Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  Such was the breakneck speed of Louis Napoleon’s and Haussmann’s programme. Once again Paris became one immense building site, of mud, dust and rubble. The Hôtel de Ville was besieged—not by insurgents this time, but by battalion-sized teams of masons and carpenters. The question remains, still hotly debated: was “Haussmannization” a net benefit for Paris, or the reverse? The financial cost was astronomical. There were several priorities: functional—to clear the congestion of old Paris; economic—to relieve the heavy pressure of rents; aesthetic—to create a city beautiful in her grandeur and architectural unity; and strategic—to lance the festering abscesses of the old city that had been, from time immemorial, the lairs of assassins and rogues, such as the Buttes-Chaumont, and of riot and revolution in the east of Paris. Largely secondary were hygiene and social welfare—the amelioration of life for the poor.

  Like his illustrious and insatiably restless uncle, Louis Napoleon was an unswervingly hands-on despot. And his technical know-how was often superior. He was passionate, and knowledgeable, about the use of industrial-age wrought iron and glass. “I just want huge umbrellas, nothing more!” he demanded of Victor Baltard when it came to reconstructing Les Halles. The result was seen not only in the new food market, until its removal out to Rungis a century later, but also in Henri Labrouste’s wondrously light and airy reading room in the (old) Bibliothèque Nationale with its delicate iron pillars, in the Rhinelander Jacques Hittorf’s cathedral-like Gare du Nord and in the handsome remnants of Louis Napoleon’s Marché du Temple. In marked contrast to Prince Albert in London, who so favoured the neo-gothic, Louis Napoleon disliked the gothic style; consequently it was little used in public buildings of the period. Windows in the new Hôtel Dieu would be pastiches of Henri IV rather than Abbé Suger. Perhaps fortunately for Paris—given the horrors, such as the Centre Pompidou, perpetrated on it by modern architects in the latter part of the twentieth century—both he and Haussmann believed in classical, traditional forms, restrainedly adapted to the new era.

  Pressure to do something about the congestion of the streets of central Paris, already becoming an impossible problem back in the days of Philippe Auguste, had become as intense as it is in any modern city. In 1850, the Boulevard des Capucines carried 9,000 horses daily; by 1868, the figure had risen to 23,000. So, in the uncompromising language of Haussmann himself:

  We ripped open the belly of old Paris, the neighbourhood of revolt and barricades, and cut a large opening through the almost impenetrable maze of alleys, piece by piece, and put in cross-streets whose continuations terminated the work. Completion of the Rue de Turbigo finally helped eliminate the Rue Transnonain [scene of the unforgotten massacre of 1832] from the map of Paris.

  In the centre of the city 20,000 houses were demolished and 40,000 new ones were built at an enormous cost (inflated by the arts of profiteers). At a stroke of the Baron’s pen whole medieval quartiers that had resisted Henri IV, Louis XIV and XV, the Revolution and even Napoleon I were now destroyed. Great boulevards cut through the evil-smelling, chaotic alleys of old Paris, long and wide and straight as a die. The longest, Rue La Fayette, ran from the Chaussée d’Antin to La Villette for five kilometres without a single kink, and remains one of the city’s main arteries, unaltered (except for being sens unique) today. Other new creations, like the Boulevard de Sébastopol, the Avenue de Malakoff and the Pont de l’Alma (with its Herculean stone zouaves that henceforth were to measure the level of the Seine in flood), drew their names from the Second Empire’s (spurious) victories in the Crimea. With a minimum carriageway of twenty metres, the new streets were also substantially wider, while average building heights were also raised one storey.

  The most radical impact of Haussmann was felt in the ancient, medieval heart of Paris, in the Ile de la Cité. Here between 1841 and 1864 Eugène Viollet-le-Duc had been at work restoring and re-creating with considerable licence Notre-Dame, so ravaged by the Revolution—sometimes to good effect, sometimes not. Viollet-le-Duc capped his contribution to the great cathedral with a statue of himself up among the angels lining the roof, the only one with its eyes directed to heaven. Around Notre-Dame Haussmann now conducted a massacre as if an atomic bomb had exploded. Before him there had been clusters of “mud-coloured houses, broken by a few worm-eaten window frames, which almost touched at the eaves, so narrow were the streets,” wrote Eugène Sue in his Mystères de Paris. “Black, filthy alleys led to steps even blacker and more filthy and so steep that one could climb them only with the help of a rope attached to the damp wall by iron brackets.”

