Back in 1909, a super-rich French banker named Albert Kahn decided to create a photographic record of the world using the new color photography process that had just appeared, the Autochrome Lumière. One of the cities they documented was Paris.

Starting in 1914, Kahn’s photographers (Leon Gimpel, Stephane Passet, Georges Chevalier and Auguste Leon) began to document life in Paris using the pioneering color process, which featured color filters made from dyed potato starch grains.

Here’s a beautiful gallery of the color photos they made a century ago (with some color enhancing done on the original shots):

In addition to the large number of shots of Paris, roughly 72,000 Autochromes were created around the world through Kahn’s ambitious project. The Autochrome fell out of favor in photographers just a few decades after its introduction when Kodak and Agfa introduced their Kodachrome and Agfacolor Neu processes in 1935 and 1932, respectively.