Works under this agreement, and the huge loan it required, were not actually begun until 1860, thanks to growing opposition to Haussmann and his ever-more-extensive plans. In the Council of State, this opposition took shape in a modification of the law on compulsory purchases, making it more favorable to landowners and less favorable to the city, which as a result would suffer a distinct fall in revenues. In the Legislature, opponents managed to remove several planned operations and lower the government’s share of the funding—thus raising the city’s estimated share to more than one hundred and thirty million francs (closer to four hundred million francs in the end, due to huge cost overruns).
This growing unhappiness with Haussmann surfaced during the debates. Despite the citywide approval for his initial projects, this second set had, as far as many were concerned, gotten out of hand. Those who were uneasy about the Second System increasingly viewed Haussmann, and the emperor as well, as virtual megalomaniacs, carried away with their own power and grandeur. There also was a growing suspicion that both gentlemen were happily colluding with the speculators then thriving in Paris. At this point, however, the opposition still did not dare oppose the prefect directly and took cover by questioning him on his morals. After all, the fellow had actually been seen rather too many times with a particular dancer from the Opéra ballet, as well as with another dancer from the Opéra Comique.
This led to ribald jests, which reached the ears of Octavie Haussmann, the baron’s long-suffering wife. Only the pleas of the equally long-suffering Empress Eugenie prevented Octavie from returning to Bordeaux for good.
Whereas the First System had dramatically cut into and reshaped the city’s heart, from the Place du Carrousel, Place Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, and the Louvre colonnade to the Hôtel de Ville and the Place du Châtelet, the so-called Second System, as Haussmann conceived it, would reach farther into Paris. Even the slicing of the Boulevard de Sébastopol and the Boulevard Saint-Germain through the urban fabric had been done without much difficulty (with the exception, of course, of the impact on those who were displaced).
But now, Haussmann’s Second System would dramatically transform whole neighborhoods throughout Paris. On the Right Bank, these transformations would extend from today’s Place de la République to the Place de l’Etoile and the plain of Monceau, with significant alterations as well to eastern Paris. On the Left Bank, Haussmann would drive through Mount Sainte-Geneviève and the quarters of Saint-Jacques and Saint-Marcel, while the Ile de la Cité would emerge with scarcely a trace of its former self.
Adding to the chaos created by the destruction of houses that went with roadbuilding would be the upheaval produced by an army of trench diggers engaged in installing water and gas pipes as well as drains and sewage lines. Haussmann had not overlooked anything in his far-reaching plans, and in 1858, in addition to his proposals for new roads, he presented the municipal council with the final results of Belgrand’s investigations into providing Paris with good-quality water. According to Belgrand, the best and most plentiful supply of water was the Somme-Soude, which would require the construction of a twenty-six-mile aqueduct as well as more than one hundred miles of water mains. Already the municipal council (anticipating the need) had authorized the construction of a reservoir in Passy to hold this water, once it reached Paris. Soon after Haussmann’s January 1858 report, the council (which was having a busy year) approved building another reservoir in northern Paris, at Buttes Chaumont, while yet a third was on the books for southern Paris, at Montsouris. Estimates for the total cost of these reservoirs alone came to twelve million francs.
And then there were all the pipes required to get the water to the people of Paris. Haussmann had at hand the results of one study, which provided for laying sixty-two miles of larger pipes and more than two hundred and fifty miles of smaller pipes, both for private consumption. He also called for forty-seven miles of larger pipes plus ninety-five miles of smaller pipes for street-cleaning, watering parks and gardens, and supplying fountains. All this, he estimated, would cost eight million francs.
This was not the end of it, for (based on English precedent) Haussmann now in addition proposed a sewer system to carry rain and wastewater from Paris to a point downstream on the Seine, as well as a system of sewers linked up with them. Already, Haussmann had doubled the city’s sewer system, and now, in 1858, he called for many more miles of sewers (at an estimated cost of fifty million francs).
The municipal council, perhaps overwhelmed by Haussmann’s research and proposals, took its time about replying and did not formally approve the diversion of water from the Somme-Soude until 1859. But at that time, it gave the prefect high marks for his work on water distribution and sewage in Paris.
