Georges-Eugène Haussmann
Georges-Eugène Haussmann, known as Baron Haussmann, was a French official who supervised a radical urban renewal programme of new boulevards, parks, and public works in Paris, referred to as Haussmann's renovation of Paris, aimed at introducing grandeur in the city. First a prefect in Var, Yonne, and Gironde, his skills as an administrator led to his appointment in Paris by Emperor Napoleon III in 1853.
The signature architectural landmark of his works was the Paris Opera, the largest theatre in the world, designed by Charles Garnier, crowning the centre of Napoleon III's new Paris. Haussmann completely rebuilt Paris above and below ground; on his own estimation by 1870 one in five streets in central Paris were his creation, while revamped sewers now ran alongside miles of pipes to distribute gas for thousands of new streetlights. With his right-hand Adolphe Alphand and at the Emperor's direction, a plan was laid out for four major parks at the cardinal points of the compass around the city: the Bois de Boulogne to the west, Bois de Vincennes to the east, Parc des Buttes Chaumont to the north, and Parc Montsouris to the south. The major parks and their smaller counterparts in the city were an immediate success with all classes of Parisians.
Critics forced his dismissal as prefect of Seine in 1870, but his vision of the city still defines much of Paris today. He was made a senator in 1857 and a grand cross of the Legion of Honour in 1862. The Boulevard Haussmann as well as Haussmann–Saint-Lazare station in Paris bear his name.
Biography
Origins and early career
Haussmann was born on 27 March 1809, at 53 Rue du Faubourg-du-Roule, in the Beaujon neighbourhood of Paris, the son of Nicolas-Valentin Haussmann and Ève-Marie-Henriette-Caroline Dentzel, both of Alsatian families. His paternal grandfather was a deputy of the Legislative Assembly and National Convention, an administrator of the department of Seine-et-Oise and a commissioner to the army. His maternal grandfather was a general and a deputy of the National Convention:, a baron of Napoleon's First Empire.He began his schooling at the Collège Henri-IV and the Lycée Condorcet in Paris and then began to study law. At the same time, he studied music as a student at the Paris Conservatory, as he was a talented musician. Haussmann joined his father as an insurgent in the July Revolution of 1830, which deposed the Bourbon king Charles X in favor of his cousin, Louis Philippe, Duke of Orléans.
He was married to Octavie de Laharpe on 17 October 1838 in Bordeaux. They had two daughters: Henriette, who married the banker Camille Dollfus in 1860, and Valentine, who married Vicomte Maurice Pernéty, the chief of staff of his department, in 1865. Valentine divorced Pernéty in 1891 and then married Georges Renouard.
On 21 May 1831, Haussmann began his career in public administration. He was named the secretary-general of the prefecture of the department of Vienne at Poitiers. On 15 June 1832, he became the deputy prefect of Yssingeaux. Despite proving himself as a hard worker and able representative of the government, his arrogance, dictatorial manner, and habit of impeding his superiors led to his being continually passed over for promotion to prefect. He was posted as deputy prefect to the Lot-et-Garonne department at Nérac on 9 October 1832, the Ariège department at Saint-Girons on 19 February 1840, and the Gironde department at Blaye on 23 November 1841.
After the 1848 Revolution swept away the July Monarchy, establishing the Second Republic in its place, Haussmann's fortunes changed. In 1848, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoléon Bonaparte, became the first elected President of France. In January 1849, Haussmann travelled to Paris to meet the Minister of the Interior and the new President. He was deemed to be a loyal holdover from the civil service of the July Monarchy, and shortly after their meeting Louis-Napoléon granted Haussmann a promotion to prefect of the Var department at Draguignan. In 1850, he became the prefect of the Yonne department. In 1851 was appointed as prefect of Gironde out of Bordeaux.
In 1850, Louis Napoléon started an ambitious project to connect the Louvre to the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, by extending the Rue de Rivoli and create a new park, the Bois de Boulogne, on the outskirts of the city, but he was exasperated by the slow progress made by the incumbent prefect of Seine, Jean-Jacques Berger. Louis-Napoleon was highly popular, but he was blocked from running for re-election by the constitution of the Second French Republic. While he had a majority of the votes in the legislature at his disposal, he did not have the two-thirds majority needed to change the constitution.
At the end of December 1851, he staged a coup d'état, and in 1852 declared himself Emperor of the French under the title Napoleon III. In November 1852, a plebiscite overwhelmingly approved Napoleon's assumption of the throne, and he soon began searching for a new prefect of Seine to carry out his Paris reconstruction program.
The Emperor's Minister of the Interior, Victor de Persigny, interviewed the prefects of Rouen, Lille, Lyon, Marseille and Bordeaux for the Paris post. In his memoirs, he described his interview with Haussmann:
"It was Monsieur Haussmann who impressed me the most. It was a strange thing, but it was less his talents and his remarkable intelligence that appealed to me, but the defects in his character. I had in front of me one of the most extraordinary men of our time; big, strong, vigorous, energetic, and at the same time clever and devious, with a spirit full of resources. This audacious man wasn't afraid to show who he was. ... He told me all of his accomplishments during his administrative career, leaving out nothing; he could have talked for six hours without a break, since it was his favourite subject, himself. I wasn't at all displeased. ... It seemed to me that he was exactly the man I needed to fight against the ideas and prejudices of a whole school of economics, against devious people and skeptics coming from the Stock Market, against those who were not very scrupulous about their methods; he was just the man. Whereas a gentleman of the most elevated spirit, cleverness, with the most straight and noble character, would inevitably fail, this vigorous athlete ... full of audacity and skill, capable of opposing expedients with better expedients, traps with more clever traps, would certainly succeed. I told him about the Paris works and offered to put him in charge."
