FAMOUS STORIES

Baron Haussmann’s Paris

There is a good reason why Paris is one of, if not the, great cities of the world – certainly the most beautiful.

In 1853, under the direction of Emperor Napoleon III, Baron Georges Haussmann demolished and rebuilt three quarters of the city in one of the most spectacular urban redevelopments history has ever known.

In 1852 when Napoleon III came to power, Paris was suffocating from massive overcrowding. The French Revolution and various other political upheavals had prevented Paris from receiving the modern upgrades that the Industrial Revolution had brought to other European cities. In fact, Paris’ infrastructure had barely progressed from the Middle Ages. The streets were polluted, there was only a rudimentary drainage system into which Parisians were still emptying sewerage and waste which then drained directly into the Seine – from where the people took their drinking water.

All this would change. In only 17 years, Baron Georges Haussmann transformed Paris from a mass of narrow, cobble-stoned laneways, riddled with filth into the beautiful, elegant, well-organised city we know today.

To do this, he evicted much of the city’s population. Many, many people were forced to live in the inaccessible outskirts of Paris. Haussmann demolished seventy per cent of Paris. In effect, he was creating a city from scratch. With much of the city razed, he re-landscaped the roads, including the roads uniting at Emperor Napoleon I’s Arc de Triomphe. Working with landscape gardener Charles Aphand, these new boulevards were lined with trees and beautiful public gardens were created in pockets around the city. Medieval slums were replaced with elegant apartment buildings and commercial centres.

Haussmann used the latest technology to give the city street lights, sewerage, public transport and bridges. Using aqueducts, he brought clean drinking water to the city from more than a hundred miles away.

Haussmann changed Paris so much that it’s estimated that sixty per cent of the city’s present buildings date from the 17 years of his tenure. And this extraordinary renovation was made with only the force of horses, oxen, picks and shovels – heavy construction machinery hadn’t yet been invented.