FULL FEATURE: Women in the City of Light

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In 1851, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the original, staged a coup d’etat as President of France and made himself Emperor. At this point France was so knackered from all the internal turmoil that they didn’t care who was in charge, or how he got there as long as the madness stopped.

Napoleon III, as he styled himself, is not remembered particularly fondly, but his reign ushered in a period of unprecedented urban development in Paris. The Second Empire was responsible for a new incarnation of the French capital, under the guise of Baron Hausmann. 18,000 street lamps turned Paris into the City of Light. Slums and decrepit quarters were flattened and replaced by wide, tree-lined boulevards, apartment blocks, mansions and wide open spaces. Sanitation was overhauled, railway termini were constructed in all corners of the city. In order to make war for 200,000 new buildings, more than half a million people were displaced and sent to the suburbs.

I’ve been writing up a broad history of this for a new project, but I wanted to expand on one aspect of this regeneration that I won’t get to cover in that, and that is how the modernisation of the city changed the lives of Parisian women in the mid-late nineteenth century. I’m going to I will get to working class women, but I’m going to start with the upper classes/the bourgeoisie…

Parisian shoppers in the late nineteenth century (Musée Carnavalet)