#haussmannization

This is largely prompted by @coelenterata​‘s comments on Hugo’s musings on Old and New Paris in 2.4.1! 

One of my favorite things in Les Mis is the way Hugo acknowledges both the potential and the pain of change.  Even the most peaceful and personal progress means a sacrifice of something;  even Valjean abandoning his hate means giving up the comfort it offered. Children growing up is natural and good, but it means changing family relationships all along the way. The acknowledgement that change is inevitable and necessary and also hard , even when it’s good, is one of the reasons I love Les Mis so much (and one of the things that saves Hugo’s very 19C faith in “ Progress”  from being really offputting for me).

But what I didn’t realize at all  when I first read Les Mis is that when Hugo talks about Old and New Paris, he’s talking about something besides the inevitable change all cities go through; he’s talking about Haussmannization. 

Baron Haussmann was hired by Napoleon III to radically redesign and renovate Paris. There was of course a certain necessity to this; every major city requires constant infrastructure changes to keep up with changing populations and transport issues and a million other factors.

But this plan was overtly done in the 19th century spirit of Social Improvement Through Design, with the goal of a Modern, Healthy , Open city!! 

...which just coincidentally  meant radically opening up a lot of the old, medieval neighborhoods , which were full of the poorest,most insurrection-prone residents of the city, and the narrowest,most barricadable streets.  

While there’s a lot of debate about the net effect of the Haussman renovation on the poorer populations of the city and Parisian popular protests:

Haussmann himself did not deny the military value of the wider streets. In his memoires, he wrote that his new boulevard Sebastopol resulted in the "gutting of old Paris, of the quarter of riots and barricades.He admitted he sometimes used this argument with the Parliament to justify the high cost of his projects, arguing that they were for national defense and should be paid for, at least partially, by the state. ( source: Wikipedia and Le Moncan, bolding mine)

--so the government at the time definitely saw this as potentially a way to enable state control in the city.*

Between the displacement of poor residents, the reduced opportunities for insurrection-through-barricading, and the perceived loss of the Architectural History of Paris, NIII’s New Paris was a major point of criticism for critics of the government--and for Romantic Socialist Hugo, Defender of Notre Dame and The Architectural Heritage of Paris, even more so--  so there’s a social outrage in with a lot of his nostalgia about Old Paris.

Honoré Daumier (1852) Voilà donc mon pot de fleurs

Lithograph Gift of Eugene L. Garbaty, 1954.145

Now that the building next door has been torn down under Haussmannization, this couple can finally see the Seine, and their plant can get some sun.

I can’t ever allow myself to sleep in. I freak out. I didn’t have class until 3 p.m. today, so I didn’t have to wake up at 8:30 as usual; but when I woke up suddenly to see it was 9:10… I freaked out a little. I don’t know.

Regardless, I took my time waking up, showering, and enjoying breakfast. I even shaved my legs again. Fun stuff for Parisian Rafsody. Afterwards, nothing too special occurred. I ran to campus (didn’t run, I walked and sat my ass on a metro and then walked again) to print my response paper for Art and Architecture, and then mosseyed on over to Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve to finish up my readings for class and to study some Marketing Smokin’ Notes. 

Having and using a library makes you feel legit as hell. I just flashed it to the security guard and waltzed right on in to the large room filled with wooden tables, iron banisters, and books, on books. What’s odd is that it was more packed last Saturday than it was today. French people, man.

Today, Art and Architecture class was a walking class, and we were to meet at the Louvre at 3 p.m. Although at times boring, the readings we had to complete for this week’s lesson were rather fun. We read about the “Haussmannization” of Paris in the 1800s-1900s, which I never knew was a thing. Georges-Eugene Haussmann was appointed prefect of the Seine by Napoleon III, a.k.a. non-elected mayor that rules all and can do whatever the hell he wants to do to Paris, namely, tearing down entire streets, building vast avenues, and basically building the Paris we know and love today. 

The walking tour involved walking through the streets that were unaffected by Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris and ending in the neighborhoods that were—noticing the differences in architecture, size, layout, on the way. This whole concept ties into our discussions of modernity. Haussmann’s idea of a modern Paris was a uniform Paris, a vaster Paris. Prior to his plans, there were no boulevards cutting across the city. One had to take the roads on the perimeter of Paris in order to get to the other side. In the end, the network of “spaghetti” roads, as I call them, all interconnected and led up to the monuments we recognize Paris by. If you look at a map of Paris, or an areal shot of Paris you can see what I’m talking about. 

The strangest part about this whole lesson was realizing that a whole ‘nother Paris existed prior to what we know, and yet, we see Paris as this ancient and beautiful city, that has always been just that, beautiful. Although French influence still remains in the “new” architecture under the direction of Haussmann, a lot of his work was influenced by Roman aesthetics. Not only that, but also the fact that entire neighborhoods, livelihoods, and families had to be removed from their homes so that boulevards and brand new buildings and monuments could be put in place is baffling. I guess this too is incorporated into modernity, as it is a huge dichotomy. We love the Paris we have today. I even cried the first time I saw it. But we walk streets that were completely reconstructed, causing the greatest housing crisis in France’s history. Dichotomies, dichotomies, dichotomies. 

The walk was interesting, and I learned more about the city I’ve already been inhabiting for almost a month, but you know what else? It’s February, and I’m starting to feel it… Or not feel it. My feet turned into ice blocks the entire 2 and half hour walk around town. No one was happy, and as happy as we were to be learning, we just as quickly lost interest as we lost sensation in our bones. 

But hey, good news is, Amsterdam tomorrow baby. 

Or at least, all the Paris photos by Charles Marville that are on collections.paris.fr and aren't just post-Haussmannization shots of streetlamps and urinals. All nearly-500 of them. NOT KIDDING.

The catch: they're really fucking low-res, and if you want the high-quality versions you'll have to look them up on collections.paris.fr and use their stupid Flash zoom tool. They're still nice for a general overview of the streets Haussmann destroyed or use as a not-too-detailed art reference, but there's a LOT of detail you can see on zoom that you can't see in these.

Old-as-balls no-longer-extant or highly-fiddled-with neighborhoods that are absurdly well documented here:

- The Ile de la Cité - The Latin Quarter, especially in the vicinity of the Rue Mouffetard (the old version that used to extend down a lot further south) - The Faubourg Saint-Germain, especially the parts that would be demolished for the Boulevard Saint-Germain - The area around Les Halles - A bunch of shit that got destroyed to build the Avenue de l'Opéra - A bunch of shit around the Rue Saint-Honoré, idk man don't look at me I'm shit at the western half of Paris - A bunch of more recent, mostly-still-extant shit from the 2e and the 9e that Balzac stans will probably think of as the Rich Bankers And Their Mistresses crescent

Just uploaded a bunch of Charles Marville's photographs of 1860s Paris to Photobucket--go have a look! Marville was specifically tasked with photographing all the streets about to be destroyed in Haussmann's demolitions, so almost all of the places in these photographs no longer exist. Also, most of them are old as balls.

The Floor Scrapers by Gustave Calliebotte