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  As the deterioration of the old medieval centre of Paris became more pronounced, elites became more frantic about ‘the urban crisis’. On Ile-de-la-Cité, most artisans had moved away, leaving about 15,000 men, most day-labourers, crammed into the island’s rooming houses. Notre Dame towered over these small, jam-packed buildings. A police report had noted the presence of ‘an enormous number of down-and-out people, men and women, who survive only through plunder and who find refuge only in the bars and brothels that pollute the quartier’. On the Right Bank, much of the First Arrondissement, centring on the great market of Les Halles, Le Marais, including the Third and Fourth Arrondissements, and, to the north, the Eleventh and Twelfth Arrondissements reflected the grim texture of urban life. A good part of the Fifth Arrondissement on the Left Bank, with its many scrap metal and cloth sellers, was also very poor. The miserable, disease-ridden faubourg Saint-Marceau, one of the poorest parts of Paris, reached into the Thirteenth Arrondissement, where rag-pickers plied their trade and tanners tossed animal remains into the Bièvre River.5

  Central and eastern Paris formed, according to one observer, ‘a gothic city, black, gloomy, excrement- and fever-ridden, a place of darkness, disorder, violence, black, misery, and blood’. Horrible smells emanated from ‘appalling alleys, houses the colour of mud’ and from stagnant, putrid waters. Paris, like other large cities, was an unhealthy place where every year more people died than were born. Only about a fifth of the buildings had running water. Keeping out freezing winters was a perpetual challenge. People of relative ease living in the beaux quartiers of western Paris felt they resided uncomfortably in a sordid capital of immorality and vice, its dark, dank quartiers the preserve of the ‘dangerous and labouring classes’, even if most people of means had never actually seen these neighbourhoods. Popular literature helped firmly place this image in the upper-class imagination, depicting poor neighbourhoods of Paris as the haunts of ‘the dregs of society’.6

  To accommodate the exponential growth in Paris’s population and limit the deterioration of the city centre, in 1853 Napoleon III summoned Baron Georges Haussmann, prefect of the département of the Seine, to plan the rebuilding of Paris. Of Alsatian origins, Haussmann had been born in the capital. After completing law school he moved into the bureaucracy, serving as a sub-prefect and then prefect in several provincial départements, where, during the Second Republic, he lent his administrative skills to political repression. An energetic man with a talent for organisation, Haussmann seemed the perfect Parisian bureaucrat, and was eager to use the emerging field of statistics to his advantage in launching his great project. But the elegantly dressed Haussmann was also an arrogant, vain and aggressive bully willing to do anything in his power to ensure that France would never again be a republic.7

  In many ways, then, Haussmann was the ideal man to realise Napoleon’s dream of rebuilding the French capital into an imperial city. The Emperor and the prefect of the Seine had three goals. The first was to bring more light and air into a city ravaged by cholera in 1832 and 1849 (and again in 1853–54, after Haussmann’s grand projects had begun), while building more sewers to improve the city’s sanitation. Second, they wanted to free the flow of capital and goods. The first French department stores – Bon Marché, Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville, Le Printemps, Le Louvre and La Samaritaine – would stand on Haussmann’s wide boulevards, along with glittering brasseries and cafés, which became the face of modern Paris, although small shops remained essential to the urban economy.8

  Third, the Emperor and his prefect wanted to limit the possibilities of insurgency in traditional revolutionary neighbourhoods. The boulevards themselves would become an obstacle to the construction of barricades by virtue of their width. On eight occasions since 1827 disgruntled Parisians had built barricades in the city, most recently during the February Revolution and then during June Days of 1848, when workers rose up to protest against the closing of National Workshops that had provided some employment in a time of economic distress. Barricades went up again in Paris following Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état. Then, protestors managed to block the advance of professional armies of the state by hurriedly constructing barricades on the narrow streets of central and eastern Paris, using wood, cobblestones, and just about anything else that could be found. Napoleon III had no intention of letting that happen again.9

  Haussmann’s boulevards reflected the determination of the leaders of the Second Empire to impose their version of social order on Paris. The prefect of the Seine did not mince words: ‘Bringing order to this Queen City is one of the first conditions of general security.’ Some of the boulevards indeed tore right through the insurgent quartiers of the June Days. The boulevard Prince Eugène provided troops with relatively easy access into ‘the habitual centre … of riots’.10

  The new boulevards of Paris thus embodied the ‘imperialism of the straight line’, intended not only to quash uprisings but also to display the modernity and might of the empire. They provided power alleys down which troops could march in showy processions, as had been the case in earlier examples of classical urban planning from Philip II’s Madrid to Peter the Great’s St Petersburg and Frederick the Great’s Berlin. The rue de Rivoli, completed in 1855, led visitors to the international exposition on the Champs-Élysées, which featured 5,000 exhibits, many celebrating the city’s technological innovations. The ‘capital of the world’ had emerged as a spectacular ‘permanent exposition’, or what novelist Théophile Gautier called ‘A Babel of industry … A Babylon of the future’.11