Persigny sent him to Napoleon III with the recommendation that he was exactly the man needed to carry out his renewal plans for Paris. On 22 June 1853, Napoleon III made him prefect of Seine. On 29 June, the Emperor gave him the mission of making the city healthier, less congested and grander. Haussmann held this post until 1870.
Rebuilding of Paris
Napoleon III and Haussmann launched a series of enormous public works projects in Paris, hiring tens of thousands of workers to improve the sanitation, water supply and traffic circulation of the city. Napoleon III installed a huge map of Paris in his office, marked with coloured lines where he wanted new boulevards to be. To a degree the boulevard system was planned as a mechanism for the easy deployment of troops and artillery, but its main purpose was to help relieve traffic congestion in a dense city and interconnect its landmark buildings. He and Haussmann met almost every day to discuss the projects and overcome the enormous obstacles and opposition they faced as they built the new Paris.The population of Paris had doubled since 1815, with no increase in its area. To accommodate the growing population and those who would be forced from the centre by the new boulevards and squares Napoleon III planned to build, he issued a decree annexing eleven surrounding communes, and increasing the number of arrondissements from twelve to twenty, which enlarged the city to its modern boundaries.
For the nearly two decades of Napoleon III's reign, and for a decade afterwards, most of Paris was an enormous construction site. To bring fresh water to the city, his hydraulic engineer, Eugène Belgrand, built a new aqueduct to bring clean water from the Vanne River in Champagne, and a new huge reservoir near the future Parc Montsouris. These two works increased the water supply of Paris from 87,000 to 400,000 cubic metres of water a day.
He laid hundreds of kilometres of pipes to distribute the water throughout the city. He built a second network, using the less-clean water from the Ourq and the Seine, to wash the streets and water the new park and gardens. He completely rebuilt the Paris sewers, and installed miles of pipes to distribute gas for thousands of new streetlights along the Paris streets.
Beginning in 1854, in the centre of the city, Haussmann's workers tore down hundreds of old buildings and cut eighty kilometres of new avenues, connecting the central points of the city. Buildings along these avenues were required to be the same height and in a similar style, and to be faced with cream-coloured stone, creating the uniform look of Paris boulevards. Victor Hugo mentioned that it was hardly possible to distinguish what the house in front of you was for: theatre, shop or library. Haussmann managed to rebuild the city in just 17 years, although some works were completed after him leaving office as prefect. "On his own estimation the new boulevards and open spaces displaced 350,000 people; ... by 1870 one-fifth of the streets in central Paris were his creation; he had spent ... 2.5 billion francs on the city; ... one in five Parisian workers was employed in the building trade".
File:Paris Opéra Garnier Fassade 1.jpg|thumb|The Paris Opera was the centrepiece of Napoleon III's new Paris. The architect, Charles Garnier, described the style simply as "Napoleon the Third".
To connect the city with the rest of France, Napoleon III built two new railroad stations: the Gare de Lyon and the Gare du Nord. He completed Les Halles, the great iron and glass produce market in the centre of the city, and built a new municipal hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu, in the place of crumbling medieval buildings on the Île de la Cité. The signature architectural landmark was the Paris Opera, or Palais Garnier, the largest theatre in the world, designed by Charles Garnier, crowning the centre of Napoleon III's new Paris, at the end of the newly-designed Avenue de l'Opéra. When the Empress Eugenie saw the model of the opera house, and asked the architect what the style was, Garnier said simply, "Napoleon the Third."
Napoleon III also wanted to build new parks and gardens for the recreation and relaxation of the Parisians, particularly those in the new neighbourhoods of the expanding city.
Napoleon III's new parks were inspired by his memories of the parks in London, especially Hyde Park, where he had strolled and promenaded in a carriage while in exile, but he wanted to build on a much larger scale. Working with Haussmann and Adolphe Alphand, the engineer who headed the new Service of Promenades and Plantations, he laid out a plan for four major parks at the cardinal points of the compass around the city. Thousands of workers and gardeners began to dig lakes, build cascades, plant lawns, flowerbeds, trees, and construct chalets and grottoes. Napoleon III created the Bois de Boulogne to the west of Paris, the Bois de Vincennes to the east, the Parc des Buttes Chaumont to the north, and Parc Montsouris to the south.
In addition to building the four large parks, Haussmann had the city's older parks, including Parc Monceau, formerly owned by the Orleans family, and the Jardin du Luxembourg, refurbished and replanted. He created twenty small parks and gardens in the neighbourhoods, as miniature versions of his large parks. Alphand termed these small parks "green and flowering salons." The intention of Napoleon's plan was to have one park in each of the eighty neighbourhoods of Paris, so no one was more than 10 minutes walk from a park. The parks were an immediate success with all classes of Parisians.
Haussmann's works resulted in 64 km of new streets; France's annual budget was spent on rebuilding the city over the course of just over two decades.