The major projects that Haussmann proposed in 1858, and which would proceed throughout the 1860s, fell into several major categories. The first centered on what then was called the Place du Château-d’Eau and now is the Place de la République, which he envisioned as the base for redeveloping an entire poverty-stricken portion of Paris. This involved the creation of three major new thoroughfares radiating out from the newly important square: the Rue de Turbigo (heading southwest, through the volatile Arts et Métiers quarter and into the quarter adjoining Les Halles, site of the barricade memorialized in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables); the Boulevard de Magenta (taking a northwest course and linking the Place with both the Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est); and the Boulevard du Prince Eugène (today’s Boulevard Voltaire), which connected the Place du Trône—now the Place de la Nation—with today’s Place de la République. All of these roadways improved traffic flow, but they just as unquestionably served as unimpeded avenues on which troops could march into the roiling heart of anti-imperial Paris.
Through this poverty-stricken area flowed the Canal Saint-Martin, which for several decades had connected (just above the Bassin de la Villette) with two other canals, the Ourcq and the Saint-Denis, to create a waterway cutting across one of the Seine’s many wide-ranging loops and linking it to the river Ourcq. Although Napoleon Bonaparte had originally conceived of this canal network as a means of bringing the Ourcq’s waters to the fountains of Paris (fountains for supplying the public with drinking water), it remained pristine only briefly. Soon the Industrial Revolution flooded in, blighting everything it touched. Where there had once been grassy banks, there now rose warehouses and foundries. Abject poverty quickly followed, accompanied by radical politics and a readiness for mob uprisings.
Haussmann viewed the Canal Saint-Martin with a critical eye, for it presented a kind of defensive moat between the potentially insurgent inhabitants to the east and order-restoring government troops marching in from the west. But the Canal Saint-Martin presented difficult technical problems, not the least the fact that where today’s Boulevard Voltaire had to cross it, the canal stretched well above the road level. Eventually Haussmann and his engineering team decided against a bridge and instead chose to lower a large portion of the canal.
This not only eliminated three traffic-impeding locks, but it allowed Haussmann to cover over almost half the canal, from today’s Place de la République to the Place de la Bastille. Boats could still navigate the canal underground through a series of tunnels, while aboveground, Haussmann created a wide promenade along today’s Boulevards Jules-Ferry and Richard-Lenoir, with trees, gardens, and fountains. This of course was quite pleasant for those who could enjoy it (including, in time, George Simenon’s famed Inspector Maigret, who lived with his wife on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir). But for most, life remained as difficult as ever, with the major difference being that (much to Louis-Napoleon’s approval), an obstacle was now removed between the rabble-rousers of the eastern quarters and the soldiers he sent to subdue them.
In the process of all this improvement, the Place du Château-d’Eau, which began as a relatively small square with a large lion-bedecked fountain, was expanded into a major plaza that the Third Republic would rename the Place de la République—installing the
huge monument featuring Marianne, the personification of Republican France, in the fountain’s place.
Of course, Haussmann and the emperor were scarcely interested in promoting republicanism and had already taken care to erect a military barracks, named the Prince Eugène Barracks, in the Place du Château-d’Eau to assure proper military surveillance of this unruly area. These barracks (now quarters for the Republican Guard) were and remain huge, intended to accommodate more than three thousand men gathered from all over Paris. Their purpose was to respond rapidly to trouble in the flammable surrounding areas, especially the notorious Faubourg Saint-Antoine.
