Before it was built as a church, this land had belonged to the Hotel Memus-plaisirs, meaning "menu of delights." In 1792, it had been the National Guard Free School; in 1793, it became the National Conservatory of Music; in 1795, the National Conservatory of Music and Drama; and after the Bourbon Restoration in 1822, it was renamed the National Conservatory of Music.
The Paris Opera had burned down in 1763. It was not until 1860 that the French Ministry of Fine Arts decided to build a new Paris Opera. The land had stood vacant for nearly a hundred years in the meantime.
When you sat in a restaurant with a menu in your hand, you had many choices. Which one did you want tonight?
Too few choices and too many choices could both make choosing difficult. Among the 171 submitted designs, the work of thirty-five-year-old architect Charles Garnier stood out. He chose eclecticism, though not everyone agreed with him at the time.
Today's Paris Opera was known as a "jewel box," magnificent and breathtaking. In fact, eclecticism, also known as syncretism, had already begun to emerge during Napoleon I's era, and it had even been mentioned in Napoleon's diary.
Many things were like that. At first, they were hard to accept, but once you got used to seeing them, they no longer mattered.
The Great Exhibition was held in Hyde Park in 1851, at the Crystal Palace. It looked like a greenhouse, yet inside were steam traction engines, high-speed turbines, cranes, kitchenware, and reaping machines from America.
Even earlier, Napoleon had already held industrial exhibitions in Paris. The first was held at the Louvre Museum, while the second was held at Les Invalides, where tents had been erected temporarily.
That exhibition displayed a threshing machine designed by a Scottish engineer.