#niii

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.

(source)(translation and notes under cut below)

J’ai invité hier Girardin à dîner et nous avons causé en toute cordialité. Il m’a parlé d’un feuilleton de Gautier qui me touche. Remercie Gautier pour moi. Il paraît que M. Augier me croit fusillé et croit mes ouvrages fusillés avec moi. Girardin m’a dit que le feuilleton de Gautier était charmant et m’a promis de me l’envoyer, ainsi qu’un feuilleton de Janin. Donc il faudra que tu remercies Janin. Je suis convaincu que le remercîment venant de toi lui fera encore plus de plaisir que de moi.

Je viens de lire une bonne phrase dans l’Émancipation, journal jésuite et bonapartiste d’ici. Je te la transcris. Il s’agit du Corps Législatif.

« Les élections sont parfaitement libres. Cependant un journal qui proposerait au choix des électeurs le nom de Victor Hugo ou le nom de Charras serait inévitablement suspendu ».