Baron Haussmann

Baron Haussmann (1809-1891), French civil servant and urban planner, who extensively redesigned Paris under the reign (1852-1870) of Napoleon III. Haussmann adopted the title “Baron”, though strictly speaking he was not entitled to it because, although his maternal grandfather was ennobled, French titles do not pass down the female line.

Haussmann was born in the city he was later to transform, on March 27, 1809. He was a lawyer by education but he never practised. His first important opportunity came with the July Revolution of 1830, as it did for many frustrated careerists, when the Bourbon kings were driven out and replaced by Louis Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, whose son Haussmann had befriended. Haussmann, who fought in the three-day insurrection, was rewarded with an appointment to the administrative corps. He served for many frustrating and obscure years in the provinces until his second major opportunity came with the Revolution of 1848 (see Revolutions of 1848) and subsequent rise to power of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, initially as the elected president of the new Second Republic (1848-1852), and, after seizing power in a coup d’état and proclaiming himself Emperor Napoleon III, as the head of the Second Empire (1852-1870). Haussmann, known as a tough, talented, and loyal bureaucrat, had rallied to the Bonapartist cause and in 1853 he was appointed Prefect of the Seine, the most important position in the administration. The emperor gave his new prefect the task of rebuilding a dishevelled, overcrowded, unruly Paris and presented Haussmann with a sketchy map of his vision for Paris. The prefect had to fill in all the details, and his work went well beyond Louis Napoleon’s original scheme.

Haussmann began by making the first topographical map of the city. The major weapon of the greatest urban renewal project in history was the street. To open up medieval Paris, with its twisting, unpaved streets whose indescribable composition could corrode one’s clothing, he cut more than 50 major paved boulevards, which still provide the template of the city. In addition he built a number of monuments and public buildings, the capital’s largest cemetery, virtually all the parks, the central markets (Les Halles), hundreds and hundreds of apartment houses, the new opera house, and a water and sewer system that still serve the city. He also incorporated the surrounding suburbs into Paris (1860).

Haussmann had little feeling for the past. He scorned the Middle Ages and demolished much of Paris’s medieval heritage in the name of hygiene and progress. The Île de la Cité, the largest island in the River Seine and the cradle of Paris, was gutted. The densely populated slum now held only Notre Dame cathedral and some public buildings. He destroyed whole neighbourhoods to make way for his boulevards and buildings. The cliché that he created broad boulevards to control urban insurrection by preventing rioters from building barricades is no longer accepted. He built only two strategic street combinations to contain rioting. He did, however, separate the poor neighbourhoods from the rich ones, with a great boulevard (Strasbourg-Sébastopol) that bisected Paris north to south and left the working class on the east side of Paris.

Haussmann’s urban principles were few and rigidly applied. All the new boulevards were to be straight, visually leading at both ends to a monument or public building. Cutting into the dense fabric of historic Paris he created several optical illusions of rectilinear boulevards when existing historical buildings could not be destroyed. The height of the new apartment houses was fixed by law, as was their ornamentation and building materials. He had a sense of grandeur and built the largest cityscape in Paris: the 12 streets that meet at the Arc de Triomphe (begun by the first Napoleon), forming an enormous star pattern: the Étoile.

This massive transformation, which was only completed after Haussmann’s fall, was financed by dubious and creative borrowing in an age of buccaneer capitalism. Some funds came from tax revenues on property, building materials, wine, and tobacco, but Haussmann also used deficit spending, a new idea at the time. The debt he incurred was not retired until 1929. His financial juggling got him into political trouble and under pressure the emperor dismissed Haussmann in 1870. However, the architect of the new Paris did not enrich himself while in office, despite the vast fortunes being accumulated by others. In the heyday of speculation on urban renewal he left office with only the pension of a retired prefect. The once-powerful prefect ended his days peacefully, dividing his time between his Paris apartment and his house near Bordeaux, writing his memoirs, which read like a prefect’s report to his superiors, to celebrate his achievement. He died in Paris on January 11, 1891.

Haussmann’s methods were brutal and he was a bully, and inevitably his projects made him a controversial figure. Nonetheless, he put his indelible stamp on Paris, the most durable and successful of all the works of the Second Empire.