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Second Empire

Second Empire

8.1
A period when Napoleon III ruled France from 1852 to 1870
  • proper noun
translation icon : Segundo Imperio
  • Its appearance developed during the Second Empire (1852-1870), under the direction of Napoleon III and Georges Haussmann.
  • Napoleon III's Second Empire
  • Second Empire ideology
  • art in the Second Empire

Examples

  • From this letter, one can reconstruct Silvestre's troubled political fortunes in the latter years of the Second Empire.

    Academic text (2006)
  • Napoleon III's Second Empire came to a swift and humiliating end with his surrender to the Prussians in September 1870, and Haussmannized Paris.

    Academic text (2003)
  • All attempts to identify exactly what Interior says about relations between the sexes in the Second Empire.

    Academic text (1993)
  • In the Second Empire, the so-called "nonpolitical" press proliferated.

    Academic text (2003)
  • The Second Empire, with its perceived decadence and irresponsibility, became the foil against which to rebuild the "true France."

    Academic text (2003)
  • During the Second Empire, the prescriptive principles of mural painting accommodated the viewer's erratic gaze and limited attention.

    Academic text (1993)
  • By relying on associations with eighteenth-century art and society, government ministers, administrators, and critics confirmed the distance between the role of mural painting as public art in the Second Empire and the new consumer-based culture of the Third Republic.

    Academic text (1993)
  • Among the technological accomplishments of the Second Empire, the sewers occupy a strangely overdetermined place within modern Parisian history, perhaps because they were thought to allegorize the processes of history itself.

    Academic text (1998)
  • On December 2, 1852, the Second Empire was officially established, and Louis Napoleon was proclaimed Napoleon III.

  • In the Second Empire, the so-called 'nonpolitical' press proliferated.

Surface Forms

Morphology

2nd + empire

The compound simply combines 'second' (following the first in sequence) with 'empire' (a state ruling over territories), so a B1 learner who knows both words can infer it denotes an empire that is second in sequence. The specific historical referent (Napoleon III's France and the exact dates) requires extra knowledge, but the core compositional meaning is transparent.

Etymology

Second Empire comes from the words Second (the later time) and Empire (rule by an emperor). It was the name for Napoleon III's government from 1852 to 1870, so 'Second Empire' means that specific period of French imperial rule.