On rue Scribe, Paris

seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from Maldives

seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from China

seen from United States
seen from Germany

seen from Serbia

seen from United States
seen from China
seen from Malaysia
seen from Singapore
seen from Singapore
seen from Germany

seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from China
seen from Netherlands
On rue Scribe, Paris

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
Hugo, Haussmann, and Old And New Paris
This is largely prompted by @coelenterataāās comments on Hugoās musings on Old and New Paris in 2.4.1!Ā
One of my favorite things in Les Mis is the way Hugo acknowledges both the potential and the pain of change.Ā Even the most peaceful and personal progress means a sacrifice of something;Ā Ā 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 itās good, is one of the reasons I love Les Mis so much (and one of the things that saves Hugoās very 19C faith inĀ ā ProgressāĀ from being really offputting for me).
But what I didnāt realize at allĀ Ā when I first read Les Mis is that when Hugo talks about Old and New Paris, heās talking about something besides the inevitable change all cities go through; heās talking about Haussmannization.Ā
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!!Ā
...which just coincidentallyĀ Ā 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.Ā Ā
While thereās 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.Ā ( 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, NIIIās 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--Ā so thereās a social outrage in with a lot of his nostalgia about Old Paris.
*Iām going to go ahead and say that this is a very normal thing for a government to want; being able to get military or emergency services into your streets is pretty important for a lot of reasons, and more democratic administrations than NIIIās have struggled with renovating poor neighborhoods to allow modern traffic and infrastructure while minimizing displacement of the people living there. But I also think when a dictator seizes power in a violent military coup, people have every reason to be extra upset about anything that makes it harderĀ Ā to organize and resist the government.Ā
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.
Voila donc mon pot de fleurs qui va avoir du soleil ... je saurai enfin si c'est un rosier ou une giroflƩe !...
Jour 24: Class on the go
I canāt ever allow myself to sleep in. I freak out. I didnāt have class until 3 p.m. today, so I didnāt 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 donāt 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 (didnāt 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 toĀ Bibliotheque Sainte-GenevieveĀ to finish up my readings for class and to study some Marketing Smokinā Notes.Ā
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. Whatās 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 theĀ Louvre at 3 p.m. Although at times boring, the readings we had to complete for this weekās lesson were rather fun. We read about the āHaussmannizationā 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.Ā
The walking tour involved walking through the streets that were unaffected by Haussmannās reconstruction of Paris and ending in the neighborhoods that wereānoticing the differences in architecture, size, layout, on the way. This whole concept ties into our discussions of modernity. Haussmannās 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 āspaghettiā 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 Iām talking about.Ā
The strangest part about this whole lesson was realizing that a whole ānother 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 ānewā 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 thisĀ tooĀ 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 Franceās history. Dichotomies, dichotomies, dichotomies.Ā
The walk was interesting, and I learned more about the city Iāve already been inhabiting for almost a month, but you know what else? Itās February, and Iām 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.Ā
But hey, good news is, Amsterdam tomorrow baby.Ā
Bonne nuit. Bisous.

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
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 CitƩ - 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'OpƩra - A bunch of shit around the Rue Saint-HonorƩ, 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
I realized halfway through my downloading spree that I should probably be numbering these by arrondissement so you have some idea where they are, but didn't feel like going back and renaming a couple hundred pictures, so uh, sit down with google and an old map from my website and go to town if you're curious. If you sort them by date modified they tend to clump together geographically.
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 asĀ balls.
This photo is of the Rue des Trois-Canettes, which was part of the rabbit warren of medieval streets on the Ćle de la CitĆ© that Haussmann particularly wanted to clear out.
The Floor Scrapers by Gustave Calliebotte
1875