A Parisian merchant or manufacturer, Dumourrier-Duperrier, in 1699, furnished the first effective, organized system of combating fires in the city, and in 1717 he received, by letters-patent, the direction of the _Compagnie de Garde-Pompes_, the origin of the present organization. In 1792, the total effective of this force was two hundred and sixty-three men, officers included, with forty-four force-pumps, twelve suction-pumps, and forty-two casks. The men were provided with uniforms and, later, armed with sabres; in the year IX of the Republic, the corps, then four hundred strong, was placed under the direction of the Préfet de police, under the general administration of the Préfet de la Seine. The frightful conflagration which ended the fête given by the Austrian ambassador, Prince von Schwartzenberg, to the Emperor, in honor of his marriage with Marie-Louise, in 1810, awoke public attention to the insufficiency of the arrangements for extinguishing fires, and in the following year measures were taken to secure a larger authority and more energetic action. Napoleon decided that the gardes-pompes should be put on a strictly military footing; an imperial decree of September 18, 1811, created a battalion of sapeurs-pompiers consisting of four companies with thirteen officers and five hundred and sixty-three men. For the first time, they were armed with muskets, and as a military force were held as an auxiliary in the police service and in the maintenance of public order. One of the articles of this decree provided for the payment of this force by the city until the establishment of a company to insure against fire,--which was held to foreshadow an intention to place this expense, at least in part, upon these companies, and thereby relieve the municipal budget. During the Revolution of 1848, the provisory government thought it prudent to deprive the pompiers of their muskets; and in April, 1850, the President of the Republic disbanded the battalion and reorganized it, retaining a small proportion of the former members. Down to this date, it had been recruited from the engineers and the artillery of the army, but since then, from the infantry only. In 1860, the annexation of the banlieue necessitated a new reorganization; the successive augmentations of the force brought its total effective, in 1866, up to a regiment of twelve hundred and ninety-eight men, divided into two battalions of six companies each. The efficiency of the organization was greatly augmented by the introduction of steam fire-engines in 1873. * * * * *