to music. Buffalo Bill and
sharpshooter Annie Oakley drew large crowds to their Wild West Show at the exposition.[49] The
exposition welcomed 23 million visitors. [50]

The 1900 Universal Exposition

The Universal Exposition of 1900 took place from 15 April until 12

November 1900. It celebrated the turn of the century and was by far
the largest in scale of the Expositions; its sites included the Champ de
Mars, Chaillot, the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais. Beside the Eiffel
Tower, it featured the world's largest ferris wheel, the "Grande Roue
de Paris", one hundred metres high, that could carry sixteen hundred
passengers in forty cars. Inside the exhibit hall, Rudolph Diesel
the Universal Exposition of 1900 demonstrated his new engine, and one of the first escalators was on
included events at the Grand display. The Exposition coincided with the 1900 Paris Olympics, the
Palais and Petit Palais as well as first Olympic games held outside of Greece. The Exposition
the Eiffel Tower and Chaillot popularized a new artistic style, the Art nouveau, to the world.[51] Two
architectural legacies of the Exposition, the Grand Palais and Petit
Palais, are still in place in the city.[52] Though it was a great popular success, attracting an estimated forty-
eight million visitors, the 1900 exposition lost money and was the last such exposition in Paris on such a
grand scale.[50]

Restaurants, cafés, and brasseries

A Parisian café by Ilya Repin (1875)

Dining in the garden of the Ritz, a painting by
Pierre-Georges Jeanniot (1904)
Paris was already famous for its restaurants in the first
half of the 19th century, particularly the Café Riche,
the Maison Dorée and the Café Anglais on the Grands
Boulevards, where the wealthy personalities of Balzac's novels would dine. The Second Empire had added
more luxury restaurants, particularly in the center near the new grand hotels: Durand at the Madeleine;
Voisin on the Rue Cambon and Rue Saint-Honoré; Magny on the Rue Mazet; Foyot near the Luxembourg
Gardens; and Maire at the corner of the Boulevard de Strasbourg and Boulevard Saint-Denis, where lobster
thermidor was invented. During the Belle Époque, many more prestigious restaurants could be found,
including Laurent, Fouquet's and the Pavillon de l'Élysée on the Champs-Élysées; the Tour d'Argent on the
Quai de la Tournelle; Prunier on the Rue Duphot; Drouant on the Place Gaillon; Lapérouse on the Quai des
Grands-Augustins; Lucas Carton at the Madeleine, and Weber on the Rue Royale. The most famous
restaurant of the period, Maxim's, also opened its doors on the Rue Royale. Two luxury restaurants were
found by the lakes in the Bois de Boulogne: the Pavillon d'Armenonville and the Cascade.[53]

For those with more modest budgets, there was the Bouillon, a type of restaurant begun by a butcher named
Duval in 1867. These establishment served simple and inexpensive food and were popular with students
and visitors. One from this period, Chartier, near the Grands Boulevards, still exists.

A new type of restaurant, the Brasserie, appeared in Paris during the 1867 Universal Exposition. The name
originally meant a place that brewed beer, but in 1867 it was a type of café where young women in the
national costumes of different countries served different drinks of those countries, including beer, ale,
chianti, and vodka. The idea was continued after the Exposition by the Brasserie de l'Espérance on the Rue
Champollion on the Left Bank, and was soon imitated by others. By 1890, there were forty-two brasseries
on the Left Bank, with names including the Brasserie des Amours, the Brasserie de la Vestale, the Brasserie
des Belles Marocaines, and the Brasserie des Excentriques Polonais (brasserie of the eccentric Poles), and
they were often used as a place to meet prostitutes.[53]

Sports
Paris played a central role in the organization of international sports and in the professionalization of sports.
The first efforts to revive the Olympic Games were led by a French educator and historian, Pierre de
Coubertin. The first meeting to organize the games took place at the Sorbonne in 1894, resulting in the
creation of the International Olympic Committee and
the holding of the first modern Olympic Games in
Athens in 1896. The second games, the first Olympics
held outside of Greece, were the 1900 Summer
Olympics in Paris, from 14 May until 28 October
1900, organized in conjunction with the Paris
Universal Exposition of 1900. There were 19 sports
included in the event, and women competed in the
Olympics for the first time. The swimming events took
place in the Seine. Some of the sports were unusual by
modern standards; they included automobile and
motorcycle racing, cricket, croquet, underwater
swimming, tug-of-war, and shooting live pigeons.

Cycling also became an important professional sport,

with the opening in 1903 of the first cycling stadium,
the Vélodrome d'hiver, on the site of the demolished
Palace of Machinery from the 1900 Exposition on the
Champ de Mars. The first stadium was demolished and Women's tennis at the 1900 Paris Olympics
moved in 1910 to boulevard de Grenelle. The first
Tour de France, the most famous of all French cycling
events, took place in 1903, with the finish line at the Parc des Princes stadium.

In September 1901, Paris hosted the first European lawn tennis championship in 1901, and on June 1,
1912, hosted the first world championship of tennis, at the stadium of the Faisanderie in the Domaine
national de Saint-Cloud.

The first championship of France in football took place in 1894, with six teams competing. It was won by
the team Standard Athletic Club of Paris; the team had one French player and ten British players. The first
rugby match between England and France took place on 26 March 1906 at the Parc des Princes, with the
victory of England.

