DESPITE ITS REPUTATION as la ville rouge, hot-bed of revolution, for most of the nineteenth century Paris was a court city. It was the principal residence of the monarch, where a large number of the inhabitants served the monarch and his family, his administration and his household, and political, cultural and economic life depended in part on the monarchy. Due to the size of the monarch's household 3,000 in 1830 under Charles X and of those of junior members of his dynasty, perhaps 10,000 people in Paris (out of a population of around 700,000) worked for the court. Despite the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 and frequent riots and insurrections, Paris normally contained more courtiers and aspiring courtiers than revolutionaries. Indeed it contained sufficient material for three courts Bonaparte, Bourbon and Orleans. Furthermore, Paris often functioned as a court city for Europe as well as France. Architecture above all established Paris as a court city, especially the Tuileries palace in the heart of Paris, connecting the two outstretched wings of the Louvre, and the palace of Saint-Cloud outside the city, which was the court's summer residence. Between 19 February 1800, when the First Consul took up residence in the Tuileries, and 4 September 1870, when his niece by marriage, the Empress Eugenie, fled it to escape a baying mob, these palaces had as much influence, both in France and abroad, as Versailles before 1789. If they had not been destroyed in 1870-71, during the FrancoPrussian war and the Commune, the French monarchies of the nineteenth century would be less forgotten today. The numerous other royal properties scattered throughout Paris, which were known as the Domaine de la Couronne, also provided visual confirmation that it was a court city. They included the palaces of the Luxembourg, the Elysee, and the Palais Royal, residence of the Duc d'Orleans; five royal theatres and opera houses, all containing lodges reserved for the court officials who ran them; the ministries; the royal factories making luxury goods for the court, such as the Gobelins tapestry factory; and the royal museums, such as the Louvre. The Palais Bourbon, which contained the Chamber of Deputies, showed that Paris remained the capital of Europe. Niall Fergusson's assertion that (Britain created the modern world'! is incorrect. Not only was French, rather than English, the language of the world until 1939, but it is the semi-circular French Chamber of Deputies in the Palais Bourbon, rather than the rectangular House of Commons in Westminster, that was and still is the principal architectural model for other parliaments. Moreover the Charte of Louis XVIII, promulgated in the Palais Bourbon on 4 June 1814, rather than the English constitution, was the model for other