1848-1870

Second Empire, Coup d’État, pomp and defeat

Louis-Napoléon was mercilessly caricatured by Daumier and others

Coup d’état, Second Empire, Haussmann, Colonialism, Sedan, National Government – in progress

The topography of Paris changed dramatically under the Second Empire. Driven by dual needs to re-engineer whole areas to facilitate military intervention against resistors and to create and sustain housing speculation, Louis-Napoléon’s Paris prefect, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, invested public funds massively in renovating Paris.

Near the very beginning of this process, the realisation by some commercial entrepreneurs that the developing railway system made it possible to put on sale together a wide variety of national and international manufactured products and foodstuffs led to the establishment of what we now call Department stores. Huge stores that sold many different products rather than just one type of good or service catered for Paris’s growing wealthy upper and middle classes.

On November 18 1852 the Bon Marché store opened its doors on the Rue de Sèvres. With its fixed prices, acceptance of returns and advertising it revolutionised the shopping habits of well-to-do Parisians.

Four years later the second oldest surviving department store was opened on the rue Rivoli. At first it was called ‘The Parisian Bazar’, and from 1856 it was renamed the ‘Bazar Napoléon’ before the end of the Second Empire in 1870 led to its current name BHV (Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville). In 1865 Le Printemps was opened on the corner of the Boulevard Haussmann and the Rue du Havre, close to the busy Gare St Lazare, the capital’s first railway station built in 1837.