Paris also hosted several of the world's earliest automobile races. The first, in 1894, was the Paris-Rouen
race, organized by the newspaper Le Petit Journal. The first Paris-Bordeaux race took place on 10–12 June
1895, and the first race from Paris to Monte-Carlo in 1911.[54]

Science and technology

Scientists in Paris played a leading role in many of major scientific
developments of the period, particularly in bacteriology and physics. Louis
Pasteur (1822-1895) was a pioneer in vaccination, microbacterial fermentation
and pasteurization. He developed the first vaccines against anthrax (1881) and
rabies (1885), and the process for stopping bacterial growth in milk and wine.
He founded the Pasteur Institute in 1888 to carry on his work, and his tomb is
located at the institute.[55]

The physicist Henri Becquerel (1852-1908), while studying the fluorescence

of uranium salts, discovered radioactivity in 1896, and in 1903 was awarded
the Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery. Pierre Curie (1859-1906) and
Louis Pasteur Marie Curie (1867-1934) jointly carried on Becquerel's work, discovering
radium and polonium (1898). They jointly received the Nobel Prize for physics
in 1903. Marie Curie became the first female professor at the
University of Paris and won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1911.
She was the first woman to be buried in the Panthéon.[55]

The neon light was used for the first time in Paris on 3 December 1910
in the Grand Palais. The first outdoor neon advertising sign was put up
on Boulevard Montmartre in 1912.[20]

The arts

Literature

During the Belle Époque, Paris was the home and inspiration for some
Marie Curie (1911)
of France's most famous writers. Victor Hugo was sixty-eight when he
returned to Paris from Brussels in 1871 and took up residence on the
Avenue d'Eylau (now Avenue Victor Hugo) in the 16th
arrondissement. He failed to be re-elected to the National Assembly,
but in 1876, he was elected to the French Senate.[56] It was a difficult
period for Hugo; his daughter Adèle was placed in an insane asylum,
and his longtime mistress, Juliette Drouet, died in 1883. When Hugo
died 28 May 1885 at the age of eighty-three, hundreds of thousands of
Parisians lined the streets to pay tribute as his coffin was taken to the
Panthéon on 1 June 1885.

Victor Hugo (1876)

Émile Zola was born in Paris in 1840, the son of an

Italian engineer. He was raised by his mother in Aix-
en-Provence, then returned to Paris in 1858 with his
On 1 June 1885, crowds line the streets of Paris
friend Paul Cézanne to attempt a literary career. He
as Victor Hugo's remains are taken to the worked as a mailing clerk for the publisher Hachette
Panthéon. and began attracting literary attention in 1865 with his
novels in the new style of naturalism. He described in
intimate details the workings of Paris department
stores, markets, apartment buildings and other institutions, and the lives of the Parisians. By 1877, he had
become famous and wealthy from his writing. He took a central role in the Dreyfus affair, helping win
justice for Alfred Dreyfus, a French artillery officer of Alsatian Jewish background, who had falsely been
accused of treason.

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. He became
famous, but also became ill and depressed, then paranoid and suicidal. He died at the asylum of Saint-Esprit
in Passy in 1893.
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). Paris was also the home of one of
the greatest Russian writers of the period, Ivan Turgenev.

Guy de Maupassant Paul Verlaine (1893) Stéphane Mallarmé Marcel Proust

(1888) (1896) (1900)

Emile Zola (1902)

Music

Paris composers during the period had a major impact on European music, moving it away from
romanticism toward impressionism in music and modernism.

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) was born in Paris and admitted to the Paris Conservatory when he was
thirteen. When he finished the Conservatory, he became organist at the church of Saint-Merri, and later at
La Madeleine. His most famous works included the Danse Macabre, the opera Samson et Dalila (1877),
the Carnival of the Animals (1877), and his Symphony No. 3 (1886). On 25 February 1871, he co-founded
the Société Nationale de Musique with Romain Bussine to promote French contemporary and chamber
music. His students included Maurice Ravel and Gabriel Fauré, two of the foremost French composers of
the late 19th- and early 20th centuries.[57]
 Georges Bizet (1838-1875), born in Paris, was admitted to the Paris
Conservatory when he was only ten years old. He finished his most
famous work, Carmen, written for the Opéra-Comique, in 1874. Even
before its première, Carmen was criticized as immoral. Furthermore,
the musicians complained that it could not be played, and the singers
complained that it could be not be sung. The reviews were mixed, and
the audience cold. When Bizet died in 1875, he considered it a failure.
Nonetheless, Carmen soon became one of the best-known and
beloved operas in the repertoire worldwide.[58]

The most famous French composer of the late Belle Époque in Paris
was Claude Debussy (1862-1918). He was born at Saint-Germain-en-
Laye, near Paris, and entered the Conservatory in 1872. He became
part of the Parisian literary circle of the symbolist poet Mallarme. At
first an admirer of Richard Wagner, he went on to experiment with
impressionism in music, atonal music and chromaticism. His most
Claude Debussy (1908)
famous works include Clair de Lune for piano (written ca. 1890,
published 1905), La Mer for orchestra (1905) and the opera Pelléas et
Mélisande (1903-1905).[59]

The most revolutionary composer to work in Paris during the Belle Époque was the Russian-born Igor
Stravinsky. He first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by the impresario Sergei
Diaghilev and first performed in Paris by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911)
and The Rite of Spring (1913). The last of these transformed the way in which subsequent composers
thought about rhythmic structure and dissonance treatment.

