Introduction
Paris would not be the city of light without its sublime monuments, its colossal avenues, its magnificent buildings. Paris would not be the most visited city in the world without its unique urban fabric.
It’s hard to imagine that 170 years ago, this city of light looked like a real maze or cesspool. In the middle of the 19th century Paris was still a medieval city with narrow streets and dilapidated dwellings, a labyrinthine city both picturesque with mansions, but above all unhealthy and dangerous. Made of narrow streets overcrowded and where it is difficult to circulate. A capital that has not evolved much since the French revolution. And precarious conditions for an exploding population attracted by the economic activity of the capital. This was an ideal terrain for the spread of a deadly disease, as infectious diseases (Cholera, Plague, Tuberculosis) were taking their toll at the time. Tens of thousands of Parisians died. No one knew where cholera came from or how it was spread. The only certainty to cure Paris was to operate on its heart.
Baron Haussmann
It is Louis Napoleon Bonaparte who will be responsible for this enormous task. Napoleon III, who had lived in London, found that Paris had everything to envy its rival across the Channel, transformed by the industrial revolution with its wide avenues, its parks and its stations. He decided to modernize the French capital. His motto was that everything should flow, air, people, money. To satisfy his ambitions Napoleon had to find a man capable of carrying out large-scale works, Baron Haussmann was his man.
Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann came from a family of Cologne established for six generations in Alsace. He was prefect of the Seine, the former department of Paris, from 1853. His motto was hygiene and authority. His mission was to unify and beautify the city.
Haussmann was to rely on the plan of the Simeon commission created by Napoleon III. The network of arteries that it proposes aims to connect the stations between them, Paris counts then 6 which have just been built like the station of the east inaugurated in 1849, all these guys are heads of line of the big lines. Once the big crossroads of Paris was built, secondary tracks came in order to disengage very populated districts or to connect new districts to the city center.
The construction site
Haussmann will start with a large crossroads that goes from north to south (boulevard de Sébastopol and Saint-Michel) and from east to west (rue de Rivoli)
Haussmann wanted to replace the houses of the old Paris by buildings of a very particular style: first of all it is a building made of cut stone, its facade is often richly decorated with mythological statues, fantasy bestiaries or exotic fauna and flora. It has six floors. The first floor is normally used for stores, the second floor or rather between floors, the next floor called the noble floor with a balcony reserved for the richest households. The intermediate floors 4rd and 5th without balcony, the 6th floor also flanked by a balcony, and the sixth floor under the attic formerly inhabited by the servants with its maids’ rooms which offer a beautiful view and where one suffocates in summer, this floor must be set back from the facade, to create an oblique which will allow the sun to penetrate as deeply as possible. Haussmann did not invent this style, but he generalized it: the landscape of the modern city must be homogeneous. And for the first time, for his works Haussmann will realize the plan of Paris in three dimensions.
In less than twenty years, 70 new roads are pierced, 9 bridges are created or widened, 40,000 buildings are built, 585 km of sewers are dug, and two large parks are planted: Les Buttes-Chaumont and Parc Montsouris. The 80,000 street trees. without forgetting the Bois de Vincennes and the Bois de Boulogne. As far as embellishment is concerned, everything has to be aligned: the cornices of the balconies and the facades.
Urban furniture was unified: kiosks, the famous Morris columns, street lamps, benches and even the grills that protected the base of the trees.
To allow for better traffic flow, Haussmann created new roads: the Champs-Elysées, the boulevards Saint-Germain, Saint-Michel, Magenta and the Avenue Foch, as well as the Rue de Rivoli, along which he had water pipes and a sewer system built. Each breakthrough opened onto a monument, and during the inaugurations the perspectives were hidden behind large canvases that were lifted up, the view opened onto a church, an opera house, an equestrian statue or even a newly created railroad station, an emblem of industrial modernity. Haussmann also thought about the circulation of capital and the stations served as a gateway for the goods that would come to supply the new department stores of Le Bon Marché and Printemps, the true commercial windows of Paris.
The urban planner’s project was driven by a great modernist and hygienist impulse, but some people denounce less avowed security objectives. Indeed, after the uprisings of 1830 and 1848, Haussmann had to protect himself against the possibility of a new civil war and make it impossible to build barricades in the streets of Paris. To do so, he widened the streets and drew straight lines between the working-class neighborhoods and the fire stations. To achieve these major works Haussmann destroyed and not only a little the Paris of the 16th and 17th century Paris is almost wiped off the map to the great displeasure of the defenders of heritage even the birthplace of the baron disappears, it remains today very little of this Paris of before in the image of the Marais or the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Haussmann ensured the supply of drinking water to Parisians.
The price of the new Paris
On December 2, 1851, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte seized full powers by force. A few months later, in March 1852, he passed an authoritarian law that allowed for expropriation for public utility and hygiene. Forcing part of the working class to leave the city center, which had become too expensive, to move to the outskirts.
All this of course at an exorbitant cost Haussmann did not hesitate to put the city heavily in debt at the cost of loans and dubious real estate operations, which led to his disgrace in 1870 just before the fall of the Second Empire. Nowadays, all his problematic aspects have been forgotten. Haussmann’s works are mostly admired and attract tourists from all over the world. Haussmann had emulators in Europe, notably James Hobrecht, the Prussian urban planner, who developed Berlin and launched sewerage works at the end of the 19th century, but unlike Paris, not much remains of these works in the German capital, which was destroyed and rebuilt continuously over the last century.
In 1868 the great writer Emile Zola wrote that “Each new boulevard that is pierced rejects the poor class in greater numbers to the suburbs and brings in the bourgeoisie”.
Haussmann and Napoleon wanted to create a new modern city adapted to commercial evolutions. The Haussmannian buildings are imposed everywhere in the capital, especially in the beautiful districts of the west. But not all its inhabitants were housed in the same way. The bourgeois occupied the main floors, while the servants crammed into the attic in the servants’ rooms. The symbol of this concentration of inequalities are the two staircases, the main one reserved for the bourgeois, and the service staircase used by the servants, the domesticity disappears from view. And this is the paradox of the 19th century, it is an era that is entirely dedicated to progress but not for all, and this was the price to pay to make the new Paris one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
