page_title: Paris under Louis-Philippe
section_title: The railroad arrives
hierarchical_section_title: Paris under Louis-Philippe / The railroad arrives
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Locomotive type 111-Buddicom N°33 "St Pierre", compagnie de Paris à Rouen. Constructeur&#160;: Allcard-Buddicom &amp; Cie. Photographié à la cité du train à Mulhouse.
context_page_description: Paris during the reign of King Louis-Philippe was the city described in the novels of Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo. Its population increased from 785,000 in 1831 to 1,053,000 in 1848, as the city grew to the north and west, while the poorest neighborhoods in the center became even more crowded.
  The heart of the city, around the Île de la Cité, was a maze of narrow, winding streets and crumbling buildings from earlier centuries; it was picturesque, but dark, crowded, unhealthy and dangerous. A cholera outbreak in 1832 killed 20,000 people. Claude-Philibert de Rambuteau, prefect of the Seine for fifteen years under Louis-Philippe, made tentative efforts to improve the center of the city: he paved the quays of the Seine with stone paths and planted trees along the river. He built a new street to connect the Marais district with the markets and began construction of Les Halles, the famous central food market of Paris, finished by Napoleon III.
  Louis-Philippe lived in his old family residence, the Palais-Royal, until 1832, before moving to the Tuileries Palace.
context_section_description: The most important  economic and social event of the reign of Louis-Philippe was the arrival in Paris of the railroad. The first successful passenger railway line in France had opened between Saint-Étienne and Lyon in 1831. The financiers, the Péreire brothers, built the first line from Paris to Saint-Germain-en-Laye between 1835 and 1837, largely in order to persuade the banking community and the Parisians that such a means of transport was feasible and profitable. The line between Paris and Versailles was approved on 9 July 1836; it was the site of the first railroad accident in France on 8 May 1842, in which at least 55 passengers were killed and between 100 and 200 injured,  The accident did not slow down the growth of the railroads: the Paris-Orléans line opened on 2 May 1843, and the line between Paris and Rouen was inaugurated the next day.
  The first train stations in Paris were called embarcadéres (a term borrowed from river navigation)), and their location was a source of great contention, since each railroad line was owned by a different company, and each went in a different direction. The first embarcadére was built by the Péreire brothers for the line Paris-Saint-Germain-en-Laye, at the Place de l'Europe; it opened on 26 August 1837. It became so successful that it was quickly replaced by a larger building on the Rue de Stockholm, and then an even larger structure, the beginning of the Gare Saint-Lazare, built between 1841 and 1843. It was the station for the trains to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Versailles and Rouen.
  The Péreire brothers argued that Gare Saint-Lazare should be the only railway station in Paris, but the owners of the other lines each insisted on having their own station. The first Gare d'Orléans, now known as the Gare d'Austerlitz, was opened on 2 May 1843 and was greatly expanded in 1848 and 1852. The first Gare Montparnasse opened on 10 September 1840 on the Avenue du Maine and was the terminus of the new Paris-Versailles line on the Left Bank of the Seine. It was quickly found to be too small and was rebuilt between 1848 and 1852 at the junction of the Rue de Rennes and Boulevard du Montparnasse, its present location.
  The banker James Mayer de Rothschild received the permission of the government to build the first railroad line from Paris to the Belgian border in 1845, with branch lines to Calais and Dunkerque. The first embarcadére of the new line opened on the Rue de Dunkerque in 1846. It was replaced by a much grander station, the Gare du Nord, in 1854. The first station of the line to eastern France, the Gare de l'Est, was begun in 1847, but not finished until 1852. Construction of a new station for the line to the south, from Paris to Montereau-Fault-Yonne began in 1847 and was finished in 1852. In 1855, it was replaced by a new station, the first Gare de Lyon, on the same site.
caption: An 1844 locomotive from the Paris-Rouen line, now in the railroad museum in Mulhouse
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