The Man Who Created Paris
By Jonathan Glancey
26 January 2016
Paris remains one of the world’s most visited cities, and of those tens of millions drawn to its remarkably compact centre each year, the Marais district exerts a magnetic pull. Fashionable among aristocrats before Louis XIV – the “Sun King” – moved his court from Versailles, this pungent quarter of narrow streets and jumble of historic houses and courtyards sank into near-squalor in succeeding centuries before its renaissance in recent decades as a charming labyrinth of fashion boutiques, cafés, restaurants, museums and galleries.
Napoleon III and Haussmann had their sights on areas like the Marais, a jumble of streets and houses that is now a major draw for tourists
Walking through these lively and endearing medieval streets, it seems almost incredible that they were once considered the enemy, to be demolished in haste – and not, it has to be added, by the German military, who had less than healthy designs on Paris at various times between 1870 and 1945. No, it was none other than the Emperor of France, Napoleon III, and his Prefect for the Seine, George-Eugène Haussmann – who died 125 years ago – who had districts like the Marais in their sights.
Like much of Paris, however, the Marais stank to high heaven in 1853 when the emperor instructed Haussmann to rebuild the odorous city along grand and salubrious lines. Entire medieval quarters of the city were to be razed with modern avenues taking their place. “It was the gutting of Paris,” wrote Haussmann proudly in his Memoires.
Demolition man
A public administrator with no training in architecture or urban planning, Haussmann turned Paris into a titanic building site for 20 years. Even though he was forced to resign in 1870 as the emperor faced growing criticism for excessive expenditure, work on Haussmann’s plan continued until the late 1920s.
Conceived and executed in three phases, the plan involved the demolition of 19,730 historic buildings and the construction of 34,000 new ones. Old streets gave way to long, wide avenues characterised by rows of regularly aligned and generously proportioned neo-classical apartment blocks faced in creamy stone.
Along with imperious avenues, Haussmann engineered grand squares, city parks modelled on London’s Hyde Park, a comprehensive sewage system, a new aqueduct giving wide access to fresh water, a network of underground gas pipes for lighting streets and buildings, elaborate fountains, grandiloquent public lavatories and rows of newly planted trees.
This urban infrastructure was matched by bold new railway stations – Gare du Nord and Gare de L’Est – the opulent Paris Opéra, new schools, churches, two dozen city squares, a brace of ambitious theatres at Place du Châtelet, the giant, iron-framed Les Halles food market, (Èmile Zola’s “Belly of Paris”), and the sensational network of a dozen avenues radiating from the Arc de Triomphe at the core of Haussmann’s Place de l’Ètoile.
Since renamed Place Charles de Gaulle, l’Ètoile is every foreign driver’s nightmare experience: well, you try heading into fast and furious traffic coming at you from 12 directions simultaneously while attempting to negotiate, or fight, your way around Napoleon Bonaparte’s monumental victory arch.
