WHEN ONE knows Paris as it is now – cramped, noisy, polluted – it is hard to imagine that it used to look like a village with women selling flowers out of carts, horse-drawn vehicles on the Alexandre III Bridge, and a traffic-free Place de la Concorde.
The following images, captured between 1907 and 1930, were taken using the autochrome Lumière process, an early method of photography that allowed artists to capture the world around them in its natural colours. It is believed that most of the pictures featured below were taken by Léon Gimpel, Stéphane Passet, Georges Chevalier, and Auguste Léon. Thanks to Nicolas Bonnell and his blog Paris Unplugged, we are now able to see what Paris looked like over 100 years ago.
