Line 1 of the Métropolitain opened between Porte de Vincennes and Porte Maillot, giving Paris an underground rail network to rival London's. Engineer Fulgence Bienvenüe oversaw construction, while architect Hector Guimard's sinuous cast-iron station entrances became instant icons of Art Nouveau design, still recognizable as symbols of the city today.
Paris had lagged behind London, which opened the world's first underground railway in 1863, but city planners were determined that the 1900 Exposition Universelle would showcase French engineering at its finest. Fulgence Bienvenüe, a civil engineer who had lost an arm in a construction accident years earlier, directed the tunneling beneath the city's dense historic core, a task complicated by centuries-old catacombs, sewers, and unstable soil.
The opening day line ran just over 10 kilometers, connecting Porte de Vincennes to Porte Maillot, and Parisians packed into the wood-paneled cars to marvel at a mode of travel that seemed to belong to the future. Hector Guimard's station entrances, with their whiplash curves and amber glass lamps shaped like flower buds, drew initial mockery from traditionalists who found them garish, but they endured to become perhaps the most photographed pieces of street furniture in the world.
Within a few years the network expanded rapidly, and the Métro became so central to Parisian identity that the phrase 'métro, boulot, dodo' (subway, work, sleep) entered the language as shorthand for the rhythm of city life.