| 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 years up to World War I were marked by the unstable but thoroughly conservative governments of the Third Republic. 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 has rarely seen. 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, politicized thuggery grew rife in Paris, culminating in a pitched battle outside the Chamber of Deputies in February 1934. (Socialist leader Léon Blum was only saved from being lynched by a funeral cortege through the intervention of some building workers who happened to notice what was going on in the street below.) The effect of this fascist activism was to unite the Left, including the Communists, led by the Stalinist Maurice Thorez, in the Popular Front. When they won the 1936 elections with a handsome majority in the Chamber, there followed a wave of strikes and factory sit-ins. Frightened by the apparently revolutionary situation, the major employers signed the Matignon Agreement with Blum – now Prime Minister – which provided for wage increases, nationalization of the armaments industry and partial nationalization of the Bank of France, a forty-hour week, paid annual leave and collective bargaining on wages. These reforms were pushed through parliament, but when Blum tried to introduce exchange controls to check the flight of capital the Senate threw the proposal out and he resigned. The Left returned to opposition, where it remained, with the exception of coalition governments, until 1981. Most of the Popular Front's reforms were promptly undone.
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