Michael Adcock, Who Teaches French History at the Department of History, the University of Melbourne

Remaking Urban Space Baron Haussmann and the Rebuilding of Paris, 1851-1870 by Michael Adcock, who teaches French history at the Department of History, the University of Melbourne he Paris that the modern vis- of his personal study in the Tuileries itor enjoys today - the Paris Palace show that it was dominated by a Tof broad boulevards and large master plan of Paris, across which monumental vistas - is essentially the he had drawn the broad outlines of his city that was transformed in one intense, proposed rebuilding, emphasising new centrally-planned campaign of rebuild- roads and boulevards. It may seem sur- ing during the Second Empire (1852- prising that a man who had spent most 1871), with some projects being com- of his life in exile, and who consequent- pleted in the early years of the Third ly did not know Paris very well - he had Republic (1871-1940). to ask his way to the Place des Vosges when he first returned ]. - should con- There is a vision of Paris that domi- ceive such a bold plan to remodel the nates our perception of the capital today, city; paradoxically, this is probably why and that is the alluring image of the he could do so, because anybody more refurbished city as it appeared in the last George Haussmann, familiar with the city would have been decades of the 19th century, recorded by the engineer from the provinces daunted by the dense accretion of some a generation of painters who became Impressionists, and who recorded differ- 2,000 years of urban history. enamoured of the new perspectives of ent aspects of the city: Jean Beraud, for urban space. We have inherited literally example, was a sophisticated, rather Napoleon III's grand vision required hundreds of images which convey their slick, chronicler of fashionable society, the services of a capable engineer who sense of excitement, of a new ease and and used a highly polished style to had the boldness and the flair to trans- sophistication, generated by the new record his interest in the new social pos- late the plan into reality. The existing urban spaces. Camille Pissarro's Le sibilities of public space. Prefect of Paris, Berger, proved to be Boulevard Montmartre (1897, National too cautious, and too half-hearted, and Gallery of Victoria), for example, seeks These charming images show us, was dismissed in 1853. The emperor to express the dynamic, varied, fast- then, the Paris that was created by the then made a choice that would prove to moving quality of modern life by means Second Empire, but they do not show us be inspired: he chose a young, but not of the reduction of solid forms into the the Paris of the Second Empire. The completely unknown, engineer from the briefest notation in dabs of paint. Paris of Napoleon III, the modern provinces, George Haussmann, and ele- Gustave Caillebotte's Rainy Day in metropolis celebrated by Charles vated him to the powerful position of Paris (1877, Art Institute of Chicago) Baudelaire and by Edouard Manet, was Prefect of the Seine District. There was uses a smooth, compact paint surface to a quite different city, an urban space an element of political reward here: evoke the sheeny appearance of the new convulsed by the most elemental trans- Haussmann had been an early supporter streets on a rainy day. The artist depicts formation. For most of the Second of Louis-Napoleon prior to and during bourgeois strollers who no longer share Empire, the city resembled a vast con- his coup d'etat (2nd December 1851), this suburb with all ranks of society: the struction site, wherein whole suburbs and had already been promoted to new apartment buildings behind them were demolished, new horizons were Prefect, or imperial administrator, in the are expensive, and the working people opened up, and new types of urban department of the Gironde; he was also of Paris could no longer afford to live dwellings were erected. entrusted with the role of "Special here. Commissioner to the Government", with The impulse to remake Paris on this the delicate mission of winning over the The new Paris also attracted the vast scale came from the emperor, royalist city of Bordeaux to the new attention of many artists who were not Napoleon III, himself. Surviving images regime.2 ■ The Monumental Plan The task that Napoleon III and Haussmann took on was, quite literally, gargantuan in scale. Both were, of course, familiar with monumental planning: Napoleon III had studied prece- dents such as the Campidoglio in late Renaissance Rome, and had seen urban developments such as the Place des Vosges in Paris, constructed during the 17th century by King Henri IV. He had also been intrigued by the distinctive French tradition of "utopian" urban planning, in which architects such as Ledoux and Boulle created ideal cities on paper. 3 A great deal of actual urban renovation proved, however, to be uni- tary: it involved single monuments or monumental ensembles. It was one thing to clear a space in the fabric of a con- gested city and to erect a single splendid monument, but it was another to re- order the fabric of the whole city, so that single monuments could be placed in relation to each other along lines of communication and of visual access. Planning a city retrospectively, after it has developed, is a bold undertaking. A city such as Paris presented particular problems: it was not only a large city, with three times the population density of London, but was also a very compact city, because the basic unit of settlement was the apartment building. 4 Even rela- tively modest clearances of land would involve the displacement of large num- bers of people. Two of the earliest cut- tings, the Boulevard Sebastopol and the extension of the Rue de Rivoli, for example, involved the loss of some 40 streets, the demolition of 2,000 Demolition for the Avenue de l'Opera, by Ferat dwellings, and the displacement of 25,000 people. 5 enormous. Graphic artists recorded their neers used a new technology, electric It is the work of the graphic artists sense of awe at the scale of the earth lighting, to floodlight whole sites so that of the period that best captures the moving projects: Ferat's Demolition for the project could continue. The cutting extent of the alteration to the urban fab- the Avenue de l'Opera gives us some of some boulevards required the ric. Maxime Lalanne's Demolition for idea of the size of the earth-moving removal not only of the suburb that lay the Rue des Ecoles (1865, Museum of equipment, and of the tons of debris and in their path, but occasionally of land- Fine Arts, Boston), for example, depicts soil being carted away. It also reminds forms: the Boulevard de l'Opera, for the dense, compact mass of apartment us of one of the most persistent memo- example, necessitated the lowering of buildings, virtual warrens of hundreds of ries of the Parisians who lived through the terrain by several metres, in order to small dwellings, and the extent of the the upheaval: they recalled that they create the desired vista up to the Opera swathe being cut through them. seemed to be living with the smell of building at the end. In simple terms of the physical mass dust permanently in their nostrils. The This then was the fundamental of material to be moved, the project was work continued day and night: the engi- transformation of the fabric of the city, ■ and hence of the fabric of people's embodiment of the city of Paris as a to all that. The new apartments were everyday lives. It must have done con- person suffering unprecedented violence more expensive overall, and their floor siderable violence to their posed percep- and invasion. One anonymous image plans were usually identical from the tions of urban space. How did they represented Paris as Madam Lutetia ground floor to the fifth, so that there respond to the disruption? What trace Shunning the Advances of Baron was little possibility for differentiation has been left of their response to this Haussmann, the point being that the city of prices and the setting aside of cheap elemental change? is both historicised, by reference to its rooms. There were still garret rooms, classical past as Roman Lutetia, and but even these were of a higher quality feminised, by personification as an ele- than their predecessors, and they were Dealing with the gant young woman confronted with a now reserved for the domestic servants Demolition brutal suitor. A second image by Morin, of the rich bourgeois families. Was there It was left to chroniclers and artists The City of Paris Invaded by Workers, is a coherent plan to force the workers out to record some of the sense of shock even more revealing: it depicts the city of Paris? Historians seem to recoil from and disorientation. Honore Daumier, for as a woman weighed down to the such a precise accusation. There can, example, recorded the responses of ground by the weight of works being however, be little doubt that when the Parisians with real compassion: he tem- operated upon her. A female Gulliver, logic of real estate values virtually made porarily suspended his acerbic satire of she is over-run by the swarm of workers this process inevitable and ineluctable, the bourgeoisie and noted their gentle streaming in from the countryside to the propertied classes were well pleased bewilderment at the sight of a familiar take advantage of the work available on with the result.

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