What Was Life Like In Napoleonic Paris?

7 March 1815, a mountain road south of Grenoble. Napoleon, back from exile, walks alone toward a line of loaded muskets and pulls his coat open. Jean, a young soldier from Paris, has one second to decide. Thirteen days later, without fighting a single battle, Napoleon is back in Paris. For the next 84 days, the city belongs to him again. We follow Jean home to Saint-Antoine and see a city split in three: the emperor's Paris of palaces and parades, the Paris of money in the Palais-Royal and the Chaussée-d'Antin, and the Paris of hands, where masons, tanners and furniture makers live off their work. Water carried up the stairs, mud in the streets, clothes at the pawnshop, cheap wine beyond the customs wall, and a giant elephant rising at the Bastille. On the street, people sing the Marseillaise. In the Palais-Royal, the money asks only one question: will there be war?