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. His most famous works are the Gymnopédies
(1888).[60]
 Georges Bizet Camille Jules Massenet Eric Satie Maurice Ravel
(1875) Saint-Saëns (1880)
(about 1880)

Igor Stravinsky,
as drawn by
Picasso (1920)

Painting

Paris was the home and the frequent subject of the

Impressionists, who tried to capture the city's light, its
colors, and its motion. They survived and flourished
because of the support of Paris art dealers, such as
Ambroise Vollard and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, and
wealthy patrons, including Gertrude Stein.

The first exhibit of the Impressionists took place from

April 15 to May 15, 1874 in the studio of the
photographer Nadar. It was open to any painter who
could pay a fee of sixty francs. There, Claude Monet
exhibited the painting Impression: Sunrise (Impression,
soleil levant), which gave the movement its name. The Bal du moulin de la Galette by Pierre-Auguste
Renoir (1876) depicts a Sunday afternoon dance in
Other artists who took part included Pierre-Auguste
Montmartre. Paris became the birthplace of
Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, Camille
Impressionism and modern art during the Belle
Pissarro, and Paul Cézanne.
Époque.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) spent much of
his short life in Montmartre painting and drawing the
dancers in cabarets. He produced 737 canvases in his lifetime, thousands of drawings and a series of posters
made for the cabaret Moulin Rouge. Many other artists lived and worked in Montmartre, where rent was
low and the atmosphere congenial. 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. Maurice Utrillo lived at the same address from
1906 to 1914, Suzanne Valadon lived and had her studio there, and
Raoul Dufy shared an atelier there from 1901 to 1911. The building is
now the Musée de Montmartre.[61]

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

painted by Picasso in Montmartre
(1907)

A new generation of artists arrived in Montmartre at

the turn of the century. 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
Luxe, Calme, et Volupté by Henri Matisse (1904)
poet Max Jacob and began by painting the cabarets
and prostitutes of the neighborhood. Amedeo
Modigliani and other artists lived and worked in a
building called Le Bateau-Lavoir during the years 1904–1909. In 1907, Picasso painted one of his most
important masterpieces, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, in Le Bateau-Lavoir. Led by Picasso and Georges
Braque, the artistic movement cubism was born in Paris.[62]

Henri Matisse came to Paris in 1891 to study at the Académie Julien in the class of painter Gustave Moreau,
who advised him to copy paintings in the Louvre and study Islamic art, which Matisse did. He also made
the acquaintance of Raoul Dufy, Cézanne, Georges Rouault and Paul Gauguin, and began to paint in the
style of Cézanne. Matisse visited Saint-Tropez in 1905, and when he returned to Paris, he painted a
revolutionary work, Luxe, Calme et Volupté, using bright colors and bold dabs of paint.[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. Henri Matisse's two versions of The Dance (1909) signified a key point in
the development of modern painting.[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. It was replaced by a new Salon sponsored by the Société des
Artistes Français. In December 1890, the leader of the society, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, propagated
the idea that the new Salon should be an exhibition of young, yet not awarded, artists. Ernest Meissonier,
Puvis de Chavannes, Auguste Rodin and others rejected this proposal and made a secession. They created
the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and its own exhibition, immediately referred to in the press as the
Salon du Champ de Mars[64] or the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux–Arts;[65] it was soon also
widely known as the "Nationale". In 1903, in response to what many artists at the time felt was a
bureaucratic and conservative organization, a group of painters and sculptors led by Pierre-Auguste Renoir
and Auguste Rodin organized the Salon d'Automne.
 Portrait of the painter Self-portrait of Pierre- Henri de Henri Matisse (1913)
Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir (1876) Toulouse-Lautrec
Claude Monet as
portrayed by Pierre-
Auguste Renoir
(1875)

Sculpture

Monument to Balzac, by Auguste Rodin, on the

Boulevard Raspail (1890)
Constantin Brâncuși, Portrait of
Mademoiselle Pogany, 1912
The Belle Époque was a golden age for sculptors; the government of Philadelphia Museum of Art
the Third Republic commissioned very few monumental buildings, but
did commission a large number of statues to French writers, scientists,
artists and political figures that soon filled the city's parks and squares. The most prominent sculptor of the
period was Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). Born in Paris into a working-class family, he was rejected for entry
into the École des Beaux-Arts and rejected by the Paris Salon. He had to struggle for many years to win
recognition, supporting himself as a decorator and later as a designer for the Sèvres porcelain factory. He
gradually won attention for his design for the Gates of Hell, a museum of decorative art which was never
built; its plan included what became his most famous work, The Thinker. He was commissioned by the city
of Calais to make a monument, The Burghers of Calais (1884), to commemorate an event that took place in
that city in 1347, during the Hundred Years' War. He was also commissioned to create a Monument to
Balzac (now on the Boulevard Raspail), which caused a scandal and made him a celebrity. Rodin's work
was exhibited near the 1900 Exposition, which won him many foreign clients. In 1908, he moved from
Meudon to Paris, renting the ground floor of a private mansion in the 7th arrondissement, the Hôtel Biron,
now the Musée Rodin. By the time of his death, he was the most famous sculptor in France, perhaps in the
world.[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. Their works decorated
theaters, parks, and were featured at the International Expositions. The more avant-garde artists organized
themselves into the Société des Artistes Indépendants. They held annual Salons that helped set the course of
modern art. At the turn of the century, Paris attracted sculptors from around the world. Constantin Brâncuși
(1876-1957) moved from Bucharest to Munich to Paris, where he was admitted, in 1905, to the École des
Beaux-Arts. He worked for two months in the workshop of Rodin, but left, declaring that "Nothing grows
under big trees", and went in his own direction into modernism. Brâncuși won fame at the 1913 "Salon des
indépendants" and became one of the pioneers of modern sculpture.[67]

