Seven Ages of Paris (42 page)

The national railway network increased from nothing in 1840 to 18,000 kilometres by 1870, so that all of a sudden the Riviera—formerly the haunt of only a few eccentric English at Cannes—became a Parisian resort. Paris was also now the country’s largest inland port. Telegraph lines radiated out all over the country, and shipbuilding expanded as never before. The enrichissez-vous exhortation applied with even more force to the Second Empire. Men like M. Potin the grocer became millionaires overnight; and, as Alphonse Daudet’s unhappy Nabab discovered, scandals and vicious intrigues could reduce them to nothing again just as quickly. Speculation raged, the contagion spreading to the summit of the establishment, with even the Emperor’s most esteemed adviser, the Duc de Morny, heavily tainted.

Yet out of this frenzy a wealthy new bourgeoisie had arisen, installing itself solidly and comfortably in the châteaux from which its forebears had driven the aristocrats. As ostentatious as any European aristocracy and determined not to be driven out in its turn, the bourgeoisie was the chief political mainstay of the regime that was responsible for its good fortune—though it had little favourable to say of its benefactor. Never before had France as a whole been more prosperous, and in a very short time she had established herself as one of the world’s leading industrial powers. Her population at the census of 1866 had grown to 37.5 million, but the most remarkable feature was the immense growth of the big cities, especially Paris, as a result of this industrialization. In the twenty years between 1831 and 1851 Paris alone grew in population from 786,000 to 1,053,000.

* Napoleon II, the tragic son of Bonaparte and Marie Louise, died of tuberculosis, aged only twenty-two, in Vienna, a virtual prisoner of his Austrian grandfather.

HAUSSMANN

“I want to be a second Augustus,” declared Louis Napoleon even before coming to power, “because Augustus made Rome a city of marble.” One of the first steps he took after the coup of 1851 was to issue orders that all future work connected with the transformation of Paris would be sanctioned by simple decree. From then on he pursued the city’s reconstruction with almost maniacal fervour. This was certainly the Second Empire’s greatest surface achievement (in fact its one truly ineffaceable landmark). As an urban developer Louis Napoleon, for better or worse, ranks in Parisian history with Henri IV. In terms of scale alone he in his two decades of rule left far more of permanence behind him than his uncle, despite the immense powers wielded by Napoleon I. To a large extent it was Napoleon III who completed the unfinished grandiose designs of his uncle.

Between Emperor and master architect, there was an instant and almost total accord and identity of purpose. Georges-Eugène (later Baron) Haussmann had no training in architecture, but—a Protestant Alsatian with more than a streak of the German in his genes—he was really a highly efficient, ruthless and somewhat arrogant administrator, with a touch of financial wizardry. He was to describe himself, with painful accuracy, as having been chosen first and foremost “as a demolition artist.” Aged forty when Louis Napoleon discovered him (he was then Prefect of the Var in the sleepy south), Haussmann was brought to Paris and installed as prefect of the Seine. As such he found himself in a position of almost limitless power. With no mayor, as of yore the city Council was appointed by the Prefect and its authority reduced to that of a municipal commission; while, as senior executive of the central government, the Prefect ruled over not only Paris but also all of her surrounding suburbs. In this role Haussmann was reinforced by Louis Napoleon’s dictatorial decrees, which enabled him to expropriate at will properties and whole streets that were intended for development. Financing, on a massive scale, was effected by a mix of private investment and huge public loans yielding at least 5 per cent. With both the Bourse and industry supporting Louis Napoleon’s coup, there was little difficulty here.

During the first stage of the programme—the extension of Napoleon I’s Rue de Rivoli—expropriation so pushed up the value of property bordering the development that Paris was able to finance part of her costs virtually for nothing. Within two weeks of the December 1851 coup, the city received a credit of over two million francs to clear, finally, the slums between the Louvre and the Tuileries—one of the many undertakings which Napoleon I had failed to complete. Two days later a further decree earmarked twenty-six million francs for the completion, and extension, of the Louvre; in March 1852, a decree ordered the construction of the Palais de l’Industrie on an empty space between the Champs-Elysées and Marie de Médicis’s Cours de la Reine. In July, the state conveyed to Paris what is now the Bois de Boulogne, lying well outside the city limits—with the condition that she spend two million francs developing it as a park, this being one of Louis Napoleon’s hobby-horses. Two weeks later came another decree laying down the Rue de Rennes on the Left Bank.

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 recreating 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 demolishing 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.