Another major new thoroughfare proposed for this eastern part of town was the wide and long Avenue Daumesnil. Leading from the Place de la Bastille to the Farmers-General wall and eventually to the Bois de Vincennes, Haussmann envisioned it as a kind of pendant to the Champs-Elysées, a poor-man’s access route to his own pleasure grounds. The Bois de Vincennes, on the eastern edge of Paris, was about to be transformed, on the emperor’s orders, into the workers’ equivalent of the upper-class Bois de Boulogne on Paris’s western side. After all, when the workers were behaving themselves, the emperor was inclined to be generous. As he put it, “The faubourg Saint-Antoine should also have its Hyde Park.”2
Meanwhile, Haussmann was planning to clear and develop the area around the Place de l’Europe and the Gare Saint-Lazare and also was opening two new streets, the Rue de Rouen (now Rue Auber) and Rue Halévy, that nicely connected the Gare Saint-Lazare with the area directly to the southeast that would star the future Opéra. Haussmann had by now decided to place the new Opéra in this location.3 But the whole project of the Opéra, especially its site, was still under wraps as far as Haussmann and Louis-Napoleon were concerned: after all, land prices could rise astronomically should word get out.
Continuing counterclockwise around the city to the west, Haussmann also had the plain of Monceau in his sights. This involved extending Boulevard Malesherbes in a northwest direction from the Church of the Madeleine all the way to the Monceau customs barrier in the Farmers-General wall, deviating slightly en route from the Haussmannian straight line to compensate for the necessary rise up to Monceau’s elevation. Where the boulevard took a bend, Haussmann had the new Church of Saint-Augustin erected to provide an impressive vista at what appeared to be the boulevard’s terminal point, as a pendant to La Madeleine. Haussmann’s insistence on order and symmetry had another consequence: Saint-Augustin’s outsized dome resulted from the prefect’s requirement that it be visible all the way from the Arc de Triomphe.
This was Haussmann’s part of town, where he was born—near the corner where Avenue de Friedland crosses the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.4 There, it becomes Boulevard Haussmann, named by the emperor in the prefect’s honor—one of the longest streets through what soon would become the elegant heart of Paris. Yet at the time that Haussmann was sending the Boulevard Malesherbes toward Monceau, he had to clean up a notorious quarter en route, a festering slum known as La Petite Pologne. Eugène Sue was well acquainted with the area and its terrors, which he depicted in his Mysteries of Paris. “There were no streets,” he wrote, “but narrow alleys, no houses but ruins, no pavement but a small carpet of mud and dungheaps.” From morning to night, one could hear the cries for help, which no one bothered to answer.5
In making way for progress, Haussmann would raze the entire quarter—which meant that a mass of lodgings would be destroyed. Although a large number would be constructed in their place, “there was a disconnect between the two programs, leading to a crisis in lodgings, which . . . favored speculation.”6 Speculation usually involved the Pereire brothers, and farther up the boulevard, toward Monceau, Haussmann would find the brothers’ help invaluable. But this was of little concern to the original inhabitants of this dismal slum, who all-too-frequently found that, in the wake of widespread demolition, they had nowhere to go.
Monceau itself had a long and involved history, dating from the middle ages and before. Eventually, the lands had come into the hands of the Orléans family, a collateral line of French royalty that, in 1830, provided France with King Louis-Philippe. It was Louis-Philippe’s father, Philippe, Duke of Orléans, who in the 1770s created a dreamy landscape garden on the site, complete with a colonnaded pool, winding paths, and numerous miniature temples and follies. The creation of the Farmers-General wall intruded along the garden’s northern edge, but its customs barrier was disguised as a circular rotunda in the form of a tiny classical temple, and Philippe claimed its upper story for his own use.
Philippe, who attempted to reinvent himself as a champion of the common man during the Revolution, renaming himself Philippe Egalité, had even cast his vote for his cousin Louis XVI’s execution. But he soon followed his king to the guillotine, losing his lands in the process. These were returned to his family after the Restoration of the monarchy, but Louis-Napoleon seized and nationalized them. Still, due to a plethora of complexities, by the time Haussmann cast his eye on the park, half of it still belonged to the Orléans family, while the other half belonged to the state. As a result, Haussmann now found that to continue Boulevard Malesherbes on its northwestern course, he would have to make a major purchase on behalf of the city.