  It was all “fearfully inconvenient and squalid”—and dangerous as well. In this area there lived, as late as 1856, some 14,000 people—many of them, according to Sue, “released convicts, thieves, murderers.” As a young student Haussmann had frequently walked through these squalid streets, and knew them and their even more squalid denizens well. But there must also have been some medieval gems among the houses. All were now swept away. Instead, the Cité became a huge administrative centre, inhabited by law courts, lawyers and police. Few private houses survived there. Three major roads now traversed it, linked directly to the bridges. In front of Notre-Dame Haussmann created a vast open parvis, which opened up the prospect of the cathedral’s magnificent façade and portico, but was open to fierce criticism on account of its excessive scale, and because it largely fulfilled the function of a police parade ground. Meanwhile, at the other end of the island, part of Henri IV’s beautiful Place Dauphine was removed to be replaced with a pointlessly monumental staircase to the western aspect of the Palais de Justice.

  On the Left Bank, in driving through the new Boulevard Saint-Germain Haussmann destroyed some of the magnificent hôtels that stood in his way—notably the birthplace (where number 188 Boulevard Saint-Germain now stands) of Louis XIV’s Duc de Saint-Simon, whose family were among the earliest settlers in the faubourg. Further east, Haussmann’s new road network encircled and sealed off the unhealthy and lawless slum that had grown up around the Mont Sainte-Geneviève.

  Across the river, similarly ruthless treatment—but perhaps to better historic effect—was meted out to the clutter of houses between the Louvre and Tuileries, an area vividly described by Balzac, as of 1838, in La Cousine Bette as being:

  wrapped in the eternal shadow projected by the high galleries of the Louvre, blackened on this side by the northern wind … One wonders who can live here, what must happen at night, when this alley turns into a haven for cutthroats, and when the vices of Paris, wrapped in the mantle of night, are given free rein.

  At a cost of two million francs Louis Napoleon now managed to achieve that which not only his illustrious uncle, but also the long line of rulers from Philippe Auguste onwards had failed to do: complete the Louvre. Continuing strictly in the style of his predecessor, he added the long galleries down the Rue de Rivoli and finished those Louis XIV had initiated along the Seine. The Louvre now became a masive entity, its outstretched arms linked at the western end by the Tuileries Palace, to create the greatest palace in the world, larger even than Philip II’s sombre pile of the Escorial. Unforeseen by Louis Napoleon, it was also to be the apogee of the Louvre, given that a year after his fall the Tuileries Palace would be eradicated by Communard incendiaries.

  Westwards from the Louvre, Paris with unprecedented speed began to reach out far beyond the Champs-Elysées. Likened by Flaubert to “a river carrying on its current the bobbing manes of horses and the clothes and heads of men and women,” the great avenue, lit by gas, for the first time became a respectable place in the hours of darkness. In Paris as a whole 32,000 gas lamps had replaced 15,000 oil lanterns by the time Haussmann departed. Whereas at the coming of the Second Empire, the Place de la Concorde was still the boundary of urban Paris, beyond it the voracious metropolis extended to embrace within it country villages like Chaillot and Auteuil (still regarded as “just about the end of the world”) in the south and the Place de Wagram in the north. In January 1860 the work began on dem
olishing the old Farmers-General wall that encircled the city, and seven new arrondissements in and beyond the faubourgs were incorporated. In the half-century between 1806 and 1856, the population of the suburbs increased from 13,000 to 351,000 so that with one leap metropolitan Paris, now with a population approaching two million, spread out as far as the circle of protective forts that had been constructed by Thiers under Louis-Philippe.

