Rue Eugène Mercier

Eugène Mercier is the founder of the Champagne house that bears his name. He is presented as the inventor of the advertising film. In 1858, Eugène Mercier founded his own Champagne House with the ambition to create a great Champagne brand accessible to the greatest number of people. In the 1880s, the Mercier brand experienced spectacular growth. When Eugène Mercier died in 1904, he left his son and sons-in-law a prosperous, solid company and a great Brand with an established reputation. Eugène Mercier, inventor of modern "communication". In 1871, Eugène Mercier dug cellars for 6 years to create a real underground city. "Count by kilometer, not by meter", he ordered the architect in charge of the work. The excavation of the 47 galleries, with a total length of 18 kilometers and a depth of 30 meters, required the extraction of 125,000 cubic meters of chalk. 40 times the weight of the Eiffel Tower, or 280,000 tons, is the amount of chalk excavated to dig the Mercier cellars. The design of these cellars is doubly innovative: built on a single level, they communicate at ground level with the Paris-Strasbourg railway line. In 1885, Eugène Mercier organized visits to the cellars and assigned staff to welcome the public. Travellers and tourists on the Paris-Strasbourg line discovered the galleries decorated by the Champagne sculptor Gustave André Navlet. In 1886, the cellars of the Maison Mercier were lit with electricity, thanks to a huge steam engine installed in the cellars. The installation of one of the very first electric elevators allows the connection between the cellars and the offices. A bottle rinsing machine developed by Eugène Mercier was able to wash 120,000 bottles a day. A private railway line adjoining the house was used to transport the wagons used to ship the champagne. Between 1870 and 1881 a giant Foudre (1,600 hectolitres, the equivalent of 200,000 bottles at the time) was designed and built by Eugène Mercier to carry out large-scale blending. It was necessary to go all the way to Hungary to select the one hundred and fifty oak trees needed to build this giant. In 1889 for the Universal Exhibition in Paris, Eugene Mercier decided to exhibit the "Mercier lightning". It is taken there, pulled by twelve pairs of oxen and the reinforcement of eighteen horses for eight days. This media event made the front page of all the newspapers reporting the journey from Epernay to Paris of this "cathedral of champagne" of twenty tons. In 1891, the President of the Republic, Sadi Carnot, visited the Mercier cellars in a carriage. 100,000 candles were lit on this occasion. In 1900, the Mercier balloon flew over the Paris World Fair. Mercier offered visitors from all over the world the chance to fly over Paris in a Mercier balloon. This ingenious idea, conceived by Eugène Mercier in 1900, was an ingenious and elegant way to promote his champagne. In 1900, the first advertising film made thanks to the talent of the Lumière brothers was presented to visitors to the Mercier Pavilion at the 1900 Universal Exhibition. A cinematograph projected the first documentary film entitled "From the bunch to the glass" imagined by Eugène Mercier. More than 3 million visitors flocked to see the animated views, under the sign of modernity. Throughout his life, Eugène Mercier knew how to "create the event" and thus arouse the curiosity and sympathy of journalists and the population.