Paris, 1889

A city in political, cultural, and artistic ferment at the dawn of the Belle Époque

A lot can change in a hundred years.

In 1789, Paris was the center of world attention as its citizens rose up against the ancien regime. Anger over food shortages — a regular feature of life in Europe for centuries — combined with the government’s mismanagement of its finances and new ideas about equality to rupture French, and European, history. The events of 1789 were a genuine turning point in the world, the end of an old way of doing things and an opening to a new set of possibilities.

But I don’t really want to talk about Paris during the French Revolution today, as interesting as it is. I want to look at the city a century later. By 1889, Paris was a city transformed.

The nineteenth century had been a century of upheaval — first the revolution, then Napoleon’s wars, then a series of unstable and short-lived governmental systems. By 1889, France was governed by the “Third Republic,” which, as it says on the tin, was the country’s third attempt in a century to govern itself withou…