“If only the heavens had given me twenty more years of rule and a little leisure”, he wrote in exile on Saint Helena after the Battle of Waterloo, “one would search vainly for the old Paris nothing of it would remain but vestiges.” Napoleon III, however, was following in the footsteps of his uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte, who had equally grand designs on Paris. What still seems astonishing is that so much of the city was demolished and reordered on what seems like the whim of an emperor and his Prefect of the Seine, Haussmann. 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. 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.Īlong 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. Conceived and executed in three phases, the plan involved the demolition of 19,730 historic buildings and the construction of 34,000 new ones.
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