In the European picture as a whole a less notable shift of direction occurred around 1870 than in England and America. There was naturally continuity in the Vienna of Francis Joseph, since the Imperial government called the tune in Austrian architecture and the King-Emperor’s reign went on without a break—indeed, it lasted for another generation and more. What is surprising is that the end of the Second Empire and the beginning of the Third Republic brought so little change in France. There was, of course, a short hiatus in production like that which followed the fall of the first Napoleon. As around 1820, however, so around 1875 the story picks up again almost as if there had been no break at all. Gradually interest in exposed metal construction, in decline since the fifties, revived; by the time of the Paris Exhibition of 1889 French feats of metal construction, not so much the Galerie des Machines as the Eiffel Tower, became the talk of the world (see Chapter 16). In the fugue-like composition of nineteenth-century architectural history different themes have differing durations. The English theme of High Victorian Gothic, picked up in any case only by the Anglo-Saxon sections of the orchestra, came effectively to an end with the early seventies; the Second Empire theme, whether it be considered in a specialized sense or in a broader one, was picked up at least selectively by the whole western world and not least boldly by the Anglo-American section; moreover, it continued in most countries, with some modulation, for at least a decade longer than the High Victorian Gothic. Yet both in England and America, the important new themes of the seventies and eighties were rooted not in the Second Empire but in the Victorian Gothic, even though they represent something much more original than mere modulations of that earlier theme.