  The National Assembly provided funds for the enormous series of projects, augmented by a tax on goods brought into the city, assessed at the customs barriers (octrois) that ringed Paris. But, as costs soared, Baron Haussmann found ways of resourcefully raising money in addition to taxes, working around the Corps Législatif to do so. He demanded capital outlays from contractors who would in principle be paid with interest once their work was done. Haussmann then turned to issuing ‘proxy bonds’, backed by funds now owed by these contractors. The imperial rebuilding of Paris left the capital with a debt of 2.5 billion francs. By the late 1860s, the prefect of the Seine had raised 500 million francs. The Emperor was well aware of Haussmann’s financial machinations, but remained committed to his grand plans for Paris, which would continue to create jobs and build the prestige of his empire.12 Yet, the financing strategy was rather like a balloon mortgage that could burst at any time.

  The rebuilding of Paris also entailed the destruction of 100,000 apartments in 20,000 buildings. The ‘Haussmannisation’ of Paris sent many Parisians packing for the urban periphery because they had been pushed out of rented apartments, their homes had been destroyed, or prices had skyrocketed in a city that was already extremely expensive. In some places in the central arrondissements, such as Ile-de-la-Cité, the population actually fell as people moved toward the periphery. About 20–30 per cent of the Parisian population moved, most into nearby or neighbouring quartiers, but also into the inner suburbs. These were annexed to Paris on 1 January 1860 for the purposes of increasing tax revenue, but also to make it easier for the government to police this restive periphery. Newcomers from the provinces had also moved to the inner suburbs, particularly Montmartre in the Eighteenth Arrondissement, La Villette in the Nineteenth, and Belleville in the Twentieth. These districts became the residences, temporary or permanent, of an increasingly large number of poor workers, as did the growing suburbs beyond the walls of Paris.13

  Rather than staving off class strife, however, the rebuilding of Paris only accentuated the contrast between the more prosperous western arrondissements and the poor eastern and north-eastern quartiers, the so-called ‘People’s Paris’. The flowering of western Paris had begun a half-century ago, as businesses and banks were established there. One could also find arcades and passageways of glass and metal – ‘veritable gallery-streets’ – whose shops anticipated the new department stores. But under Napoleon III the bourgeoisie’s day had
truly arrived.

  In the Ninth Arrondissement, for example, the quartier of Chaussée d’Antin, the centre of what Balzac described as ‘the world of money’, became a residence for the kings of finance and their ladies. The residence or hôtel of the Guimard family, which had been built in 1772, was converted into a store selling the newest in consumer novelties. Nearby stood another elegant residence that became the headquarters of one of the railway companies whose trains were slowly transforming France. The Grand Hôtel and its Café-de-la-Paix was built on boulevard Capucines a few steps from Charles Garnier’s new Opera, construction of which began in 1861. When Empress Eugénie asked the Parisian-born architect what would be the style of the new Opera, he supposedly replied without the slightest hesitation ‘pure Napoleon III’.14 On place Saint-Georges stood the sizable residence of Adolphe Thiers, who packed his mansion with objets d’art from around the world.

  Nearby, the Champs-Elysées and the Eighth Arrondissement on the western edge of Paris also flaunted the privileges granted by wealth. Carriages and horses carried the rich out to the Bois-de-Boulogne, where ‘tout Paris’ could frolic. Magnificent private residences lined the avenue. Nearby stood elegant cirques (circuses), such as the Jardin d’Hiver, café-concerts (where revellers could go to drink and listen to live music), and restaurants. A lavish private residence had been purchased by the mother of Empress Eugénie, who of course would not allow her mother to live just anywhere. The Champs-Elysées fit the bill.15

  On the other side of the Seine, the boulevard Saint-Germain, partially completed in 1855, paralleled the river. As it cut through the Seventh and Sixth Arrondissements, the boulevard also sported private residences offering privacy and elegance, many dating from the eighteenth century. Across the street, the Café Flore set up shop late in the Second Empire, bringing together, then as now, a clientele with money to spend.

  *

  A world away from the opulence of western Paris, although not far in distance, rue de la Goutte d’Or bisected a proletarian neighbourhood. In his L’Assommoir, Émile Zola described Gervaise – a character who would ultimately drink herself to death – as she looked up at number 22:

  On the street side it had five floors, each one with fifteen windows in a line, the lack of shutters of which, with their broken slats, gave the huge wall-space a look of utter desolation. But below that there were four shops on the ground floor: to the right of the doorway a huge sleazy eating-house, to the left a coal merchant’s, a draper’s and an umbrella shop. The building looked all the more colossal because it stood between two low rickety houses clinging to either side of it … Its unplastered sides, mud-coloured and as interminably bare as prison walls, showed rows of toothing-stones [stone links projecting from the end of a building so that more could be quickly added and linked up] like decaying jaws snapping in the void.16

  Like Gervaise, many working-class Parisians began to feel alienated from the city they loved amid the dramatic and devastating changes orchestrated by Haussmann in the interests of the upper classes.17 Indeed, this sense of not belonging arguably contributed to an emerging sense of solidarity among those living on the margins of the capital. And, even as western Paris was being transformed into a gleaming city of wide boulevards and lavish apartments, eastern and northern Paris and its periphery were being remade by ongoing industrialisation. The edge of the city offered more space, access to the railways and canals of northern Paris, and a labour force perched at its gates (where the customs barriers could be found), making it an ideal location for manufacturing. Larger manufacturers were to be found in the inner suburbs (some of these factories predated the Second Empire) – those annexed in 1860 – including the Cail metallurgical factory in Grenelle, which employed about 2,800 workers. Entrepreneurs in the inner suburbs produced candles, soap, perfumes and sugar, bringing raw materials into northern Paris via the Ourcq Canal.

