PARIS 91 from which soldiers and all persons in livery were excluded), and finally, to close the imper- fect catalogue of innovations, the first coffee house in Paris. At the accession of Louis XV. Paris occupied a spa'ce of 2,809 acres, and counted 500 grand thoroughfares, 9 faubourgs, 100 squares and open places, 9 bridges, 22,000 private houses, of which 4,000 had carriage en- trances (portes-cocheres), and more than 500,- 000 inhabitants. It was the capital of science, art, literature, taste, and pleasure, not only for France but for Europe. During this reign the growth of the city went on in all ways. In the following reign, the duke of Orleans, better known in history as Philippe Egalite, enclosed the spacious gardens of the Palais Royal with a continuous quadrangle of uniform architec- ture, whose galleries, furnished with shops of every kind, and coffee rooms, gambling rooms, and wine rooms, became one brilliant bazaar. The famous orgies of the regency in the palace E roper were followed by revolutionary orgies i its gardens. It was, up to the first quarter of the present century, the central stage and sink of what was brightest and foulest in Paris. In 1784 the farmers general of the city customs erected about the enlarged city an octroi or customs wall, enclosing an area of 8,708 acres, containing more than 50,000 houses, 967 lighted streets, 46 parish and 20 other churches, 11 abbeys, 133 monasteries and religious houses, 15 seminaries, 10 colleges, 26 hospitals and asylums, 60 fountains, and 12 markets. This octroi wall formed the city boundary till Jan. 1, 1860. In the first years of the revolution many monuments of the mid- dle ages were demolished or mutilated; the fine arts generally were neglected in the fierce struggle about more essential things ; material growth was checked and the population dimin- ished. But the ground was cleared for future improvements, and many of the institutions of which Paris to-day has best reason to boast date their origin from the revolutionary pe- riod; such are the museums of the Louvre, the bureau of longitudes, the conservatory of arts and trades, the polytechnic school, and the national industrial exhibitions held in Paris. In the political order, the revolution finally crowned a work at which the ablest monarchs and statesmen of France had for centuries been more or less consciously laboring. It swiftly swept away the last obstacle to the completing of an administrative system which, centralized at Paris, extends its sovereign con- trol to the remotest corner of the land, vivi- fying and strengthening perhaps the nation by unity of impulse, but crippling the power and weakening the spirit of individual action in equal proportion, and unduly subordinating the country at large to metropolitan influence. Napoleon I. expended more than 100,000,000 francs, when money for such purposes was of far greater productive value than at present, on works of public utility and ornament, but left some of the grander of them to be finished by his successors. Under the restoration and Louis Philippe private enterprise, encouraged by peace, vied with the government in enlarg- ing and adorning the city. An improved civil police, better drainage, paving and lighting of the streets, with increased attention to comfort and decency in domestic architecture, mark this period. During its latter part, too, the present fortifications were constructed, and the whole arrangement for the defence of Paris was thus placed upon an entirely different footing from the comparatively unprotected condition of the past. The city's material prosperity seemed but transiently dimmed at the close of the reign of Louis Philippe,, though the immediate effect of the revolution of 1848 was a check upon it. But a visitation of the cholera and the insur- rection of June furnished to the republican government early suggestions of the need and nature of certain changes afterward embraced in the general system of transformation car- ried nearly to completion under the second empire. The republic was suppressed by the coup d'etat of Dec. 2, 1851. Its name was abolished a year later, when Louis Napoleon " closed the era of revolution," and had him- self named emperor. Almost the only French monarch born and residing throughout his reign in Paris, he aimed to make of his birth- place the most salubrious, convenient, and sumptuous city of Europe, a monument of his reign and a fortress for his dynasty. The public works of this period cost the city and na- tional treasury, exclusive of certain special ap- propriations, from 1852 to 1859, an average of about $2,800,000 per annum, and for the next decade about $3,600,000. In the last year of the empire it is known to have surpassed the estimates. One of the early acts of Napoleon III. was to order that to be done which Louis XIV. had contemplated, Napoleon I. had la- bored at, Louis Philippe had talked of, and the provisional government had decreed, namely, the clearing away of the intervening huddle of old houses and the connecting of the Louvre with the Tuileries. "While this work of dem- olition and monumental construction was in progress, the palace of industry and the palatial central markets were built ; the rue de Rivoli was extended for miles through a labyrinth of dark streets ; much of the present great system of sewers was constructed ; a great number of new streets, parks, places, &c., were laid out ; and a large majority of those works mentioned in the earlier part of this article, as contribu- ting to the present beauty and convenience of the city, were planned and executed. Mean- time the efforts of individual and associated private capital, credit, and feverish speculation kept pace with their imperial progress. Of all the houses of Paris in 1870, less than one third had been built prior to 1852. The returning visitor might traverse broad thoroughfares for miles together, and, except for here and there a glimpse of a spared monument, hardly meet with a reminder of the places he knew 25 years
