At least in England, its principal home, the Age of Cast Iron, so paradoxically interrelated with the Gothic Revival in its very early stages, came to an end in considerable part because of the triumph of the Gothic Revival around 1850 (see Chapter 10). For several decades the characteristic new architectural developments were stylistic rather than technical. Yet it was the later theories—not the practice—of a French medievalist, Viollet-le-Duc, which played a great part in the renewed interest in the frank use of metal on the Continent in the eighties and nineties (see Chapter 16). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ PART TWO 185O-19OO CHAPTER 8 SECOND EMPIRE PARIS, UNITED ITALY, AND IMPERIAL-AND-ROYAL VIENNA MANY historians, in despair, have merely labelled the period after 1850 ‘Eclectic’ as if earlier periods of architecture—and notably all the preceding hundred years since 1750—had not also been eclectic, although admittedly to a lesser degree. Within the eclecticism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there can readily be distinguished the two major stylistic divisions with which Part I has dealt separately (in Chapters 1-5 and in Chapter 6, respectively). So also in the fifties, sixties, and seventies two principal camps are discernible among the architects. Their programmes were less clear than in the previous half century, and in one case much less widely accepted internationally. Yet the High Victorian Gothic of England, taken together with the later Neo-Gothic elsewhere, on the one hand, and what may be loosely called the international Second Empire mode on the other, subsume between them a fair part of the more conspicuous architectural production of the third quarter of the century.