It was now that Emile Pereire stepped in, to prevent Haussmann the embarrassment of having to deal with the ousted royal family. This led to an amicable agreement, and in gratitude, the city sold Pereire a large chunk of the land not needed either for the road or for what Haussmann already envisioned as a new (and smaller) public park. This, in turn, the Pereire brothers used to build the elegant residential blocks on the Monceau plain. One of these, the luxurious mansion of the Camondo banking family—Jewish bankers from Turkey who moved to Paris in the late 1860s—would serve as the model domicile for Zola’s blatantly nouveau speculator, Saccard, in La Curée.7
Farther around the city to the west, Haussmann had already taken major steps to establish the layout of the Place de l’Etoile,8 which would become possible after 1860, with the destruction of the Farmers-General wall.
He also planned two wide new boulevards for the nearby Chaillot and Trocadéro quarter. The one (now Avenue George V) would lead from the Pont de l’Alma toward the Champs-Elysées, while the other (now Avenue du Président Wilson) would take traffic from the bridge westward toward the Trocadéro and the Bois de Boulogne.
Haussmann’s Second System also envisioned a multitude of new roads on the Left Bank, starting at the Pont de l’Alma, where he envisioned two wide avenues forking outward (Avenues Rapp and Bosquet). Plans also were in the works to extend the Boulevard de la Tour-Maubourg to the Pont des Invalides, where it would match up with what now is Avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Farther to the east, in the Latin Quarter and territory to the southeast, Boulevard Saint-Marcel and Boulevard de Port-Royal would complete the line of inner boulevards on the Left Bank that Louis-Napoleon had featured on his original color-coded map. Where these two boulevards met, another boulevard, Arago, would lead from the Gobelins tapestry manufacturing quarters to the Barrière d’Enfer (now Place Denfert-Rochereau), opening up the barrière to the east. At the same time, Haussmann decided to continue today’s Boulevard Raspail up to Boulevard du Montparnasse, opening up Place Denfert-Rochereau to the north.
To encircle Mount Sainte-Geneviève (hardly as formidable a rise as the name would suggest), Haussmann planned a wider avenue (Avenue des Gobelins) between today’s Place d’Italie and the ancient Rue Mouffetard, which would link with a new road, Rue Monge, to the east, while other roads would join up with Boulevard Saint-Michel to the west. This, Haussmann thought with considerable pride, would open up the hitherto dense network of streets of the Latin Quarter (another area of troublesome opposition to imperial rule).
But it was on the Ile de la Cité that Haussmann’s Second System would have an especially outsized impact, as virtually half the island would succumb to the wrecking ball. Both the Pont Saint-Michel (arched, narrow,
and once lined with houses) and the equally narrow Pont au Change would be completely rebuilt. The old street that took traffic from the Pont au Change onto the island would be widened and become the Boulevard du Palais, while another new street, the Rue de Lutèce, would extend eastward from it, bordering a newly razed section that would become the police prefecture. Haussmann planned to carry on his demolition westward to the Pont Neuf, leveling Place Dauphine in the process, but he did not get that far.
Restoration continued on Sainte-Chapelle and Notre-Dame, and significant space would now be cleared around the cathedral, especially along its southern side, which at long last would be open to view, thanks to the demolition of the former archbishop’s palace that had existed for centuries between the cathedral and the small southern arm of the Seine. Soon admirers would also be able to gaze at a full front view of the cathedral, thanks to Haussmann’s insistence on demolishing whatever was necessary to expand the tiny parvis, or cathedral square, to its present size.
In addition to the former archbishop’s palace, the charity hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu, had been squashed for centuries between Notre-Dame and the southern arm of the Seine. By now an enormous structure that had spread to both sides of the river’s narrow arm, the Hôtel-Dieu was a dark and sinister edifice that crammed in some eight hundred patients, polluting the river with a deluge of hospital waste. Haussmann, who worried about hygiene, wanted to move it completely from the Ile de la Cité, which already was too crowded for his taste. But the emperor insisted on keeping a hospital in the city’s center, which meant that in the end, the Hôtel-Dieu moved to the other side of the island, where it now overlooks the northern (and wider) arm of the Seine. To make space for the hospital, more demolition was necessary.
Paris, City of Dreams Page 16