  Away from the centre, however, beyond the Arc de Triomphe, there still existed rural scenes; there were fields where the Trocadéro now stands, and windmills at Montmartre, while Passy had the air of an isolated village. The newly acquired space also allowed Louis Napoleon to indulge in the construction of parks for the people. If this was a ramification of “bread and circuses,” it was a totally beneficial one. In his beloved Bois de Boulogne, greatly influenced by his knowledge of Hyde Park, the Emperor himself did much of the landscaping, cutting new drives and creating artificial cascades. Leading to it was the most resplendent and most expensive of all the new thoroughfares, the Avenue de l’Impératrice, named after his Eugénie, not Josephine (it is now the Avenue Foch). At the other end of Paris, in the Buttes-Chaumont, another superb example of artistic landscape gardening was achieved. Still further out, the Bois de Vincennes—originally enclosed in 1183 by Philippe Auguste to house the animals presented to him by a conciliatory King of England—was also now laid out by Louis Napoleon as a spacious pleasure park. In 1848 Paris had only 19 hectares of parks; by 1870 the total was 1,800.

  STYLE AND STRATEGY

  For all Haussmann’s massive public works, the salient feature of his new Paris was the apartment building. His standardized block, running for hundreds of unbroken metres down the new boulevards, was both an extrapolation of Napoleon I’s Rue de Rivoli and a product of the new industrial age. An extraordinary degree of architectural unity was achieved by the continuous run of symmetrical wrought-iron balconies on the piano nobile, linking one building to another, as did a common cornice line which was there to reinforce the horizontal effect of a street’s perspective. Pilasters linked the piano nobile with the floors above, while carved decoration of the external white limestone was otherwise minimal. The overall intent was that the visual impact should be that of the street rather than of the individual building. The austere appearance of the façade was softened by the trees lining the new, wider streets. Interior decor, however, would often be much more ornate. At street level, there would be a grand porte-cochère entrance through which carriages seldom passed.

  In terms of planning regulations, little had been changed since those of 1783–4, and Haussmann annulled them with decrees of 1852 and 1859. By these, with health as well as aesthetic standards in mind, a lighting-angle formula of 45 degrees was established, so that on the new twenty-metre-wide streets a maximum height of twenty metres was now permitted, allowing insertion of another storey to provide six or seven floors. At the same time, because of rocketing ground values, deep sites were avoided—which meant that, unlike in Victorian London, Haussmann’s apartments had few gardens, the streets few leafy squares.

  The whole emphasis of a street of Haussmann apartment blocks, which remains the basic image still of Paris today, was one of bourgeois comfort. In his writings Proust describes what it was like to grow up as a child in 9 Boulevard Malesherbes, where the family of his successful doctor father enjoyed the luxuries of gas lighting, central heating from a coal furnace, running water, lavatories and a large bathroom, and a marble staircase with wrought-iron bannisters. There were seven rooms (including Dr. Proust’s consulting rooms); and a fifteen-metre-long corridor separated the parents from the children’s quarters, reeking of the eucalyptus fumigations for poor Marcel’s asthma. On a middle-class physician’s salary, the Prousts employed a live-in butler, chambermaid and cook. But Marcel deemed the family salon to be of “an ugliness completely medical.”

  With so much borrowed from the past, was there (leaving aside the new apartment blocks) any such thing as a Second Empire style? In church architecture, certainly, there was little to boast about: the Trinité was built in pseudo-Renaissance style; Saint-Augustine, crammed ingeniously into a narrow triangular space, was a Romano-Byzantine pastiche constructed around one of Baltard’s iron frameworks. Perhaps the age is best epitomized by Charles Garnier’s new Opéra, which in its florid magnificence symbolized the wealth of the day, its affection for the new rococo, with just a touch of vulgarity. However, because of its elaborateness, the most exotic decoration ever seen in Paris, it was not on stream for the Great Exposition of 1867, and in fact would be opened only eight years later, after the Empire had already fallen (when Garnier himself would even be made to pay for his seat).

