Although their Palace of the Tuileries may have vanished, if Napoleon III and Eugénie returned today they would find no difficulty in recognising their capital. Until 1853, despite its elegant mansions and imposing public buildings, Paris remained a medieval city. According to an English guidebook of 1864, it had been ‘a dense mass of old, lofty houses, only accessible by narrow and crooked streets, impervious to light and air’. As Balzac and Victor Hugo made clear, it was certainly very picturesque, especially the Gothic alleys of the Ile de la Cité or around the Châtelet, but at the same time dangerous and horribly unhealthy. The streets were a paradise for muggers, while filthy open drains ran down the middle of each thoroughfare. There was no proper water supply, everyone drinking from dubious wells: thousands died in the cholera epidemics of the 1830s.
While Louis-Philippe completed the Arc de Triomphe and the Madeleine, repaired some of the public buildings, widened a few streets and improved the paving, the Louvre remained unrestored, the Place de la Carrousel was obscured by shoddy houses and shops, and the Place de la Concorde and the Champs Elysées were still muddy, unpaved ground.
The emperor’s chosen instrument for rebuilding Paris was a career civil servant, Georges Eugène Haussmann. An arrogant, overbearing man, most people disliked him. ‘He is very tall, bulky, and has an authoritative way of walking ahead and dragging his partner after him, which makes one feel as if one was a small tug being swept on by a man-of-war’, wrote Lillie Moulton after being taken into dinner by him at Compiègne. He behaved like this with opponents, ruthlessly forcing through demolition and reconstruction. But behind Haussmann stood Napoleon, who inspired the major projects. It was his idea to provide easy access between the new railway stations and the centre of Paris – for the sake of both business and pleasure – to clear away the warrens that hid the city’s great monuments and, not least, to install modern drainage. ‘It was the emperor who planned it all’, said Haussmann, with a certain exaggeration. ‘I have merely been his collaborator.’ It was Napoleon who insisted that Les Halles should be made of iron.
When Haussmann was appointed prefect of the Seine, six months after Eugénie’s wedding, he was summoned to an audience at Saint-Cloud where the emperor gave him his first, staggering briefing. It was a map marked with coloured lines, red, blue, green and yellow. They traced the new Parisian boulevards that Napoleon was determined to build – wide, well paved, tree-lined and gas-lit avenues that would replace the cobbled alleys.
First, Haussmann completed the rue de Rivoli, then he constructed the avenue Napoleon III (now avenue de l’Opéra), linking it with the Place de l’Opéra. Then came the ‘grands boulevards’, radiating out from great squares, flanked by peripheral boulevards. Not content with boulevards, the emperor redesigned the whole of central Paris, and Hippolyte Taine did not exaggerate when he wrote that town planning on this scale had not been seen in France since Roman times. Among the tall, white buildings that went up were the huge markets of Les Halles, the Polytechnique, the Ecole des Beaux Arts and such government offices as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Quai d’Orsai. The Louvre was completed, the Bibliothèque Nationale rebuilt and a new opera house begun. Two vast parks were laid out at each end of the city, the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes. Paris also acquired its first department store, the Bon Marché, which opened in 1853.
Within months of Haussmann taking office 50,000 buildings had been demolished, a process that went on almost until the end of the Second Empire. Slums vanished, the stench of former times disappearing with the oozing walls and the cesspits. Unavoidably, hundreds of thousands of Parisians were displaced. Up to now it had been normal for working men and clerks to live in the garrets or basements of bourgeois houses, but the rents in Haussmann’s new mansions and apartments were so high that they were forced to move into the slums on the far side of the city. Tradesmen were ruined by losing their shops, and had to compete for any sort of work with labour coming in from the provinces on the railways – the population doubled before the reign was over. The emperor tried to help by providing special housing at low rents and free medical treatment, but on much too small a scale. Nothing earned him more hatred than rebuilding Paris, not even the coup of 1851.
Not only the poor were upset. Many mourned the loss of medieval Paris, the insensitive destruction of the old streets. Others were angered by the lack of compensation and by the enormous price of the new housing. Some very unpleasant rumours began to circulate about Haussmann’s finances.
Even so, France soon realised that her capital had been transformed into one of the glories of Europe. Napoleon III had succeeded brilliantly in creating his dream city. By the 1860s he and Eugénie could drive through a gleaming Paris that had become, as they planned, ‘the capital of capitals’.