Becoming the City of Light
The nineteenth-century rooms in the Musée Carnavalet bear testament to the climate of violence that reigned in Paris for decades after Louis XVI lost his head on the square named after him (now the place de la Concorde). Contrary to what the French like to believe, their Revolution wasn’t simply a bit of political debating, a few thuds of the guillotine and then liberté, égalité, fraternité for ever more. There were rebellions and/or coups d’état in 1799, 1815, 1830, 1848, 1851 and 1871, as well as various lesser outbreaks of violence that took their toll on the cityscape.
Whole walls at the Carnavalet feature nineteenth-century paintings of well-known buildings like the Louvre and the Hôtel de Ville being bombarded, almost always by Parisians, as well as more intimate scenes of martyrdom on the barricades—one victim of the 1848 uprising is writing a slogan on a half-demolished wall in his own blood.
However, the greatest destruction of the city wasn’t caused by political upheaval—ironically, the demolition of most of Paris’s medieval core was done in an attempt to save the city from itself.
It was in the mid-nineteenth century that Baron Haussmann, the man who gave his name to a boulevard and a whole style of Parisian achitecture, tore down so many medieval houses, churches and palaces that he gave Paris its nickname, the Ville Lumière or City of Light—there is a theory that the name is a reference, not to quaint streetlamps or philosophical enlightenment, as is often suggested, but to the sun shining through the gaps that Haussmann smashed in the ancient pattern of streets.
Georges Eugène, aka Baron Haussmann (in fact, he had no right to the title), was a native Parisian, the son of one of Napoleon Bonaparte’s military attachés. He was also, some would say, the city’s biggest vandal.
He was the Préfet de la Seine (Paris’s chief administrator) from 1853 to 1870, and the man entrusted with a mission to remodel the city along rationalist nineteenth-century lines.
In fairness, much of the destruction he unleashed was well meant. During Napoleon III’s enforced exile in England, the French Emperor fell in love with Victorian London.***** He saw a grandiose city that had been reconstructed and much expanded in the centuries after the Great Fire of 1666, and began to think that he could do the same thing to Paris, but without all the smoke. He therefore conceived a grand plan entitled Paris embellie, Paris agrandie, Paris assainie (Paris beautified, enlarged and cleaned up), making trebly sure that people knew which city he was talking about.
Napoleon III’s promise was to bring air, light and clean water to the Parisians. He also had a secret ambition, which was to make it more difficult for the city’s rebellious populace to barricade the streets, as they had done in 1830 (when King Charles X was booted out) and 1848 (when King Louis-Philippe was forced to flee). Napoleon III also thought it would be useful to have wide roads linking the city’s various army barracks, so that troops could move about freely to crush uprisings.
Haussmann, a politician and friend of the Emperor’s Minister of the Interior, was chosen for the job, apparently because of his total lack of nostalgia. He was a great lover of straight lines, and quickly set about smashing them through the old city with no regard for the treasures that got in his way. He destroyed about half the buildings on the Île de la Cité (it was almost literally a stroke of luck that Notre-Dame was not in the way of the three new streets he drew across the map of the island), and even knocked down his own birthplace in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré.
To his credit, before launching his campaign of destruction, Haussmann had the old city preserved for posterity by a photographer. Le Baron commissioned one of the first exponents of the new art form, a Parisian painter called Charles Marville, to take hundreds of pictures of the neighbourhoods that were about to be toppled or built over. Though Haussmann wasn’t just being a romantic—he also got Marville to photograph his work in progress, like the piles of bricks that were to become the avenue de l’Opéra, and the similar mounds of rubble that would be cleared away to create the place du Carrousel, the roundabout that now lies between the Louvre Pyramid and the Tuileries.******
The Musée Carnavalet’s collection of paintings records the trauma that the destruction caused. One picture shows a row of old buildings that look like bodies with their ribcages torn open, the victims of Haussmann’s charge through the Opéra district. A beautiful model of a gothic tower set into the fabric of an ordinary residential house is a poignant record of a corner of the place de l’Hôtel de Ville that was sacrificed so that the large square could be made squarer. Vast areas were redeveloped during this Haussmannian frenzy—it is estimated that about 20,000 buildings were destroyed, and around 40,000 built (many of those in the outlying areas annexed into Paris to increase the number of arrondissements from twelve to twenty).
Haussmann was interested in the details as well as the general destruction. He dictated strict rules about the style and height of the buildings that would line his new streets—they were to be 20 metres high, with the different storeys of adjoining buildings closely aligned, and their facades had to be similar in style, even if they were designed by different architects. All of which explains the uniformity of so many of Paris’s streets today.
The Haussmann era was also a turning point in the city’s social
