The Spectacular Second Empire, 1852-1870

A regime denigrated in its time and held in contempt after its fall, the Second Empire was, for a long time, associated with the decadence and superficiality of the "fête impériale". Against a background of social unrest, this prosperous era was a time of splendour and of economic euphoria, of ostentation and numerous lavish celebrations that are worth revisiting. It was also a period of moral and aesthetic crisis, torn between the old cultural frameworks and the new practices, between increasingly excessive decoration and the quest for the real - conflicting currents that determined much of French artistic creation in the 1850s and 1860s.
Close