A R T I C L E  

Leaders in Style

The Last “Golden” Age

Opulent, garish and glittering, the Second Empire Period was one long carnival. This issue, we turn from the refined Art Nouveau era to the mid 19th century, when the new fashion for revivalism saw an extravagant celebration of French style.

It is late spring in 1846. A painter named Badinguet boards a ship crossing the English Channel. As the French coast finally passes out of sight, “Badinguet” begins to breathe freely again. Napoleon’s nephew, Louis-Napoleon, is thanking his lucky stars, and his painter’s disguise. Having made good his escape from the Ham fortress, he is finally heading for freedom.

Six years later, on the anniversary of his Uncle’s victory at Austerlitz, Louis-Napoleon rode through the Arc de Triomphe as the self-declared Emperor Napoleon III. From imprisonment, to exile, to absolute power, life for the Bonaparte pretender had been volatile. For the next 18 years his rule would literally shape Paris and come to be remembered as the last time one man’s word was French law.

The new emperor wanted a new France. Yet he also wanted to be seen as a worthy successor, not only to his Uncle, but to all the great rulers of the past. Thus Napoleon III, or “Second Empire”, style came to be a unique assortment of French styles drawn from the previous five centuries.

Anything from Gothic to Renaissance to Louis XVI was in vogue. Whether it was a new building, a salon or a piece of furniture, more was always more as everyone in France sought to mimic the imperial splendour.

One of the new emperor’s first acts was the complete renovation of the French capital. Baron Haussman, the architect of the new Paris, earned himself the nickname “the demolition artist” when he swept away the medieval slums. The Paris of today, with its wide boulevards lined with elegant, uniform buildings and its 12-pointed Place de l’Etoile, is entirely his creation.

Haussman’s Paris included new, suddenly upmarket, districts, where the bourgeoisie flocked to take up residence in grand apartment houses. It was an age of consumerism, when the burgeoning middle-classes had money to spare and the industrial revolution had given rise to a multitude of mass-produced goods.

The bourgeois apartments of Paris, and even of London and New York, were furnished with the latest French furniture. In the salle a manger (dining room) one found the Emperor’s favourite Renaissance style while in the salon, on the other hand, there was a mass of sofas and chairs in Louis XV, XIV and XVI styles.

Eclecticism was the order of the day, however: a single piece of furniture sometimes featured two or three styles. Dark woods were combined with new materials such as mother-of-pearl, papier-mâché and ivory inlay; upholstery was richly decorated and bulged luxuriously between colourful buttons.

Opulence and extravagance were everywhere. Garnier built the famous Palais Garnier, in all its Neo-Baroque-Neo-Renaissance splendour, and christened its design “the Napoleon III style”. Haussman crowned his achievements by creating a 750 000 franc cradle, made of rosewood and silver, for the Empress Eugenie’s first child.

Yet it was not to last - the glitter was merely “tinsel”. As Napoleon III’s own apartments burned, the French lost the Franco-Prussian war and, with it, the last vestiges of Imperialism. The carnival was over.

Jennie Sharpe