Second Empire Style — High Jewellery Under Napoleon III
Second Empire Style — High Jewellery Under Napoleon III
The opulent, historicist court style of 1852–1870 Paris and its lasting reference value
Second Empire style is the jewellery idiom that flourished in France during the reign of Napoleon III, from the proclamation of the Second Empire in 1852 to its collapse in 1870 following the Franco-Prussian War. The style is defined by a return to scale, by an eclectic borrowing from earlier European traditions — Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, and the freshly excavated antique — and by the pre-eminence of the Paris court as the arbiter of fashion. Empress Eugénie, married to Napoleon III in 1853, set the tone: parures of substantial weight, mounted with the finest available stones, fabricated by the houses that the Empire patronised most heavily, including Bapst, Mellerio, Chaumet, and the young Boucheron.
Stylistic vocabulary
Where the preceding Romantic period had favoured sentiment and naturalism in modest scale, the Second Empire returned to the stage. Tiaras, rivières, stomachers, and full parures were made for court appearances and grand-occasion wear. Designs drew on historical sources: Renaissance enamels and cartouche forms, eighteenth-century giardinetto and bouquet motifs, and a Baroque taste for swags, scrolls, and acanthus. The same period produced the first wave of archaeological revival jewellery — closely studied imitations of Etruscan, Greek, and Roman work, made possible by the excavations at Pompeii, Herculaneum, and the Etruscan tomb fields, and popularised in Rome by Castellani.
The second defining current was the rise of the diamond as the dominant Second Empire stone. The discovery of South African diamond fields at the end of the period (Kimberley, 1867 onward) lay just outside its temporal frame, but Brazilian and Indian diamonds were already abundant in the Paris market, and improved cutting in Antwerp and Amsterdam produced larger, brighter stones. Coloured stones — emerald, ruby, sapphire — appeared in important pieces, often with diamond accents. Pearls remained a high-status material, and the Second Empire produced some of the most important pearl-and-diamond compositions in the historical record.
A third current was naturalism executed at scale. Floral parures with diamond-set blossoms on tremblant springs, vine and leaf compositions in articulated mounts, and animalier motifs all featured in the period's high jewellery. The naturalism of the Second Empire is distinguished from the slighter naturalism of the preceding decades by the size of the pieces, the density of the stone-setting, and the technical sophistication of the articulation that allowed flowers and leaves to move with the wearer.
Empress Eugénie and the crown jewels
Eugénie was the principal patron and the period's defining wearer. She commissioned and re-commissioned extensively from Bapst, the official court jeweller, including the diadem of currants designed by Alexandre-Gabriel Lemonnier in 1855 and the great pearl-and-diamond tiara now in the Louvre. The French crown jewels were extensively reset under her direction, with pieces from earlier periods broken up and the stones remounted in compositions reflecting Eugénie's taste and the scale fashionable at court. Several of the most important historical stones in French royal possession — the Régent diamond, the Sancy, the great pearls of the Bourbon collection — were either reset for Eugénie or featured in her appearances during the period.
After the fall of the Empire in 1870, Eugénie escaped to England with a portion of her personal jewels. The remaining French crown jewels passed back into state custody. The Third Republic, on republican principles uneasy with the symbolism of crown property, determined to liquidate the collection. The historic 1887 sale dispersed many of the central Second Empire pieces to private collectors and to the international trade — fragments survive in major museum collections including the Louvre, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Smithsonian. The 1887 sale is one of the most significant single events in the history of nineteenth-century jewellery dispersal and continues to influence pricing for documented Second Empire material on the contemporary market.
Houses and craftsmen
Bapst held the title of court jeweller and produced the most important imperial commissions. The firm had served the French crown since the eighteenth century and brought to the Second Empire a continuity of technique and access to historic stones that no competitor could match. Mellerio dits Meller, also a court supplier and one of the oldest established jewellery houses in Europe, served Eugénie and the wider European royal courts; the firm's archives preserve substantial Second Empire records and the house remains in family ownership today.
Boucheron opened in 1858 in the Palais-Royal, where its early production set the tone for what became the firm's later reputation. Lemonnier, Massin, and Fontenay were among the most influential designers of the period; Massin in particular pioneered the lighter, more flexible mounting techniques that opened the path to the corsage ornaments and tremblant brooches of the late nineteenth century. Castellani in Rome supplied the archaeological-revival material that became fashionable across the period, with his Etruscan-revival granulation work in particular setting a standard that influenced jewellery design across Europe.
Below the level of the great houses, a substantial Paris production of Second Empire taste was made by smaller workshops serving the bourgeois market. These pieces — often described in trade as second-tier Second Empire — share the period's stylistic vocabulary but use less expensive stones, lighter mountings, and smaller scale. They are the most numerous Second Empire survivals in the contemporary antique-jewellery market and provide accessible examples of the period's design vocabulary.
Identification and dating
Second Empire pieces are identified by a combination of mounting technique, stone selection, and design vocabulary. Closed-back silver-on-gold mounting persists into the early Empire and gives way to open-back gold mounting through the 1860s, particularly for diamond work as cutting improved. French marks — the eagle's head for 18-carat gold, the boar's head and other warranty marks for silver — are a useful diagnostic, as are the maker's marks of Bapst, Mellerio, Boucheron, and Massin where they survive on documented pieces. Old-mine and old-European cuts predominate among the diamonds; rose-cut stones appear in transitional pieces from the early Empire.
Dating within the period is sometimes possible from style alone. Earlier Second Empire pieces tend toward Renaissance and Rococo revival in their motif vocabulary; later pieces show stronger naturalism and more pronounced archaeological-revival elements. The Empire's collapse in 1870 produces a sharp stylistic break, and pieces dated to the early 1870s show transitional characteristics into the Belle Époque idiom that follows. Imperial commissions dated from court archives — where surviving — provide the most secure benchmarks for stylistic dating of less well-documented work.
The trade today
Auction performance for Second Empire jewellery is strong: documented imperial-provenance pieces from the 1887 sale or from Eugénie's personal jewels achieve prices well above their material value, and undocumented pieces of the period in fine condition trade as significant antique jewellery. The major sales rooms — Christie's, Sotheby's, Bonhams — regularly offer Second Empire material in their important jewellery sales, and specialist dealers in nineteenth-century work maintain consistent stock of period pieces at varying levels of distinction.
The style remains a reference point for high jewellery design at the major contemporary houses, where Second Empire forms recur in tiara, parure, and stomacher revivals. Boucheron, Chaumet, Cartier, and Van Cleef & Arpels have all produced collections over the past two decades drawing explicitly on Second Empire references, and major contemporary tiara commissions — for state ceremonies and royal weddings outside France — have repeatedly drawn on the period's vocabulary. The continuity from the Second Empire workshops to contemporary haute joaillerie is one of the strongest design lineages in the modern jewellery trade.
Condition is the central question for buyers of Second Empire pieces. Many parures have been broken up over their 150-year history, with stones reset into modern mounts and the original frameworks lost. A complete, documented Second Empire parure is therefore a significant rarity. Pieces showing original mounts, original stones, and original cases command large premia over comparable pieces with later replacements, and the major auction houses provide condition reports that are central to bidder decision-making.