For more details on this topic, see Haussmann's renovation of Paris.

At the end of the century, Paris was the centre stage for the French Revolution; a bad harvest in 1788 caused food prices to rocket and by the following year the sovereign debt had reached an unprecedented level.[36] On 14 July 1789, Parisians, appalled by the king's pressure on the new assembly formed by the Third Estate, took siege of the Bastille fortress, a symbol of absolutism,[37] starting revolution and rejecting the divine right of monarchs in France. Jean-Sylvain Bailly, the first Mayor, was elected on 15 July 1789,[38] and two days later the national tricolour flag with the colours of Paris (blue and red) and of the King (white) was adopted at the Hôtel de Ville by Louis XVI.[39]
The Republic was declared for the first time in 1792. In 1793, Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette were executed on the Place de la Révolution, in Paris, the site of many executions. The guillotine was most active during the "Reign of Terror", in the summer of 1794, when in a single month more than 1,300 people were executed. Following the Terror, the French Directory held control until it was overthrown in a coup d'état by Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon put an end to the revolution and established the French Consulate, and then later was elected by plebiscite[40] as emperor of the First French Empire.[41]
19th century[edit source | editbeta]
For more details on this topic, see Haussmann's renovation of Paris.
Paris was occupied by Russian and Allied armies upon Napoleon's defeat on 31 March 1814; this was the first time in 400 years that the city had been conquered by a foreign power.[42] The ensuing Restoration period, or the return of the monarchy under Louis XVIII (1814–24) and Charles X, ended with the July Revolution Parisian uprising of 1830.[43] The new constitutional monarchy under Louis-Philippe ended with the 1848 "February Revolution" that led to the creation of the Second Republic.[44] Cholera epidemics in 1832 and 1850 ravaged the population of Paris: the 1832 epidemic alone claimed 20,000 of the population of 650,000.[45]
The greatest development in Paris' history began with the Industrial Revolution creation of a network of railways that brought an unprecedented flow of migrants to the capital from the 1840s. The city's largest transformation came with the 1852 Second Empire under Napoleon III; his préfet, Baron Haussmann, levelled entire districts of Paris' narrow, winding medieval streets to create the network of wide avenues and neo-classical façades that still make up much of modern Paris. The motivation for this transformation was twofold: to create wide boulevards that beautified and sanitised the capital and to increase the effectiveness of troops and artillery against any further uprisings and barricades, for which Paris was so famous.[46]


Drilling (opening/alignment/widening) of numerous streets under the Second Empire and the Third Republic
The Second Empire ended in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), and a besieged Paris under heavy bombardment surrendered on 28 January 1871. The discontent of Paris' populace with the new armistice-signing government seated in Versailles resulted in the creation of the Paris Commune government. It was supported by an army created in large part of members of the city's former National Guard, which continued to resist the Prussians and opposed the army of the "Versaillais" government.[47] The Paris Commune ended with the Semaine Sanglante ("Bloody Week"), during which roughly 20,000 "Communards" were executed before the fighting ended on 28 May 1871.[48] The ease with which the Versaillais army gained control of Paris owed much to Baron Haussmann's renovations.[49]
France's late 19th-century Universal Expositions made Paris an increasingly important centre of technology, trade, and tourism.[50] The most famous were the 1889 Exposition universelle to which Paris owes its "temporary" display of architectural engineering progress,[51] the Eiffel Tower, which remained the world's tallest structure until 1930,[52] and the 1900 Universal Exposition, which saw the opening of the first Paris Métro line.

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