Physical recovery was remarkably quick. Within six or seven years few signs of the fighting remained. Visitors remarked admiringly on the teeming streets, the expensive shops and energetic nightlife. Charles Garnier's Opéra was opened in 1875. Aptly described as the "triumph of moulded pastry", it was a suitable image of the frivolity and materialism of the so-called naughty Eighties and Nineties. In 1889, the Eiffel Tower stole the show at the great Exposition. For the 1900 repeat, the Métropolitain (métro) - or Nécropolitain, as it was dubbed by one wit - was unveiled.

 

The lasting social consequence of the Commune was the confirmation of the them-and-us divide between bourgeoisie and working class. Any stance other than a revolutionary one after the Commune appeared not only feeble, but also a betrayal of the dead. In the years up to World War I, none of the contradictions had been resolved and the parties began to polarize. The trade union movement unified in 1895 to form the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), and in 1905 Jean Jaurès and Jules Guesde founded the Parti Socialiste (also known as the SFIO). On the extreme right, fascism began to make its ugly appearance with Maurras' proto-Brownshirt organization, the Camelots du Roi, which inaugurated another French tradition - of violence and thuggery on the far Right.

Yet despite - or maybe in some way because of - these tensions and contradictions, Paris provided the supremely inspiring environment for a concentration of artists and writers - the so-called Bohemians , both French and foreign - such as Western culture had rarely seen before. Impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism were all born in Paris in this period, while French poets like Apollinaire, Laforgue, Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars and André Breton were preparing the way for Surrealism, concrete poetry and symbolism. Film, too, saw its first developments. After World War I, Paris remained the world's art centre, with an injection of foreign blood and a shift of venue from Montmartre to Montparnasse.

As Depression deepened in the 1930s and Nazi power across the Rhine became more menacing, fascist thuggery and anti-parliamentary activity increased in France, culminating in a pitched battle outside the Chamber of Deputies in February 1934. The effect of this fascist activism was to unite the Left, including the Communists, led by the Stalinist Maurice Thorez, in the Popular Front , who went on to win the 1936 elections with a handsome majority in the Chamber.