Although the wall’s tollhouses were architect-designed and beautiful, Parisians were not impressed, and when revolution broke out, they destroyed all but four.6 But the Farmers-General wall managed to survive, since Napoleon Bonaparte and subsequent regimes found it, and the income it collected, useful. So this somewhat-battered relic was still standing when Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte assumed the imperial crown.
By this time, Paris had continued its surge outward, into areas such as Passy, Montmartre, and Belleville. In the 1840s, reflecting this new ring of growth, the government under King Louis-Philippe enclosed Paris within yet a larger and more bristling wall. Named after France’s then-premier, Adolphe Thiers, the Thiers Fortifications with their sixteen forts now stood ready to withstand all comers as Louis-Napoleon began his reign.
Of course, other rulers throughout French history had sought to beautify and improve Paris, perhaps none more so than rough and gruff Henri IV, with the creation of his beautiful Place des Vosges in the Marais and his harmonious and elegant western entrance to the city—featuring massive additions to the Seine-side Louvre and the completion of the Pont Neuf, or New Bridge, as well as the creation of Place Dauphine.
Napoleon Bonaparte had also entertained visions of Paris: “I intend to make Paris the most beautiful capital in the world,” he once remarked, and he set about this task with dizzying focus and energy. He was responsible for the stone embankments around the Ile de la Cité and along a portion of the Right and Left Banks. He added four more bridges, including the popular footbridge linking the Ile de la Cité and the Ile Saint-Louis, as well as the stone Pont d’Austerlitz and Pont d’Iéna (both named in honor of his victories) and an iron footbridge, the Pont des Arts, linking the Louvre and what now is the Institut de France. He began work on the Louvre’s massive northern wing and started the new Rue de Rivoli, from the Place de la Concorde. Not about to leave his place in history to chance, he did not overlook monuments dedicated to his own glory, including his work on the Vendôme Column, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Arc du Carrousel, as well as his makeover of the Church of La Madeleine and the Palais Bourbon in a style more in keeping with the neoclassical tastes of the time.
In addition to monumental fountains (especially the large sphinx-bedecked Fontaine du Palmier in the Place du Châtelet), Bonaparte planned a vast imperial city on the site of the current Place du Tracadéro and the Palais de Chaillot, visualized as extending all the way to the Bois de Boulogne—a grandiose scheme that fell by the wayside after Waterloo.
Bonaparte’s successors, Louis XVIII and Charles X, completed the Bourse (the neoclassical structure housing the stock exchange) as well as a network of canals (the St-Denis and the St-Martin) that connected the wide-swinging loops of the Seine. They also continued work on the Madeleine and resumed construction on the Arc de Triomphe while commissioning several new bridges, including the Pont de l’Archvêché (at the tip of the Ile de la Cité) and a pedestrian bridge linking the Right Bank to the Ile de la Cité (now replaced by the Pont d’Arcole).
King Louis-Philippe’s prefect of the Seine, Claude-Philibert de Rambuteau, completed work on the Arc de Triomphe, the Madeleine, the Hôtel du Quai d’Orsay, and several town halls and improved prisons and hospitals. He paved streets; built public fountains, sidewalks, and drains; and planted trees. Under Rambuteau’s direction the quays and the Seine’s retaining walls were extended, and gas was supplied to customers through concessions to private companies. Perhaps most striking, Rambuteau decided to cut directly into the urban fabric with a straight and wide street (since named in his honor) that required a large number of compulsory purchases, through an ancient slum to the north of Les Halles. He thus, not by chance, eradicated the very streets where the uprising of 1832 took place—the one that Victor Hugo so memorably commemorated in Les Misérables.
Still, by the time Louis-Napoleon came to power, Paris remained a city of just under a million people hemmed in by the old toll wall and living in tall, narrow houses lining dark and often filthy streets. More than one-third of the city’s inhabitants were crammed into the city’s small and concentrated center, where they fought for survival or simply eked out their lives. Traffic throughout the city was impeded by the tolls placed on the city’s bridges, and although several squares—including the Place des Vosges, the Place Vendôme, and the Place de la Concorde—broke up the dense urban fabric, the Grands Boulevards were crowded, and even the Champs-Elysées was still only a dusty road between the Place de la Concorde and the Rond-Point. Beyond, the Arc de Triomphe simply marked l’Etoile, one of the entrances through the toll wall, while beyond the toll wall stretched a ring of rural communes, themselves encircled, or in some cases even bisected, by the Thiers fortifications.
This was a city marked by an almost savage divide between opulence and poverty, with as many as 650,000 impoverished residents (workers and unemployed) out of a population of just under a million. Perhaps 180,000 Parisians were of the various ranks of the middle class, or bourgeoisie, while the remaining population was largely made up of domestic servants who resided with their employers. Already, western Paris was the abode of the well-to-do, while the poor clung to life in the eastern and central portions of town.