The flood of 1910

The Paris flood of 1910 reached the height of 8.5
meters on the scale measuring the river's level on the
Pont de la Tournelle. The Seine rose above its banks
and flooded along the course it had followed in
prehistoric times; the water reached as far as the Gare
Saint-Lazare and the Place du Havre. It was the
second-highest flood recorded in the history of Paris
(the highest was in 1658), and was the third major
flood of the Belle Époque (the others were in 1872 and
1876). Nonetheless, it received much more attention
than earlier floods, largely because of the advent of
photography and the international press. Postcards and A footbridge over the Avenue Montaigne during the
other images of the flood spread around the world. The 1910 flood
municipal authorities made a special survey of the city
to measure exactly its extent. It also demonstrated the
vulnerability of the city's new infrastructure: the flood stopped the Paris Metro and shut down the city's
electricity and telephone system. Afterwards, new dams were constructed along the Seine and its major
tributaries. No comparable floods have taken place since. [68]

The end of the Belle Époque

On 28 June 1914, the news reached Paris of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria
by Serbian nationalists in Sarajevo. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July, and following the
terms of their alliances, Germany joined Austria-Hungary, while Russia, Britain and France went to war
against Austria-Hungary and Germany. France declared a general mobilization on 1 August 1914. On the
day before the mobilization, the leader of the French socialists, Jean Jaurès, was assassinated by a mentally-
disturbed man in the Café du Croissant near the headquarters of the socialist newspaper L'Humanité in
Montmartre. The new war was supported by both French nationalists, who saw an opportunity to gain back
Alsace and Lorraine from Germany, and by most on the left, who saw an opportunity to overthrow the
monarchies in Germany and Austria-Hungary. Parisian men of military age were ordered to report to
mobilization points in the city; only one percent did not appear.[69]

The German army rapidly approached Paris. On 30 August, a German plane dropped three bombs on the
Rue des Récollets, the Quai de Valmy and the Rue des Vinaigriers, killing one woman. Planes dropped
bombs on 31 August and 1 September. On 2 September, a bulletin of the military governor of Paris
 announced that the French government had left the city
"in order to give a new impulsion to the defense of the
nation." On 6 September, six hundred Parisian taxis
were called upon to carry soldiers to the front lines of
the First Battle of the Marne. The offensive of the
Germans was stopped and their army pulled back.
Parisians were urged to leave the city; by 8 September,
the population of the city had fallen to 1,800,000, or 63
percent of the population in 1911. For the Parisians,
four more years of war and hardship lay ahead. The
Belle Époque became just a memory.[69]
Parisians assemble outside the Gare de l'Est for
mobilization into the army (August 2, 1914) Chronology

1871-1899
1872

Population: 1,850,000 [70]

13 January – opening of the École Libre des Sciences Politiques, or Sciences Po.
1873
24 July – Law passed supporting the construction of the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur on
Montmartre, financed by private contributions.
1874
French government returns to Paris from Versailles. MacMahon, first president of the
French Third Republic, moves into the Élysée Palace.
7 May – Société de l'histoire de Paris et de l'Île-de-France founded at the École nationale
des chartes.[71]
15 April – First Paris exhibit by Impressionist painters in the studio of the photographer
Nadar. [72]
12 August – Opening of canal bringing the water of the Vanne river to Paris.
1875
5 January – Opening of the Palais Garnier opera house.
3 March: Premiere of Bizet's opera Carmen.
15 June – first stone placed of the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur.
1877

Population: 1,985,000 [70]

