Unit 11:  Paris of Napoleon III and Haussmann(1848–1870), Part I

		Louis-Napoleon/Napoleon III: After the February revolution of 1848 removed Louis-Philippe from the French throne and established a republic, a provisional government was set up, and April elections gave moderates and conservatives a majority. Displeasure with this government then brought the radicals who had been largely responsible for the earlier uprising back to the streets in a three-day bloody rebellion in June known as the “June Days.” The radicals were crushed, however, and a new constitution was drawn up. In December 1848 a president of the Second Republic was elected: Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the son of Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon's brother) and grandson of Josephine de Beauharnais (Napoleon's first wife). Tension between the president and the Legislative Assembly over the next three years led Louis-Napoleon to plot a coup d'état in 1851. In December of that year he had a number of legislators arrested and ultimately oversaw a revision of the 1848 constitution which gave him a longer term. These changes were approved by the (limited) electorate, as were those a year later, in December 1852, by which the Second Republic was transformed into the Second Empire and President Louis-Napoleon into the Emperor Napoleon III. (Napoleon II, the former “King of Rome” and son of Napoleon I, had died in 1832 at the age of 21.)
Napoléon III, 1862, by Hippolyte Flandrin, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon (RMN).

Although history was at first unkind to the Second Empire , recent historians have offered a revised view:

Some biographers converted the emperor from an unscrupulous tyrant into an almost visionary reformer and patron of progress. Many economists pointed out that the period of the Second Empire brought the most rapid economic and social change in French history, so that in retrospect it constitutes a kind of watershed between the France of the old regime and the France of the twentieth century. Some historians even suggested that Napoleon's system came nearer than any other to reconciling the diverse traditions—libertarian, equalitarian, authoritarian—left to posterity by the Great Revolution (Gordon Wright. France in Modern Times. Third Edition. New York : W.W. Norton, 1981, p. 146).

Whatever one might say about his political strengths and weaknesses, though, it cannot be denied that Napoleon III initiated in Paris one of the vastest projects of urban renovations that the world has ever known. Inspired by the unrealized schemes for the city of his uncle Napoleon I, by urban successes seen during his travels abroad, by his hope to respond to the problems of overcrowded, unsanitary conditions in many areas of the city, and, very likely, by his desire to reduce the possibilities for popular insurrections and street barricades, Napoleon III at the very beginning of his regime drew up a list of urban projects that he planned to achieve.

Among these were a network of new thoroughfares to facilitate movement (of his troops as well as of commercial traffic!) throughout the city, the completion of the north wing of the Louvre and thus of Henri IV's plan for the union of the Louvre and the Tuileries, the renovation of the central market—Les Halles—near the St-Eustache church, and the transformation of the Bois de Boulogne just to the west of the fortifications into a public park on the order of Hyde Park, which he had greatly admired in London. It is surely significant, then, that a contemporary painting of the emperor's study in the Tuileries reveals a huge map of the city on the wall near his desk! Indeed it was a map of Paris indicating proposed new streets that the emperor gave to his new prefect in 1853.

Napoleon III's study in the Tuileries, 1862. Jean-Baptiste Fortuné de Fournier, Château de Compiègne (RMN).

WEBSITE: A concise summary of Napoleon III's career is available at: http://www.xs4all.nl/~androom/biography/p004916.htm

Georges-Eugène Haussmann: This new prefect was Georges-Eugène Haussmann whom Napoleon III named Prefect of the Seine in 1853 and who would prove to be the vigorous and capable administrator needed by the emperor to execute his plans. Alistair Horne describes the “almost limitless power” that this position gave to Haussmann: With no mayor, as of yore the city Council was appointed by the Prefect and its authority reduced to that of a municipal commission; while, as senior executive of the central government, the Prefect ruled over not only Paris but also all of her surrounding suburbs. In this role Haussmann was reinforced by Louis Napoleon's dictatorial decrees, which enabled him to expropriate at will properties and whole streets that were intended for development. Financing, on a massive scale, was effected by a mix of private investment and huge public loans yielding at least 5 per cent. With both the Bourse and industry supporting Louis Napoleon's coup, there was little difficulty here ( Seven Ages of Paris . New York : Knopf, 2002, p. 233).
		Georges-Eugène Haussmann, photo by Pierre Petit, Musée d'Orsay (RMN).

This power, combined with his enthusiasm for the emperor's projects and his own determination to transform Paris into an orderly, rational, and beautiful city, led to seventeen years of public works which in large measure created the modern city seen today. “About 60 percent of the buildings and streets of Paris in 1970 had been built in Haussmann's time” (David P. Jordan. Transforming Paris : The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann. NY: The Free Press, 1995, p.358).