  For Haussmann aesthetics had been only one of several considerations. There was one further aim all-important to the precariously installed Emperor. In 1855 Queen Victoria came to Paris on an official visit, the first by an English monarch since Henry VI had been crowned at Notre-Dame in 1422. Cementing a brief period of entente cordiale that followed the joint Anglo-French effort in the Crimean War, Louis Napoleon had pushed the boat out and had laid down a special branch railway between the Gares du Nord and de l’Est, so as to make a better impression of the entry into Paris; he had flirted agreeably with the Widow of Windsor and had made her, she recorded, “feel safe with him.” Exactly forty years after Waterloo, diplomacy persuaded her to genuflect over Napoleon’s tomb, while the organ of the Invalides played “God Save the Queen.”

  The Queen’s sharp eye, however, had quickly noticed that her host had had the streets of Paris covered with macadam, “to prevent the people from taking up the pavement as hitherto.” Later on, it would have been evident to any competent military observer what useful fields of fire Haussmann’s long, straight streets provided, what opportunities to turn the flank of a barricade there were for troops debouching from their oblique intersections, and how easy the wide boulevards made it to convey riot-breaking squads from one end of Paris to another. In particular, evoking a century of Parisian insurrections, in the troublesome east end there was now the broad and straight Boulevard Voltaire to allow for speedy passage of troops between what is now the Place de la République and the Place de la Nation. At last, Haussmann felt assured, they had succeeded “in cutting through the habitual storm-centres.” In the words of one French historian, Paris now was “as strategically ordered as any battlefield.” In fact, however—and with what force will be seen later in the hideously destructive Communard revolution of 1871—he had to a large extent achieved the defeat of his own purpose.

  Henri de Rochefort, aristocrat turned revolutionary and most bitter opponent of Louis Napoleon’s Second Empire, growled, “Paris has been called France’s head, but is now nothing but its legs.” By this he meant the legs of the under-privileged classes laborieuses. One of the major tragedies of Louis Napoleon’s reign was that, however genuine he was in his desire to do something for the poor of Paris, the works of Haussmann were to have quite the opposite effect. Because of the escalation of rents in the newly developed quartiers—or because affordable accommodation had simply disappeared, as in the old Cité—the classes laborieuses were driven, eastwards and outwards, from the charmed city of the boulevards to crowded ghettos that were every bit as evil as those demolished in the centre. In a deeply suffering population, one inhabitant in every sixteen was living off public charity. One of these new slum shanty-towns would ironically become known as the “Cité Dorée.” Meanwhile the bourgeoisie now represented a greater percentage of the inner-city population than ever before.

  Thus Haussmannization had led to a kind of apartheid provoking sullen resentment. Far from piercing the traditional trouble-centres of Paris, Haussmann had just created new and much more threatening ones, in solidly proletarian and Red arrondissements such as Belleville and Ménilmontant, where in the latter days of the Empire no policeman would dare appear alone and where—as the Commune was to show—concentration of manpower had made the work of organiz
ing a revolt easier than it had ever been. The consequences for Paris would be terrible, insofar as the bulk of the Communards who, in 1871, would destroy much of what the Prefect had not swept away in the city centre came from this expelled proletariat. Still, as in bygone ages, the areas which they now inhabited lacked proper sewerage, and the terrible stench of deprivation remained—as did the almost endemic diseases of typhoid (which, in 1865, accounted for 1,161 deaths) and tuberculosis, infant mortality and the curse of alcoholism. L’eau à l’étage was a luxury that only the affluent like the famille Proust could afford.

  Controversy continues to surround the merits of Haussmann’s new Paris. At the time it had its vigorous critics. The conservative Goncourt brothers said it made them think of “some American Babylon of the future”; Gautier agreed, “This is Philadelphia; it is Paris no longer!” (though he had never seen Philadelphia). George Sand, however, construed it a blessing to be able to walk without “being forced every moment to consult the policeman on the street corner or the affable grocer.” Emile Zola, in his novel Une Page d’amour, tried hard to depict the great city as “an enormous storm-tossed ocean, or a distant and alien Babylon,” but in the end affection triumphed over distaste: “I love the horizons of this big city with all my heart … depending on whether a ray of sunshine brightens Paris, or a dull sky lets it dream, it resembles a joyful and melancholy poem. This is art, all around us. A living art, an art still unknown.”