Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
A City of Unrest
With Napoleon's exile to the island of Sainte-Hélène, a series
of unpopular governments ruled for the next 60 years,
culminating finally in the 1871 establishment of a republic,
once and for all. But it was a tumultuous period in teeming and
seething Paris, whose population had now reached 900,000.
First the Bourbons—two brothers of Louis XVI— took power
one after the other, but they and Charles X, who was too
reliant on the Church and too authoritarian, didn't last long.
After a riot in which some 5,000 workers were killed ended
the short-lived republic, Louis-Philippe ruled as the 'bourgeois
monarch' from 1830-1848. However, intolerable conditions
brought the city to bursting point, and explode it did.
By about 1848, the Industrial Revolution and the rise of
science and reason were taking hold in Europe. Railroads
were being built and ports expanded. French workers were
flocking into the small city and its growing suburbs. Paris
now held more than a million people, and it was still dark
and dense, with warrens of narrow alleyways running with
rats and filled with filth and disease. Fresh water was still rare
and a crowded tenement stood directly in front of the Louvre.
The streets were open sewers as in medieval times, the Seine
was part of the sewer system and in 1848 alone, some 19,000
people died of cholera. Factories overworked their employees
and there was a high rate of unemployment. Paris may have
been the world capital of culture, but the air was polluted with
smoke and soot, and crime was uncontrollable.
First came what was meant to be a peaceful demonstration
near the Madeleine. But troops on the boulevard des Capucines
(in the 8
e
arrondissement
) started a riot by firing into the crowd.
Revolution became the order of the day. Barricades shot up
in the streets, the king abdicated and fled, and finally some
50,000 poverty-stricken citizens marched in protest in June.
This was too much for the new conservative government,
and in putting down the rebellion, some 1,500 Parisians were
killed and another 5,000 deported.
As his name was known thoughout France, Louis Napoléon
Bonaparte, Napoléon's nephew, was elected president in 1848.
In 1852, he changed his mind and named himself Emperor
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