the whole of Mont Ste Geneviève. The line of the new enceinte is still marked by a circuit of boulevards passing from the Champs de Mars at Pont d'Austerlitz by Place de l'Enfer and Place d'Italie. Similar enlargements, also marked out by a series of boulevards, incorporated with the town on the right side of the faubourgs of St Antoine and Poissonnière and the quarters of La Chaussée d'Antin and Chaillot. In 1784 was begun, instead of a line of fortifications, a simple customs-wall, with sixty propylaea or pavilions in a heavy but characteristic style, of which the finest are adorned with columns or pilasters like those of Paestum. In front of the Place du Trône (now Place de la Nation), which formed as it were a façade for Paris on the east side, there were erected two lofty rostral columns bearing the statues of Philip Augustus and St Louis. Towards the west, the city front was the Place Louis XV. (Place de la Concorde), preceded by the magnificent avenue of the Champs Élysées. Between the barriers of La Villette and Pantin, where the highways for Flanders and Germany terminated, was built a monumental rotunda flanked on the ground floor by four peristyles arranged as a Greek cross, and in the second storey lighted by low arcades supported by columns of the Paestum type. None of these works were completed till the time of the empire. It was also in the latter part of the reign of Louis XIV., and under the first republic, that the quarter of La Chaussée d'Antin was built.
The history of Paris during the Revolutionary period is the history rather of France, and to a certain extent of the whole world (see France: History; French Revolution; and the articles on the Jacobins and other clubs). During the Consulate hardly anything of note took place at Paris except the explosion of the infernal machine directed against Bonaparte on the 24th of December 1800.
The coronation of Napoleon by Pope Pius VII. was celebrated in Notre Dame on the 2nd of December 1804. Eight years later, during the Russian campaign, the conspiracy of General Malet, happily suppressed, was on the point of letting loose on all France a dreadful civil war. The empire, however, was then on the wane, and Paris was witness of its fall when, after a battle on the heights of Montmartre and at the barrière de Clichy, the city was obliged to surrender to the allies on the 30th of March 1814.
For the next two months the city was in the occupation of the allies and witnessed a hitherto unique assembly of sovereigns and statesmen. Their deliberations issued on the 30th of May 1814 in the first treaty of Paris (see Paris, Treaties of, below). So far as the city itself was concerned, the only permanent loss that it suffered through the occupation was that of the art treasures with which Napoleon had enriched it at the expense of other capitals; among these were many paintings and pieces of statuary from the Louvre, and the famous bronze horses from Venice, which were taken down from the triumphal arch of the Carrousel and restored to the façade of St Mark's. The expressed determination of Blücher and his Prussians to blow up the Pont de Jéna, built to commemorate Napoleon's crushing victory of 1806, was frustrated by the vigorous intervention of Wellington and of the emperor Alexander I.
Paris under the Restoration witnessed the revival of religious ceremonials to which it had long been unaccustomed, notably the great Corpus Christi procession, in which the king himself carried a candle. Then came Napoleon's return from Elba (March 1815) and the interlude of the Hundred Days. After Waterloo, though there was fighting round Paris, there was no effort to defend the city against the allied armies; for the Parisians had grown thoroughly weary of Napoleon, and Louis XVIII., though he returned “in the baggage train of the enemy,” was received by the populace with rapturous acclamation (see Louis XVIII.). The second treaty of Paris was signed on the 20th of November of the same year (see below). It left France in the occupation of 150,000 foreign troops, and the crown and government under the tutelage of a committee of representatives of the foreign great powers in Paris.
Paris now became the centre of the royalist reaction, and of a political proscription which reflected, though without its popular excesses, the White Terror of the South. The most conspicuous event of this time was the tragedy of the trial and execution of Marshal Ney (q.v.). For the rest, the only event of note that occurred in Paris under Louis XVIII. was the assassination of the duke of Berry by Louvel on the 13th of February 1820. Ten years later the revolution of 1830,[1] splendidly commemorated by the Column of July in Place de la Bastille, put Charles X. to flight and inaugurated the reign of Louis Philippe, a troublous period which was closed by the revolution of 1848 and a new republic. It was this reign, however, that surrounded Paris with bastioned fortifications with ditches and detached forts, the outcome of the warlike fever aroused by the exclusion of France from the treaty of London of 1840 (see Mehemet Ali). The republic of 1848 brought no greater quiet to the city than did the reign of Louis Philippe. The most terrible insurrection was that of the 23rd-26th of June 1848, distinguished by the devotion and heroic death of the Archbishop Affre. It was quelled by General Cavaignac, who then for some months held the executive power. Prince Louis Napoleon next became president of the republic, and after dissolving the chamber of deputies on the 2nd of December 1851, caused himself to be proclaimed emperor just a year later.
The second empire completed that material transformation of Paris which had already been begun at the fall of the ancient monarchy. First came numerous cases of destruction and demolition caused by the suppression of the old monasteries and of many parish churches. A number of medieval buildings, civil or military, were cleared away for the sake of regularity of plan and improvements in the public streets, or to satisfy the taste of the owners, who thought more of their comfort or profit than of the historic interest of their old mansions or houses.
It was under the first empire that the new series of improvements were inaugurated which have made Paris a modern city. Napoleon began the Rue de Rivoli, built along this street the wing intended to connect the Tuileries with the Louvre, erected in front of the court of the Tuileries the triumphal arch of the Carrousel, in imitation of that of Septimius Severus at Rome. In the middle of the Place Vendôme was reared, on the model of Trajan's column, the column of the Grand Army, surmounted by the statue of the emperor. To immortalize this same Grand Army he ordered from the architect Pierre Vignon a Temple of Victory, which without changing the form of its Corinthian peristyle has become the church of the Madeleine; the entrance to the avenue of the Champs Élysées was spanned by the vast triumphal arch De l'Étoile (of the star), which owes its celebrity not only to its colossal dimensions and its magnificent situation, but also to one of the four subjects sculptured upon its faces — the Chant du départ or Marseillaise, one of the masterpieces of Rude and of modern sculpture. Another masterpiece was executed by David of Angers — the pediment of the Panthéon, not less famous than Soufflot's dome. The museum of the Louvre, founded by decree of the Convention on the 27th of July 1793, was organized and considerably enlarged; that of the Luxembourg was created in 1805, but was not appropriated exclusively to modern artists till under the Restoration. The Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, due to the Convention, received also considerable additions in the old priory or abbey of St Martin des Champs, where the council of the Five Hundred had installed it in 1798.
Under the Restoration and under the government of July many new buildings were erected; but, with the exception of the Bourse, constructed by the architects Brongniart and Labarre, and the colonnade of the Chamber of Deputies, these are of interest not so much for their size as for the new artistic tendencies affected in their architecture. People had grown weary of the eternal Graeco-Roman compilations rendered
- ↑ Notable in the history of the city for the discovery by the populace of the effectiveness of barricades against regular troops. These had been last used in the Fronde.