1878
1 May – Opening of the Universal Exposition of 1878 held at the Trocadero Palace and
on the Champ de Mars.
30 May – The first test of electric lighting on the Avenue de l'Opéra and the Place de
l'Étoile.[73]
1879
July – Installation of first telephone system in Paris.
1880
 3 January – The ice on the Seine thaws
suddenly, and the river rises more than two
meters in three hours, sweeping away the Pont
des Invalides under reconstruction.[73]
10 July – Amnesty for those imprisoned or exiled
after the Paris Commune.
14 July – Bastille Day is celebrated officially for
the first time since 1802.
The Brasserie des Bords du Rhin opens.
The Direction Régionale de Police Judiciaire de
Paris opens its headquarters at 36 Quai des
Orfèvres.
The History of Paris Carnavalet Museum opens.
1881
15 August (through 15 November) – The
International Exposition of Electricity is held,
highlighted by the illumination of the Grands
The grand stairway of the Paris Opera
Boulevards with electric lights.
(1875)
18 August – Opening of the Chat Noir, the first
modern cabaret, in Montmartre.[74]
1882
January – Collapse of the Union Générale bank, the cause of the Paris Bourse crash of
1882.
10 January – Opening of the Musée Grévin, the first Paris wax museum, in the Passage
Jouffroy.
12 April – Inauguration of the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro.
13 July – Opening of the reconstructed Hôtel de Ville, burned by the Commune in 1871.
1883
16 June – The Catholic daily newspaper La Croix begins publication.
14 July – Inauguration of the statue Monument à la République on the Place de la
République.
August – First municipal summer camp for students of the schools of the 9th
arrondissement.
22 September – The opening of the first lycée for girls, the Lycée Fénelon.
1884
7 March – Decree requiring the use of trash cans, nicknamed poubelles after the Prefect
of Paris Eugène Poubelle, who introduced it.[74]
8 July – Opening of the first municipal swimming pool at 31 Rue du Château-Landon.
23 July – Law allowing construction of residential buildings up to seven stories high.
7 November – Last serious cholera epidemic in Paris.
Students' General Association of Paris founded.
Les Deux Magots café opens.
Samuel Bing art gallery opens.
Premiere of Massenet's opera Manon.
2 February – Municipal Council allows women to work as interns in Paris hospitals.
 1 June – Huge crowds observe the funeral procession of Victor Hugo, whose remains
are placed in the Panthéon.
3 August – First stone laid for the new buildings of the Sorbonne.
1887
January – Construction begins of the Eiffel Tower. The structure is strongly condemned
by leading Paris writers and artists.[75]
25 May – A fire destroys the Opéra-Comique during a performance of Mignon; more than
a hundred persons are killed.
1888
14 November – Dedication of the Institut Pasteur by Louis Pasteur.
Lycée Molière opens.

1889
First Paris telephone book published.
30 January – First cremation in France at Père
Lachaise Cemetery.
2 April – Opening of the Eiffel Tower. Guests
must climb to the top by the stairs, because the
elevators are not finished until May 19.[75]
6 May – Opening of the Universal Exposition of
1889. Before it closes on 6 November, the
Exposition is seen by twenty-five million
visitors.[75]
14 July – Socialist Second International founded
in Paris.
5 August – Opening of the grand amphitheater of
the new Sorbonne.
1890
The Eiffel Tower under construction
1 May – First celebration of May 1 Labor Day by (August 1888)
socialists in France, leading to confrontations
with police.
1891 – Population: 2,448,000 [70]
15 March – One time zone, Paris time, is established for all of France.
20 May – First professional cooking school founded on the Rue Bonaparte.[76]
1892
Le Journal newspaper begins publication.
First use of reinforced concrete to construct a building in Paris, at 1 Rue Danton.
4 October – Launch of the first weather balloon from the Parc Monceau.
1893
7 April – Café Maxim's opens.
12 April – opening of the Olympia music hall on the Boulevard des Capucines.
3 July – Disturbances in the Latin Quarter between students and supporters of Senator
René Bérenger over supposedly indecent costumes worn at the Bal des Quatre z'arts.
One person is killed.[76]
 December – Opening of the Vélodrome d'hiver cycling stadium on the Rue Suffren, in the
former Galerie des Machines from the 1889 Exposition.
9 December – the anarchist Auguste Vaillant explodes a bomb in the National Assembly,
injuring forty-six persons.
1894
10 to 30 January – The Photo-Club de
Paris, founded in 1888 by Constant Puyo,
Robert Demachy and Maurice Boucquet,
holds the first International Exposition of
Photography at the Galeries Georges
Petit,[77] 8 rue de Sèze (8th
arrondissement), devoted to photography
as an art rather than a science. The
exhibit launches the movement called
Pictorialism.
First championship of France football Poster for the first public screening of a motion
tournament between six Parisian teams. picture at the Grand Café, Paris (1895)
12 February – The anarchist Émile Henry
explodes a bomb in the café of the Gare
Saint-Lazare, killing one person and wounding twenty-three.
15 March – The anarchist Amédée Pauwels explodes a bomb in the church of La
Madeleine. One person, the bomber, is killed.
22 July – The first automobile race, organized by Le Petit Journal, from Paris to Rouen.
Asile George Sand (women's shelter) opens.
1895

Opening of the first Galeries Lafayette department store[78]

22 March – first projected showing of a motion picture by Louis Lumière at a conference
on the future industry of cinematography at 44 Rue de Rennes.[79]
10 August – The founding of the Gaumont Film Company, the first major French film
studio.
Le Cordon Bleu cooking school opens.
Maison de l'Art Nouveau art gallery opens.
12 November – French Automobile Club is founded.
28 December – First public projection of a motion picture by the Lumière Brothers in the
basement of the Grand Café on the corner of Rue Scribe and the Boulevard des
Capucines. Thirty-eight persons attend, including future director Georges Méliès.
1896
6 October – Czar Nicholas II of Russia lays the first stone for the Pont Alexandre III.
7 December – the Municipal Council approves the project to build the first Paris
Metropolitan subway line.
1897
The Théâtre du Grand-Guignol opens.
The Parc des Princes velodrome opens.
4 April – The first women are allowed to attend the École des Beaux-Arts.
13 July – The opening of the Musée de l'Armée (Army Museum) at Les Invalides.
3 September – opening of the first movie theater, in the Théâtre Robert-Houdon on the
Boulevard des Italiens. The theater is rented for three months by Georges Méliès to show
 films.
4 December – The first Paris automobile show held as part of the "Salon du Cycle" at the
Palais des Sports on the Rue de Berri.
1898
13 January – Émile Zola publishes his open letter to the President of France on the
Dreyfus affair, J'accuse in L'Aurore newspaper.
20 April – The first motorcycle race at Longchamp Racecourse.
19 September – The work begins on the Paris Métro.
20 October – The first wireless communication made between the Eiffel Tower and the
Panthéon by Eugène Ducretet and Ernest Roger.
The Hôtel Ritz Paris opens.
Le Dôme Café opens.
1899
Inauguration of the monumental statue Triomphe de la République by Jules Dalou on the
Place de la Nation.

