Through the Mailly family saga, the city of Paris became the cultural and political center of the nineteenth century, spanning the Napoleonic era, the Restoration, the July Monarchy, the 1848 uprisings, the Second Empire, the Commune, and the Belle Époque.
In this context, different approaches and tensions emerge: musical Romanticism, great literature and poetry, art, which sees Impressionism as a fundamental shift for the contemporary era, and science, which, starting with electrical and magnetic phenomena and mathematics, reaches all the way to the first discoveries about the atom and radioactivity.
Alongside this, the technologies of the telephone, railways, power plants, iron construction, the bicycle, the automobile, and cinema revolutionize the way of life, as do socialist experiences and Marxist thought.
The century concludes with the English vision of the Restoration and the Empire, the Italian Risorgimento movements inspired by Mazzini and Garibaldi, the American Civil War, and the German Reich, while philosophy evolves from Hegelian thought to Nietzsche.
The nineteenth century ends with major questions still open and a general feeling of positivism, failing to grasp the tragedies looming, partly due to sustained progress.