Thus, while Paris by Napoleon III’s reign had become France’s center of banking and finance as well as of industry and manufacturing, its opulence was pockmarked by large areas of dirt- and disease-infested slums that bred regular outbreaks of cholera. This dense tangle of streets, dark and congested, was a nightmare for anyone trying to cross the city, whether in horse-drawn carriage, on horseback, or by walking. Men carried goods on their backs or in handcarts or wheelbarrows, dodging horses and carriages (in 1853, some six thousand horse-drawn carriages traversed the Grand Boulevards in a twenty-four-hour period). Traffic was impeded by the warren of small streets—“impenetrable labyrinths,” as one historian has called them7—that one had to traverse in order to get anywhere. All this intensified as the city’s population continued to rise.
Adding to the difficulties in getting from one point to another, the railway stations (the Gare du Nord, the Gare de l’Est, the Gare de Lyon, the Gare Montparnasse, the Gare Saint Lazare, and the Gare d’Orléans, now the Gare d’Austerlitz) were unconnected with one another and difficult to reach from the center of town. Something had to be done to link them and to provide access to the city center. Other forms of transportation were just as hamstrung, with six-horse stagecoaches thundering into stations that were difficult to reach and completely inadequate to handle the traffic. Even the Seine was overcrowded, with rafts now having to stop outside of town, and large shipments of hay, wheat, and wine piling up, waiting for delivery.
Louis-Napoleon saw the railway stations as the true gateways of the city, and he was intent on providing north-south and east-west transportation arteries as well as green spaces throughout every part of Paris. And yes, he wanted to open up areas that had been bastions of insurrection and to facilitate troop movement—on wider streets that could not be easily blockaded by a few mattresses and a pile of junk. Order and prosperity marched together to his way of thinking, and he was convinced that his grands travaux would achieve what the National Workshops had failed to do, offering a solution to economic crisis. In the process, the cleanup of ghastly slums would, to his view, improve the morals of the people who lived in them.
Louis-Napoleon had already begun the work but was stymied by his then-prefect of the Seine, a cautious bureaucrat by name of Jacques Berger, who—much to his employer’s exasperation—was unwilling to fund such grandiose plans on credit. Unlike Berger, Louis-Napoleon strongly believed that the development of amenities and infrastructure in Paris would pay for itself by having a multiplier effect upon the economy as a whole. In this, he was supported by Persigny. And soon, he would be supported by Georges Haussmann.
Although Louis-Napoleon had long nurtured his dreams, he needed someone to carry them out. Georges Haussmann would be his great organizer, the one who would pu
sh, prod, and transform dreams into reality.
Haussmann first saw the map—the original map that Louis-Napoleon had created when in exile and had brought with him to Paris after his election—in a private tête-à-tête with the emperor immediately after being sworn in as prefect. After displaying an appropriate amount of enthusiasm, he warned the emperor that although the people of Paris would in the main be supportive of this kind of improvement, he might well encounter opposition, especially from the powerful and wealthy haute bourgeoisie (upper middle class). Louis-Napoleon seemed neither surprised nor disturbed by this observation and replied that he would simply override any opposition by dissolving the conservative and potentially stiff-necked municipal council and creating a more supportive body in its place. Haussmann, who well knew the emperor’s power but understood the dangers of creating enemies at the outset, warned him to be cautious and wait until such steps were absolutely necessary (in the end, Haussmann prevailed over the councilors, and the council remained). And then, after an exhausting and somewhat troubling day, Haussmann moved into to his suite of offices and living quarters in the Hôtel de Ville.
Work on the Hôtel de Ville, the town hall for all of Paris, had been completed just before the 1848 revolution, and Haussmann’s apartments, in the wing facing the Seine, were luxurious and included several reception rooms on the first floor.8 The first floor also featured a large Festive Hall, facing east in an adjoining wing overlooking the main courtyard, the Cour Louis XIV, which for the moment featured a statue of the Sun King. After Haussmann’s arrival, this particular effigy would give way to a monumental staircase, providing an impressive entrance to the Festive Hall—in time for Queen Victoria’s visit.
Other buildings and annexes soon followed the new prefect’s arrival, for the Hôtel de Ville had nowhere near the number of offices necessary to accommodate the functions of the Seine prefect, whose responsibilities stretched beyond the city of Paris and included the districts of Saint-Denis and Sceaux. In addition to his primary responsibilities, Haussmann took great care to decorate these offices and meeting rooms with appropriate murals, carvings, and ceiling paintings.
The new prefect also set up a private study next to his bedroom, with an internal staircase leading directly to his first-floor office. This setup functioned as a kind of war room, for Haussmann kept a secretary on duty round-the-clock (often working late into the night to come up with the figures or clarifications that the prefect urgently needed for the following day). It was in his private study that Haussmann set up a unique map of his own, mounted on casters, that he could consult at any moment.
This map was the result of Haussmann’s appalled discovery that Paris did not have an up-to-date official survey map. Roadbuilding in Paris had always proceeded informally, and this way of doing things was now creating a huge mess with the Rue de Rivoli extension as it slowly made its way toward the Hôtel de Ville. Most unfortunately, when this much-ballyhooed east-west artery reached the tower that remained from the ancient Church of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie, workers were surprised to discover that the variations in land height between the road and its surrounding area were far greater than anyone had anticipated, being off by several feet. This was an astonishing difference, and something that immediately raised the question of how to join the new Rue de Rivoli with the streets attempting to cross it, as well as with its access to the Pont Notre-Dame, whose entrance was already sufficiently steep to cause comment. Even the stability of the tower of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie was threatened, and there was talk about having to pull it down.