1900–1913
1900
13 February – Whistles are issued to Paris traffic
policemen.
24 February – The first newsreel films, of the Boer War,
are shown at the Olympia Theater.
14 April – The opening of the Universal Exposition of
1900 that involved the building of the Grand Palais, the
Petit Palais, and the Pont Alexandre III. Before it closes
on 12 November, the Exposition attracts more than fifty 1905 map of Greater Paris, with
the city centre still largely
million visitors.[80]
confined within the city walls.
13 May – Right-wing candidates win the municipal
elections after twenty years of domination by the left.
14 May – The opening of the 1900 Summer Olympics, Olympiad II, the first Olympic
games held outside Greece.
19 July – The opening of the first line of the Paris Métro, between the Porte de Versailles
and Porte Maillot.
15 September – Automatic ticket gates for the metro are replaced by ticket agents due to
the high number of people jumping the gates.
4 December – Law passed permitting women to practice law.
1901

Population: 2,715,000[70]
The Pathé opens a film production studio in Vincennes.
April 1 – The opening of the new Gare de Lyon train station, including the restaurant Le
Train Bleu.
1 July – The opening of the first electric train line in Europe between Les Invalides and
Versailles.
28 September – First European lawn tennis championship held in Paris.
1902
 26 January – First Gitanes cigarettes go on sale.
16 October – First use of fingerprints by Paris police to
identify a murderer.
Première of the Georges Méliès film A Trip to the
Moon.[81]
Première of the opera Pelléas et Mélisande by Claude
Debussy.[82]
1903
1 July – Start of the first Tour de France, which ended on
19 July with a parade of the winners at the Parc des
Princes.
10 August – The first serious Métro accident at
Couronnes station, with eighty-four persons killed. The Quai Saint-Michel and Notre-
4 September – Opening of the haute couture fashion Dame, by Maximilien Luce (1901)
house of Paul Poiret.
The first Vélodrome d'hiver cycling stadium opens in the
former Galerie des Machines of the 1900 Paris Exposition.
Première of Octave Mirbeau's play Business is Business.
1904
6 February – Opening of the Alhambra music hall on Rue de Malte.
18 April – The socialist (later Communist) newspaper L'Humanité begins publication.[83]
8 May – Socialists and radicals win the Paris municipal elections.
23 November – Consecration of the first Paris church built of concrete, Saint-Jean-
l'Évangéliste de Montmartre.
20 December – The first automobile taxis go into service.
1905
After viewing the boldly colored canvases of Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de
Vlaminck and others at the Salon d'Automne of 1905, the critic Louis Vauxcelles
disparages the painters as "fauves" (wild beasts), thus giving their movement the name
by which it became known, Fauvism.[84]
The Gaumont Film Company's Cité Elgé studios opens at Buttes-Chaumont.
First underground public toilets open at the Place de la Madeleine.
1906

