The Second Empire episode in the United States is a curious one. On the one hand, it was a consciously ‘modern’ movement, deriving its prestige from contemporary Paris, not from any period of the past like the Greek, the Gothic, or even the Renaissance Revivals—of which last, of course, it was in some limited sense an heir. On the other hand, the considerable originality of the mode as it was actually employed was largely unconscious and due to the lack of accurate visual documents, or even a codified body of precedent, to be followed. At this time contemporary conditions demanded, as in Europe, the construction of many public edifices, Federal, state, and municipal, to house a complexity of functions. It would have been almost impossible to compress these within the rigid rectangles of the Greek Revival even had the Greek Revival not already been rejected by most critics twenty years or more earlier. Yet the Second Empire episode was necessarily brief, lasting little more than a decade. The crass assurance it reflected, particularly the special arrogance of the post-war politicians in Washington, the state capitals, and in the bigger cities, was much shaken by the Panic of 1873. The mode did not therefore, as in much of Europe, continue in America into the eighties and nineties. The episode has a longer-term significance, nevertheless. Slight as was the actual relationship to the Second Empire mode of the first two Americans to be trained at the École des Beaux Arts, Hunt and Richardson, their personal influence and their prestige encouraged a growing trek of architectural students to Paris; their recommendations alone would hardly have had much effect had not fashion already established Paris rather than London in the public mind as the centre of modern architectural achievement and inspiration. From the mid eighties on, the long-maintained dependence on England in architectural matters began to be notably weakened; for a generation and more very many American architects would seek their roots abroad, but henceforth in France, or even Italy, not England.