  The populations in the industrialised parts of Paris shot up with the arrival of new factories. The population of the Twentieth Arrondissement, for instance, grew from 17,000 in 1800 to 87,000 in 1851 and continued to soar. Montmartre, which had only about 600 inhabitants in 1800, reached 23,000 in 1851 and 36,500 five years later. Chemical and metallurgical production transformed La Villette, which had risen from about 1,600 inhabitants fifty years earlier to more than 30,000 by 1860. Beyond the walls of Paris, the arrondissement of Saint-Denis grew from 41,000 in 1841 to an astounding 356,000 in 1856, as industries leap-frogged beyond the city.18

  In 1834, a minister of Louis-Philippe had warned that the factories being built on the edge of Paris could ‘be the cord that will strangle us one day’.19 During the Second Empire, the staggering population growth in Paris’s working-class neighbourhoods accentuated the fear Parisian elites had of ordinary workers living on the geographic and social margins of their city. Belleville, a neighbourhood of nearly 60,000 people on the north-eastern edge of Paris, had been annexed to Paris along with the other inner suburbs. ‘Belleville is coming down the hill!’ became a compelling fear in the beaux quartiers below.20

  Louis Lazare, a royalist critic of the Second Empire and the rebuilding of Paris, argued that instead of dispensing millions of francs on the wealthier neighbourhoods, the money would have been far better spent on the ‘dreadful Siberia’ of the periphery. Lazare warned that ‘around the Queen of Cities is rising up a formidable cité ouvrière’.21

  Conservative Louis Veuillot shared a critique of Haussmannisation with republicans, who rejected the authoritarian structure of the empire and its privileged elite. The Catholic polemicist embraced the memory of old Paris destroyed by modernity, materialism, secularism and state centralisation. He saw the new boulevards as ‘an overflown river which would carry along the debris of a world’. Paris had become a ‘city without a past, full of minds without memories, hearts without sorrows, souls without love! City of uprooted multitudes, shifting piles of human dust, you can grow to become the capital of the world, [but] you will never have citizens.’22

  Mounting opposition to Napoleon III’s regime was also infused by anti-clericalism both in the ranks of middle-class radicals and the urban poor. The Catholic Church was extremely visible in the Paris of the Second Empire, yet the Church was increasingly absent from the lives of Parisian working families. If the Second Empire had seen a revival of fervent Catholicism in parts of France, particularly after the sighting of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes in 1856, Paris, other large cities, and regions like Limousin, Ile-de-France and large parts of the south-west had undergone ‘de-Christianisation’ – a decline in religious practice. In Ménilmontant, in the Twentieth Arrondissement, only 180 men out of a population of 33,000 performed their Easter duty, the obligation to receive Holy Communion. The situation of the Church was even bleaker in the working-class suburbs.23 This was perhaps unsurprising given that the Church told the poor that this world is a valley of tears and that they should resign themselves to poverty – their reward for suffering would come in Heaven.

  Intellectual currents during the middle decades of the nineteenth century also challenged the Catholic Church’s declared primacy of faith over reason. Positivism, based on the belief that rational inquiry and the application of science to the human condition were advancing society, was becoming more popular in universities across Europe. The papal Syllabus of Errors (1864), which denounced modern society, seemed to associate the Church with ignorance and a rejection of human progress. Popular literature, including works by Victor Hugo, George Sand and Eugène Sue, sometime presented the Catholic clergy in an unfavourable light. Anti-clericals believed French paysans to be under the thumb of the clergy, whispering instructions in confessionals.

  If the parish clergy provided useful functions – baptisms, marriages and burials – the religious orders lived in isolated contemplation and prayer (‘they eat, they sleep, they digest’ went an old refrain). Moreover religious orders, particularly the Jesuits, were closely identified with the conservative political role of the Church,
whose archbishops and bishops had supported Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état.

  Many Parisians in particular objected to the Church’s dominant role in primary education. During the Second Empire, male religious orders rose in Paris from six to twenty-two for men and from twenty-two to an astonishing sixty-seven female orders. The number of men in religious orders increased from 3,100 in 1851 to well over 20,000 by 1870, and women from 34,200 to more than 100,000 in 1870. In 1871 52 per cent of Parisian pupils were in schools run by religious orders and staffed by teachers who were not required to take the examinations required of lay teachers. The Church’s virtual monopoly over the education of girls stood out, and yet literacy remained lower among women than men.24