Population: 2,722,731.[85]
22 March – First England-France Rugby match played at the Parc des Princes.
11 June – The first motorized bus line begins service between Montmartre and Saint-
Germain-des-Prés. Horse-drawn omnibuses continued to run until January 1913.
23 October – First airplane flight in Paris by Santos Dumont, who flew sixty meters at an
altitude of three meters at the Parc de Bagatelle.
1907
22 February – First woman receives a license to drive a taxi in Paris.
25 March – The first traffic roundabout created in Paris at the Place de l'Étoile.
Summer. Pablo Picasso, living in the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre, paints Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon, a major turning point in modern art.
The Kahnweiler art gallery opens.
1909
1 March – First escalator installed in a Paris Métro
station.
29 May – Opening of the Luna Park amusement park at
the Porte Maillot.
2 June – Paris première of the ballet Les Sylphides by
Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes at the Théâtre du
Châtelet, Paris, with Vaslav Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova
in the leading roles.
13 December – Creation of first one-way streets in Paris
on the Rue de Mogador and Rue de la Chaussée-
d'Antin.
1910
January 21–28 – Great flood of Paris. The Seine rises
8.5 meters, the highest level since 1658, and overflows
its banks. The flood affects one sixth of the buildings in First Paris flight by Santos
Paris. [86] Dumont in 1906.
13 February – Opening of the Vélodrome d'hiver cycling
stadium on the Rue de Grenelle.
3 December – First use of neon lights on the
Grand Palais. The first neon advertising sign
appears on the Boulevard Montmartre in 1912.
Coco Chanel opens her first boutique, called
Chanel Modes, at 21 Rue Cambon.[87]
First Gauloises cigarettes go on sale.
According to Robert Delaunay, Salle II of the
1910 Salon des Indépendants is "the first
collective manifestation of a new art (un art The Quai de Passy during the 1910 Great
naissant), known two years later as Cubism. [88] Flood of Paris
At the Salon d'Automne of 1910, held from 1
October to 8 November, Jean Metzinger
introduces an extreme form of what would soon be labeled Cubism.[89]
1911
24 January – Departure of the first Paris-Monte Carlo automobile race.
22 August – The Mona Lisa is stolen from the Louvre. It is recovered in Florence in
December 1913.[90]
Gaumont-Palace cinema opens.
Fictional Fantômas crime series begins publication.[91]
The 1911 Salon des Indépendants officially introduces "Cubism" to the public as an
organized group movement.
1912
15 February – Opening of the "Maison de Beauté" salon of Helena Rubenstein at 255
Rue Saint-Honoré.[90]
4 May – Criminal Brigade of the Sûreté formed to deal with major crimes and criminals.
1 June – First world tennis championship held at the Stade de la Faisanderie in Saint-
Cloud.
29 May – Premiere of Nijinsky's ballet Afternoon of a Faun.
 The Cubist contribution to the 1912 Salon
d'Automne creates a controversy in the
Municipal Council of Paris leading to a
debate in the French Chamber des
Deputies about the use of public funds to
provide the venue for such art. The
Cubists are defended by the Socialist
deputy Marcel Sembat.[92][93]
1913
31 March – Opening of the Théâtre des
Champs-Élysées. Dancers from Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring
29 May – Première of Stravinsky's ballet (1913).
[94]
The Rite of Spring.
1 October – First collection of trash by
motorized trucks instead of handcarts.
24 December – First presidential Christmas tree, placed at Trocadéro, is lit by President
Raymond Poincaré.