Soon Haussmann found the man he wanted to provide the kind of technical support he needed—Eugène Deschamps, a Paris architect and land surveyor to whom Haussmann later (and uncharacteristically) paid tribute as “a man of unrivaled merit,” who demonstrated his “unquestionable superiority” for the seventeen years he spent by the prefect’s side. In talks with section heads and lower-level civil servants (whom Haussmann, to his credit, had worked with throughout his career), the prefect had spotted Deschamps as someone with the kind of knowledge and preference for plain speaking that he needed. At the time, Deschamps’s survey office formed an insignificant part of the voirie de Paris (Paris Department of Transport), which in turn was buried deep in the bureaucracy along with a number of other offices dealing with the city’s infrastructure. Haussmann doubled the size of Deschamps’s office, placed him in charge, and promoted the office to a far more prominent place on the organizational chart. Within a few years, the once-lowly Department of Transport would become a major department responsible for all official maps and surveys for the City of Paris.
Deschamps’s new responsibilities were breathtaking: as Haussmann later put it in his memoirs, “I formed the plan to make M. Deschamps my immediate assistant for the principal and certainly the most arduous part of the great project for which I had assumed responsibility.” Deschamps’s job, first, was to “draw up the whole new system of major roads that were needed throughout Paris in order to implement the emperor’s program.” Next, “while this vast program was being carried out,” his job would be “to study carefully the route of each section in the smallest detail.” At that point, he would decide which properties the government would take over, in compulsory purchases (expropriation), and finally—in a function requiring the utmost sensitivity and discretion—Deschamps would estimate the value of these properties. In all of these duties, Haussmann relied on the “integrity of [Deschamps’s] character” and “the reliability of his work.”9 Haussmann would not be disappointed in his choice.
Not surprisingly, given the disaster that the Rue de Rivoli project had become, Haussmann immediately asked Deschamps to prepare a survey for the entire area of Paris as contained within the Farmers-General wall. This enormous project required that Paris be divided into a multitude of adjacent triangles, minutely measured and fitted together into divisions and then into a general map of the city. This map showed the alignments of the old roads and—as the program proceeded—the lines where new roads would go. It also recorded spot heights. Haussmann had this survey map made up on large sheets on a scale that he could accommodate, on casters, in his private study. He would soon publish a smaller reproduction (still a cumbersome five feet by eight) and an even smaller reproduction for the general public.
In the past, Haussmann had found good people to work for him, and his ability to spot talent was especially noteworthy here. Eugène Deschamps would play a primary role in creating the Paris of the Second Empire. And it was his map, not the emperor’s map, that would dominate Haussmann’s thinking, as well as the confines of the prefect’s study, where Haussmann could pull it out at any moment, day or night, to consult it. In the seventeen years during which Georges Haussmann consulted this detailed map, as it changed and grew, there never occurred a single mistake.
When Haussmann came into office, preliminary sections of the emperor’s projects were already under way, including the beginning of the great north-south axis, christened the Boulevard de Strasbourg, which in 1853 was completed between the Gare de l’Est and the Grands Boulevards. The emperor’s longed-for redevelopment of the Latin Quarter around the Rue des Ecoles and the Sorbonne had also begun, as had the eastward push of the Rue de Rivoli.
What Haussmann now faced was the completion of these daunting projects, which revolved around the objective of a grand cross of thoroughfares in the heart of Paris (east-west and north-south, or “la Grande Croisée de Paris,” as he put it).10 These featured the extension of the Rue de Rivoli toward the Bastille; the parallel continuation of the Rue des Ecoles along the Left Bank; and the continuation of the north-south artery from the Boulevard de Strasbourg down to Châtelet and beyond, bisecting the Rue de Rivoli, the Ile de la Cité, and the Left Bank.
In addition, as if Haussmann didn’t have enough to do, the emperor had already launched two other major projects: construction of the huge central markets of Les Halles and the development of the Bois de Boulogne.
And, oh, yes—the emperor was deeply interested in throwing some lavish parties. Haussmann, of course, was expected to make these happen—and as grandly as possible.
Haussmann started out with his wrecking ball on the slum that had grown up, astonishingly, around the Place du Carrousel, between the Louvre and the emperor’s own Palais des Tuileries, and spread northward to the adjacent quarter that now encompasses Rue Saint-Honoré and the Place du Palais Royal. This dismal area consisted of a web of dark and fetid lanes lined with a crowd of ancient and crumbling abodes—“dangerous little streets,” as Félix Nadar later recalled, “suffocated, dark and humid.”11 According to the decree declaring this in the public interest, those slums along the northern side of the Louvre were to be replaced with arcaded houses—which indeed happened. The Rue de Rivoli that Haussmann created is one long extension of arcaded buildings, a straight line being, in the words of urban geographer and historian Michel Carmona, “part of France’s heritage in aesthetics and regulatory practices.”12
Paris, City of Dreams Page 8
