Great Renovation of Paris

The Great Renovation of Paris was a vast commission of public works and extraordinary buildings commissioned by French Emperor Napoleon II, and designed and led by the renowned engineer, Sir Georges-Eugène Haussmann. The project lasted from 1856 to 1872, and started Paris' transition into a modernized city, and brought great prestige to the city, making it the marvel of Europe.

Background
Before discussing the Great Renovation of the city, it is important to emphasize why such a large renovation was necessary. Paris, as a city in the former half of the 19th century, was a hub of disease, pestilence, and poverty, with much of the city consisting of dirty slums. the French social reformer Victor Considerant wrote: "Paris is an immense workshop of putrefaction, where misery, pestilence and sickness work in concert, where sunlight and air rarely penetrate. Paris is a terrible place where plants shrivel and perish, and where, of seven small infants, four die during the course of the year." The street plan near the city center had changed little since the Middle Ages. Many city streets throughout Paris were only 3-7 feet wide, making it hard for carts and carriages to move through the roads. The city was incredibly densely populated, making it extremely easy for disease to spread, particularly cholera.

Hausmann's Plans
Napoléon I dismissed Berger as the Prefect of the Seine and sought a more effective manager. His minister of the interior, Victor de Persigny, interviewed several candidates, and selected Georges-Eugène Haussmann, a native of Alsace and Prefect of the Gironde (capital: Bordeaux), who impressed Persigny with his energy, audacity, and ability to overcome or get around problems and obstacles. He became Prefect of the Seine on 22 June 1853, and on 29 June, the Emperor showed him the map of Paris and instructed Haussmann to aérer, unifier, et embellir Paris: to give it air and open space, to connect and unify the different parts of the city into one whole, and to make it more beautiful.

Haussmann went to work immediately on the first phase of the renovation desired by Napoléon III: completing the grande croisée de Paris, a great cross in the centre of Paris that would permit easier communication from east to west along the rue de Rivoli and rue Saint-Antoine, and north-south communication along two new Boulevards, Strasbourg and Sébastopol. The grand cross had been proposed by the Convention during the Revolution, and begun by Napoléon I; The Emperor was determined to complete it. Completion of the rue de Rivoli was given an even higher priority, because the Emperor wanted it finished before the opening of the Paris Universal Exposition of 1858, only two years away, and he wanted the project to include a new hotel, the Grand Hôtel du Louvre, the first large luxury hotel in the city, to house the Imperial guests at the Exposition.

Under the Emperor, Haussmann had greater power than any of his predecessors. In February 1851, the French Senate had simplified the laws on expropriation, giving him the authority to expropriate all the land on either side of a new street; and he did not have to report to the Parliament, only to the Emperor. The French parliament, controlled by Napoléon III, provided fifty million francs, but this was not nearly enough. Napoléon III appealed to the Péreire brothers, Émile and Isaac, two bankers who had created a new investment bank, Crédit Mobilier. The Péreire brothers organised a new company which raised 24 million francs to finance the construction of the street, in exchange for the rights to develop real estate along the route. This became a model for the building of all of Haussmann's future boulevards.

To meet the deadline, three thousand workers laboured on the new boulevard twenty-four hours a day. The rue de Rivoli was completed, and the new hotel opened in March 1857, in time to welcome guests to the Exposition. The junction was made between the rue de Rivoli and rue Saint-Antoine; in the process, Haussmann restyled the Place du Carrousel, opened up a new square, Place Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois facing the colonnade of the Louvre, and reorganized the space between the Hôtel de Ville and the place du Châtelet. Between the Hôtel and Ville and the Bastille square, he widened the rue Saint-Antoine; he was careful to save the historic Hôtel de Sully and Hôtel de Mayenne, but many other buildings, both medieval and modern, were knocked down to make room for the wider street, and several ancient, dark and narrow streets, rue de l'Arche-Marion, rue du Chevalier-le-Guet and rue des Mauvaises-Paroles, disappeared from the map.

In 1858, work began on the north-south axis, beginning with Boulevard de Strasbourg and Boulevard Sébastopol, which cut through the center of some of the most crowded neighborhoods in Paris, where the cholera epidemic had been the worst, between the rue Saint-Martin and rue Saint-Denis. "It was the gutting of old Paris," Haussmann wrote with satisfaction in his Memoires: of the neighborhood of riots, and of barricades, from one end to the other." The Boulevard Sébastopol ended at the new Place du Châtelet; a new bridge, the Pont-au-Change, was constructed across the Seine, and crossed the island on a newly built street. On the left bank, the north-south axis was continued by the Boulevard Saint-Michel, which was cut in a straight line from the Seine to the Observatory, and then, as the rue d'Enfer, extended all the way to the route d'Orléans. The north-south axis was completed in 1862.

The two axes crossed at the Place du Châtelet, making it the center of Haussmann's Paris. Haussmann widened the square, moved the Fontaine du Palmier, built earlier by Napoléon I, to the center and built two new theaters, facing each other across the square; the Cirque Impérial (now the Théâtre du Châtelet) and the Théâtre Lyrique (now Théâtre de la Ville).