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French Second Empire: Napoleon Iii
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The French Second Empire style is named after the Mansard-roofed buildings of France constructed during Napoleon III's Second Empire in the third quarter of the 19th century. Mansard roofs, named after 17th century French architect François Mansart, were steeply pitched and provided extra living space under the roof.
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The French Third Republic, sometimes written as the IIIrd Republic (1870-1940), was the governing body of France between the Second Empire and the Fourth Republic. It was a parliamentary republican democracy that was created following the collapse of the Empire of Napoleon III in the Franco-Prussian War. It survived until the invasion of France by the German Third Reich in 1940.
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The Second Empire was, above all, inertial. It sought to preserve the bureaucratic, regulatory, and economic frameworks of the First Empire. It was a rationalist, positivist, and materialist movement - despite the deliberate irrationalism of the young Louis-Napoleon. It was not affiliated to a revolutionary party, nor to popular militias. It was not collectivist. And its demise was the outcome of military defeat.
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"[A] brilliant, comprehensive, and well-researched examination of Napoleon III and the Second Empire...One of the best works on the French Second Empire and an erudite addition to the Cambridge 'New Studies in European History' series." Choice
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Although the machinery of government was almost the same under the Second Empire as it had been under the First, its founding principles were different. The function of the Empire, as Emperor Napoleon III often repeated, was to guide the people internally towards justice and externally towards perpetual peace. Holding his power by universal suffrage, and having frequently, from his prison or in exile, reproached previous oligarchical governments with neglecting social questions, he set out to solve them by organising a system of government based on the principles of the "Napoleonic Idea", i.e. of the emperor, the elect of the people as the representative of the democracy, and as such supreme; and of himself, the representative of the great Napoleon I of France, "who had sprung armed from the French Revolution like Minerva from the head of Jove," as the guardian of the social gains of the revolutionary period.
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This style gets its name from the reign of Napoleon III (1852-1870), the French Second Empire. The dominant element of the style is the Mansard roof. Dormers are featured on the steeply pitched roofs.
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Napoleon Iii