After Haussmann, these distinctions disappeared. The new buildings were posher, with people of similar (mainly middle) class on every floor except the ground (still for shops and businesses) and the top, which was now reserved for the chambres de bonne or maids’ rooms. It was the beginning of the gentrification that has steadily evicted the poor from all but the far reaches of the city’s outer arrondissements.
Haussmann did some good works—he created large ‘English-style’ parks—Monceau, Montsouris, and the Buttes-Chaumont. He laid out the Champs-Élysées, and built the Gare de Lyon and Gare de l’Est. More importantly, he renewed the water-supply system and oversaw the construction of the sewers, replacing the centuries-old system of simply dumping everything in the fetid unpaved lane in front of medieval houses, or sluicing it off into the Seine, from where the drinking water came.
Predictably, such huge changes weren’t made without whiffs of financial wrong-doings, and the Prime Minister Jules Ferry was moved to publish a pamphlet called Les Comptes Fantastiques d’Haussmann—Haussmann’s Fantasy Accounts, a neat pun on Les Contes Fantastiques d’Hoffmann, Hoffmann’s Fairy Stories. And it was amid allegations of overspending and dubious dealings that the Baron lost his job in January 1870—just months before Napoleon III himself was deposed after an ill-advised Prussian war. All of which was followed in 1871 by yet another round of riots and barricades that even Haussmann’s boulevards couldn’t contain.
A Parisian nightmare
Fortunately, Haussmann’s destruction work inspired literary creativity—Émile Zola, that tireless transcriber of social changes, wrote a novel called La Curée (which could be translated as The Feeding Frenzy). It features a speculator who makes a killing out of Haussmannian insider trading, buying up land and buildings that he knows will be compulsorily purchased at a good price by the city.
But perhaps the most interesting book inspired by the great clean-up is an early example of sci-fi, a story called Paris Nouveau et Paris Futur by Victor Fournel, a writer and journalist who, like Zola, spent much of his time documenting life in his city. Fournel’s books include Les Rues du Vieux Paris, in which he describes not only the streets but the people who lived in them in the Middle Ages, and Les Cris de Paris, a record of the calls used by street peddlers and buskers.
Given his feel for history, it is not surprising that Fournel was horrified by Baron Haussmann’s plans to remodel Paris with the wrecking ball, and in 1865 he wrote Paris Nouveau et Paris Futur as a nightmare vision of how the city would look in a hundred years’ time. He foresaw Paris in 1965 stretching unbroken halfway to the sea. Fournel predicts ‘a century of hard work, a furious obsession for building and a delirium tremens of demolition’ that would produce ‘a typical capital of modern civilization … at its centre, a square one lieue [about 4 km] across, off which radiate 50 boulevards, each 50 metres wide, lined with buildings 50 metres high, a long series of gigantic cubes containing an equal number of equal-sized apartments’.
These boulevards, just like Haussmann’s, are tools of military oppression—in the centre of the main square, Fournel envisages an enormous army barracks topped with a lighthouse to shine along the boulevards, preventing disorder.
The city would be a giant wheel with spokes 15 kilometres long, Fournel says. It would be perfect for tourists, who ‘wouldn’t need a guide—they could just go out of their hotel, turn left or right, walk around the circle and, in the evening, arrive back at the hotel.’
Piling on the irony, he predicts that the city would at last get rid of ‘gothic monstrosities’ like Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois (the old church opposite the eastern façade of the Louvre). Meanwhile, Notre-Dame could be modernized so that it looks presentable, and other monuments like the Hôtel de Ville and Invalides would be displaced so that they stood in alignment with the new boulevards.
Fournel’s dream ends when he is shaken awake by his concierge and warned to leave the building, which is about to be demolished to make way for the boulevard Saint-Germain.
But, even if he meant to exaggerate, he did get a few things uncannily right. For a start, he gives a vivid description of armies of workers being transported into the centre of the city by train. Rush hours today at Saint-Lazare and the Gare du Nord are far worse than his nightmares. And even more accurately, Fournel’s Paris Futur seems to be an exact model for the post-war French new town, a concept so soulless that it has turned many of the city’s poorer suburbs into drug-dealing, rioting no-go areas. In a way, his nightmare vision of the future is actually more humane than these real banlieues because, being a typical Parisian, Fournel couldn’t resist imagining that his futuristic boulevards would at least have plenty of cafés.
Paris exposes itself
The 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle brought more light to the city. The exhibition was a hymn to modernism, with electrically illuminated fountains, floodlit galas and glowing glass pavilions. The Expo site was spread along the largely empty banks of the Seine to the southwest of the old city, and featured some spectacular architecture. In front of the École Militaire there was the enormous Galerie des Machines, the grandest of Paris’s Art Nouveau glass palaces, bigger and more striking than the Grand Palais. It was flattened in 1909 so that the army could reclaim its parade ground, the Champ-de-Mars. And the centrepiece was, of course, the Tour Eiffel, the world’s tallest tower until it was knocked off its pedestal by the Chrysler Building in 1930.
There are famous photos of the Tower at different stages in its construction, but the Musée Carnavalet has one