See also
Paris architecture of the Belle Époque

References

Notes and citations

1. Héron de Villefosse, René, Histoire de Paris, Bernard Grasset, Paris, 1959, p. 380
2. Fierro 1996, p. 204.
3. Héron de Villefosse 1959, pp. 381–382.
4. Héron de Villefosse, René, Histoire de Paris (1959), Bernard Grasset. p. 380-81
5. Fierro 1996, p. 282.
6. Marchand 1993, p. 134.
7. Fierro 1996, p. 305.
8. Marchand 1993, p. 129.
9. Marchand 1993, p. 132.
10. Marchand 1993, p. 207.
11. Fierro 1996, p. 676.
12. Fierro 1996, p. 331.
13. Fierro 1996, p. 205.
14. Combeau 2013, pp. 72–73.
15. Jack Aldren Clarke, French Socialist Congress, 1876,1914, The Journal of Modern History,
The University of Chicago Press, 1989.
16. Fierro 1996, pp. 631–634.
17. Fierro 1996, pp. 208–210.
18. Fierro 1996, pp. 899–1900.
19. Fierro 1996, pp. 895–896.
20. Fierro 1996, p. 637.
21. Dansette, A., Histoire religieuse de la France contemporaine, pp. 406-407. Cited in Fierro,
1196, p. 369
22. Fierro 1996, pp. 371–372.
23. Fierro 1996, pp. 372–373.
24. Fierro 1996, p. 381.
25. Fierro 1996, p. 386.
26. Marchand 1993, p. 126.
27. Fierro 1996, p. 777.
28. Fierro 1996, pp. 911–912.
29. Fierro 1996, p. 809.
30. "Coco Chanel & Cremerie de Paris, a Love Story".
31. Toledano, Roulhac B.; Elizabeth Z. Coty (2009). François Coty: Fragrance, Power, Money.
Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican. ISBN 978-1-58980-639-9.
32. Fierro 1996, p. 938.
33. Fierro 1996, pp. 900–901.
34. Fierro 1996, pp. 1165=1166.
35. Fierro 1996, p. 1032.
36. Fierro 1996, p. 1182.
37. Fierro 1996, pp. 993–994.
38. Sarmant 2012, p. 204.
39. Sarmant 2012, pp. 198–199.
40. Sarmant 2012, p. 202.
41. Marchand 1993, p. 169.
42. Fierro 1996, p. 1089.
43. Jarrassé 2007, pp. 162–183.
44. Du Camp, Maxime, Paris - ses organes, ses fonctions, et sa vie jusqu'en 1870, p. 596.
45. Fierro 1996, p. 838.
46. Weingardt 2009, p. 15.
47. Sutherland 2003, p. 37.
48. "Tour Eiffel, entre refus et fascination, 1899–1950" (http://www.lettresvolees.fr/queneau/docu
ments/Dossier_Tour_Eiffel.pdf) (PDF). www.lettresvolees.fr. Retrieved 4 August 2021.
49. John W. Stamper, "The Galerie des Machines of the 1889 Paris World's Fair." Technology
and culture (1989): 330-353. In JSTOR (https://www.jstor.org/stable/3105107)
50. Fierro 1996, p. 863.
51. Philippe Jullian, The triumph of Art nouveau: Paris exhibition, 1900 (London: Phaidon, 1974)
52. Richard D. Mandell, Paris 1900: The great world's fair (1967).
53. Fierro 1996, p. 1138.
54. Fierro 1996, p. 632-634.
55. Petit Robert 1988, p. 1377.
56. "Anciens sénateurs IIIème République : HUGO Victor" (http://www.senat.fr/senateur-3eme-re
publique/hugo_victor1354r3.html). www.senat.fr.
57. Petit Robert 1988, p. 1597.
58. Petit Robert 1988, p. 233.
59. Petit Robert 1988, p. 501.
60. Petit Robert 1988, p. 1622.
61. Dictionnaire historique de Paris, (2013), La Pochothèque, (ISBN 978-2-253-13140-3)
62. Petit Robert 1988, p. 1416.
63. Russell T. Clement, Four French Symbolists, Greenwood Press, 1996, p. 114.
64. Auguste Dalligny, 'Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts - l'Exposition du Champ de Mars',
Journal des Arts, 16 May 1890
65. Paul Bluysen, 'Le Salon du Champ de Mars - IV, La République française, 23 June 1890
66. Petit Robert 1988, p. 1541.
67. Petit Robert 1988, p. 272.
68. Fierro 1996, p. 946.
69. Fierro 1996, p. 216.
70. Combeau 2013, p. 61.
71. "Mémoires de la Société de l'histoire de Paris et de l'Île-de-France" (https://web.archive.org/
web/20150505102729/http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/010033154) (in French). 1874.
Archived from the original (http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/010033154) on 2015-05-05.
72. Fierro 1996, p. 627.
73. Fierro 1996, p. 628.
74. Fierro, Alfred, Histoire et dictionnaire de Paris p. 629
75. Fierro, Alfred, Histoire et dictionnaire de Paris p. 630
76. Fierro, Alfred, Histoire et dictionnaire de Paris, p. 631.
77. "Luminous-Lint" (http://www.luminous-lint.com/app/contents/fra/_pictorialism_photo_club_de
_paris_1894_plates_01/). www.luminous-lint.com.
78. 'Dictionnaire Historique de Paris (2013) p. 306
79. Fierro, Alfred, Histoire et dictionnaire de Paris, p. 632.
80. Fierro, Alfred, Histoire et dictionnaire de Paris, p. 633.
81. "France, 1900 A.D.–present: Key Events" (http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ht/?period=11&re
gion=euwf#/Key-Events). Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: Metropolitan Museum
of Art. Retrieved 1 June 2014.
82. Radio 3. "Opera Timeline" (https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/opera/timeline/). BBC. Retrieved
1 March 2015.
83. Judith Goldsmith (ed.). "Timeline of the Counterculture" (http://www.well.com/~mareev/TIME
LINE/). Retrieved 1 June 2014 – via The WELL.
84. Chilver, Ian (Ed.). "Fauvism" (http://www.enotes.com/oxford-art-encyclopedia/fauvism)
Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20111109091224/http://www.enotes.com/oxford-art-en
cyclopedia/fauvism) 2011-11-09 at the Wayback Machine, The Oxford Dictionary of Art,
Oxford University Press, 2004. Retrieved from enotes.com, 26 December 2007.
85. Truslove, Roland (1911). "Paris" (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia
_Britannica/Paris). In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 20 (11th ed.).
Cambridge University Press. pp. 805–822, see page 810. "Below is shown the population of
the arrondissements separately (in 1906)....."
86. Sonia Landes; et al. (2005). "Brief Chronology of Paris" (https://books.google.com/books?id=
QnbbAgAAQBAJ&pg=PR17). Pariswalks (6th ed.). Henry Holt and Co. ISBN 978-0-8050-
7786-5.
87. Mackrell, Alice (2005). Art and Fashion (https://books.google.com/books?id=pEpPMIWdhh8
C&q=%22Coco+Chanel%22+%22career%22&pg=PA133). Sterling Publishing. p. 133.
ISBN 978-0-7134-8873-9. Retrieved 8 March 2011.
88. Christopher Green, Cubism and its Enemies, Modern Movements and Reaction in French
Art, 1916-28, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1987 p. 314, note 51
89. Robbins, Daniel (January 25, 1964). "Albert Gleizes, 1881-1953 : a retrospective exhibition"
(https://archive.org/details/albertgleizes1881robb). [New York : Solomon R. Guggenheim
Foundation] – via Internet Archive.
90. Fierro, Alfred, Histoire et dictionnaire de Paris, p. 637.
91. David Lawrence Pike (2005). Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London,
1800–1945. Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-7256-3.
92. Patrick F. Barrer: Quand l'art du XXe siècle était conçu par les inconnus, pp. 93-101, gives
an account of the debate.
93. "biography" (http://www.peterbrooke.org.uk/a&r/chronology). www.peterbrooke.org.uk.
94. Nigel Simeone (2000). "Four Centuries of Music in Paris: A Brief Outline" (https://books.goog
le.com/books?id=45AsgMZBbcoC&pg=PA11). Paris--a Musical Gazetteer. Yale University
Press. p. 11+. ISBN 978-0-300-08054-4.

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Combeau, Yvan (2013). Histoire de Paris (https://archive.org/details/histoiredeparis0000com
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Héron de Villefosse, René (1959). Histoire de Paris. Bernard Grasset.
Jarrassé, Dominique (2007). Grammaire des Jardins Parisiens. Paris: Parigramme.
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Sarmant, Thierry (2012). Histoire de Paris: Politique, urbanisme, civilisation. Editions Jean-
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