The Second Empire mode was the heir, or at least the successor, of the last universal style of the western world, the Romantic Classical. Moreover its wide international sway was hardly terminated by the end of Napoleon III’s reign in France any more than its beginning had waited for his enthronement. Concerning that sway it should be noted, however, that considered as a definite ‘style’ the Second Empire mode is very far from characterizing as much of French production in this age as of that in several other countries. Indeed, somewhat paradoxically, its actual initiation may almost be said to have occurred outside France and before the political Second Empire actually began in 1852. In this chapter and the next, certain alternative developments in succession to the earlier Renaissance Revival have been associated with the Second Empire mode, sometimes a bit arbitrarily perhaps, for lack of a more appropriate place to deal with them. Although France was less affected by the Picturesque in the first half of the nineteenth century than England, the Renaissance Revival had permitted some straying from the more rigid paths of Romantic Classicism in the thirties and forties (see Chapters 3 and 6). The earliest French work of the twenties that may seem of Italian Renaissance inspiration is very severe and flat, approximating occasionally the effects of the German _Rundbogenstil_ yet consistently disdaining that mode’s tendencies towards either medievalism or originality in detail. Gradually, under Louis Philippe, there were changes: on the one hand, there arose an interest in later periods of the Italian Renaissance; on the other, there came an increasing and less peripheral use of sixteenth-century and even later native models. Common to both these developments was an evident desire for richer and more plastic effects.[178] What above all distinguishes the mature Second Empire mode, even more in other countries than in France, is the elaboration of three-dimensional composition by the employment of visible mansard roofs and of pavilions at the ends and centres of buildings, these last capped either with especially tall straight-sided mansards or, even more characteristically, with convex or concave ones. Such features are rare before 1850 in France and almost unknown elsewhere.[179]