The Temple of Money: The Rise and Fall of the Paris Bourse

If you stood at the Place de la Bourse on a weekday afternoon in the 1870s, you might have mistaken the scene for a riot with a dress code. Men in top hats shouted, waved their arms, and shoved each other aside beneath a colonnade that looked, for all the world, like a Greek temple. This was, in fact, rather the point. The god being worshipped was capital, and the Palais Brongniart was its sanctuary — a faith with excellent architecture and terrible manners. Napoleon’s Temple to Commerce The Bourse itself long predates its famous building, having drifted through several improvised homes over the eighteenth century — the rue Quincampoix, the rue Vivienne, a corner of the Palais Royal — the financial equivalent of a family that keeps getting evicted. It took an emperor to fix its address permanently. Napoleon decided in 1807 that France’s financial dealings deserved a home worthy of a continent he was busy conquering, and commissioned the architect Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart to build…